Anne Hyde, Duchess of York

by J. R. Henslowe

It is no happy nor welcome task to trace the progress of disillusionment, estrangement, coldness, following the ill-assorted union of the King’s brother and the Chancellor’s daughter. One can so easily picture the eager bystanders murmuring with unctuous satisfaction the time-honoured conclusion: “I told you so!” And yet—“The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!” One would gladly omit from the record of that marriage the chapter which must now perforce be set down, if only for the sake of all that went before, of all that was to follow.

In the year 1640, when the Earl of Leicester—who was afterwards to be half guardian, half jailer, of Princess Elizabeth and her youngest brother at Penshurst—was ambassador at Paris, the youngest of his famous sons, Henry, was born there. When he was eighteen his mother, whose favourite he is said to have been, died, and in 1665 he was attached to the household of the Duke of York as Groom of the Bedchamber.[^[177]]

[177]. “Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts,” John Heneage Jesse. “She is said to have proposed the Duke’s journey to York in 1665 to be more with Sidney.”

“Diary of the Times of Charles II.,” by Henry Sidney, Earl of Romney. Edit. R. W. Blencowe (Introduction).

“History of My Own Time,” Burnet. “A very graceful young man of quality that belonged to her Court.” “The Duke took up a jealousy, put the person out of his Court.”

He had his full share of the hereditary beauty of his family, the beauty which distinguished his sister Dorothy, married three years after his birth to the gallant young Sunderland who fell at Newbury, and his brother Robert, believed by many of his contemporaries to be the father of Monmouth, and who was known in his day as the “handsome Sidney.”

Conscious or not of his personal advantages, Henry Sidney fell passionately in love with the Duchess, but that wild adoration was no secret. Such things never were at that time, and the Court speedily rang with the tale. Pepys licks his eager lips over the matter. “Pimm tells me,” he writes, “how great a difference hath been between the Duke and Duchess, he suspecting her to be naught with Mr Sidney. But some way or other the matter is made up, but he was banished the Court, and the Duke for many days did not speak to the Duchess at all.” Anthony Hamilton pronounced her guilty, but Reresby, always kind and never scandalous, says stoutly the Duchess “was kind to him and no more.” One thing is certain, James was hotly jealous of his servant. If there really was any truth in the aspersion on her, if Anne, in her lonely splendour, conscious of her husband’s waning affection, resenting his infidelity, turned to the love laid humbly and adoringly at her feet, then we can but say: God pity her! for she was destined to drink deep of sorrow.

But it is quite as easy and fully as reasonable to give her the benefit of the doubt. From what we have already seen, from what we have still to see, it can be argued that she was too resolute, too self-contained, too guarded, to succumb at this period of her life to mere personal attraction. She had risked too much, had won her honours too hardly, to venture them easily. That she was accused goes for nothing. Almost every one was accused sooner or later, and the particular accusation may very well have been an ill-natured tale invented to blacken an unpopular princess. The hero of the romance, Henry Sidney, “the handsomest youth of his time,” was destined to a brilliant career in after days.[^[178]] The short-lived disgrace which was the immediate consequence of his passion for the Duchess, did him no harm. Much later, it is true, he was dismissed from office, but he was made envoy to the States of Holland, and remained there two years, having declined the embassy in Paris. It is said that he voted for the exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession, in the Parliament which met in 1680, when member for Bramber, and perhaps the recollection of that early, ill-starred love had more than a little to do with his action then. At the coronation of James, so the story goes, the crown nearly fell from its wearer’s head, a sinister omen, as many people considered it. Henry Sidney standing by, promptly averted the accident, and adjusted the diadem, remarking with happy audacity “it was not the first time that a Sidney had supported the crown.” He became, however, one of the stanchest upholders of the Revolution, and took with him to The Hague, in the fateful year of 1688, the invitation of the plotters to William of Orange. On the coronation of the latter, Sidney received the reward of a peerage, being created Viscount Sidney and Baron Milton, and a few years later, in 1693, he was made Earl of Romney and also became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland and Warden of the Cinque Ports. Henry Sidney died in 1704, unmarried. It was, possibly, a tribute to the memory of a long dead romance—at least, one is free to think so.

[178]. “Memoirs of Sir John Reresby.” “His Royal Highness and his duchess came down to York (Aug. 5) where it was observed that Mr Sydney, the handsomest youth of his time and of the Duke’s bedchamber was greatly in love with the duchess, and he might well be excused, for the Duchess, daughter to Chancellor Hyde, was a very handsome personage and a woman of Fine Wit. The Duchess on her part seemed kind to him, but very innocently.”

There was at one time a rumour coupling the name of the Duchess of York with Henry Savile, another of the Duke’s grooms of the bedchamber, and in reference to this report, Pepys piously ejaculates: “God knows what will be the end of it!” However, as in the case of Sidney, there is no positive evidence beyond rumour, and rumour was not likely to spare anyone who had so many enemies as Anne Hyde. Therefore here, too, a plea of innocence may be admitted on her behalf.