The Lesbian Storyline in 'The Favourite' Is Rooted in Fact
Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, is handily the oddball among the eight contenders for Best Picture. In an unpredictable awards season filled with musical blockbusters and true-life Oscar-bait stories, it's the hilariously odd reimagining of a royal love triangle that fills the dark horse role in this year's race. The odds of a film this quirky actually taking the top prize are slim, but the period piece about the power struggle within Queen Anne's court is without doubt one of the most exemplary films of 2018.
But once you've had a chance to see it, the question in everyone's Google search history is: Did Queen Anne really get it on in the library with her chambermaids? Maybe not as explicitly as it was depicted in the film, but it's not completely out of the question. While Lanthimos isn't one to shy away from the sexuality and distorting the truth, the inspiration for the same-sex love triangle comes from a bit of historical backing.
The Favourite depicts Olivia Colman's Queen Anne as a gout-stricken glutton who plays a political game of emotional nepotism between Rachel Weisz's Sarah Churchill and Emma Stone's Abigail Masham, but the real-life story is a bit more politically focused. Queen Anne's politics leaned a bit more toward the Tory party. The Queen's closest friend and most influential confidant Sarah was a Whig. That doesn't make for fun banter over all that duck racing.
The plot of The Favourite hinges on the dynamic between Sarah and Abigail, an impoverished cousin Sarah originally rallied to get hired in the Queen's court. The bad news for Sarah? Abigail was a fellow Tory, not nearly as politically aggressive, and provided Anne with the emotional support she craved from Sarah. That led to a private friendship that developed, and now we get to the alleged lesbian stuff.
As Sarah ascended to power, she spent more time away from the court. In her stead, Abigail moved from being a simple servant to a lady of the bedchamber, just like in the movie. That closeness pressed on Sarah's nerves, also like the movie. But unlike the film, there's no definitive proof that it's due to a strained romantic relationship. As politically aggressive as Weisz' Sarah Churchill was in The Favourite, her influence is still understated in comparison to her political prowess in real life.
The place where most historians pull a potential romantic relationship from lies in a series of letters between the Queen and Sarah. That's mostly interpreted through a 21st century lens though. The emotional nature of Sarah and Queen Anne's relationship was deemed relatively normal back in that day and age. But the fallout that followed was bad.
In the power struggle between Sarah and Abigail, the implication of a lesbian relationship between Abigail and the Queen was thrown around a lot. Long story short, Sarah doubled-down and slut-shamed and gay-shamed Queen Anne in public, which is a power play, but also super tacky. Sarah came into Queen Anne's court with a story that used risqué language (you know, for 18th century England) to describe the relationship between Anne and Abigail.
The rocky correspondence between Sarah and Queen Anne's was further strained in real life when the Queen's husband passed and Sarah refused to wear mourning clothes. In the film, her husband had already died and was only mentioned in passing. When you have alleged Queen-on-chambermaid sex, I guess you have to cut the fat elsewhere. That's showbiz.
In both the film and real life, the Whig party continued to take issue with the place that Abigail took in the Queen's court, pushing back against Queen Anne for the rest of her reign. When Sarah was eventually dismissed from the court, Abigail remained until Queen Anne died. Some historians allege that Queen Anne might have been a lesbian, with an even smaller group suggesting the relationship was with Abigail, but the majority seem to suggest otherwise.
Of course, Hollywood knows how to make what could have been a mundane politically charged tale into something a bit more salacious. Ultimately, Queen Anne was just a stoic figure who likely just wanted a nice confidant, which is what we're all kind of looking for right? But in the meantime, The Favourite and Olivia Colman do a bang up job of making Queen Anne a woman who just happens to be really into rabbits, lobster racing, and cunnilingus.
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