A of all, she definitely was a lesbian, and I’m not going to have this argument with you. She lesbianed all over Great Britain, and every woman she ever lesbianed with made the ultimate mistake of forgetting that Anne was the Queen, the rightful head of God’s true church and the lawful ruler of the Empire, ruining their chances of staying in her good graces for the duration of her reign, Sarah Churchill.
Someday, I’m sure, Nicole will walk us through her survival plan for getting and keeping Henry VIII’s affections, but that day is not today. Today is for explaining how I would have outlasted every one of Queen Anne’s favorites and ridden out her reign in unquestioned trust and support.
Step One: Avoid scandal. This isn’t the Tudor Court, and Anne isn’t Henry. You’re not going to be able to marry her or give her an heir, so get married and stay married, to someone either too thick to notice or too distracted to care that you’re sleeping with the Queen. It’s a mistake to pick someone overly devoted to you, because he’s going to start resenting Anne’s demands on your time. Pick a man who just wants to see you at dinner and to sire four or five children, or else someone with a sizable stable of mistresses of his own. Keep him happy. Don’t knock yourself out doing it, but don’t ignore him either. The cover of a respectable marriage goes a long way, and it’s probably your greatest asset. Cultivate it. Without it, the second Anne dies her heirs are going to toss you out of court for unspecified moral turpitude.
Step Two: Know when to stop disagreeing with her. I have a naturally mutinous tongue. This would be hard for me. But do you know what near-absolute monarchs absolutely loathe? Lovers who try to shove in with their non-royal opinions.
Anne, however, expected kindness and compassion from her closest friend. Sarah was not forthcoming in this regard and frequently overpowered and dominated Anne. One major political disagreement occurred when Sarah insisted that her son-in-law, Charles Spencer, the third Earl of Sunderland, be admitted into the Privy Council. Sarah allied herself more strongly with the Whigs, who supported the Duke of Marlborough in the war; and the Whigs hoped to utilise Sarah’s position as royal favourite. Anne refused to appoint Sunderland: she disliked the radical Whigs, whom she saw as a threat to her royal prerogative.
Don’t do this! Let the Queen offer your relatives prized sinecures. This way she gets to feel gracious and benevolent, which royals love to feel. If you push her into giving your shitty nephew a job when she hates his politics, what are you going to do when you need a real favor? If I were Queen Anne’s girlfriend, I would disagree with her just enough that she felt like I kept her on her toes and “challenged her,” but never so much that she thought I had forgotten my place. I would memorize my place.
Step Three: Choose innocuous pet names. This, at least, Sarah got right. Mrs Freeman and Mrs Morley? Who could object to that? The trick is to always fly under the radar of “They’re just really good friends.”
Step Four: Never introduce potential rivals to her. Your beautiful, charming, impoverished, unmarried cousin? Yeah, don’t bring her to court. She’s hungry, and she has more free time. You can never show jealousy in front of the Queen, obviously, which is an irritating limitation, but what you can do is keep obvious challengers with more pliable personalities and suppler skin from wandering into court. Be friendly to any of the Queen’s other favorites – if you play your cards right, they will come and go, while you stay constantly in the center of her orbit – but don’t hand someone else the knife to stab you in the back with.
Step Five: Let others nag her. You exist to offer her unqualified support and a respite from the pressures of ruling the country. You think a woman who has to worry about her fourteen dead children and the future of the British crown wants to fight over what jewels she wore to church?
On the way to the thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral, Sarah engaged in a furious argument with Anne about the jewels Anne wore to the service, and showed her a letter from the Duke of Marlborough which expressed hope that the Queen would make good political use of the victory. The implication that she should publicly express her support for the Whigs offended Anne; at the service Sarah told the Queen to “be quiet” after Anne continued the argument, thus offending the Queen still further. Anne’s next letter to Sarah was an exercise in chilling hostility, referring sarcastically to the “command” Sarah had given her to be silent: as a result Sarah, who rarely admitted that she was in the wrong, realised that she had gone too far and apologised for her rudeness, but her apology had little effect.
If you’re going to become the Queen’s mistress, you cannot nag or criticize her. You don’t have the safety of the title of royal consort. You have nothing but the Queen’s good will, and she has been raised from birth to believe she is God’s representative on earth. This is not a relationship of equals!
Step Six: When and if your own lesbian affair with the Queen comes to an end, accept your fate with cheerful good humor, that she might grant you a distant earldom to live out your retirement in peace.
The passion [Anne] showed for Abigail, and the stubborn refusal to dismiss her, angered Sarah to the point that she implied that a lesbian affair was taking place between the two women. During the mourning period for Anne’s husband, Sarah was the only one who refused to wear suitable mourning clothes. This gave the impression that she did not consider Anne’s grief over his death to be genuine.
Sarah Churchill was damn lucky Anne wasn’t a Tudor; if anyone had tried to pull this shit a hundred years sooner they would have had their heads removed five times over.
Messy accusations are never a good post-breakup look, and it’s all the more ill-advised when your ex is the Queen of Damn England and also Scotland Now and lesbian affairs are SUPER frowned upon. You cannot win them all. You had a good run. Take your consolatory minor palace and try not to remind the Queen of her youthful indiscretions. Get out while the getting is good!
“Unspecified moral turpitude” is either the name of a really pretentious #dad cover band that plays mostly James Taylor songs, or the working title of Jonathan Franzen’s latest…oeuvre.
I approve of unspecified moral turpitude, but yes. I can see your point.
I enjoy moral turpitude too much to want it associated with Jonathan Franzen.
This is my new favorite bon mot. Oscar Wilde would, I’m sure, adore it.
I do too, but it seems like he’s good at ruining things. 🙁
Man, I am far too lazy to be an effective royal lesbian lover. This sounds like so much woooork, can’t you just behead me now and have done with it? Unless I have to walk to the gallows. Are they still gallows if its a beheading? Or is that specific to hanging? Would I have to know this as a secret lesbian royal lover? Would it be a terrible faux pas if I referred to a drawing and quartering as occurring at the gallows, and all the better, fancier secret lesbian lovers would gasp and pity my coarse unrefined nature?
Yeah, I think I’m just gonna keep my head down and be the lover of some lower-ranking lady in waiting, or something.
Gallows is hanging. “The block” for beheading.
‘Little is known about Queen Anne’s first mistress, except that she suddenly appeared out of nowhere, threw the entire Court into chaos, and was convicted of witchcraft, all within about twenty minutes.”
I would watch this show.
I love self-contradictory tags 🙂
I suspect they made a bit more sense before they were ordered alphabetically…
I thought they were carefully planned to show up that way.
I mean, yeah, but those were tacky jewels.
Did I already know for sure that Mallory was a fellow Slytherin? Or is she just very, very sympathetic to our methods? Has this already been covered?
DURMSTRANG
Ah! Of course. Cousins, then, if not sisters?
Toast Slytherins represent.
Fellow Slytherin reporting in!
We’re gonna win the House Cup this year for sure!
I am a Slytherin but this sounds like too much work for me.
…on the flip side, if my eventual reward was to be Queen’s Librarian or something, I guess I could bestir myself for Queen and Country.
So, it just occurred to me 30 seconds ago that the problem House Slytherin has is that nobody in it (in-universe, at any rate) will set out logical arguments against the rampant anti-Slytherin prejudice in the wizarding world. You know who could address this?
That’s right: Hermione Granger, Rules Lawyer.
ANNE ANNE ANNE ANNE ANNE GOOD QUEEN ANNE
Also, we know Anne was gay because Margaret Tyzack played her in the miniseries and Margaret Tyzack only plays lesbian masterminds, formidable spinsters, and the Emperor Claudius’ emotionally distant mom.
This is a sadly under-rated method of historical research.
She might have been a lesbian, but surely calling Queen Anne a mastermind is going a bit far?
She was handed a political shit sandwich and stabilized it to the best of her ability. Also she had an affair with another lady in front of everyone. And she must have had enormous strength of mind to keep going after all her grievous personal losses- she attended all those cabinet meetings in person and before that she didn’t knuckle under to her father (who cursed her) or her sister (who used financial blackmail to try to get her to give up the Churchills.)
And her memorial statue was described as “looking longingly into a wine shop.” TEAM ANNE FOR EVER.
I just got her new biography from the library and will be reporting back.
I am far from an expert on British history, but I was under the impression that a fair portion of the stabilization was due to the actions of her husband rather than to her directly? And surely the key to successfully carrying out a lesbian affair as a queen in the 1600’s is to be covert rather than carrying on with someone who consistently publicly undermines you. Sure Sarah Churchill overstepped and that was a stupid move on her part, but Anne should have shut that shit down WAY sooner than she did. I didn’t mean to say that Anne was a terrible ruler or anything, just not a political genius.
The wine shop bit is glorious though.
EDIT: Some googling has alerted me to the fact that I apparently mentally condensed Anne and Mary II on account of Mary also being a probable lesbian. I apologize for any Anne slander and delight in England having a much richer history of lesbian queens than I had realized.
(This comment was a hot and hairy mess and I deleted it because it didn’t make very much sense.)
PLS REPORT BACK I don’t know anything about Anne and it has become clear that this is a terrible state to be in. But I struggle with biographies unless they are super duper well written.
I will!
Also, if you like old fashioned TV “The First Churchills” is on YouTube- it’s mostly about Sarah and John Churchill (duh) but Anne shows up around episode 5 and it’s all based on their letters. The women are the best part because they did lots of research and took the roles seriously and the men (surprise, surprise) thought a TV drama about dead aristos was beneath them and barely even learned their lines. Sarah comes off as a huge bitch even in a show that’s sympathetic to her, but she’s also pretty cool. (John will say, “Now Sarah, remember not to do this daft thing,” and she’ll do the daft thing and be all, “John, I did the daft thing because I do what I want,” and John will be like, “I’ll work around it because anything you do is OK with me, angeltits!”) It’s v. BBC in the 70’s and you can fast forward through the bits with men in bad wigs talking about policy but there is a great moment early on when a mob is after Nell Gwynn and shouts “Down with the Catholic whore!” and she says, “You are mistaken, good people, I am the PROTESTANT whore.” And I think one of the dudes from “Are You Being Served?” runs one of the religious persecutions. What I’m saying is, have some knitting or something handy but there will be moments where you put it down.
IIRC it wasn’t so much “TV drama about dead aristos was beneath them” as “working with then-unknown Susan Hampshire was beneath them”. They’d all signed on when Judi Dench was supposed to be playing Sarah; when she dropped out they massively resented somebody not-famous getting the star role.
Amusingly, Susan Hampshire is now the most famous member of the cast.
It’s true about John Neville and co being mean to Susan Hampshire for not being Judi Dench, but there was also an element of “this isn’t Shakespeare; I don’t need to bother that much” among most of the male actors on that set. My source is a rather delightful interview on the DVD with Susan Hampshire, who has only grown more charming over the years. She’s talking about all the research and out-of-hours character preparation she and Tyzack did (long phone conversations at night talking about what the characters were feeling and how to react) and adds something like, “Some people didn’t think they needed to bother” (but she says it very nicely.) And the interviewer says, “It’s always the men, isn’t it?” which Hampshire affirms. She’s so diplomatic and funny and kind about it, though.
And it really does come through in the finished product- you see some characters and think, well, I know he’ll react to this in such-and-such a way because he’s done so throughout the show, but Sarah and Anne take you by surprise. It was a pretty troubled production- the screenwriters were turning in the *scripts* at the last minute sometimes and during the process they never knew how many episodes they were going to film! (Which, to be fair, probably made it hard for the actors to get their lines down.) And the tape they were filming on was so expensive that they couldn’t take as much time as they liked. (She has another great bit on this interview where she says the lighting designer really liked her, so towards the end, she’d be making herself up to look old and wrinkled and he’d be lighting her so she looked like an angel!) It’s a lot of fun and worth checking out if you go for backstage drama!
OMG, that series. Alistair Cooke said it damn near killed Masterpiece Theatre in its infancy. John Neville looked happily baked throughout the entire series, no matter what was happening: his child died? Ah, well… (looking around muzzily). Sarah fucked up another royal thing? Oh, that’s my girl (eyes half-closed).
Margaret Tyzack was the dog’s bollocks as Anne. Daniel Day-Lewis’ mother, Jill Balcon, played a lady in waiting, so there’s that to watch for. Otherwise, re-watch Elizabeth R and glory in Glenda Jackson’s fabulousness.
Wikipedia’s page on Augustan literature has a blatant Anne smear that is so casually done. “Anne was reportedly immoderately stupid” Oh, OK.
That’s it: I’m doing more research and then officially shifting my Wronged Dead Monarch I Must Defend from Richard III to Anne. (Sorry, Richard; *I* know you were a competent, reasonably just king and probably not the murderer of your nephews.)
Dude, just negotiating life with multiple chronic illnesses, which she had, takes a hell of a lot of nous.
Can we take a moment to talk about the incredible lump of dullness that is Prince George of Denmark, Anne’s husband?
Firstly, centuries of angst on ruling queens, gone. Elizabeth couldn’t marry. Mary I, Mary, Queen of Scots, angst over their husbands. Anne’s sister, Mary, only got to be a ruling queen *with* her husband. But good ol’ Prince George? Nope. Never was going to be king. Didn’t even get a Prince Consort title.
Secondly, Charles’s immortal comments on him, “I have tried him drunk, I have tried him sober, there is nothing in him”
(Also, poor Anne — 17 pregnancies, no child survived to adulthood. She was pregnant non-stop for 15 years, practically)
TIL: gonna need to become Queen Regnant of some place.
But how do we think late in life Emily Gilmore would fair? On the one hand I think she would be masterful at court politics. Plus being a widow kinda covers step one. And she’s got the wits/personality to deal with steps three, four, and six. On the other hand I do think she might be the type to nag someone about gaudy jewels they wore to church. Thoughts?
I suspect this would only work if, in addition to the mandatory time travel device, there was an element of soul-swapping involved. Emily Gilmore would have to BE Queen Anne.
My entire plan for ‘in-the-past lesbianism’ is ‘be a widow’.
Ok not my ENTIRE plan but it’s step 1-5. (I think about this too muchhhhh)
I think, ideally, your husband is gay in this scenario. Thus you are both on the same page about it being a cover, you let him have discreet affairs with men, he has no issues with you sleeping with the Queen, you are both equally invested in maintaining the facade of a functional heterosexual marriage and thus your husband is an ally and not someone you have to double-cross.
What they used to call a “lavender marriage” in the 1920s, I guess. (I always liked that term).
I’m straight and have a good friend who is gay, and we have talked quite a bit about how, if this were 50-80 years ago, we would have gotten married and had a delightful life with two adorable and well-loved children, a few small dogs and a schedule of eagerly anticipated annual theme parties (ides of march! Derby Day! Midsummer’s Night! Wassail!) and a series of attractive blonde 22 year old males just sort of idly roaming around who I would refer to as “X’s best chum”. Meanwhile, I would be free to indulge in illicit affairs and also sleep on my own in a king size bed when the mood struck while having the freedom and cover of hetero marriage and an accomplice for my forays into Society. Etc.
I’d never heard that term before. It sounds so soothing!
Step Seven: Heavily insinuate potential rivals could be plotting overthrow and allying themselves with the Habsburgs or Papists or some other rival faction.
“I don’t know what she’s doing here, considering last I saw her at court she was repeatedly crossing herself. If you understand my meaning, Your Majesty.”
I’d prefer to AVOID starting witch-hunts, literal or figurative (substitute “Papist” or “spy” for “witch”). Sooner or later, when you work to raise the levels of suspicion and paranoia with (false) accusations, all that suspicion and heightened scrutiny will fall on YOU, too… and in this scenario, you DO have something to hide!
What if you just insinuate that potential rivals are way more into the D than they are into the C, iykwim?
“I’m not sure what she’s doing here, considering last time I saw her at court, she was constantly admiring her husband’s breeches, Your Majesty.”
This is glorious but the tags are the best thing ever.
All right. As an Abigail I think I’ve got this. At least I have no female cousins to try to sabotage me.
Where are these quotes from, Mallory?? What are you, an undergraduate in a class I’m teaching who has somehow managed to make it all the way to upper-division university courses without learning about citation practices? (Unfortunately there are a disturbing number of them.)
I’LL NEVER TELL
UGH WELL I TRIED
Out of curiosity, I Googled. They’re from the Wikipedia article on Sarah Churchill.
My favorite line so far from the Sarah Churchill’s wikipedia page is: “She had famous subsequent disagreements with many important people…”
Because it makes it sound like all she did was go around disagreeing with famous people. Which is quite a legacy!
That is not an adequate response to [citation needed] and Jimmy Wales is disappointed in you.
Mallory, I thought you’d turned over a new leaf with these one-time-use tags.
I honestly did not know that we were supposed to stop doing them
https://twitter.com/mallelis/status/6485925031347…
Ok, but those are almost more amazing out of context, so I support one-time-use tags.
The one use tags make my life.
I adore one use tags and will cry if you discontinue them.
“maybe she was bisexual what do i know about anything i think she was probably a lesbian but i’m not going to stop anyone from suggesting she was bisexual, queen anne was a lesbian and i’m not going to brook arguments to the contrary, some people are bisexual but queen anne wasn’t one of them”
These tags are a beautiful slam poem.
Yessssssss
I love these very practical guides to being the lover of a royal. I mean, come ON, have a little bit of common sense!
A lot of the guys Catherine the Great kept as lovers really could have used this advice.
Both Toast editors have plans to seduce royalty and establish a crosstime empire? Has Nicole Chung set her sights on a past ruler too?
I am a long-time lurker Toastie ( <3 ), and this article inspired me to finally make a commenting account. Anne is super underrated, and she definitely deserved a higher caliber set of lesbian lovers, among other things. For the Queen Anne aficionado slash general lover of feminist writers of English historical fiction, I have to recommend _Shores of Darkness_ by Diana Norman. The book is sprawling (and, tbh, less overtly feminist that some of her later stuff, but still amazing), and its climactic twist involves Anne’s ladies of the bedchamber. Not, unfortunately, in a lesbian way, but still tantalizing.
Oooh I’ve been looking for some new fun, pulpy, feministy reads and this author sounds perfect! Thank you!
When I was a child I had a Ladybird ‘Kings & Queens of England’ book that described Anne as ‘rather a dull woman, whose chief interest was in drinking tea.’ I now think this was a carefully crafted sentence designed to keep vulnerable young minds from researching further and finding out about royal lady lovin’. And possibly to also discourage tea drinking.
I had that one too! I loved the Ladybird Books, especially their beautiful illustrations.
Yes! Most of my conceptions of historical events are still largely influenced by the Ladybird illustrations of them.
“Her chief interest was drinking tea” is a fabulous euphemism for lesbianism.
The tags are my favourite part
This well-reasoned plan assures me I too would’ve lasted with Anne.
Any recommendations for highly fictionalized (and eroticized) historical fiction accounts of Anne and her lesbian liasons?
This is amazingly similar to my plan for having an affair with Richard III, except without the lesbian part.
“Someday, I’m sure, Nicole will walk us through her survival plan for getting and keeping Henry VIII’s affections, but that day is not today”
OK, but — WHEN IS THAT DAY? I need to know. Can it be tomorrow? Please and thank you.
Right? As a person watching The Tudors for the first time, this is key information.
So when Anne dumped Sarah like a sack of tacky jewels, would one call it… Queen Anne’s Revenge?
… I’ll see myself out.