Memoirs and Historical Reputation

Want to walk the halls of Anne Bleyn's childhood home? or explore the castles that made up Henry VI's English stronghold With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tutor past alongside the world's leading historians and archeologists You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week coovering everything from the ancient world World War II Just visit history hit. com For slash, suubbscribe I'm Professor Susanna Lipbskom and welcome to Not just the Tutors from History Hood podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, fromom Holbein to the Huguenos, from Shakespeare to Samuraise Relieved by regular doses of murdder, espionage, and witchcraard. In other words, just the tutors but most definitely also the tudors In the glittering royal courts of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, power did not always sit on the throne. 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 courord I started with Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I forbidden love Followed by George Vill', Duke Buckingham, the intimate favorite of King James I andI Do have a listen to those fascating episodes, if you haven't done so already At the heart of Queen Anne's reign was one such figure, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marborough. 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 sixteen sixty, 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 and sustained through letters, shared secrets, a mutual dependence. But it was also profoundly political As mistress of the robes and groom of the store Sarah controlled access to the quQeen, 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 centre of national power Yet Favourite courourt was as fragile as it was intoxicating In seventeen oh eight at St. Pauls Cathedral A silent but devastating message was delivered Queen appeared without the jewels Sarah had carefully prepared for her Public sign. that their once unbreakable bond was beginning to fracture Behind the scenes, rivalries had taken root none more significant than that of Abigal 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 factionism played out through deeply personal relationships. And if 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 favourite, but one of its fiercest chroniclers. In this third episode of our series on Royal Favorites, I'm delighted to say that I'm joined by historian Ophelia Field. Author of the favorite Sarah Duchess of Aborgh Aphelia is the director of a postgraduate programe 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 the quQueen and a country And professors is Al Lipskom and this is not just the tudus F from History H He videoo welcome to the podcast Thank you so much for having me I'm really excited to talk about Sarah Churchill. Why do you think we find her so compelling? Who was she? 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 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 subject. the relationship with Queen Anne begin? 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 honour to her. She later became Anne's Lady of the bedchamber So they were at court together very young and They acted together in sixteen seventy five in a mask kind of play together when Anne was only ten years old and Sarah was fifteen They must have, you know already started to have a relationship at that point, though we don't have letters between them until sixteen eighty three, 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 exiled court. with Mary Modinna, who was a very interesting woman nurturing her maids of honour to be interesting people Surely that age difference is quite important because it means at that crucial stage, tens to fifteen, 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 tated the nature of that friendship. that dynamic. it's certainly set a sort of a power dynamic that was the inverse of their actual status as princess and maid of honour. But you know, that in a way, what I always 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 twenty seven years and very soon, these are letters between young women who are getting married and having babies and everything. 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 that'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 crushes and just leaving it at that. I think that oversimplifies and patronizes them Yes, and it doesn't recognize the way in which we change as humans, does it? Soly. How did it evolve as a relationship, then? What was the nature of it as time went on 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 and very quickly did start to dote on her and idolize her. and she went to serve and 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 An' st letters, the ones that we have at least show her Tking to Sarah is 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 friendriendship today, there was much more of a concept that one was monogamous with one's close friends, these friends that you had these whole of passionate relationships with, you had to to be much more faithful to that friend and And then they had that as I described at 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 have 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 and her friend did not have a similar awakening. But unbeknownst to her, they were not having the same reactions to the various martyrdoms and things she believes she saw in Scotland So that's it was going, but then you have the glorious revolution is a turning point because essentially Sarah and her husband a major influence on Anne and her husband deciding to flee palace and betrayed Anne's father. And that moment of influence really is the sort of where the story really kicks off and where their relationship becomes something political significance for everyone for the nation. let just ask sort of obvious question for people thinking about this today. What you've described as a relationship is one that's passionate and possessive, It sounds more like romance, iros than filure. Talk me through what you make of the idea that Sarah and Anne were lovers I know because I'm an avid listener to your podcast, you've hadard many people discuss this subject and I don't think I can add too much to what some of them have said in the sense that I agree with the line 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 frissant or a highly romantic tenor, that that they meant it, they felt it. It wasn't just all pretend and that yes, that the at least for Anne This was a relationship at the absolute emotional core of her life. And that's what's matters, biographically and in terms of what subsequently happens So I and 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 It's sort of neither here nor there to the to the dynamics of the story What matters is that Anne was in love with Sarah and Sarah was Foervan She was her employer. She was 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 for man's feelings in those younger years. I think that's really clear and helpful and actually a nice corrective for the way that it is pererhaps thought of the modern age of our intendense focus on the physicality of a relationship, whereas actually you're pointing to intimacy, which is You know being known and knowing someone, and that it's worth so much more, isn't it And and it's something we can actually chart as historians who really can't chart anything else Yeah, 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 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 sixteen nineties, when they are alsoso in opposition to and sister Mary and William III They essentially have to go into a kind of exile together to Sighion house. And they are bonded in adversity. Sarah's husband is charged with treason. they have various deaths of children and things that they have to go through together. They are in this long period of 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 only when you give that the proper weight as well that you can then understand the sort of hystior of everything that follows It all seems like overreaction unless you really understand that the length and the depth of that friendship during the sixteen nineties. That's really helpful. Can we talk a bit about Sarah's Abition. You've given us a sense of how brilliant she was. How did her ambition shape her roller court There's no doubt that both Sarah and Anne were quite ambitious. I think people always talk about the differences between them, that actually the similarity, that is one similarity that they both had, Anne's whole reaction to the birth of her 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 key point on which I do believe her and not everyone does. I do think she had session ideas that meant she was predisposed towards the Whig partarty 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 families Dynastic brilliant. She could have just gone along with a whole bunch of toory policies and decisions that she shouldn't the fact that she was ambitious all do you her own point of view and Phing spant 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 by, but not everyone does. But I do think that her ambition was always framed, you know, in the same way as male politicians. 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 takeake a certain direction. Walk us through. politics then, What was it that she wanted to see achieved? I mean, I think she function of having grown up in court and so close to Anne I thought her wig principles are those of treating the monarch as there to serve the country, a contract theory of You are there because we allow you to be there on the thread. She essentially sees The Mary is sort of the least worst institution thatough it could be She doesn't have a sort of any aura around the throne. She believes in the importance of English civil liberties in parliament and all these things. and she genuinely believes, whether it's true it was the case or not her, Lelief that she had grown up with and became hardened over the years was that it was all on the precipice of being under threat from French invasion, Catholic tyranny authoritarianism. She genuinely thought she was, you know, defending notot democracy as we mean it, but but various principles of English freedoms that she believed went on bide. I mean she bought that whole 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. Sasha Verl 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 partarty based on even when it was against her own interest to necessarily push for those appointments based on on those kinds of beliefs. The incident that I mentioned at St. Paul's Cathedral when Anne refused to wear her jaws. It's so dramatic What's really going on there peopleeople know that An not wearing her jewels is a kind of expression that they will read it not just to Sarah falling out of favour, 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, and 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 peopleople standing around here, Sarah hissing had to be quiet. you know, from that that moment, they just have to sit through the rest of this thanks giving ceremony and kind of absolutely mortified silence of anger. and 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 answer, she refers obliquely back to this scene and says, you told me you didn't want my answer, so I shall give you none. You know She is clearly knew that, you know, she she had her her pride as a queen by this point and was was not going to have her sevent hiss at her in public this way. That sounds a bit like Anne is just having a hissy fit herself really doesn't told me to be quiet, I'm not going to say anything else ever again 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 the 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 Um 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 tubves stages And the Staint 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 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 But 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 jaws, suggesting that actually you're now an anti war. That it depends on being really well versed in the culture of the time You mentioned Abigail Mushroom. C we talk about her? How has she come to replace Sarah in Anne's favor? So again, because the sixteen nineties 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 sixteen ninety that Sarah discovers she has some ability 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 Abigail a job in Anne's chamber and att a certain point in time Sarah senses and Golphin, who's the treasurer together sense that Anne is getting advice that somebody is advising her and they start to cast around for who 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 her Abigail's other cousin, who was Harley, who was trying to organize a kind of moderate Whig Tory opposition to the Marlboroughs and government, that he was channneeling or using Abigail as a conduit to Anne and to push his positions on various things But it was when when Sarah discovers this, it's personal betrayal. It's a personal betrayal on two fronts, not just An seeming to switch favour, but also Abigail having basically betrayed her patron that she no doubt felt patronized by, but nonetheless, somebody who had to a family a huge amount And so she has this sort of double personersal betrayal which she then maps directly onto An to flee also taking a political turnerm 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 incclination to party, inclination to a in 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 qu loaded personal terms and she's always switching if she's if she's been accused of being overly personal about something then 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 goes, Oh, no, sorry, I was just talking about our friendship. It's always this kind of trying to have tepoke. You know, Abigail is a harder figure to read ue 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 Jacobbean plays about favorites and things that you raise somebody from social obscurity and then they betray you. but and the ingratitude, the ungrateful favourite, but the similarities are more striking in many ways than the differences between them As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit. 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 whereher there's a contrast with that image and how much that sort of sense of her image goossip about her reputation is part of that rise and fall. Yeah. Quite interesting cassart. didn't have a huge amount of education, but she She's an autoideuct, 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 first and Buckingham, she's know, interested in all this, but she also has these male friends Arthur Mannerning in particular, who are better educated and keep telling her all the time of the parallels between what she is doing and what previous favorites in history have done and everything. And she gets a real since 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. Albians in seventeen oh five, and they compared her to the favorite of Edward III and to the Duke of Buckingham in the Commons and all these kind of thing. So there are these sort of analogies surrounding her all the time. She also she'd watched William III's favorites. like she absolutely hated the Earl of Portland who was Williams first favorite 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 a change of a cabinet or something she was She'd seen other people, she'd seen other women in who had been mistresses to kings and things and how they did or didn't engage use that influenial and try to be political or not. She really very interested in her own narrative and proving herself to be one sort of favourite and not another. 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 Mulborough House The problem with talking about Sarah is I mean she lived for eighty four 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 are 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 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 partarticularly on Blenham, when I was first sort of shown around Blenham by a tour guide, they didn't 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, she despite her major arguments with the architect Vanbough, she did shape the way it turned out more than anybody else basically. But they were very different. That's a good example of public and private because they were very those if we contrast Marlborgh House and Bennon Palace The Benon 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 is 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 familyil's you know, status Marborough House is a much more interesting one because when she realized she was falling out of favour and she needed she was going to lose her apartments in St. James's, she needed another London base and that was H. 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, Marbor is having an affair with a younger woman And so it is this kind of you know, um decision to do something for herself to build a house in the taste that she wants. I mean, to us, Marborghouse and Blondham Palace, you have to be quite an expert eye to see the difference in their grandeur. But for her she built Marbor has to be a kind of anti Benom in a lot of choices that she made about it decoratively and architecturally So It was really Marborough House is her house and Blendham is just one she was kind of forced to finish as qu as she could before her husband had too many strokes and everything, you know, so there was different scenarios, but she 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 Give me some more sense of that time, this moment when her political fortunes are declining and the way in which she is fending for herself by the of Mlborgh house, but what else is happening in that kind of final Conrontation between Sarah and Queen Anne and how that plays out over time Sarah believes that she is def fighting for her own survival, not just selfishly for her own sake, but because on her favor risks some of the credit that her husband has the peace conferences and internationally in terms of having trust of 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 asks for them back she doesn't send them Well, they have this final confrontation at Kensington Palace. which is Aain, we only really know it how 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 and 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 and she writes these long letters that manyany 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 s. And they said, oh, yes, that's all sounds very reasonable. O 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 Ann please Don't dismiss me. just leave Leave me in place until pieces concluded on British terms is her basic line Don't dismiss me, don't dismiss my husband. Don't dismiss Sydney Goodolf and the treasurer until We have benefit of my husband's victories in the war. That would be her lying 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 cyidical kind clinging ont to power for its own sake, but But as I said, she had of thought she had a nobler purpose in this blackmailing of the monarch. As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodysiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal and society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit It's really interesting that she reworked that scene again and again because that suggests that it had profound impact on her. I'm reminded of something some fifty years earlier when there's an artist who paints the explosion of Delf again and again and again, and it turns out he lost his family and the explosion of Delf. You that sort of reworking artistically suggests that something has cause trauma. and perhaps we can talk a bit more about how Sarah used her writing, her memoirs as a tool defend her reputation and create a version of herself for posterity Yes, again, one of her achievements that is tends to just get wrapped up in the story of her Horiz 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 seventeen oh four as a letter to a friend just to justify herself in relation to the her role in the Revolution and the years under William and Mary She goes through a whole series of co authors, most of whom rather weirdly a 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 was you know some of them took to it better than others. some of them emphasized it and made it sound more romantic some of them downplayed it a bit and everything But she has she goes through all these different versions and Her feelings changed at one point where she is particularly outrage, indignant after their fall. when she's working on her manuscript when the Mlborers 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 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 Youither. By the time those memoirs are finally published, which is in seventeen forty two. 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's sort of actually tries to sort of make it a slightly more sympathetic and balanced account By that time she actually put up the statue of Anne at Bennham Palace. So she you it was partly because she was She hated Queen Caroline so much more at that particular juncture. So she and suddenly seemed nostalgically allright. But But Sarah's writing, because it's so powerful, because she has 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 Canavarian view of the 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. Um she would have seen Some of its vehemence really a self defense because she was a celebrity in the first British newspapers coincide with her of celebrity, and she was really vilified and satirized by partarticularly after she was dismissed and then her husband was dismissed. It was sort of open season on the Marborers and there were Dozens I think in my bibliography, there are eighty five contemporary satires and things about the Marboras and the vast majority of them are you know highly critical of her, particularly as a woman And so she 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. beforefore 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 a lot of people were quite slow to grasp. Only her and Harley really seemed 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 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, means it has to have some political pertinence And also one the first you know favorite to become a royal biographer 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 Well she's so exceptional that you know, it's impossible to ty typcicalize. Her story in one way, 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 hope public office and she could not exercise the kind of power she actually had a mind to exercise. And so ultimately, we learn that even for her You know fundamental inequality was the key to her suffering and her tragedy. 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 Um ministers who she managed to get appointed. She basically did it by persuading Godolphin, who persuaded Marlborough, who persuade no persuaded Marlborough, who persuaded Goodolphin, or she persuaded both of them to then persuade Anne, who it was at sort of several removes that she made the big things happen, the things that really seem to 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. To conclude then, given that You say that the Hanoverians received Sarah's version of events And we talk about how her contemporaries, how later generations viewed Sarah and how her reputation has changed over time. In some ways, images of her were set not just by herself, but also by critics of her quite early on There was 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 her as sort of embodying a hysterical and woman basically, that has stayed quite fixed. She was also blamed both by her contemporary deffoe and then very quickly by other weak historians who came later for having caused the downfall of the Whigs that somehow by her having alienated Anne This is what caused her husband's downfall and the sort of loss of the election in seventeen ten 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 like Anne, you have to make cast Sarah as a 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 causing any friction and so. 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 quite clear but she gave it a try for a couple weeks or months and it didn't do anything. So she said gone back to her the 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 tellell her life weirdly stay away from politics. so try to just talk about her as a courtier or as a mother who and grandmother who's established like the Spencer Churchill dynasty and all these things That's in the early twentieth century, that basically continues as well. And it's not until Effectively nineteen ninety one, I would say, is the first biography by Dr. Francis Harris that really treated Sarah seriously as a political player 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 Congreve, Defoe, Fielding, Mary Delaere Manley, who is absolutely obsessed with her, Jonathan Swift and then Horace Walpole And then you, you know, have plenty of other historical novelists and things like Jean Plady and soone who write about her over the years. And the story is in about twenty five pro full biographies and an equal number of other books that deal with that. I mean, basically every ten years she gets a her story retold. and you can sort of see it like the rings of a tree tell you about the Morors of the time and their attitudes to women changing over time. She's like a perfect study for that And you know, then most recently, of course, we've had