The central drama of The Favourite -- the scuffle for personal influence over the queen between Abigail Hill and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough -- is drawn from life. This wasn't even Anne's first time involved in an intense love rivalry between women -- even as an adolescent she and her sister both wrote passionate love letters to an older woman, with Anne styling herself as the male romantic lead of a contemporary melodrama. On the other hand, Anne had at least one sex scandal involving a man during that same general period. The seventeen-year-old Anne was the subject of fierce gossip involving her relationship with the much-older Earl of Mulgrave and the fear that Mulgrave had taken her virginity, at the same time as her relationship with another lady of the bedchamber was abruptly broken off. Churchill herself would much later insinuate that the latter relationship had been sexual in nature and that it demonstrated both Anne's susceptibility to malign influences provided they were accompanied by a pretty face and Anne's essential fickleness in allowing her lady friend to be sent away. That sounds a lot like hindsight talking.

Sarah Churchill, née Sarah Jennings, had come to court when Anne was around eight years old. The two eventually forged a friendship, and Anne pushed to make Sarah her Lady of the Bedchamber. By all accounts, Sarah was a phenomenally attractive character -- good-looking, intelligent, acerbic, and outspoken. Her boldness must have seemed like an appealing quality to the young Anne, who was somewhat retiring and by Sarah's own account a remarkably poor conversationalist. The two women spent a great deal of time in one another's company, and when apart wrote to one another a great deal -- Sarah's letters to Anne have been destroyed, but Anne's letters to Sarah are consistently ardent, expressing a complex mix of closeness, jealousy, insistence, and affection. Anne often wrote to Sarah daily and expected replies of equivalent frequency. Princess Anne saw Sarah as a friend and peer, but even as close friends and constant companions the two women were not of equal station, and Anne's superior position gave her close attention to Sarah's wishes (and Sarah's undeniable awareness of that fact) a dangerous air. It was from this bed of physical intimacy and written correspondence across a distinct difference of rank that the two women's habit of referring to one another as Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman arose as a playful fiction. At this stage, Anne seems to have trusted Sarah completely and implicitly, defending her from criticism against her own family members. Their friendship was characterized by the sharing of confidences and no small number of dramatic gestures; Anne was fiercely partisan to Sarah's interests and was suspected by those who had their own interests in the matter of allowing Sarah (and by extension Sarah's husband) too much influence over her thoughts and decisions.

Anne's marriage to her husband George seems to have been amicable and mutually devoted; so was Sarah Churchill's relationship with her own husband. Both women had sex with their husbands and had children by them; in particular, Anne's marriage resulted in more than a dozen pregnancies, all of them ending unhappily. This doesn't mean that either woman was necessary not attracted to women, or that either woman was attracted to men, but that they were operating in the same social roles as other women of their station. So with those considerations in place, were these relationships with women sexual? Were Anne and Sarah's feelings for one another romantic, as we'd understand that now? What about Anne and Abigail? That part is hard to tell, but we can at least confirm that rumors regarding Anne's sexuality began to emerge publicly after Anne became queen and after the Duchess of Marlborough came to be supplanted by Abigail Hill.

Abigail Hill came to court as one of the Duchess' many, many cousins; for a time she served in a menial position there, only advancing to a role in Anne's household when Sarah herself insisted upon it. Anne was happy to comply; not yet queen at that point, she had her hands full with political wrangling, and any jealousy she might have harbored for a competitor for Sarah's attention was busy elsewhere. Anne's friendship with Sarah (and the specter of Sarah's influence over Anne) had put her at bitter odds with the king as well as her own sister, and for years Abigail would be only a background player in Anne's interpersonal drama. (This interim of time is one that Lanthimos' film severely abridges.) Once the relationship between Abigail and the queen was sufficiently close as to pose a political threat, contemporary pro-Marlborough writers began to intimate that Abigail's later relationship with Queen Anne was improper perhaps from the start; these writers included Sarah herself, who characterized her own relationship with the queen as innocent (if needy on Anne's part) and the queen's relationship with the usurping Abigail as fundamentally different. To hear Churchill tell it, Anne and Abigail's intimacy was corrupt; it was demeaning (to the queen, not to Abigail) and it was also sexual. The sexual aspect almost stands as a metaphor for the impropriety of the rest of the relationship (unnatural, unfitting, fruitless, and faintly ridiculous -- the ageing queen doting on a young upstart) but it's clearly intended as more than a metaphor.

Churchill's private secretary, Arthur Maynwaring, is believed to have written a number of satires that unsubtly paint Abigail as a sexual mercenary -- "having too great a Regard for [her] own Sex," and only marrying to throw others off the scent. Another satire paints Abigail's rise through the ranks of service in blunt terms -- she goes from chambermaid to "Slut of State" by leveraging her charms with the queen while serving the interests of Robert Harley.

When Qu[een] A[nne] of great Renown

Great Britain’s Scepter sway’d,

Besides the Church, she dearly loved

A Dirty Chamber-Maid.

O! Abi[gail], that was her Name,

She starch’d and stitch’d full well,

But how she pierc’d this Royal Heart,

No Mortal Man can tell.

However for sweet Service done,

And Causes of great Weight,

Her Royal Mistress made her, Oh!

A Minister of State.

Her Secretary she was not,

Because she could not write,

But had the Conduct and the Care

Of some dark Deeds at Night.

(You can read the rest, as well as another satire on Abigail Hill Masham, on Rictor Norton's site -- I wouldn't recommend Norton's scholarship totally without reservations but his site is handy for primary sources on the history of homosexuality.)

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(Edited to catch a typo)