Let’s cut our meat with spoons!
The sense is as good
As that Churchill should
Be put to command the Dragoons. 40
He made a good start with his regiment, however, issuing the men with new red coats faced with blue, and keeping the annual cost of each troop down to £2,200, evidence of his ‘careful administration’. Churchill’s lieutenant colonel was Lord Cornbury, grandson of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Charles’s first chancellor, and so nephew to the Duke of York’s deceased wife Anne Hyde. It was to prove a portentous connection.
There were limits to royal benevolence. When somebody suggested that Churchill might make a good ministerial colleague for Sunderland, Charles replied bluntly that ‘he was resolved not to have two idle Secretaries of State’. Churchill was certainly much preoccupied with rebuilding Holywell House, and with his growing family. Another daughter, Anne, was born in 1684, John (a son at last) followed in 1686, Elizabeth in 1687, Mary in 1689 and Charles, who lived for only two years, in 1690. There is no evidence, during the early 1680s, of a man eaten up by ambition. He had his peerage and a colonelcy, stood high in royal favour, and perhaps Charles’s suggestion of temporary indolence is not unfair, for he was still a young man but not now in much of a hurry. Indeed, if anyone in the family was making the running at this period it was not John, but Sarah.
Sarah Jennings had first met Lady Anne, youngest daughter of James, Duke of York and Anne Hyde, at Whitehall when Sarah was ten and Anne only six, and they appeared together in a court production of the masque Calisto in December 1674. They had seen a good deal of one another in Scotland, and in 1680 Sarah was on hand when Anne was involved in a controversial relationship with John Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, a great favourite of the king’s but, at thirty-five, almost twice her age. Although London gossips suggested that Mulgrave had seduced her ‘so far as to spoil her marrying to anyone else’, Mulgrave had probably done no more than write letters ‘intimating too near an address to her’. He was exiled to Tangier, but went on to hold high office under James II, William III, who made him Marquess of Normanby, and Queen Anne herself, who created him Duke of Buckingham.41
The Mulgrave affair both accelerated efforts to get Anne suitably married, and, as the historian Edward Gregg is right to suggest, ‘underlined – and perhaps contributed to’ a growing divergence between Anne and her elder sister Mary, whose hints of displeasure at Anne risking her reputation were not welcomed by someone who did not believe that she had done anything at all to contribute to the scandal. Bruised by her sister’s priggishness, and thrust on inexorably towards an arranged marriage, Anne became increasingly attracted to the beautiful, intelligent and witty Sarah. Their friendship was to be so closely interwoven with John Churchill’s own rise that we cannot hope to tease the strands apart. Nor can we be certain of the precise nature of the relationship, because Sarah, who wrote most about it, did so mainly after the burning affection of its early years had frozen into mutual contempt.
We have two main difficulties. The first is that it is never easy for men to grasp the depth and intensity of the love that can exist between women. Even the most heterosexual of men usually know that they have bonds of affection with other men that are indeed ‘passing the love of women’, even if they are not always comfortable in talking about them. Yet it is hard for them to acknowledge that women can have relationships which are as profound, partly because of men’s fear that women’s affection is in some way finite, and that the emotion which binds them to other women must necessarily limit that available for commitment to men.
Our second problem is that the relationship between Anne and Sarah has now become part of the battlefield of sexual politics. Some lesbian authors have suggested that the relationship was indeed lesbian, and that it is only the gender-centric perversity of the historical establishment that has prevented a proper acknowledgement of the fact that European courts at this time were full of girls and women in loving physical relationships, and historians who deny it are simply revealing their inherent homophobia.
It is important to understand that correspondence may mislead us. In a letter whose sheer nobility mists one’s eyes even today, Margaret Godolphin told Jael Boscawen, her sister-in-law, ‘My dear, believe me, that of all earthly things you were and are most dear to me.’ She evidently did not mean that she loved Jael more than she loved Sidney, for ‘Nobody ever had a better or half so good a husband.’ Yet her affection for Jael went beyond this happiest of marriages. So: ‘Not knowing how God Almighty may deal with me … as in case I be to leave the world, no earthly thing may take up my thoughts,’ it was to Jael she wrote just before her confinement, bidding farewell to mortality and putting her affairs in order.42 When Anne’s sister Mary wrote breathlessly, ‘What can I say more to persuade you that I love you with more zeal than any lover and I love you with a love that was never known by man I have for you an excess of friendship more of love than woman can for woman and more love ever than the constant lover had for his mistress …’ she was in fact writing to Frances Apsley, daughter of the Duke of York’s treasurer.43 Both women enjoyed happy marriages. Just before her own marriage Anne also wrote to Frances, in a letter veiled in classical allegory: ‘Your Ziphares [Anne] changes his condition yet nothing shall ever alter him from being the same to his dear Semandra [Frances] as he ever was.’
Women often wrote passionately to one another, even if there was nothing physical in their relationship. One of Sarah’s biographers, Ophelia Field, declares that ‘it can never be certain what unlabelled feelings – feelings which Sarah would manipulate skilfully in later life – existed between the two. For now, it is enough to emphasise that Sarah and Anne were not entirely innocent of what their words might mean if history happened to eavesdrop.’44 When we do listen at history’s keyholes, let us do so as honestly as we can, neither making the easy assumptions that such whispers might imply today, nor putting our characters on a political stage which is our creation, not theirs.
There can be no doubting Anne’s need for female affection. Sarah became her lady of the bedchamber in 1683 on Anne’s marriage to Prince George of Denmark, replacing Mary Cornwallis, of whom Charles II said that ‘No man ever loved his mistress as his niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis.’45 When Sarah lost her hold on Anne’s affection she did not simply alienate Anne by her filthy temper and overbearing behaviour, but because she was insidiously outmanoeuvred by Abigail Masham.
Sarah’s own account of her friendship with Anne is best encapsulated in An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough from her first coming to court …, although so much of what she wrote in later life, on her own account or in collaboration with associates like Bishop Burnet, in some way reflects the catastrophic end of that relationship. She claimed that she wrote the book knowing that ‘I am coming near my end, and very soon there will be nothing of me but a name’, and wanted to comment on ‘the successful artifice of Mr Harley and Mrs Masham in taking advantage of the Queen’s passion for what she called the church to undermine me in her affections’.46
Sarah made much of her early friendship with Anne: ‘We used to play together when she was a child, and even then she expressed a particular fondness for me.’ This gave her an important advantage, accentuated by the fact that the manners of the Countess of Clarendon, first lady of the bedchamber, ‘could not possibly recommend her to so young a mistress: for she looked like a mad-woman, and talked like a scholar’.
