Chapter 7 Patronage, Friendship and the Politics of Access: The Role of the Early Modern Revisited

Ronald G. Asch

I

In March 1708, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough wrote to Queen Anne to com- plain about the favour the queen had shown to another courtier, Abigail Masham. The duchess had been the queen’s intimate friend and companion for a very long time, and Abigail was a mere , the female equivalent of a groom of the bedchamber, whereas the duchess was keeper of the privy purse, lady of the bedchamber, and . As such, Sarah was the official head of the bedchamber, the innermost sanc- tum of the court. In this capacity she had, theoretically at least, always access to the monarch. Yet the once intense friendship between the queen and the wife of the Duke of Marlborough, Britain’s most famous and most successful general, had become markedly cooler for a number of years. While the queen often spent her time in Kensington Palace, for instance, the duchess preferred to remain at St. James’s Palace. Nevertheless, in her capacity as head of the bedchamber she still had an apartment in Kensington. Now to her dismay, however, she had learnt that some of her rooms had been given to her cousin Abigail Masham, who had become increasingly influential at court over the years. Despite Abigail’s modest social status, she acted as a sort of go-between between the leaders of the Tory Party and Anne, whereas Sarah and her hus- band were of course ardent Whigs.1 Sarah was not successful in her attempt to regain her apartments in Kensington Palace. As she probably had no intention of actually living there, her offensive was probably not so much designed to gain access to the queen on a daily basis once more. Instead, Sarah most likely sought to bar her rival Abigail from such access; at the very least she almost surely meant to maintain a symbolic presence at Kensington. Yet this was not to be: Queen Anne’s affec-

1 Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London: Harper Press, 2012), 347–49; Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 273–78; cf. R. O. Buchholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 154–68.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004304246_009 Patronage, Friendship and the Politics of Access 179 tion for Abigail was too strong, and she may have had equally strong misgivings about being ordered about by the Whigs anyhow. Having failed in her quest to retain all of her rooms in Kensington, Sarah Churchill next concentrated her energies on enlarging at least her apartments and those of her husband at St. James’s Palace. What she wanted was easier access to these apartments by annexing some adjacent rooms to them and breaking down a wall. However, this request was also denied. The duchess complained bitterly that the queen “refused to give him [the Duke of Marlborough] a miserable hole to make a clear entry to his lodgings”, and told the queen that she would tell her political friends the Whigs about this incident. They expected her to spend more time at court, Sarah said, but by treating her so badly and refusing her adequate lodgings, the queen made this impossible.2 In these complaints one can already recognize a leitmotiv of the politics of access at early modern courts: the decision to grant or deny access to a court- ier—by giving him or her lodgings near the royal apartments, for example, or by not doing so—had serious political implications. In monarchies where the ruler shared his or her power with a similarly powerful parliament, as in England after 1688, political factions could well see this as a provocative act, even perhaps as a sign that lawful royal government was turning into despotic rule. Where such accusations were articulated, another charge was also likely to be directed at the monarch: that he or she were guided not by reason but by what is illicit, that is, passion. And so it comes as no surprise that Sarah Churchill, thwarted at court by her own cousin Abigail Masham, spread rumours about the queen and Abigail which implied that the relationship between the two women was an erotic one. What is perhaps more surprising is that Sarah told the queen so more or less to her face3—not, as it turned out, a good move. As is known, Sarah Churchill’s imprudent attack on the queen had a share in the chain of events that brought down the Whigs as a party of government in 1710. Yet this is not the place to go into those details here. What is important about this story for the present historical account, rather, is a different aspect: first, the crucial role access to the monarch at court played even in a political system where parliament was already a major factor in politics, as it was during the reign of Queen Anne; and secondly, the power of a favourite, either male or female, who had to control this access to the monarch. In her capacity as groom of the stool, the Duchess of Marlborough was also responsible for pre- senting suitors to the queen at court. Somebody who had not been admitted

2 William Coxe, ed., Memoirs of John Duke of Marlborough (London: Bohn, 1847–48), 2:487, Duchess of Marlborough to Queen Anne (25 August 1709). 3 Somerset, Anne, 362–3. For the argument that the ‘self-government’ of the monarch and his or her passions was closely related to his or her rule of the realm, see below, n. 26.