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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [01:34]
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- [02:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from our and Berlin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage, and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In the glittering royal courts of the 17th and 18th century, power did not always sit on the throne, but sometimes it stood just behind it, whispering, advising, persuading, and at times, provoking. Over the past few weeks, I've been revisiting the lives of some of the most famous, even notorious, favorites of the English court. I started with Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I's forbidden Love, followed by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the intimate favorite of King James I, and 6. Do have a listen to those fascinating episodes, if you haven't done so already. At the heart of Queen Anne's reign was one such Dutch figure, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, a woman whose influence reached from the royal bedchamber to the battlefields of Europe and whose rise and fall would come to define an age of political intrigue, war, and shifting alliances. Born in 1660, Sarah rose from modest aristocratic beginnings, if that's not an oxymoron, to become Anne's closest confidant. Their relationship was intensely personal, forged in youth, annoying, sustained through letters, shared secrets, and mutual dependence. But it was also profoundly political. As mistress of the robes and groom of the stool, Sarah controlled access to the queen, shaped her public image, and championed the Whig cause during the long and costly War of the Spanish Succession. Alongside her husband, the Duke of Marlborough, one of Britain's greatest generals, she stood at the very center of national power. Yet favorite court was as fragile as it was intoxicating. In 1708, at St. Paul's Cathedral, a silent but devastating message was delivered. The queen appeared without the jewels Sarah had carefully prepared for her, a public sign that their once unbreakable bond was beginning to fracture. Behind the scenes, rivalries had taken root, none more significant than that of Abigail Masham, Sarah's own cousin, whose quiet charm gradually displaced the duchess in Anne's affections. What followed was a story of friendship turned to enmity, of political factionalism played out through deeply personal relationships, and of a woman determined to fight for her place in history. Even as she was cast out of power, Sarah Churchill would not go quietly. Through memoirs, letters, and pamphlets, she fought to control her narrative becoming not just a royal favorite, but but one of its fiercest chroniclers. In this third episode of our series on royal favourites, I'm delighted to say that I'm joined by historian Ophelia Field, author of the Favourite Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Ophelia is the director of a postgraduate program in biography at the London campus of the University of Buckingham. Together we'll explore the extraordinary life of Sarah Churchill and the intimate, explosive relationship that shaped a queen, a court and a country. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Ophelia, welcome to the podcast.
- [06:07]
Ophelia Field
Thank you so much for having me.
- [06:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm really excited to talk about Sarah Churchill. Why do you think we find her so compelling? Who was she?
- [06:16]
Ophelia Field
Well, I mean, I think we find her compelling because her life in a way is a sort of perfect rise and fall arc. I mean everybody has their rise and fall, but hers is particularly sort of dramatic as seen on a stage. As one of her co authors of her memoirs put it, she was a great self dramatist. So she made her own life compelling for us and left remarkable sources, primary sources to work from letters and memoirs and everything. And so we have this perfect story of betrayal, of jealousy, treachery, all these things wrapped up in personal relationships that are also political. And that's really why she makes such a good book subject.
- [07:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How did the relationship with Queen Anne begin?
- [07:03]
Ophelia Field
Well, she went as quite a young woman to be a maid of honor in the court of Mary of Modena, and she initially was a maid of honor to her. She later became Anne's lady of the Bedchamber. So they were at court together very young and they acted together in 1675 in a masque kind of play together when anne was only 10 years old and Sarah was 15. They must have already started to have a relationship at that point, though we don't have letters between them until 1683, so quite a while after that. But they went together to Brussels in a kind of self imposed exile along with James II to Brussels and they also spent eight months in Edinburgh together. They had this long period where they grew very close as young women in the Restoration court and in this strangely sort of exiled court with Mary Modena, who was a very interesting woman nurturing her maids of honor to be interesting people.
- [08:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Surely that age difference is quite important because it means at that crucial stage, 10 to 15, five years is everything. I mean, it's half Anne's life and you look up to those older girls at that stage don't you? I mean, surely that must have sort of dictated the nature of that friendship, that dynamic.
- [08:27]
Ophelia Field
It certainly set a sort of a power dynamic that was the inverse of their actual status as princess and maid of honor. But, you know, in a way, what I always try to emphasize is people knowing it started that way, tend to talk as if all their letters were just written between teenage girls. But in fact, that relationship then goes on and on. We're talking about 27 years and very soon. You know, these are letters between young women who are getting married and having babies and everything. And so it is true, it starts like that. And it also, one has to remember, starts in a situation where Anne was very vulnerable. She had already lost her mother, lost many siblings. She. In fact, I think it's quite probable that it was the death of her sister Isabella that prompted her to really look for comfort in her friends and Sarah and everything. So she was in a vulnerable position as well as being younger. But that, although it's the starting point, it's wrong to then just read it as kind of teenage girls at school the whole time, which is what some historians have done, talking about adolescent crushers and just leaving it at that. I think that oversimplifies and patronizes them.
- [09:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And it doesn't recognize the way in which we change as humans, does it? So how did it evolve as a relationship, then? What was the nature of it as time went on?
- [09:51]
Ophelia Field
We have Sarah's account of that evolution in her memoirs, and that has to be taken with a pinch of salt, for sure. But, you know, I think the way she describes it is that Anne very quickly did start to dote on her and idolize her. And she went to serve Anne, but described it as being like sitting in a dungeon, basically with her, found it very boring and tedious. I mean, Sarah was hugely popular and charismatic, and lots of people wanted to spend time with her. And going to hang out with Anne was not the fun part of the day. That was how it started. But then Anne had various suitors. She married Prince George of Denmark, and there's that sort of maturing of their relationship. That basic dynamic, however, doesn't change because Anne's letters, the ones that we have, at least show her talking to Sarah, sort of like a neglected lover, always feeling that Sarah wants to be with other people and regretting that she doesn't have more of Sarah's attention. And time, she gets jealous of Sarah's other female relationships because unlike female friendship today, there was much more of a concept that one was monogamous with one's close friends, these friends that you had these sort of passionate relationships with, you had to be much more faithful to that friend. And then they had that, as I described it, that period in Scotland where they were also united in trying to distance themselves from the pro Catholic policies of Anne's father. And so they had this sort of political experience together. But Sarah describes it as if she had a political awakening at that time, seeing the persecution of Protestants, and that Anne, her friend, did not have a similar awakening, that unbeknownst to her, they were not having the same reactions to the various martyrdoms and things she believed she saw in Scotland. So that's how it was going. But then, you know, you have the glorious Revolution, which is a turning point, because essentially Sarah and her husband are a major influence on Anne and her husband deciding to flee the palace and betray Anne's father. And that moment of influence is the sort of where the story really kicks off and where. Where their relationship becomes something of signi. Political significance for. For everyone, for the cut for the nation.
- [12:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can I just ask a sort of obvious question for people thinking about this today? What you've described as a relationship, as one that's passionate and possessive. It sounds more like romance eros than philia. Talk me through what you make of the idea that Sarah and Anne were lovers.
- [12:44]
Ophelia Field
I know, because I'm an avid listener to your podcast, that you've people discuss this subject. And I don't think I can add to too much to what some of them have said in the sense that I agree with the line that it doesn't ultimately matter too much what physically happened between them, but I do take their emotions seriously. And I do think that when they used language that had an erotic frisson or a highly romantic tenor, that they. That they meant it, they felt it. It wasn't just all pretend. And that, yes, at least for Anne, this was a relationship at the absolute emotional core of her life. And that's what matters biographically and in terms of what subsequently happens. So I'm sort of we will never know. And I'm also disinterested in how much may or may not have. You know, it's quite possible things did happen, because I also don't find that a ridiculous possibility. But it's sort of neither here nor there to the dynamics of the story. What matters is that Anne was in love with Sarah, and Sarah was fond of Anne, but she was her employer. Sarah's family's entire income and existence depended on Anne. It's A very awkward situation to be in when your employer is in love with you and you have to sort of think of it in those terms. She was managing it with kindness and affection, but not necessarily reciprocating the strength of Anne's feelings in those younger years.
- [14:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think that's really clear and helpful and actually a nice corrective for the way that it is perhaps a fault of the modern age, of our intense focus on the physicality of a relationship. Whereas actually, you're pointing to intimacy, which is being known and knowing someone, and that's. It's worth so much more, isn't it? And it's something we can actually chart as historians, whereas we can't chart anything else. Yeah.
- [14:54]
Ophelia Field
And I just think it's extremely sort of arrogant to just disregard quite so many words between these women as having been nothing but a sort of poetic style. I don't know. That's my take on it. But they did also, to move the story to the next segment was incredibly important. And again, one that most narratives of Sarah and Anne skim over far too fast, which is the 1690s, when they are also in opposition to Anne's sister, Mary and William iii. They essentially have to go into a kind of exile together to Sion House, and they are bonded in adversity. Sarah's husband is charged with treason. They have various loss, deaths of children and things that they have to go through together. They are in this long period of, you know, a decade of feeling that they are in the political and sort of social wilderness and being snubbed all the time by the court and everything. And they are, at that point, Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman, they are equals together, surviving through this time that is not comfortable. And that it's only when you give that the proper weight as well that you can then understand the sort of hysteria of everything that follows. It all seems like overreaction unless you really understand the length and the depth of that friendship during the 1690s.
- [16:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's really helpful. Can we talk a bit about Sarah's ambition? You've given us a sense of how brilliant she was. How did her ambition shape her role at court?
- [16:32]
Ophelia Field
There's no doubt that both Sarah and Anne were quite ambitious. I think people always talk about the differences between them, but actually the similarity, that is one similarity that they both had. Anne's whole reaction to the birth of her half brother and the whole warming pan story and everything shows she was not a woman without her own ambitions. Sarah's ambitions, I think, are also clearly based on some political Beliefs, political principles. She wanted us to believe that. And that is the. The key point on which I do believe her and not everyone does. I do think she had certain ideas that meant she was predisposed towards the Whig party and was going to be loyal to them, even when it was against her own interest to do so. It would have really, as she herself said at one point, it would have been quite easy for her to just go along with the various things Anne wanted to do. If she had just wanted money and to stay in power, money and power for their own sake and her family's dynastic brilliance, she could have just gone along with a whole bunch of Tory policies and decisions that she shouldn't. The fact that she was ambitious to argue her own point of view and pushing that she was ambitious to actually be a politician of principle, based on a kind of ideological view of the world. That is the claim she makes about herself, which I personally buy, but not everyone does. But I do think that her ambition was always framed, you know, in the same way a male politician's could be to. Although at the time the world was full of people who in fact were, as they put it, trimming, changing sides quite all the time. She was surrounded by trimmers, people who went back and forth between parties or between different sides or different monarchs. And she herself was remarkably consistent in her beliefs over decades, really, whenever she was pragmatic, it was really only on the edges around minor issues or, you know, to be nice to her sister, who was a Jacobite or something. But she, on the whole had an ambition to make the country take a certain direction.
- [18:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Talk us through her politics, then. What was it that she wanted to see achieved?
- [18:51]
Ophelia Field
Well, I mean, I think she, as a function of having grown up in court and so close to Anne, I thought her Whig principles are those of treating the monarch as they're to serve the country. A contract theory of you are there because we allow you to be there on the throne. She essentially sees the monarchy as sort of the least worst institution that could be there. She doesn't have a sort of see any aura around the throne. She believes in the importance of English civil liberties and Parliament and all these things, and she genuinely believes, whether it's true, it was the case or not. Her belief that she had grown up with and became hardened over the years was that it was all on the precipice, being under threat from French invasion, Catholic tyranny, potpourri, authoritarianism. She genuinely thought she was defending not democracy, as we mean it, but various principles of English freedoms that she believed went on beside. I mean, she bought that whole Whig narrative and did so really at a time before it had been fully articulated either. I mean, you later get at the trial of Dr. Sacheverell and things, the full articulation for the first time of some of these things. And, you know, she did read John Locke later and everything, but she seems to have been arguing for appointments of people on the Whig party based on. Even when it was against her own interest to necessarily push for those appointments based on those kinds of beliefs.
- [20:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The incident that I mentioned at St Paul's Cathedral when Anne refused to wear her jewels, it's so dramatic, but what's really going on there?
- [20:38]
Ophelia Field
People know that Anne not wearing her jewels is a kind of expression that they will read it not just as Sarah falling out of favor, but also Anne changing her policy about the war and no longer wishing to promote the war. They start to argue about it in the carriage on the way to St. Paul's and when they get into the cathedral, Anne, the argument continues and Sarah is worried that everyone's going to hear them arguing. And she basically hisses at Anne to be quiet, but she does so in a way that people standing around hear Sarah hissing at hand to be quiet. And, you know, from that moment they just have to sit through the rest of this Thanksgiving ceremony and kind of absolutely mortified silence of anger. Anne will use this later. She will effectively kind of refer back to this when she doesn't want to give. When Sarah is hectoring her and she doesn't want to give an answer, she refers obliquely back to this scene and says, you told me you didn't want, so I shall give you none. You know, she is clearly knew that, you know, she had her pride as a queen by this point and was not going to have her servant hiss at her in public this way.
- [21:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That sounds a bit like Anne is just having a hissy fit herself, really, doesn't it? You told me to be quiet. I'm not going to say anything else ever again.
- [22:04]
Ophelia Field
No, I mean, I think there were strong feelings on both sides and Sarah clearly lost control of herself. But she was trying to also tell Anne to get control of herself in a public situation. I mean, that's the interesting thing, I think, always with favor, that it always has these two levels. It's the reality of whether the relationship is strong or not. But then there's also the public image of it. And in Sarah's case, certainly we see her fall happens internally a long time before it becomes Public knowledge. So it happens in these two stages and the St. Paul's incident is one of the first times that there's a little chink. Other observers, people who are watching closely, start to notice that something's not right between them. But actually things hadn't been going well between them for four years before that happened. So, you know, it's always this reputation, external image and also then the personal, intimate story going on in parallel.
- [23:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's very interesting. And I'm also struck by the way that so much could be signified by so little. I'm sure it's true today as well, that you have to know the codes, you have to know the cultural context of something to be able to understand an instant, like not putting on one's jewels, suggesting that actually you're now anti war, that it depends on being really well versed in the culture of the time. You mentioned Abigail Masham.
- [23:28]
Ophelia Field
Let's.
- [23:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Should we talk about her? How has she come to replace Sarah in Anne's favour?
- [23:34]
Ophelia Field
So again, because the 1690s always get erased, that story has to start earlier than it usually starts because it's back somewhere. We don't know exactly, but somewhere around 1690 that Sarah discovers she has some impoverished cousins and she basically adopts all Abigail and three of her siblings and she puts them through school, she gets them jobs, she says she nurses Abigail through smallpox with her own hands. I mean, she says she was treated Abigail like a daughter. So she gets Abigail a job in Anne's bedchamber. And at a certain point in time, Sarah senses and Godolphin, who's the treasurer, together, sense that Anne is getting advice, that somebody is advising her, and they start to cast around for who that might be and they try all sorts of different candidates before they finally begin to get a clue that it's Abigail. Basically, she got married without telling Sarah about it. And when Sarah investigates, launches a little inquiry within the court, she finds out that Anne actually attended the wedding and gave her a big dowry. And she begins to. By the fact that there's been lying about that, she begins to see that there's probably lying about other things. And in fact she was right. She was right that Abigail's other cousin, who was Harley, who was trying to organise a kind of moderate Whigtory opposition to the Marlboroughs and government, that he was channeling or using Abigail as a conduit to speak to Anne and to push his positions on various things. But it was. When Sarah discovers this, it's a personal betrayal. It's a personal betrayal. On two fronts. Not just Anne seeming to switch favor, but also Abigail having basically betrayed her patron that she no doubt felt really patronized by, but nonetheless somebody who had helped her family a huge amount. And so she has this sort of double personal betrayal which she then maps directly onto Anne, effectively also taking a political turn that is a kind of political betrayal of previous policy and promises. So the story is always this absolutely entangled, public, private meanings of everything. And Sarah plays with that rhetorically all the time. She uses words like inclination, inclination to party, inclination to an individual that you are overly passionate about. You know, she has these words that have double. Can be read either as political terms or as quite loaded personal terms. And she's always switching, if she's, you know, if she's been accused of being overly personal about something that she switches it to say, no, I was just talking politics, you misunderstood me. And then if it's taken as being overly, too much political interference, she's, oh, no, sorry, I was just talking about our friend. It's always this kind of trying to have her to ease both, you know, Abigail is a harder figure to read through. Though she did leave letters. She wasn't an unsophisticated woman. She wasn't. Although Sarah had, you know, rescued her family, there wasn't actually that much difference between them in a sense in that Sarah's family, although they were minor gentry, they'd also come from a place of extreme financial precarity and everything. So Sarah says she raised Abigail from the dust, which is this phrase that you get in a lot of sort of Jacobean plays about favorites and things that you. You raise somebody from social obscurity and then they betray you. But. And the ingratitude, the ungrateful favorite. But the similarities are more striking in many ways than the differences between them.
- [27:44]
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- [27:51]
Ophelia Field
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- [28:01]
Ophelia Field
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- [28:14]
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- [28:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can we talk a bit more about that difference between public and private? I'm interested in the way that Sarah saw herself and how she conceived of herself with regard to previous favorites. Favorites as they were depicted at the time on stage and whether there's a contrast with that image and how much that sort of sense of her image gossip about her. Her reputation is part of that rise and fall.
- [29:03]
Ophelia Field
Yeah. I mean, it's quite interesting because Sarah didn't have a huge amount of education, but she's an autodidact. She tries to teach herself about English history. She starts reading history books that are both about, she says, about favorites who have been a burden and a grievance to the state in later life. She reads the whole correspondence between James I and Buckingham. She's, you know, interested in all this. But she also has these male friends, Arthur Mannering in particular, who are better educated and keep telling her all the time of the parallels between what she is doing and what previous favourites in history have done and everything. And she gets a real sense of different models, of the sort of virtuous and evil favorite and the different ways they behave and tries to depict herself in relationship to those others did so as well. There was a court case, actually, about her influencing an election in st Albans in 1705, and they compared her to the favorite of Edward III and to the Duke of Buckingham in the Commons and all these kind of things. So there are these sort of analogies surrounding her all the time. She also. She'd watched William III's favourites like her. She absolutely hated the Earl of Portland, who was William's first favourite in England. And one of the things she most loved was when Anne gave her the rangership of Windsor Great Park. She got to kick Portland out and move in there and take his place. And it was this sort of change of favorites was almost as kind of institutional as, you know, change of a cabinet or something. She was. She'd seen other people, she'd seen other women who had been mistresses to kings and things and how they did or didn't engage, use that influence and try to be political or not. She really. She was very interested in her own narrative and proving herself to be one sort of favorite and not another.
- [30:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I wonder if we can talk a bit more about the sort of things that Sarah achieved, things like her architectural projects, you know, and how much we can see her hand at work behind something like Marlborough House.
- [31:15]
Ophelia Field
I mean, the problem with talking about Sarah is. I mean, she lived for 84 years and she never stopped. She did so many things that we are not going to have time to even cover within the theme of your royal favorites here today, because they're, you know, her whole life, latter half of her life. As well, where she basically wielded power because she was one of the wealthiest women in Europe or one of the, you know, private citizens in Europe. You know, her achievements are so many and varied that it's really hard to cover it all. But if, even if we just take the architecture, I mean, it has been underestimated how much influence she had both on. Well, particularly on Blenheim. When I was first sort of shown around Blenheim by a tour guide, they didn't, you know, they had only a little mean word to say by her. The whole fact that that house would never have got completed without her taking control of things. You know, despite her major arguments with the architect Fanborough, she did shape the way it turned out more than anybody else, basically.
- [32:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But.
- [32:19]
Ophelia Field
But they were very different. That's a good example of. With public and private, because they were very. If we contrast Marlborough House and Blenheim Palace. Blenheim palace was meant to be a public monument funded by the Crown. She saw it. She was only building it because her husband wanted it so much. And she never liked it. She never approved of it as a good use of money or the plans, or thought it was a reasonable thing to do or really wanted to be there or anything. She did it for his sake and for her family, you know, status. Marlborough House is a much more interesting one because when she realized she was falling out of favor and she needed another, she was going to lose her Apartments in St. James's she needed another London base. And that was her decision, against her husband's wishes, to find some land and build herself a house. And she's doing that at a time not just when she feels that Anne has betrayed and abandoned her, but where she also suspects that her husband, Marlborough, is having an affair with a younger woman. And so it is this kind of, you know, decision to do something for herself, to build a house in the taste that she wants. I mean, to us, Marlborough House and Blenheim palace, you have to be quite an expert eye to see the difference in their grandeur. But for her, she built Marlborough House to be a kind of ante Blenheim in a lot of choices that she made about it, decoratively and architecturally. So it was really Marlborough House is her house and Blenheim is just one. She was kind of forced to finish as quickly as she could before her husband had too many strokes and everything, you know, so it was different scenarios, but she was managing the works, you know, in a very hands on way. Getting up at six in the morning and watching the Accounts down to the penny in a way that drove all the workmen and the architects insane.
- [34:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Give me some more sense of that time, this moment when her political fortunes are declining and the way in which she is fending herself by the creation of Marlborough House. But what else is happening in that kind of final confrontation between Sarah and Queen Anne and how that plays out over time.
- [34:29]
Ophelia Field
Well, Sarah believes that she is fighting for her own survival, not just selfishly for her own sake, but because on her favor rests some of the credit that her husband has at the peace conferences and internationally in terms of having the trust and the connection to Queen Anne. So therefore, she basically tells herself that almost anything is justified to keep herself in power, at least in the appearance of intimacy and power with Queen Anne. And so in those final years, she does effectively resort to blackmail. She threatens to publish Anne's letters from when they were young, which she, as she says, very sort of in a sinister way she has kind of stored up in many different places. And even when Anne directly asks for them back, she doesn't send them. Well, they have this final confrontation at Kensington palace, which is, again, we only really know it, how dramatic it was, because Sarah worked and reworked the scene in her memoirs and in one version writes it as a kind of play script between the two of them. But they have this absolutely terrible last meeting where Sarah's in streams of tears and physically blocking Anne from leaving the room and trying to get Anne to tell her what she's done. And she knows what she's done, but she's trying to sort of have it all out, and Anne is refusing to engage. And then afterwards, she writes another letter to Anne. After that, she writes these long letters that many historians have described as kind of unhinged. But in fact, I think it's really unfair to Sarah because she checked these letters with people like her husband or the treasurer before she sent them, and they said, oh, yes, that all sounds very reasonable. Off you go, send it. So they were using her also as a way to say things that they felt but couldn't say. And she sends these letters. And when she's then told to stop writing to Anne completely, she starts to write to Anne's doctor, knowing full well that Anne's doctor is going to read these letters to him out to Anne. And so it's just another way of trying to tell Anne, please don't dismiss me. Just leave me in place until the peace is concluded on British terms is her basic line. Don't dismiss me, don't dismiss my husband. Don't dismiss Sidney Godolph and the treasurer until we have had the benefit of my husband's victories in the war. That would be her line about what she was doing. Other people around her and others who have written about her have seen it just as a completely selfish and cynical kind of clinging onto power for its own sake. But as I say, she had a. She thought she had a nobler purpose in this blackmailing of the Monarch.
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- [39:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's really interesting that she reworked that scene again and again because that suggests that it had a profound impact on her. I'm reminded of something some 50 years earlier when there's an artist who paints the explosion of Delft again and again and again. And it turns out he lost his family in the explosion of Delft. You know, that sort of reworking artistically suggests that something has caused trauma. And perhaps we can talk a bit more about how Sarah used to her writing her memoirs as a tool to defend her reputation and create a version of herself for posterity.
- [39:58]
Ophelia Field
Yes, again, one of her achievements that tends to just get wrapped up in the story of her rise and fall as a favorite. But she really was an extraordinary writer and she thought of herself as a writer. She wrote things both for publication and things that were not for publication. Her memoirs, she actually started as early as 1704 as a letter to a Friend just to justify herself in relation to her role in the revolution and the years under William and Mary. And she goes through a whole series of co authors, most of whom rather weirdly are clergymen, who, I don't know that they have to write the whole bit about the sort of romantic relationship between the teenage girls. I always think, you know, some of them took to it better than others, some of that emphasized it and made it sound more romantic, some of them downplayed it a bit and everything. But she goes through all these different versions and her feelings change. So at one point where she is particularly outraged, indignant after their fall, when she's working on her manuscript, when the Marlboroughs have to go off to the continent, they travel through the countries where Marlborough is a great hero and they go down to Hanover and she all this time is working on. And at that point she's writing with real anger towards Anne and what's happened because Anne is not yet dead, she's still. And it's all very fresh in Sarah's mind. But you know, by the time those memoirs are finally published, which is in 1742, a lot of it is brought in and stays the same. But Sarah by that point has also softened her feelings about Anne. She takes out a lot of the worst stuff that we can find in the manuscript versions and it's not a complete hatchet job on Anne. She sort of actually tries to sort of make it a slightly more sympathetic and balanced account. By that time she'd actually put up a statue of Anne at Blenheim Palace. So she was, you know, it was partly because she was. She hated Queen Caroline so much more at that particular juncture. So she, Anne suddenly seemed nostalgically all right. But Sarah's writing because it's so powerful, because she had such a good eye for little anecdotes about people and character sketches and things. It's really shaped history's view of Queen Anne and it's shaped the Hanoverian view of what happened during that period because she made sure they got her version of events long before they came to England. So they were already primed with the sort of Sarah narrative she would have seen Some of its vehemence really as self defense, because she was a celebrity in the first British newspapers coincide with her peak of celebrity. And she was really vilified and satirized by, particularly after she was dismissed and then her husband was dismissed. It was sort of open season on the Marlboroughs. And there were, you know, dozens. I think in my bibliography there are 85 contemporary satires and things about the Marlboroughs. And the vast majority of them are, you know, highly critical of her, particularly as a woman. And so she would have felt herself under attack. She didn't really use. She used the memoirs somewhat to vindicate herself, but she also hired other people and used the press at the time as well to publish indirectly lots of things to try to defend her reputation. She was somebody who both understood about political parties before most of the aristocrats of her era understood what they were and how important they were going to be. And she understood about the press and propaganda in a way that a lot of people were quite slow to grasp. Only her and Harley really seemed to. To understand the power of it very early on. So she used writing in lots of different forms through the press, through manuscripts and letters, and through ultimately her published memoirs, making her the first, you know, one of the first English female autobiographies, certainly one that's criteria for what it includes. It means it has to have some political pertinence. And also the first favourite to become a royal biographer.
- [44:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think that we can draw conclusions from Sarah's story about the role of women in politics and power structures at the time? Or was she so exceptional that it's impossible to typicalize her story in one way?
- [44:24]
Ophelia Field
The way I've been talking is of somebody who's able to break through all these limitations and barriers on women at the time. But in fact, I mean, I think ultimately the tragedy of her life is that she couldn't do many things. She could not hold public office and she could not exercise the kind of power she actually had a mind to exercise. And so ultimately we learned that even for her, that, you know, that fundamental inequality was the key to her suffering and her tragedy. And, you know, I think she. She did many things like managing elections and so on behind the scenes, you know, and. But it was. It was always having to be behind the scenes. She influenced decisions, the various government ministers who. Ministers who she managed to get appointed. She basically did it by persuading Godolphin, who persuaded Marlborough, persuade or no, or persuaded Marlborough, who persuaded Godolphin, or she persuaded both of them to Then persuade Anne, who, you know, it was at sort of several removes that she made the big things happen, the things that really seem to, you know, reach a certain level of male achievement. And she said, in old age herself, she said, you know, in the end, the only things that matter can only be done through the influence of men. And I would have been a great Member of Parliament if I could have been a man. And, you know, it is that gap that ultimately defines her life, even as she achieved so much and was so influential and powerful.
- [46:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So to conclude, then, given that you say that the Hanoverians received Sarah's version of events, can we talk about how her contemporaries, how later generations viewed Sarah and how her reputation has changed over time?
- [46:24]
Ophelia Field
In some ways, images of her were set not just by herself but also by critics of her. Quite early on there were some famous verses of Alexander Pope that people thought were about her that were published just after she died and so on, that there was a kind of an exaggerated sort of stereotype of hers, sort of embodying a hysterical, hectoring woman, basically, that has stayed quite fixed. She was also blamed, both by her contemporary Defoe, and then very quickly by other Whig historians who came later for having caused the downfall of the Whigs, that somehow by her having alienated Anne, that this is what caused her husband's downfall and the sort of loss of the election in 1710 and everything. So she is sort of made the villain by a lot of the weak historians. There's also been this kind of zero sum approach to people who write about her and Anne that if, you know, if you, if you like Anne, you have to make, cast Sarah as the villain and vice versa, which I have really little patience for because it's just, you know, it's unfair to both of them to do it that way. Then there came a whole kind of generation of Victorian, I have to say, including female biographers, who basically condemned Sarah for having lacked the sort of feminine virtues of modesty and knowing how to, you know, subtly influence things without, you know, causing any friction and so on. I mean, Sarah herself said, you know, that people who tell me I should be easy and quiet with Anne and that will work better. I have tried that and it doesn't. She's. Yeah, she's quite clear that she gave it a try for a couple weeks or months and it didn't do anything, so she'd gone back to her other way. But, you know, the Victorians had this kind of ideal of womanhood that was the very antithesis of everything Sarah represented and so you have some biographies that also tell her life weirdly, staying away from politics. So try to just talk about her as a courtier or as a mother and grandmother who established, like, the Spencer Churchill dynasty and all these things. That's in the early 20th century. That basically continues as well. And it's not until, effectively, 1991, I would say, is the first biography by Dr. Francis Harris that really treated Sarah seriously as a political player. Now, in her effort to do that, she kind of goes. She kind of leaves out a lot of the personal pain and intimacy of the story on the other side. But at least she writes that biography of Sarah as if Sarah were a man and focuses seriously on the politics. Meanwhile, you also have a huge number of fictional portrayals of Sarah. Her contemporaries are like Congreve Defoe Fielding, Mary Delavier, Manley, who is absolutely obsessed with her, Jonathan Swift and then Horace Walpole. And then you have plenty of other historical novelists and things like Jean Pleady and so on, who write about her over the years. And the story is there's been about 25 full biographies and an equal number of other books that deal with it. I mean, basically every 10 years she gets her story retold, and you can sort of see it like the rings of a tree that tell you about the moras of the time and their attitudes to women changing over time. She's like a perfect study for that. And then most recently, of course, we've had. Well, there was actually a radio play in 2008 called the Balance of Power. And then one of the authors from that was also one of the scriptwriters on the favorite movie. So we suddenly had this renewed, wonderfully renewed interest in their story. But again, I think there are certain things that Sarah would love about how that depicted her and certain things she would absolutely hate. But, you know, her wish to be seen as a truth teller of speaking truth even when it was unwelcome. She was very proud of herself for doing that. And the movie kind of makes her a hero for doing that, which I think is sort of ironic because I think it's one thing that Sarah. Probably the lesson, if there is a sort of a. A simple moral from Sarah's life, one of them is to be that sometimes kindness rather than honesty may be needed in certain situations. But, yeah, she would certainly approve of that aspect of how she has come out of recent tellings.
- [51:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So interesting. So she sort of serves as another Thomas More telling the truth or victim of conscience in various ways. Well, such an interesting overview of the nature of biography over time, and how women are made to stand for something when they are conjured up through history. But thank you also for introducing us to the real, can I say that, the real Sarah and giving us a sense of just what a fascinating character she was and what a life she led. And of course, those who want to know more or know one particularly good biography that my guest has written that's worth checking out. Ophelia Field thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [51:48]
Ophelia Field
Thank you so much for having me. And I'm just sorry we couldn't cover it all. But thank you. Thank you very, very much.
- [51:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit. Thanks also to my researcher Max Wintle and my producer Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
- [52:34]
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- [53:03]
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