THE ONE THING that the average, educated Brit tends to know about Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough and ancestor of both Sir Winston Churchill and Princess Diana, is that she had an intimate relationship with Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, who reigned from 1702 to 1714. Therefore, the first question they tend to ask me, as Sarah Churchill’s most recent biographer, is: “Did they or didn’t they?”
Academic historians, who like nothing so much as telling us that a question we’ve raised is the wrong question, would answer that lesbianism as we know it today did not really exist in the late 17th or early 18th century. They’d say that women just expressed themselves more sentimentally in those days, especially in their letters, and that these expressions should not be equated with any genuine strength of feeling. In fact, the evidence of Sarah Churchill’s life suggests to me that the Queen did love her closest friend in a way that we would classify as romantic, though perhaps not erotic—an embarrassing fact that Sarah ultimately used for her own self-preservation.
Sarah was a thirteen-year-old maid of honor when she first came into the court of Charles II to serve Princess Anne’s stepmother, Mary of Modena. Anne had already formed a close relationship with her own lady of the bedchamber, Mrs. Mary Cornwallis. Sarah later claimed that Anne had written “above a thousand letters full of the most violent professions of everlasting kindness” to this lady, and quoted Charles II laughing that “no man ever loved his mistress as his niece did Mrs. Cornwallis.” Sarah hinted that Anne’s father, the Duke of York, disapproved of the intensity of the attachment and that this was the true reason for Mrs. Cornwallis’s dismissal from her court post, while her Catholicism was only “the popular reason given out.”
Sarah and Anne themselves grew close during many long slow months in exile, alongside Anne’s father, in Brussels and then in Scotland in the early 1680’s. Anne’s earliest surviving letters to Sarah date from 1683 when Sarah was 23 and Anne 18. They show their relationship in full bloom, with Anne begging Sarah, for example, not to leave London “in mere pity and compassion to poor me (who you say you love),” and then to return quickly: “Oh come to me tomorrow as soon as you can that I may cleave myself to you.”
By this time, Sarah was already married to John Churchill (later made Duke of Marlborough, partly thanks to the relationship between his wife and the Queen). John was sent to Denmark to escort Anne’s fiancé George back to England, but the young women’s marriages were not felt to impinge upon their vows of eternal fidelity to one another.
It is true that equally intense feelings were expressed between other court ladies of the period. In letters written by one Frances Apsley to Princess Anne, for example, she explicitly declared that she felt “more of love than any woman can for woman & more love than ever the constantest lover had for his mistress”; and the letters sent by Anne Digby, Countess of Sunderland, to Sarah were every bit as fervent and possessive as Anne’s, signing off with “I long to embrace you” or “I love you beyond expression.” Some words have altered in meaning—Sarah referred to her “passion” for her children, for example—but that does not explain the sheer quantity of love letters exchanged between these women, well into adulthood. These letters suggest that there was a female equivalent to the 18th-century phenomenon sometimes labeled “sentimental sodomy.” And even if many early 18th-century ladies were in denial about their sexuality, they must have understood and enjoyed the frisson involved in casting their friendships in erotic language. What is still surprising to us today is that the Queen of England’s letters should supply so much evidence of this.
During my research on Sarah, I found dozens of publications referring to lesbianism or, as it was sometimes called, “the Game of the Flats,” played among “Women of Quality” in the 1700’s, including several filed among Sarah’s own papers. From these it is clear that female homosexuality was widely recognized, albeit regarded as an emotion or activity, not an identity. It was barely even regarded as a vice, so long as it remained a private matter within elite social circles and focused more on effusions of emotion than physical desire. In this form it was no threat to marriage or motherhood, because most men had little interest in forming intense bonds with people they considered their intellectual and moral inferiors. For the women involved, such relationships served as a means of escape from the constraints of a society based on their subservience. Even the Queen of England appears to have felt the need to escape emotionally from her own place in the social hierarchy by this means. She and Sarah wrote to one another using the middle-class nicknames of Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman: “I hope I shall get a moment or two to be with my dear Mrs. Freeman,” Anne wrote, “that I may have one dear embrace, which I long for more than I can express.”
Anne’s side of their early correspondence is the only one to have survived, because Anne obeyed Sarah’s instructions that all her letters should be be burned. This reinforces the impression of a one-sided infatuation. Sarah had a tenderness for the younger Anne, but humored rather than fanned the flames of her royal employer’s ardor, as she explained in her later memoirs: “Though it was extremely tedious to be so much where there could be no manner of conversation, I knew she loved me, & suffered by fearing I did wrong when I was not with her; for which reason I have gone a thousand times to her.” This lack of reciprocation was given a more Machiavellian gloss by Sarah’s enemies as Princess Anne’s position enlarged her political significance.
In June 1688, Louis XIV’s representative in London observed in an official diplomatic report that Anne had “a passion without measure” for her friend Lady Churchill, echoing Sarah’s later remark that Anne’s closest female friendships “were flames of extravagant passion.” After the Glorious Revolution of that year, which placed William and Mary on the throne, the two women became even more united by their arguments with the new monarchs—arguments largely based, Sarah claimed, on Queen Mary’s efforts to label Sarah’s “friendship and sincere affection” for Anne as “crimes,” and to dismiss her from Anne’s household just as Mrs. Cornwallis had once been dismissed. Anne assured Sarah: “I had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you.” She relished these romantic tests of adversity, while remaining jealous of any other friendships that Sarah formed with women. She excused herself thus: “[R]emember what the song says (to be jealous is the fault of every tender lover).”
With Anne’s accession to the throne in 1702, Sarah’s position became unequivocally that of a traditional royal favorite, and in a strange way it was reassuring to the public that this position was occupied by a woman, as if this preference gave the Queen the “heart and stomach of a King” (to quote Elizabeth I). No man ever tried to rival Sarah for Anne’s affections, and not even Anne’s husband, the Prince Consort, was considered such an important channel of influence.
Having been showered with royal bounty and the top positions in the Queen’s household, however, Sarah began to sour Anne’s feelings almost immediately. This was not, as is generally believed, because Sarah was born with an uncontrollable temper, but because she pushed forcefully for appointments and policies that were at odds with the Queen’s own belief that a government should be run independent of party politics. Sarah was a fervent supporter of the Whig party, but Anne’s sympathies leaned towards those of the Tories whenever she was forced to take sides. It was this ideological struggle that lay behind the women’s seemingly petty quarrels. What’s more, it is also apparent that Anne discounted Sarah’s political advice because it came from a woman. Sarah was frustrated to discover that Anne would take her advice on what petticoat to wear but not on what religious policy to endorse. Sarah started to suspect her cousin, Abigail Hill, who served as Anne’s chambermaid, of seductively manipulating the Queen according to the orders of the Tory leaders.
When, in the spring of 1707, Sarah discovered by chance that Anne was spending two hours every day in private with Abigail, she embarked on a campaign to force Anne to admit that she was now in love with her chambermaid. Claiming she was only concerned for Anne’s reputation because of the “noise” that the relationship was causing, but also implying that there was indeed something shameful going on, Sarah sent Anne printed satires that contained “stuff not fit to be mentioned of passions between women” to prove how the man in the street saw the situation. In July 1708, Sarah finally wrote her most explicit letter to Anne, referring to the fact that the Queen had “no inclination for any but of one’s own sex,” and containing a thinly veiled threat: she would publish Anne’s early love letters as part of her memoirs and in doing so further incriminate Anne as having “strange & unaccountable” feelings for her female friends.
Sarah forwarded Anne copies of salacious ballads about Abigail, comparing them with attacks on Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and disingenuously claiming to be disgusted by them. One satire referred to Abigail being let into the “most secret recesses” of Anne’s soul, while another referred to her performing “dark deeds at night” for her mistress. Sarah knew that insinuations coming from her pen, as an insider for almost forty years, were ten times more powerful than ballads sung in the streets. The fact that she asked Anne in private letters to deny the rumors is particularly telling. Anne’s only possible response was to maintain a dignified royal silence. At the same time, Sarah’s friend Arthur Maynwaring was threatening to introduce a parliamentary address that would have forced Abigail’s dismissal from Anne’s private service—the only precedent for which was Parliament’s forced removal of King Edward II’s lover, Piers Gaveston.
Finally, when the Tory press was ripping into her own reputation, Sarah resorted to blackmailing the Queen. The objectives of this blackmail were several: to allow Sarah to keep her household posts, or at least to retire without public humiliation; to allow the Whig ministers and Sarah’s other friends to keep their posts in the government; and, most importantly, to allow her husband Marlborough to continue as commander-general of the Allied armies in the war against France. Sarah believed she was doing all this for the national good. But, less altruistically, she seems also to have been a party to financial blackmail. Just before Sarah was dismissed, she received an unexplained payment of £18,000 from the Queen’s Privy Purse, ostensibly as payment in arrears for a £2000 per annum income that had not previously been withdrawn. The Duchess put aside her scruples over taking this “hush money” at the time, as she and her husband faced an uncertain future in exile on the Continent. However, it was to be among the last subjects she mentioned on her deathbed 32 years later: “I apprehend that you will think I was in the wrong to put her in mind of the £18,000, as I did myself, I confess it.”
So did they or didn’t they? The gay history website “QueerHis” confidently lists Anne and Sarah as lesbians, and in 1976 a collection entitled Lesbian Lives stated with absolute confidence that they had a physical relationship after 1692, if not before. In my view, however, it is unlikely that their relationship was ever physically consummated, not least because Anne was an invalid for most of her adult life: “exceedingly gross and corpulent,” as Sarah put it, disfigured by smallpox, gout, and endlessly failing pregnancies. Anne was also the first monarch to ask prudishly that her shoulders be covered up on coins. She was an emotionally needy woman, not a sexual one. Still, Sir Winston Churchill’s judgment that the two women “lived in the most sincere and natural comradeship possible between persons of the same sex” was either naïve or squeamish. While it does no favors to the past to stick modern labels on it, there must have been more latent lesbianism than comradeship in Anne’s attachment to her female favorites. Only this can explain how Sarah so effectively intimidated the woman she had known since adolescence by quoting from the 18th-century equivalent of trashy tabloid newspaper stories on homosexuality.
Ophelia Field is the author of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough: The Queen’s Favorite (St Martin’s Press, 2003). An earlier version of this article appeared in Diva magazine (UK).
