Anne, Queen of Great Britain

• 1. Introduction

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  Queen Anne of Great Britain went to her own coronation in an open sedan chair, because gout had left her unable to walk. The chair had a low back, so that her train could flow out behind her. The date was St George's Day, the 23rd of April 1702, and she was carried to Westminster Abbey to be crowned. She would turn out to be the last monarch of the House of Stuart. Her story raises several questions. How did a princess raised beside a Catholic father come to help bring him down? What happens to a crown when its holder has no heir? And why does the best-known portrait of Anne come from a woman she once trusted above anyone else?

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• 2. A Protestant Princess

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  At 11:39 pm on the 6th of February 1665, Anne was born at St James's Palace in London. She was the fourth child and second daughter of James, Duke of York, and his first wife, Anne Hyde. Her uncle was the reigning king, Charles II, and her mother's father was Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor. Anne's older sister Mary stood as a godparent at her Anglican baptism in the Chapel Royal, alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon. Of the eight children her parents had, only Anne and Mary lived to adulthood.

  As a child, Anne suffered from eyes that watered so heavily that physicians gave the condition a name, defluxion. To treat it she was sent to France, where she lived with her father's mother, Henrietta Maria of France, at the Château de Colombes near Paris. Her grandmother died in 1669, and Anne moved in with an aunt, Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans. That aunt died suddenly in 1670, and Anne came home to England. Her mother died the following year.

  Charles II gave a firm order about the faith of his nieces. Anne and Mary were to be raised as Protestants, even though their father was a Catholic. Following royal custom, they grew up in their own household at Richmond in Surrey, apart from their father. Colonel Edward Villiers and his wife, Lady Frances, looked after the girls, and Henry Compton, Bishop of London, became Anne's preceptor. Lessons covered music, dancing, languages, drawing and religion, all steeped in Anglican teaching.

  In 1673, the Duke of York's conversion to Catholicism became public, and he married a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. She was only six and a half years older than Anne. Charles II had no legitimate children, so James stood first in line to the throne, with Mary and Anne behind him, provided that he had no son. Over the next ten years, Mary of Modena had ten children, and every one was stillborn or died in infancy. Anne and her stepmother appear to have got along well, and James was a conscientious, loving father.

  Around 1671, Anne had first met Sarah Jennings, who would become her closest friend and one of her most influential advisers. In about 1678, Sarah married John Churchill, brother of Arabella Churchill, who was the Duke of York's mistress.

  In November 1677, Mary married their Dutch first cousin, William III of Orange, at St James's Palace. Anne missed the wedding because smallpox confined her to her room, and by the time she recovered Mary had left for the Netherlands. Lady Frances Villiers caught the disease and died, and Anne's aunt Lady Henrietta Hyde became her governess. A year later, Anne and her stepmother crossed to Holland and spent two weeks with Mary.

  In March 1679, with anti-Catholic hysteria stirred up by the Popish Plot, the Duke and Duchess of York withdrew to Brussels. Anne joined them from the end of August. A stay with them at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, from July 1681 until May 1682, turned out to be her last journey outside England.

  In December 1680, her second cousin George of Hanover spent three months in London, and rumours of a match with Anne spread. The historian Edward Gregg dismissed them, because the Hanoverians meant to marry George to his first cousin Sophia Dorothea of Celle. Other gossip said Lord Mulgrave was courting her. He denied it, but the talk got him temporarily dismissed from court.

  King Charles wanted a husband who would please his Protestant subjects and also suit his Catholic ally, Louis XIV of France. The answer was Prince George of Denmark, younger brother of King Christian V. Denmark was a Protestant ally of France, and Louis wanted an Anglo-Danish alliance to hold back Dutch power. Anne's uncle Laurence Hyde, by then Earl of Rochester, and Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, negotiated the treaty. James agreed eagerly, since the match weakened the influence of his other son-in-law, William of Orange, who disliked it.

  Bishop Compton conducted the wedding on the 28th of July 1683 in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace. The marriage was arranged, yet the couple proved faithful and devoted. They received a set of buildings called the Cockpit, in the Palace of Whitehall, as their London home, and Sarah Churchill joined Anne's household as a lady of the bedchamber. Sarah's husband, John Churchill, was destined to become Anne's most important general.

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• 3. Against Her Father

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  When Charles II died in 1685, Anne's father became King James II of England and VII of Scotland. The English were alarmed as he handed military and administrative posts to Catholics, defying the Test Acts that were meant to prevent it. Anne shared the unease and kept attending Anglican services. With Mary living in the Netherlands, Anne and her family were the only royals worshipping as Protestants in England.

  James wanted Anne's youngest daughter baptised into the Catholic faith, and Anne burst into tears. She wrote to Mary that "the doctrine of the Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous". Most of its ceremonies, she added, were "plain downright idolatry". Anne grew estranged from her father and stepmother as James worked to weaken the Church of England.

  Public alarm deepened when Mary of Modena became pregnant for the first time since James took the throne. Anne wrote to her sister that the royal couple would "stick at nothing, be it never so wicked, if it will promote their interest". She suspected the queen was faking the pregnancy in order to produce a false heir.

  Anne miscarried in April 1688 and left London to recover at the spa town of Bath. On the 10th of June 1688, her stepmother gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, and Anne was not there to see it. Her absence fed the belief that the child was a fraud. She may have left deliberately to avoid the birth, or she may truly have been unwell. It is also possible that James wished to shut all Protestants, even his daughter, out of affairs of state. Anne told Mary she would "never now be satisfied" about the baby, adding that "God only knows".

  To quash the rumours, James had 40 witnesses to the birth attend a Privy Council meeting. Anne said she could not come because she was pregnant, which she was not. She then declined to read the written statements, saying it was "not necessary".

  William of Orange landed in England on the 5th of November 1688, in the invasion known as the Glorious Revolution. Anne had been writing to Mary and knew of the plans. On the advice of the Churchills, she refused to side with James, and on the 18th of November she wrote to William approving of his action. John Churchill deserted James on the 24th, and Prince George followed that night. On the evening of the 25th, James ordered Sarah Churchill held under house arrest at St James's Palace.

  Anne and Sarah slipped out of Whitehall by a back staircase and put themselves under the protection of Bishop Compton. They spent one night in his house. On the 26th of November, James learned that Anne had gone, and he lamented, "God help me! Even my children have forsaken me." Anne and Sarah reached Nottingham on the 1st of December. Two weeks later, with a large escort, Anne arrived in Oxford, where she met George in triumph.

  Anne returned to London on the 19th of December, and William visited her at once. James fled to France on the 23rd. Anne showed no concern about her father's flight and simply asked for her usual game of cards. She explained that she "was used to play and never loved to do anything that looked like an affected constraint".

  In January 1689, a Convention Parliament declared that James had effectively abdicated by fleeing, and the Estates of Scotland took similar action. William and Mary became monarchs of all three realms. The Bill of Rights 1689 and the Claim of Right Act 1689 placed Anne and her descendants next in line after them, ahead of any children William might have by a later marriage.

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• 4. Sisters at Odds

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  Soon after William and Mary took the throne, John Churchill was rewarded with the Earldom of Marlborough, and Prince George was made Duke of Cumberland. Anne asked for Richmond Palace and a parliamentary allowance. The king and queen refused the palace and tried, without success, to block the allowance. William also would not let George serve in the army in an active role. The royal couple feared that a financially independent Anne would slip out of their influence and gather a rival political faction.

  Around this time, Anne and Sarah, now Lady Marlborough, began calling each other Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman. Anne asked for the pet names so that the two could speak as equals when they were alone. Anne took the name Morley, and Sarah became Freeman.

  In January 1692, William and Mary suspected Marlborough of plotting with the Jacobites, the followers of the exiled James. They dismissed him from every office he held. Anne answered by taking Sarah to a social event at the palace, and she refused her sister's demand to dismiss Sarah from her household. The Lord Chamberlain removed Lady Marlborough anyway. Anne angrily left her royal lodgings and moved to Syon House, the home of the Duke of Somerset.

  The punishments piled up. Anne lost her guard of honour, courtiers were forbidden to visit her, and civic authorities were told to ignore her. In April 1692, she gave birth to a son who lived only minutes. Mary came to see her, but instead of offering comfort she scolded Anne once more about Sarah. The sisters never saw each other again. Later that year, Anne moved to Berkeley House in Piccadilly.

  Mary died of smallpox in 1694, and William went on reigning alone. Because any children he might have with a new wife would rank below Anne, she was now his heir apparent, and the two reconciled in public. He restored her honours, allowed her to live in St James's Palace and gave her Mary's jewels. He still kept her out of government and never named her regent when he travelled abroad. Three months later, he restored Marlborough to his offices. With Anne back in favour, Berkeley House became a social centre for courtiers who had once kept their distance.

  According to James, Anne wrote to him in 1696 asking for his permission to succeed William. She reportedly promised that she would restore the crown to his line at a convenient moment. He declined to give his consent. She was probably trying to secure her own succession by preventing James from making a direct claim.

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• 5. Seventeen Pregnancies

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  By the 25th of January 1700, when Anne's final pregnancy ended in a stillbirth, she had been pregnant at least 17 times over as many years. At least 12 of those pregnancies ended in a miscarriage or a stillbirth. Five of her children were born alive, and four of those died before the age of two.

  Early in 1687, catastrophe arrived within a matter of days. Anne miscarried, her husband caught smallpox, and their two young daughters, Mary and Anne Sophia, died of the same disease. Lady Rachel Russell reported that George and Anne took the deaths very hard. Sometimes they wept, and sometimes they "sat silent, hand in hand", George ill in bed and Anne "the carefullest nurse to him that can be imagined". In October of that year, Anne gave birth to a stillborn son at seven months.

  Historians have long searched for a cause. Based on her pregnancy losses and her physical symptoms, Anne may have had systemic lupus erythematosus or antiphospholipid syndrome. Pelvic inflammatory disease could explain why her symptoms began around the time of her penultimate pregnancy. Other suggestions include listeriosis, diabetes, intrauterine growth retardation and rhesus incompatibility. The last fits poorly, because that condition usually worsens with each pregnancy, while her only son to survive infancy was born after a run of stillbirths. Experts consider syphilis, porphyria and pelvic deformation unlikely, since the symptoms clash with her medical history.

  From at least 1698, Anne endured bouts of what was called gout, with pains that spread from her limbs to her stomach and head. It left her lame for much of her later life. At court she was carried in a sedan chair or pushed in a wheelchair. On her estates she drove a one-horse chaise herself, "furiously like Jehu and a mighty hunter like Nimrod". Her sedentary habits added weight, and Sarah later wrote that she "grew exceeding gross and corpulent", though there was "something of majesty in her look".

  Sir John Clerk, 1st Baronet, saw Anne in 1706 in the grip of a gout attack and in extreme pain. He noted her red and spotted face, her careless dress, and the foot wrapped in a poultice and rough bandages. In his words, she looked as disordered as the meanest of her subjects, and he was "much affected by this sight".

  Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, was born at Hampton Court Palace on the 24th of July 1689. Though sickly, he survived infancy, and with William and Mary childless it seemed he would one day wear the crown. He died at Windsor Castle on the 30th of July 1700, aged 11, of unclear causes. Anne and George were "overwhelmed with grief", and she ordered her household to observe a day of mourning on every anniversary. William had no children, and now Anne was the only person left in the line of succession laid down in the Bill of Rights.

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• 6. Settlement and Union

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  The Parliament of England answered the crisis with the Act of Settlement 1701. If Anne and any children of William by a future marriage left no heirs, the crowns of England and Ireland would pass to Sophia of Hanover and her Protestant descendants. Sophia was a granddaughter of James VI and I through his daughter Elizabeth, who was the sister of Anne's grandfather Charles I. More than 50 Catholics with stronger claims were shut out.

  Anne's father died in September 1701. His widow wrote to tell Anne that he had forgiven her, and she reminded Anne of her promise to seek the restoration of his line. By then Anne had already accepted the succession created by the Act.

  William III died on the 8th of March 1702, and Anne became queen. She was popular at once. In her first speech to the English Parliament, on the 11th of March, she distanced herself from her late Dutch brother-in-law. "As I know my heart to be entirely English," she began, and she promised to do whatever she could for the happiness and prosperity of England.

  Scotland was another matter. It remained an independent state with its own parliament and laws, and the Act of Settlement did not apply there. A strong minority in Scotland wanted to preserve the Stuart line and its right to inherit. In that same first speech, Anne had called a union of England and Scotland "very necessary". A joint commission met at her old home, the Cockpit, in October 1702, but the talks collapsed in early February 1703 with no agreement.

  The Estates of Scotland hit back with the Act of Security. If Anne had no further children, the Estates could choose the next Scottish monarch from the Protestant descendants of Scotland's royal line. The person chosen could not be the same person who took the English throne, unless England granted Scottish merchants full freedom of trade. Anne first withheld her assent. She gave it the following year, when the Estates threatened to withhold the money that kept Scottish support behind England's wars.

  The English Parliament replied with the Alien Act 1705. It threatened economic sanctions and the treatment of Scots as aliens in England, unless Scotland dropped the Act of Security or agreed to unite. The Estates chose union, England agreed to repeal the Alien Act, and Anne appointed new commissioners in early 1706. They presented articles of union to her on the 23rd of July 1706. The Scottish Parliament ratified them on the 16th of January 1707, and the English Parliament followed on the 6th of March. On the 1st of May 1707, England and Scotland became a single kingdom called Great Britain, with one parliament.

  Anne backed the union with ardour, despite opposition on both sides of the border. She attended a thanksgiving service in St Paul's Cathedral, where Sir John Clerk, a Scot, noticed that "nobody on this occasion appeared more sincerely devout and thankful than the Queen herself". The union even rearranged her coat of arms. The English lions and the Scottish lion, once in separate quarters, were now set side by side in the same quarter.

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• 7. Parties and Favourites

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  On the 4th of May 1702, England entered the War of the Spanish Succession, fighting alongside Austria and the Dutch Republic against France and Bourbon Spain. Charles II of Spain had died childless in 1700, and two claimants disputed his throne: the Habsburg Archduke Charles of Austria and the Bourbon Philip, Duke of Anjou. Anne made her husband Lord High Admiral, with nominal control of the Royal Navy, and she gave the army to Marlborough as Captain-General. He became a Knight of the Garter and then a duke. Sarah was named Groom of the Stool, Mistress of the Robes and Keeper of the Privy Purse.

  Anne's reign saw the two-party system grow. The Tories backed the Anglican church and the landed interest of the country gentry. The Whigs aligned with commercial interests and Protestant Dissenters. As a committed Anglican, Anne leaned toward the Tories, and her first ministry was largely Tory. Lord Godolphin served as Lord Treasurer, with Marlborough beside him, and Robert Harley sat as Speaker of the House of Commons.

  In 1702, Anne supported the Occasional Conformity Bill, which aimed to close a loophole that let nonconformists hold office by taking Anglican communion once a year. She forced her husband to vote for it, even though as a Lutheran he was himself an occasional conformist. The Whigs blocked it. After the Great Storm of 1703, Anne declared a general fast, asking God to forgive "the crying sins of this nation". When the bill returned in the storm's wake, she held back her support, fearing it was a ruse to provoke a quarrel. A third attempt, in November 1704, was also thwarted. She also revived touching for the king's evil, a ritual William had dropped as papist superstition.

  The Duke of Marlborough's great victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 boosted the war-loving Whigs. Many High Tories, who opposed a land war with France, lost their offices. Godolphin, Marlborough and Harley formed a ruling triumvirate that leaned ever more on the Whigs, especially the Whig Junto of Lords Somers, Halifax, Orford, Wharton and Sunderland. Anne disliked the Junto. Sarah pushed the queen incessantly to appoint more Whigs, whom she thought better than the Tories, whom she regarded as little better than Jacobites.

  In 1706, Godolphin and the Marlboroughs forced Anne to accept Lord Sunderland, a Junto Whig and the Marlboroughs' son-in-law, as Secretary of State for the Southern Department. Anne grew irritated with Godolphin and with Sarah for backing Sunderland and other Whigs for vacant posts. She turned for private advice to Harley and to Abigail Hill, a woman of the bedchamber related to both Harley and the Duchess. Abigail was politically closer to Harley and carried messages between him and the queen.

  On the 8th of February 1708, Godolphin and the Marlboroughs demanded that the queen either dismiss Harley or do without them. When she hesitated, Marlborough and Godolphin refused to attend a cabinet meeting. Harley tried to run business without them, but others, including Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, would not take part. The queen dismissed Harley.

  The following month, her Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, tried to land in Scotland with French help. Fearing that militia raised there might side with the Jacobites, Anne refused assent to the Scottish Militia Bill 1708. No British sovereign has vetoed a bill since. Ships under Sir George Byng chased the invasion fleet away. The scare cost the Tories support, and the Whigs won a majority in the 1708 general election.

  Sarah was furious when Abigail moved into rooms at Kensington Palace that Sarah thought were hers, though she rarely used them. In July 1708, she brought to court a bawdy poem, probably by the Whig propagandist Arthur Maynwaring, hinting at a lesbian relationship between Anne and Abigail. Sarah wrote that Anne's attachment to such a woman was "strange and unaccountable", and that many people had liked the humour of their chambermaids but few put them on the footing of a friend. Some modern commentators have concluded that Anne was a lesbian, but most reject this. Her biographers believe she saw Abigail as a trusted servant, and that she was a woman of strong traditional beliefs, devoted to her husband.

  At a thanksgiving service for the victory at Oudenarde, Anne did not wear the jewels Sarah had chosen. They argued at the door of St Paul's, and Sarah told the queen to be quiet. Anne later returned a letter from Marlborough with a pointed note beginning, "After the commands you gave me on the thanksgiving day of not answering you".

  Prince George died in October 1708, and Anne was devastated. Sarah arrived at Kensington Palace shortly before his death. Afterward she insisted that Anne move to St James's Palace against her wishes, and she took down a portrait of George from the queen's bedchamber and would not return it. Anne resented every bit of it.

  The Whigs used the loss to their advantage. They had blamed George and his deputy, George Churchill, who was Marlborough's brother, for mismanaging the navy. With Whigs dominant in Parliament and the queen distraught, they forced Lords Somers and Wharton into the cabinet. Anne insisted on performing the duties of Lord High Admiral herself. She named the moderate Earl of Pembroke to run the Admiralty on the 29th of November 1708. He resigned within a year, and in November 1709, she finally gave the post to the Junto's Earl of Orford.

  In October 1709, Anne wrote to Marlborough asking that his wife "leave off teasing & tormenting me". On Maundy Thursday, the 6th of April 1710, Anne and Sarah saw each other for the last time. By Sarah's account, the queen was taciturn and formal, repeating, "Whatever you have to say you may put in writing" and "You said you desired no answer, and I shall give you none".

  The expensive war grew unpopular, and so did the Whig government. The impeachment of Henry Sacheverell, a high church Tory who had preached against the Whigs, stirred more public anger. Anne thought he deserved a mild punishment for questioning the Glorious Revolution. Riots broke out in his support, and Sunderland hesitated to redeploy the queen's guards. Anne declared that God would be her guard and ordered him to send them. Sacheverell was convicted, but his sentence of three years without preaching was so light that the trial became a mockery.

  In June 1710, Anne dismissed Sunderland, and Godolphin followed in August. The Junto Whigs left office, and she appointed a new ministry led by Harley that began to seek peace with France. Harley, aided by government patronage, won a large Tory majority in the elections that followed. In January 1711, Anne forced Sarah to resign her court offices, and Abigail became Keeper of the Privy Purse. In March, a disgruntled French refugee, the Marquis de Guiscard, stabbed Harley, and Anne wept at the thought that he would die. He recovered slowly. When Godolphin died of natural causes in September 1712, she wept again, blaming their estrangement on the Marlboroughs.

  Emperor Joseph I died in April 1711, and his younger brother Archduke Charles succeeded him in Austria, Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire. Giving Charles the Spanish throne as well no longer suited Britain. The Whigs still thought the proposed Peace of Utrecht went too easy on Bourbon ambitions. The Tories held the Commons, but not the Lords, where the Whigs had won over the Earl of Nottingham by promising to back his Occasional Conformity bill. Anne reluctantly created twelve new peers, an unprecedented number. One was Abigail's husband, Samuel Masham, and Anne protested to Harley that she should "lose a useful servant". On the same day, Marlborough lost command of the army. The treaty was ratified, and Britain's part in the war ended.

  By signing the Treaty of Utrecht, Louis XIV of France recognised the Hanoverian succession in Britain. Gossip still said that Anne and her ministers preferred her half-brother, despite her denials in public and private. She would never allow a Hanoverian to visit or settle in England, which fed the rumours. Harley and the Tory Secretary of State Lord Bolingbroke were indeed holding separate secret talks with the half-brother about a Stuart restoration until early 1714.

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• 8. Death and Reputation

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  Anne could not walk at all between January and July 1713. At Christmas that year she ran a fever and lay unconscious for hours, which set off rumours that she was dying. She recovered, but fell seriously ill again in March 1714. By July, she had lost faith in Harley. His secretary recorded her telling the cabinet that he neglected business, was seldom understood, could not be trusted to tell the truth, and missed his appointments. She added that "he often came drunk" and treated her with disrespect.

  On the 27th of July 1714, with Parliament in summer recess, she dismissed Harley as Lord Treasurer. Her doctors blamed her failing health on the strain of affairs of state. She attended two late-night cabinet meetings that failed to settle on a successor, and a third was cancelled because she was too ill to attend. A stroke on the 30th of July 1714 took away her speech, on the anniversary of Gloucester's death. On the Privy Council's advice, she handed the treasurer's staff of office to the Whig grandee Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury.

  Anne died around 7:30 am on the 1st of August 1714, aged 49. Her doctor John Arbuthnot saw her death as a release from a life of ill health and tragedy. He wrote to Jonathan Swift, "I believe sleep was never more welcome to a weary traveller than death was to her." She was buried on the 24th of August in the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, beside her husband and children.

  Electress Sophia of Hanover had died on the 28th of May, two months before Anne, so Sophia's son George, Elector of Hanover, took the throne under the Act of Settlement 1701. The Catholic claimants, including Anne's half-brother, were ignored. The transition was relatively calm, and a Jacobite rising in 1715 failed. Marlborough was reinstated, and Whigs replaced the Tory ministers.

  The Duchess of Marlborough shaped Anne's reputation for generations. In her memoirs she conceded that the queen "certainly meant well and was not a fool", but called her ignorant and not wise. Her prejudiced recollections persuaded early biographers that Anne was a weak, irresolute woman, beset by bedchamber quarrels and deciding high policy on the basis of personalities.

  Historians have since been kinder. In his 1980 biography, Edward Gregg portrayed Anne as a woman of invincible stubbornness and the central figure of her age. Modern historians suggest that older portraits of her as fat, constantly pregnant and ruled by favourites may reflect sexist prejudice. David Green observed, "Hers was not, as used to be supposed, petticoat government." She attended more cabinet meetings than any monarch before or since. Gregg concluded that she often imposed her will, though ministers gained influence and the Crown lost some during her reign.

  Her reign coincided with a flowering of the arts and sciences. Sir John Vanbrugh built Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, and Henry Wise laid out new gardens at Blenheim, Kensington, Windsor and St James's. Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift flourished, and Queen Anne-style architecture and furniture carry her name. Anne paid George Frideric Handel £200 a year. She also sponsored high-quality medals to reward political and military achievements, produced at the Mint by Isaac Newton and John Croker, and she knighted Newton when she visited Cambridge in 1705. The union of England and Scotland created Europe's largest free trade area.

  In 1702, Anne had chosen a motto for her arms: semper eadem, Latin for "always the same". It was the very motto Queen Elizabeth I had used before her.

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