In a slightly more emollient tone the Queen carried on, ‘I know this will be uneasy to you and I am sorry for it … for I have all the real kindness imaginable for you and … will always do my part to live with you as sisters ought … for I do love you as my sister, and nothing but yourself can make me do otherwise’. Mary said she was confident that once Anne had ‘overcome your first thoughts … you will find that though the thing be hard … yet it is not unreasonable’. Assuring her sister she looked forward to a time when they could ‘reason the business calmly’, she concluded ‘it shall never be my fault if we do not live kindly together’.57
For Anne this letter came as a clarion call to battle. Her conscience apparently untroubled by her approach to Saint-Germain, she clung fiercely to the belief that she had an inalienable right to choose her own household. She set herself against what she considered spiteful bullying, as much out of self-respect as because the prospect of losing Sarah appalled her. Her letters to Sarah now became marked by a visceral hatred of her sister and brother-in-law, containing ‘violent expressions’ that at times alarmed even Sarah.58 Besides giving vent to a virulent anti-Dutch prejudice, she referred to the King and Queen as ‘the monsters’; William was given some additional epithets of his own, notably ‘Caliban’ and ‘the Dutch abortive’.
As soon as Mary’s note arrived Anne alerted Sarah that she had received ‘such an arbitrary letter from the Q[ueen] as I am sure [neither] she nor the King durst … have writ to any other of their subjects’. The Princess dismissed this as the sort of provocation ‘which, if I had any inclination to part with dear Mrs Freeman would make me keep her in spite of their teeth’, declaring herself ready to ‘go to the utmost verge of the earth rather than live with such monsters’.59
The following day the Princess sent a reply to her sister that blazed with indignation. Mary was right, she said, to think that her letter would come as a terrible shock, for the Queen could hardly doubt how much it would pain Anne to dismiss Sarah. Declaring herself satisfied that her friend ‘cannot have been guilty of any fault to you’, she requested Mary to ‘recall your severe command’, which struck her as ‘so little reasonable … that you would scarce require it from the meanest of your subjects’. Confident that ‘this proceeding can be for no other intent than to give me a very sensible mortification’, Anne stated ‘there is no misery that I cannot readily resolve to suffer’ to avoid parting with the Countess of Marlborough.60
The King and Queen were enraged by Anne’s letter. William responded with a message delivered by the Lord Chamberlain ordering Sarah to vacate her lodgings at the Cockpit. It was arguable that he had no right to do this, for the Cockpit was Anne’s personal property, but the Princess decided not to argue the point. Instead she resolved that if Sarah could not live with her in London, she would remove to the country. She at once made arrangements to lease Sion House, situated a few miles west of the capital, from the Duke of Somerset. Although she retained the Cockpit for use during brief visits to London, most of her furniture was sent down to await her arrival.
Before withdrawing the Princess paid her sister a farewell visit, ‘making all the professions that could be imagined’ in hopes of softening her. In vain, however, for the Queen remained ‘insensible as a statue’. When the brief interview ended, the Lord Chamberlain failed to escort Anne to the palace door. Forced to find her own way, Anne could not even make a speedy exit, as her servants were not waiting with her coach, having assumed the visit would last longer. Still smarting at this additional indignity, on 18 February Anne was ‘carried in a sedan [chair] to Sion, being then with child, without any guard or decent attendance’.61
Prince George endorsed this drastic action, although he had done nothing to encourage the quarrel. A foreign diplomat noted that he ‘remains very calm in the midst of this commotion, as if it was none of his concern’. However, his equanimity was tested when he went to London for the day on 23 February and the royal guards in St James’s Park did not present arms to him as he passed. Anne had no doubt that the King had instructed them to slight him, commenting viciously ‘I can’t believe it was their Dutch breeding alone without Dutch orders that made them do it’. She assured Sarah fiercely that ‘these things are so far from vexing either the Prince or me that they really please us extremely’.62
At Sion the Marlboroughs were given their own apartments, and when the King sent a further ‘peremptory message’ demanding Sarah’s removal, Anne simply ignored it. Soon afterwards the Duke of Gloucester was brought down to Sion with his governess, though Anne did agree that he should be taken to see the Queen before his departure. To avoid burning bridges irrevocably, Prince George went to take leave of the King before William went abroad on campaign on 4 March, but his presence was barely acknowledged.
Sarah later stressed that, not wanting to make things more difficult for Anne, she repeatedly ‘offered and begged the Princess to let me go’, but when she did so her mistress invariably ‘fell into the greatest passion of tenderness and weeping that is possible to imagine’. She entreated Sarah ‘never to have any more such cruel thoughts’, since ‘I had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of all the world without you’. Anne declared that if Sarah abandoned her, ‘I swear to you I would shut myself up and never see a creature’, and argued that Sarah was not responsible for her breach with William and Mary. ‘Never fear … that you are the occasion’, the Princess urged, ‘it would have been so anyway’, for ‘the monster is capable of doing nothing but injustice’. Before long Sarah came to accept that Anne and George were somehow to blame for her and her husband’s misfortunes, rather than the other way round.63
When Sarah queried whether Prince George supported his wife’s stand, Anne reassured her ‘he is so far from being of another opinion, if there had been occasion he would have strengthened me in my resolutions’. Anne also made light of the possibility that the King would strip her of her parliamentary allowance, leaving her with just the money granted by her marriage treaty. While hoping that Godolphin would use his influence to protect her, she proclaimed that if necessary she was ready to endure financial hardship. ‘Can you think either of us so wretched that for the sake of twenty thousand pound, and to be tormented from morning to night with flattering knaves and fools, we would forsake those we have such obligations to?’ she demanded. The Princess opined that Sarah surely could not ‘believe we would ever truckle to that monster’, for besides the distress of their separation, it would entail intolerable humiliation. She put it to Sarah:
Suppose I did submit, and that the King could change his nature so much as to use me with humanity, how would all reasonable people despise me? How would that Dutch abortive laugh at me and please himself with having got the better? And, which is more, how would my conscience reproach me for having sacrificed it, my honour, reputation and all the substantial comforts of this life for transitory interest … No, my dear Mrs Freeman, never believe your faithful Morley will ever submit. She can wait with patience for a sunshine day, and if she does not live to see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again.64
On 17 April the embattled Princess Anne suffered another appalling blow. In her seventh month of pregnancy she went into premature labour, experiencing more severe pain than in previous childbirths. She sent word to the Queen ‘she was much worse than she used to be, as she really was’, but elicited no response. In the end the child was delivered by the ‘man midwife’ Dr Chamberlen, one of a famous dynasty of accoucheurs whose forebear had invented the forceps. He was paid £100 for his efforts, but could not save the baby, a boy who was born alive but died within minutes.65
A foreign diplomat resident in England commented ‘it is thought this event will bring about a reconciliation’, but things turned out otherwise. That afternoon, when the Princess had not physically recovered from her ordeal, let alone from the heartbreak of losing another child, Mary visited her at Sion. Unfortunately she came not in a spirit of forgiveness, but intent on imposing her will. Her mood was not improved when she was given what she considered a ‘poor reception’, taking offence at being ‘obliged to go up through the backstairs to her sister’s apartment unattended