Most afternoons the child was taken out in a little coach drawn by Shetland ponies. His health remained a worry and Anne was understandably a nervous mother. When he started to toddle he proved even more unsteady on his feet than most children, an unrecognised early sign of the poor balance caused by his hydrocephalus. Anne proudly informed Sarah as soon as he was able to walk the length of a room, but added that ‘he is so mighty heedless I am afraid it will be a great while before one shall dare venture to let him go without leadings’. In the summer of 1691 she tried not to panic when he had an attack of diarrhoea, reassuring herself he was ‘in very good temper and sleeps well … and they tell me ’tis the best way of breeding teeth’. Later that year she thought about taking the child with her when she went to Tunbridge, despite the fact that Lady Fitzharding’s husband told her this was unwise. Defiantly Anne told Sarah, ‘His eloquence can’t convince me more than other people’s that I am in the wrong’, but in the end she thought better of it and left Gloucester behind.28
Queen Mary was very fond of her nephew, giving him a beautiful set of ivory carpentry tools to play with, but the sisters’ mutual affection for the little boy did not draw them closer together. The fact that Anne was a mother may indeed have aroused Mary’s jealousy, for in a meditation written in 1691 she recorded that she was finding it harder than ever to resign herself to being childless. Relations between the Cockpit and Whitehall remained so frosty that Sarah became concerned, partly because she thought Anne needlessly made things worse. Not only did Anne maintain a gauche silence in her sister’s presence, but the contrast between her sullen demeanour towards Mary, and her effusive behaviour to Sarah was positively embarrassing.29
When Sarah accused her of not trying hard enough to please the Queen, the Princess was adamant that ‘as for respect I have always behaved myself towards her with as much as ’tis possible’. She maintained she could not feign an affection she did not feel, for ‘if it were to save my soul, I can’t … make my court to any lady I have not a very great inclination for’. She also demurred at Sarah’s suggestion that she should be less demonstrative towards her in public, complaining ‘I think ’tis very hard I may not have the liberty of … being kind … to those I really dote on, as long as I do nothing extravagant’. Nevertheless she promised that if Sarah wished it, she would show more restraint.30
Far from a thaw developing, Anne’s feelings towards her sister and brother-in-law soon became more glacial than ever. In early 1691 William had gone to the Continent to pursue the war against France, but Prince George’s hopes of military preferment were not fulfilled and a rumour that he would be made Admiral of the fleet proved false. Upset at being overlooked, George decided to serve as a volunteer in a Royal Navy ship commanded by Lord Berkeley. He informed William of his intention when the King paid a brief visit to England in the spring of 1691. The King, who was about to go abroad once again, merely gave his brother-in-law a farewell embrace, which George interpreted as consent. In fact, the King was appalled by the prospect of George going to sea, refusing to believe his brother-in-law simply wished to do his duty. As Mary darkly put it, ‘’Twas plain there was a design of growing popular’, and the King and she concluded that the Prince and Princess were set on courting sympathy for the way George had been treated.31
Before departing William instructed his wife to ensure that George did not go, though preferably without letting it appear that she had intervened. Mary began by asking the Countess of Marlborough to dissuade George, but she declined when it was stipulated that she must pretend she was doing this on her own initiative. The Queen next urged George directly to drop his plans, only to find that since his belongings had already been loaded aboard his ship, he believed it would be undignified to change his mind at this late stage. In desperation Mary then forbade him to go. Both Anne and George were angry at the way the Prince had been humiliated, and one foreign diplomat believed that this incident was the principal cause of the total breakdown in relations between the sisters that occurred the following year. For her part the Queen thought that all along the Denmarks had wanted her to issue a prohibition, ‘that they might have a pretence to rail and so in discontent go to Tunbridge’.32
George currently had other grounds for grievance. Contrary to what had been promised, he had not been recompensed for the lands he had surrendered to the Duke of Holstein. After ‘two years fruitlessly spent’ trying to secure payment, he had not received a penny. In August 1691 he had accepted ‘with a kind of repugnance’ a compensation offer of £85,000, a figure he believed undervalued the properties’ true worth. Infuriatingly, however, the money was not made available, even though George had only settled on condition of prompt payment.33
This coincided with another setback for Anne and George. For some time they had wanted the King to make some mark of favour to the Earl of Marlborough, who in the past three years had performed many services for William and Mary. He had been one of the nine Lords Justices appointed in the summer of 1690 to advise the Queen, and the following autumn he had conducted a remarkable military campaign in Ireland, resulting in the capture of Cork and Kinsale. Despite this the King and Queen remained suspicious of him, with Mary taking the view that he could ‘never deserve either trust or esteem’. Marlborough had recently been passed over for the position of Master of the Ordnance, and Anne and George wanted William to make a gesture that would go some way towards consoling him. Having understood that the King had agreed to make Marlborough a Knight of the Garter, George wrote to William on 2 August 1691 asking him to confer the promised honour, ‘it being the only thing I have ever pressed you for’. Anne seconded this request with a letter of her own. Robustly she told William ‘You cannot certainly bestow it upon anyone that has been more serviceable to you in the late Revolution nor that has ventured their lives for you as he has done ever since your coming to the Crown. But if people won’t think these merits enough, I can’t believe anybody will be so unreasonable to be dissatisfied when ’tis known you are pleased to give it him on the Prince’s account and mine’.34 Unperturbed by the certainty of causing serious affront, the King ignored both pleas.
William and Mary had hoped that in time the Princess’s infatuation with Lady Marlborough would lessen, but of that there appeared no prospect. On the contrary, it was around now that Anne told Sarah that she was, ‘if it be possible, every day more and more hers’. By April 1691 she had also instituted a new system designed to tear down the barrier of rank that divided them. Sarah recalled that Anne became ‘almost unhappy in the thought that she was her superior. She thought that such friendship ought to make them, at least in their conversations, equals … She could not bear the sound of words which implied in them distance and superiority’.35 They therefore agreed to adopt pseudonyms which masked the disparity in status between them, and to use these when writing or talking to one another. Anne took the name Mrs Morley, while Sarah called herself Mrs Freeman, and the arrangement extended to their husbands, who now became Mr Morley and Mr Freeman respectively.
Besides seeking to correct any imbalance in their relationship, the Princess demonstrated her devotion to her friend in a more material way. In the early spring of 1691 she wrote to Sarah, ‘I have had something to say to you a great while and did not know how to go about it; but now that you cannot see my blushes’ she was emboldened to offer the Countess of Marlborough an additional £1,000 a year as a reward for having secured Anne an increase in her allowance. She begged her to ‘never mention anything of it to me, for I should be ashamed to have any notice taken of such a thing from one that deserves more than I shall be ever able to return’. Considering that the Princess was still in pecuniary difficulties, it was a particularly munificent gesture; Sarah herself would later make the snide comment that since Anne’s ‘temper did not, of itself, frequently lead her to actions of great generosity’, it was more noteworthy still.36
Mindful of the demands of Sarah’s young family, Anne permitted her lady-in-waiting to spend long periods at her house at St Albans. Such separations were painful for the Princess, and Sarah recorded ‘I had upon that many kind expostulations, but the necessity of my affairs and some indulgence to my temper required it’. While in the country, the Countess immersed herself in works of political