Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion
Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion
Anne Somerset
Often derided as weak-willed and insecure, Queen Anne was in fact one of Britain’s most remarkable monarchs. In many ways a stolid, conventional woman, she nevertheless presided over some of the most momentous events in British history and led a personal life riven by passion, illness and intrigue.In 1702, fourteen years after she helped oust her father from his throne and deprived her newborn half-brother of his birthright, Queen Anne inherited the crowns of England and Scotland. Childless, despite seventeen pregnancies that had either ended in failure or produced heartrendingly short-lived offspring, in some respects she was a pitiable figure. But against all expectation she proved Britain’s most successful Stuart ruler.Her reign was marked by many triumphs, including union with Scotland and glorious victories in war against France. Yet while her great general, the Duke of Marlborough, was performing feats of military genius, Anne’s relationship with his outspoken wife Sarah was becoming ever more rancorous. Political differences partly explained why the Queen’s earlier adoration for Sarah transformed to loathing, but the final rupture was precipitated by Sarah’s startling claim that it was the Queen’s lesbian infatuation with another lady-in-waiting, Abigail Masham, that had destroyed their friendship.Having lost the will to continue an expensive war that the Marlboroughs and their political allies favoured, the Queen embarked upon a peace process that some condemned as a betrayal of the national interest. And, as it became clear that Anne did not have long to live, the nation became polarised by fears that she intended to bequeath her crown to her Catholic half brother, rather than the German Protestant cousin whom Parliament had designated her heir.Drawing widely on unpublished sources, Anne Somerset vividly depicts the clashes of personality and party rivalries that aroused such strong feelings at the time. Traditionally depicted as a weak ruler dominated by female favourites and haunted by remorse at having deposed her father, Queen Anne emerges as a woman whose unshakeable commitment to duty enabled her to overcome private tragedy and painful disabilities, setting her kingdom on the path to greatness.
Queen Anne
The Politics of Passion
A Biography
Anne Somerset
OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE SOMERSET
The Life and Times of King William IV
Elizabeth I
Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I
The Affair of the Poisons
Ladies in Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day
For Dad, with love
The book is also dedicated to the memory of my husband, Matthew Carr. He was always the first person to be shown the typescript of my books and although he died before he could read it all, he delighted me with his enthusiasm for the sections he did see. It is one of many ways in which he is greatly missed.
Contents
Cover (#ulink_2dc48b01-8f16-5c1f-bf41-dc0ce045c1ef)
Title Page
Other Books by Anne Somerset
Dedication
The House of Stuart
List of Illustrations
Author’s Note
1 But a Daughter
2 Religion Before Her Father
3 Sure Never Anybody Was Used So
4 We Are Now in a New World
5 These Fatal Distinctions of Whig and Tory
6 The Weight and Charge of a Kingdom
7 Nothing But Uneasiness
8 Entire and Perfect Union
9 Guided by Other Hands
10 Passions Between Women
11 Making the Breach Wider
12 The Heat and Ferment that is in This Poor Nation
13 I Do Not Like War
14 The Great Work of Peace
15 The Last Troublesome Scene of Contention
16 Not Equal to the Weight of a Crown?
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE HOUSE OF STUART
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
James II, when Duke of York, with Anne Hyde and their two daughters, Princess Mary and Princess Anne c. 1674–80. By Sir Peter Lely and Benedetto Gennari. (The Royal Collection © 2011)
The Lady Anne as a child. Artist Unknown. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Queen Anne when Princess of Denmark. By Willem Wissing and Jan van der Vaardt. (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery)
Sarah Churchill (later the Duchess of Marlborough) with Lady Fitzharding, 1691. By Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Prince George of Denmark on horseback, 1704. By Michael Dahl. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Princess Anne of Denmark with the Duke of Gloucester, c. 1694. After Kneller (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Queen Mary II. After Willem Wissing. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
William, the Duke of Gloucester, with his friend, Benjamin Bathurst. After Thomas Murray © The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Queen Anne, 1703. By Edmund Lilly. (© Queen Anne, 1703, Lilly, Edmund (fl.1702–d.1716)/Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Sidney Godolphin. After Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
The Duke of Marlborough. By Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Queen Anne with Prince George of Denmark. By Charles Boit, 1706. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Print of ‘Her Majesties Royal Palace at Kensington’. (© British Museum)
Tapestry showing the French Marshal Tallard surrendering his baton to the Duke of Marlborough after the Battle of Blenheim in August 1704. (Image reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace Image Library)
Robert Harley Earl of Oxford. By Jonathan Richardson. (© Private Collection/Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Sophia Electress of Hanover. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Portrait believed to be of Abigail Masham. (© Philip Mould Ltd London/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. By George White, after Thomas Murray. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Prince James Francis Edward Stuart (the Pretender). Studio of Alexis Simon Belle. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Anne in the House of Lords. By Peter Tillemanns. (Royal Collection © 2011)
The Battle of Malplaquet, 11 September 1709, c. 1713. By Louise Laguerre. (© National Army Museum, London/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Satirical print of Bolingbroke dictating business relating to the Treaty of Utrecht. (© British Museum)
Queen Anne and the Knights of the Garter. By Peter Angelis. (© The National Portrait Gallery)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For the sake of clarity I have updated spelling and punctuation used in original documents. Furthermore, in almost all cases when Anne or her contemporaries used the abbreviations ‘ye’ and ‘yt’ in their letters, I have modernised the archaic usage by substituting ‘the’ and ‘that’. Very often Anne and her ministers ciphered their letters by substituting numbers for names. In such cases I have omitted the numbers and replaced them with the relevant name in square brackets.
Throughout Anne’s lifetime, England used the Julian Calendar, while continental Europe followed the Gregorian system. During the seventeenth century, the date in Europe was ten days ahead of England’s; with the start of the eighteenth century the gap between England and Europe widened to a difference of eleven days. When dealing with events that took place in England, I give dates according to the Julian Calendar. However, when describing events that occurred on the Continent, or when quoting letters sent from abroad, I generally give a composite date, separated by a forward slash, indicating the date according to both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Whereas in Stuart England, the calendar year started on 25 March, I have simplified things by taking it to begin on 1 January.
It is notoriously difficult to compare the value of money in the past with modern monetary values. However, as a very rough guide it should be noted that the National Archives’ Currency Converter Service calculates that £1 in 1710 would have a spending worth of £76.59 in 2005.
1
But a Daughter
The opening weeks of the year 1665 were particularly cold, and the sub-zero temperatures had discouraged the King of England, Charles II, from writing to his sister Henrietta in France. He was always a lazy correspondent, and having little news to impart thought it pointless ‘to freeze my fingers for nothing’. In early February, however, he took up his pen to report that the two of them had acquired a new niece. On 6 February, shortly before midnight at St James’s Palace in London, their younger brother James, Duke of York, had become a father to a healthy baby girl. Being without a legitimate heir, the King would have preferred a boy, and since Henrietta herself was expecting a child, Charles told her that he trusted she would have ‘better luck’ in this respect. In one way, however, the Duchess of York had been fortunate, for she had had a remarkably quick labour, having ‘despatched her business in little more than an hour’. Charles wrote that he wished Henrietta an equally speedy delivery when her time came, though he feared that her slender frame meant that she was ‘not so advantageously made for that convenience’ as the far more substantially built Duchess. The King concluded that in that event, ‘a boy will recompense two grunts more’.
The child was named Anne, after her mother, and if her birth was a disappointment, at least it did not cause the sort of furore that had greeted the appearance in the world of the Duke and Duchess of York’s firstborn child in 1660. That baby had initially been assumed to have been born out of wedlock, but when it emerged that the infant’s parents had in fact secretly married just before the child’s birth, there was fury that the Duke of York had matched himself with a loose woman who was not of royal blood. Many people shared the view expressed by the diarist Samuel Pepys ‘that he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward, it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’.
The scandal was particularly regrettable because the monarchy was fragile. Charles II had only been on his throne since May 1660, after an eleven-year interregnum. In 1649 his father, King Charles I, had been executed. This followed his defeat in a civil war that had started in 1642 when political and religious tensions had caused a total breakdown in relations between King and Parliament. During that conflict an estimated 190,000 people – nearly four percent of the population – had lost their lives in England and Wales alone; in Scotland and Ireland the proportion of inhabitants who perished was still higher. Charles I had been taken prisoner in 1646, but refused to come to terms with his opponents and so the war had continued. By 1648, however, the royalists had been vanquished. Angered at the way the King had prolonged the bloodshed, the leaders of the parliamentary forces brought him to trial and sentenced him to death. England became a republic ruled by a Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and it seemed that its monarchy had been extinguished forever.
When the royalists’ principal stronghold of Oxford had fallen in the summer of 1646, Charles I’s twelve-year-old son, James, Duke of York, had been taken into the custody of Parliament. However, in April 1648 he had managed to escape abroad, dressed as a girl. His older brother Charles was already on the Continent, having been sent overseas by their father two years earlier. James was only fourteen when news arrived that his father had been executed on 30 January 1649. In the ensuing decade all attempts to place Charles on his late father’s throne failed, and a lifetime in exile appeared inevitable for the royal brothers.
In 1656 James spent some time at the French court. While there, he met with his elder sister Mary, widow of the Dutch prince, William II of Orange, who was visiting Paris, accompanied by her maid of honour, Anne Hyde. Anne was the daughter of Edward Hyde, a pompous and severe lawyer from Wiltshire who had become a leading adviser to Charles I shortly before the outbreak of civil war. After his master’s execution, he offered his services to the late King’s eldest son, now styled Charles II by his adherents. Hyde moved his family to Holland and in 1653 they took up residence at Breda at the invitation of the widowed Mary of Orange, who bore the title Princess Royal of England. Two years later the Princess suggested that Hyde’s eighteen-year-old daughter Anne should become one of her maids of honour. Hyde had been reluctant to accept her offer, partly because he feared angering the late King’s widow, Queen Henrietta Maria, who detested him. Finally he consented, whereupon the Queen Mother was duly incensed, little guessing that within a few years she would become more intimately connected to his daughter.
After their initial encounter, James had other opportunities to see Anne when he visited his sister at Breda. He was soon passionately attracted to her, for though Anne was ‘not absolutely a beauty … there was nobody at the court of Holland capable of putting her in the shade’. At this stage she had a ‘pretty good’ figure, and was also universally agreed to be exceptionally witty and intelligent. ‘Always of an amorous disposition’, James tried to seduce her, but she did not prove an easy conquest. Even after he had ‘for many months solicited Anne … in the way of marriage’, it was only after he formally contracted himself to her at Breda on 24 November 1659 that she let him sleep with her.
In the spring of 1660 royalist fortunes were suddenly transformed. Oliver Cromwell had died in September 1658, and over the next fifteen months England descended into near anarchy. In late April 1660 the chaotic situation was resolved when the English Parliament invited Charles II to return to England and assume the crown. On 25 May Charles – now King in more than name only – landed at Dover. Four days later he made a triumphant entry into London, accompanied by James, Duke of York.
Anne Hyde left the Princess Royal’s service and came back to England with her family. Her father was now the King’s chief minister, with the official position of Lord Chancellor. Unaware that Anne was pregnant by the Duke of York, he began making arrangements to wed her to a ‘well-bred hopeful young gentleman’, but before these came to fruition James went to the King and tearfully begged permission to marry Anne. ‘Much troubled’ by this development, Charles initially refused to authorise the union but ‘at last, after much importunity, consented’. On 3 September 1660 James and Anne Hyde were married at a private ceremony in the dead of night at Worcester House, the Lord Chancellor’s London residence. The only witnesses were James’s friend the Earl of Ossory and Anne Hyde’s maidservant, Ellen Stroud.
Anne was now in the advanced stages of pregnancy, but curiously her father had failed to notice this. He was therefore shocked and appalled when the King alerted him to the fact that his daughter was expecting the Duke of York’s child and had married without his knowledge. Hyde demanded that Anne should be ‘sent to the Tower … and then that an act of Parliament should be immediately passed for the cutting off her head’, and was surprised when the King demurred.
However, although Charles told Hyde that he was sure the marriage could not be undone, the union was still not officially acknowledged. Anne continued to await her baby at her father’s house, where she was kept confined to her room.
Towards the end of September the Princess Royal arrived in England, enraged by the prospect of having her former servant for a sister-in-law. Unnerved by this, James’s commitment to Anne began to waver. He now accepted that he had been imprudent to pledge himself so precipitately, and instead of the marriage being publicly proclaimed ‘there grew to be a great silence in that affair’. James’s doubts became more pronounced when members of his court started to suggest that Anne was a woman of bad character. His best friend Sir Charles Berkeley claimed ‘that he and others have lain with her often’, and another young man testified that once, when riding pillion behind him, ‘she rid with her hand on his ———’.
An assortment of courtiers provided additional explicit details of alleged trysts with Anne during her time in Holland. Richard Talbot claimed to have had an assignation with her in her father’s study, recalling that as he was fondling her on the desk a bottle of ink had overturned, causing an appalling mess. Later the pair of them had artfully put the blame on the King’s pet monkey. After hearing such stories the French ambassador declared it ‘as clear as day that she has had other lovers’, and James too apparently became convinced of this. On 10 October the Duke informed Hyde ‘that he had learned things about his daughter which he could not say to him’, and that consequently he had decided never to see her again.
On 22 October Anne went into labour at Worcester House, and the King sent four high ranking court ladies and four bishops to witness the birth. The Bishop of Winchester interrogated the poor young woman, demanding to know who the father was, and whether Anne had slept with more than one man. Between contractions Anne gasped out that James was the father, that she had never had another lover, and that she and the Duke of York were lawfully married.
After Anne gave birth to a son the ladies present declared they were sure she had spoken the truth, but James still declined to own the child.
When the Queen Mother arrived in England in early November she encouraged courtiers to come forward with further stories to discredit Anne. Now James professed himself disgusted with the young woman’s ‘whoredom’, and having assured his mother that he ‘had now such evidence of her unworthiness that he should no more think of her’, he gave it out that it was untrue that he had already taken Anne as his wife.
Despite James’s public denial of the marriage, the King knew otherwise. The Venetian ambassador reported ‘he seems to have taken the lady’s side, telling his brother that having lacked caution at first he could not draw back … at this stage’. Charles had no doubt that the stories sullying Anne’s reputation could be dismissed as ‘a wicked conspiracy set on foot by villains’, and he signified his support for his Lord Chancellor by creating him Baron Hyde on 3 November. Charles informed the Queen Mother that both ‘seemliness and conscience’ required him to uphold a marriage he had no doubt was valid, while to Hyde he declared, ‘the thing was remediless’. James was bluntly instructed to ‘drink as he brewed and lie with her whom he had made his wife’.
Shaken by his brother’s attitude, James’s resolve to disavow Anne faltered. It did not take much to persuade him that the stories about her had all been slanders for, as a French diplomat shrewdly observed, ‘this young prince is still in love with this girl’. By December, he was stealing out of court to spend nights with Anne at her father’s house. When Anne’s mother began referring to her as ‘Madam the Duchess of York’, it was clear that matters were on the verge of being settled, and the French ambassador noted that people were now resigned to the inevitable.
On 20 December James officially acknowledged Anne as his wife, and people came to court to kiss her hand. Four days later the Princess Royal was killed by an attack of smallpox, and died expressing remorse for the harsh things she had said of Anne. Even the Queen Mother relented. Before returning to France, she received Anne and James together on 1 January 1661 ‘with the same grace as if she had liked it [the marriage] from the beginning’. That afternoon the baby prince was christened Charles, and the King and Queen Mother stood as godparents.
Although Anne had now been absorbed into the royal family, inevitably memories lingered of the unpleasantness that had attended her entrance into it. As late as 1679 James’s cousin Sophia of Hanover made a sneering reference to Anne Hyde’s lack of chastity, and she also mocked her low birth. Years later, when a marriage was mooted between the Duke and Duchess of York’s daughter Anne and Sophia’s eldest son Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, Sophia was not very keen on the idea because ‘the Princess Anne on her mother’s side [was] born of a very mediocre family’. James’s Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, was also mindful of such matters. At one point he even flattered himself that the English would prefer him as their sovereign before either of James’s daughters by Anne Hyde, despite the fact the two girls were nearer in blood to the throne than he was. While William was soon disabused of this idea, he was not alone in thinking that Anne Hyde’s progeny were unfit to succeed to the crown. In 1669 the Venetian ambassador to England reported that the Lord Chancellor’s grandchildren were ‘universally denounced as unworthy of the office and of such honour’.
These objections had no basis in law, but Anne Hyde’s daughters would always face prejudice because they were not pure-bred royalty.
The Duke and Duchess of York had a suite of lodgings in the King’s principal London palace, Whitehall, and they were also allocated St James’s Palace for summer use. With great forbearance the Duchess resisted taking revenge on those courtiers who had defamed her, astonishing everybody by accepting that they had acted ‘out of pure devotion’ to James. Yet while her graciousness in this instance could not be faulted, some people felt that she sought to compensate for her humble origins by taking ‘state on her rather too much’. ‘Her haughtiness … raised her many enemies’ and an Italian diplomat reported complaints of her ‘scorn … ingratitude and her arrogance’.
The King, however, was not among her critics. He enjoyed her company, for the Duchess was a lively conversationalist, an asset her daughter Anne did not inherit. Samuel Pepys was much impressed by the clever answers the Duchess gave when playing a parlour game, and she was certainly a good deal more amusing than her husband, whose sense of humour was non-existent. She had a forceful personality, but the Duke did not seem to mind her assertiveness: contemporaries were surprised that he appeared ‘more in awe of the Duchess than considering the inequality of their rank could have been imagined’.
Unfortunately, there were limits to the Duchess’s power over him, for James was constantly unfaithful, despite her being ‘very troublesome to him by her jealousy’. It was said that ‘having laid his conscience to rest by the declaration of his marriage he thought that this generous effort entitled him to give his inconstancy a little scope’. He was renowned for being ‘the most reckless ogler of his day’ and was ‘perpetually in one amour or other without being very nice in his choice’. He had affairs with, among others, Lady Carnegie, Goditha Price, Lady Denham, and Arabella Churchill. In 1662, the Duke’s affair with Lady Carnegie led to a disagreeable rumour that her husband had deliberately infected himself with venereal disease, and thereby ensured his wife passed it on to her lover. The Duchess of York was supposed to have contracted the illness in her turn, and this was blamed for so many of her children proving ‘sickly and infirm’. Even the pains that afflicted her daughter Anne as an adult were sometimes attributed to her having inherited ‘the dregs of a tainted original’.
In fact, as James had healthy children by his mistress Arabella Churchill, it seems unlikely that he was syphilitic, and that this caused his daughters’ ailments.
The pleasures of the table helped console the Duchess for her husband’s infidelities. One observer recalled that she ‘had a heartier appetite than any other woman in the kingdom … It was an edifying spectacle to watch her Highness eat’. Whereas with every year the Duke of York grew progressively thinner, ‘his poor consort … waxed so fat that it was a marvel to see’. By 1668 an Italian diplomat reported that she was almost unrecognisable because ‘superfluous fat … has so altered the proportions of a very fine figure and a most lovely face’.
The Duchess’s daughters would both inherit her tendency to plumpness, with Anne in her later years being clinically obese.
The Duke and Duchess of York’s eldest son, whom the King had created Duke of Cambridge, only lived a few months. When he died in May 1661 the Venetian ambassador reported he was ‘lamented by his parents and all the court’, but Pepys commented heartlessly that his death ‘will please everybody; and I hear that the Duke and his lady themselves are not much troubled at it’. The reason for this was that owing to the controversial circumstances of his birth, the child’s legitimacy would always be open to question. It was true that in February 1661, Hyde, the child’s grandfather, had taken the precaution of establishing a formal record both of his daughter’s betrothal to James while in Holland (which, if properly attested, was as binding in law as a church wedding) and their subsequent marriage at Worcester House.
Nevertheless, problems might still have arisen in future.
Though convenient in some ways, the death of the little Duke of Cambridge did mean that the succession to the crown was not secured beyond the current generation. There was therefore relief when the Duchess of York became pregnant again. However, after she gave birth on 30 April 1662 to a daughter, christened Mary, Pepys reported ‘I find nobody pleased’. Women were not formally barred from inheriting the throne by Salic law, as in France, but it was agreed that a male monarch was infinitely preferable, and even the memory of the glorious reign of Elizabeth I, who had become Queen a century earlier, could not eradicate the idea that women were not really fitted to rule kingdoms. It was not until July 1663, when the Duchess of York produced a boy ‘to the great joy of the court’, that the outlook appeared better.
The child was named James after his father and in 1664 the King conferred on him the same title as his ill-fated brother.
When Anne was born in February 1665, few would have predicted that she would one day wear the crown. King Charles II had married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in May 1662, and though as yet she had borne him no children, there were still hopes she would do so. Any legitimate child of the King would of course take precedence in the line of succession to those of the Duke of York. Anne’s two older siblings also had a better claim to the throne than she, while any legitimate son of James born after her would inherit the crown before his sisters. She could only become Queen if she had no surviving brothers, and if her elder sister Mary predeceased her without leaving children. Only a pessimist would have considered this a likely eventuality, so Anne appeared destined to be no more than an insignificant princess belonging to a cadet branch of the royal family.
The royal nursery was supervised by the Duke of Cambridge’s governess, Lady Frances Villiers, but from the first Anne was allocated her own servants. On her accession in 1702 Anne’s former wet nurse, Margery Farthing, called attention to the fact ‘that she did give suck to her present majesty … for the space of fifteen months’ and successfully asked for financial recognition. In 1669 Anne was listed as having a dresser, three rockers, a sempstress, a page of the backstairs, and a necessary woman, whose board wages amounted to £260.
Anne’s parents cannot have seen much of their daughter during the first few months of her life. Following a period of active service at sea, the Duke of York went on a northern tour with his wife, leaving their children in the care of Lady Frances. Contemporaries would not have considered the Duke and Duchess to be negligent for absenting themselves. It was standard practice for aristocratic infants to be boarded out with wet nurses until weaned, so lengthy separations were considered the norm.
As an adult Anne would give the impression that she had almost no memory of her mother, who died when her daughter was only six. In 1693 she was shown a picture of her and commented ‘I … believe ’tis a very good one, though I do not remember enough of her to know whether it is like her or no; but it is very like one the King [Charles II] had, which everybody said was so’. Since Anne went abroad for two years when she was three and a half years old, and only returned when her mother’s health was in terminal decline, it is understandable that her recollection of her was very hazy.
In September 1664 Pepys had been delighted to see the Duke of York playing with Lady Mary, then aged two, ‘like an ordinary private father of a child’. The compiler of James’s authorised Life proclaimed him ‘the most affectionate father on earth’, and other sources concurred that he was ‘most indulgent’ towards his daughters. Even in 1688 Anne herself did not deny that James had always ‘been very kind and tender towards her’.
On the whole James was justified in priding himself on being a conscientious and benevolent parent. As will be seen, he was upset when circumstances forced him to live apart from his adolescent daughter Anne, and made strenuous efforts to ensure that their separation was as short as possible. When they were reunited he reported her activities with paternal pride in his letters, and he always showed a touching concern for her health. After she married he was generous to her financially, and was compassionate when she was distressed by the loss of her children. However, James did expect deference and compliance from his daughters, and Anne was always slightly scared of him. While there is no known instance when he lost his temper with her, she was cautious of what she said to him. By temperament ‘as stiff as a mule’, James was apt to flare up when anyone disagreed with him, and though a time would come when outspokenness on Anne’s part might have been construed as a virtue, by then the habit of circumspection was too deeply ingrained to be abandoned. When urged to give James the benefit of her advice, she answered that she had always deliberately avoided discussing weighty topics with him, protesting ‘if she had said anything … he would have been angry; and then God knows what might have happened’.
It is true that Anne would ultimately flagrantly defy James both as a father and a sovereign. It was to be an astonishing act for a woman who was by nature utterly conventional, and who was so politically conservative that her instinctive affinities lay with those who considered ‘obedience to kings, as to parents, a moral, nay a divine law’.
Even then, however, she eschewed a direct confrontation with James, who remained under the illusion that she was a dutiful daughter until the very moment of rupture.
The summer of 1667 was a ghastly time for the Duke and Duchess of York. The couple had had another son a year before, but in May 1667 both he and his elder brother fell seriously ill. On 22 May the little Duke of Kendal died of convulsion fits and a month later ‘some general disease’ carried off his brother the Duke of Cambridge. As far as most people were concerned, this once again plunged the Stuart dynasty into crisis. The Venetian ambassador’s report did not even mention that the Duke of York still had two daughters who could ascend the throne in due course, instead stating baldly, ‘The royal house of England is without posterity’.
On 8 August the Duchess of York’s mother died. Three weeks later, still reeling from the blow, the widowed Lord Chancellor – who had been created Earl of Clarendon six years earlier – fell from power; in late November he fled abroad to escape trumped-up charges of treason. The Duke of York had done his best to support his father-in-law, but the latter had long been unpopular, not least because it was falsely claimed that he had deliberately arranged for the King to marry a barren bride so that his own descendants would inherit the crown. Once Hyde had antagonised the King himself, his ruin was inevitable. Pepys noted the Duke of York’s prestige had been ‘wounded by it’, and that he was ‘much a less man than he was’.
Edward Hyde was never permitted to return from foreign exile. His departure to France and the death of her grandmother narrowed Anne’s family circle. Hyde and his wife had enjoyed seeing their grandchildren and had shown a keen interest in their welfare, but henceforth his two sons Henry (who became Earl of Clarendon on his father’s death in 1674) and Laurence (created Earl of Rochester in 1681) were the only relations on Anne’s maternal side who would feature in her life. Even they were not wholly on a family footing, for the disparity in rank between them and their niece acted as a barrier, and the Earl of Ailesbury observed that Anne never addressed either of them as ‘Uncle’. It was not only etiquette that created a distance, for on reaching maturity Anne would complain that they were not as attentive to her wishes as they should have been. At times she appeared to welcome the advice that her elder uncle proffered her, once telling him she valued the way that she ‘could talk freely’ with him. In general, however, she was guarded about consulting him and his brother.
Some consolation for the Duke and Duchess of York’s recent run of bad luck came on 14 September 1667 when the Duchess had another son, Edgar, who was soon created Duke of Cambridge. Pepys thought it a development that would ‘settle men’s minds mightily’ but unfortunately the child proved a frail bulwark for shoring up the dynasty. He was the ‘least and leanest child’ the Duchess had ever produced, and his ‘very delicate constitution and frequent attacks of deadly sickness’ did not augur well for the future.
Anne too was not a strong child, for she suffered from ‘a kind of defluxion in her eyes’. The medical term was used frequently in the seventeenth century, and could just describe a localised pain, supposedly caused by a ‘flow of humours’ to that area. Alternatively it is possible that her eyes constantly watered, or emitted a discharge. Whatever the cause, this ‘serious eye disorder’ was so worrying that Anne was sent abroad for treatment while still a toddler. The Duke of York believed that French doctors would offer the best chance of curing his daughter, an idea that probably came from his mother, now based in France. Accordingly Anne was entrusted to her grandmother’s care and would spend over a year at her country house at Colombes on the Seine. In July 1668 she was taken across the Channel ‘with her retinue’, and on landing was met at Dieppe by coaches sent by the Queen Mother. According to Anne’s early biographer, Abel Boyer, when it became known at home that she was in France, the ‘surmise that she was gone thither to be bred a Roman Catholic’ caused ‘no small alarm’. Since her grandmother was a known proselytiser, such fears were understandable, if unfounded.
By August 1669 the Queen Mother’s own health was causing concern, but her death on 10 September came as a surprise. Anne was taken in by her aunt Henrietta, who was married to King Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe Duc d’Orléans. When Anne joined the nursery at Saint Cloud, its other occupants were her seven-year-old first cousin Marie Louise – who grew up to become Queen of Spain and died young – and a baby girl, born a few weeks earlier, who would later marry the Duke of Savoy.
The Duchesse d’Orléans was far from robust, and on 20/30 June 1670 she died after a sudden collapse. There were dark rumours that she had been poisoned by her husband, although there can be little doubt that natural causes were to blame. Certainly the Duc was not greatly grieved by his loss, but he did take a meticulous interest in ensuring that his wife was mourned in accordance with court etiquette. When the Duchesse de Montpensier came to offer her condolences she was surprised to see that the Duc had fitted out not only his eldest daughter but also five-year-old Anne in miniature court mourning costumes, complete with long trains of purple velvet. The Duchesse found this absurd, but quite apart from the fact that children love dressing up, it is unlikely that Anne minded. As an adult she too would take such matters seriously. Jonathan Swift declared that she was ‘so exact an observer of forms that she seemed to have made it her study, and would often descend so low as to observe in her domestics of either sex who came into her presence whether a ruffle, a periwig or the lining of a coat were unsuitable at certain times’. Mourning rituals were important to her, and so was protocol, leading the Duchess of Marlborough to complain that Anne’s mind was so taken up with ‘ceremonies and customs of courts and such like insignificant trifles’ that her conversation turned chiefly ‘upon fashions and rules of precedence’.
The English officially accepted the French autopsy findings stating that the Duchesse had not been a victim of foul play, but it was judged best to bring Anne home without delay. Accordingly, Lady Frances Villiers was sent with her husband to escort Anne to England. Before she left France the child was presented with a pair of diamond and pearl bracelets from Louis XIV, the monarch who would later become her greatest adversary.
Following her return to England on 23 July 1670, Anne was judged ‘very much improved both in her constitution and personal accomplishments’. For a time she ‘appeared to acquire a healthful constitution of body’, but she did suffer occasional relapses, and in 1677 was reported to be ‘ill of her eyes again’. Her vision remained defective and as an adult she would try to remedy it by consulting oculists such as William Read, an itinerant tailor who recommended drinking beer in the morning to hydrate the brain, and who concocted an eyewash of sulphur, turpentine, vivum, and honey of roses. She suffered less than her sister Mary, whose letters abound with complaints of being plagued by ‘sore eyes’ which became particularly bad if she read or wrote by candlelight.
Anne’s ailment had left her slightly disfigured. Abel Boyer noted that she had acquired ‘a contraction in the upper lids that gave a cloudy air to her countenance’, indicating she had a slight squint. This made her look ill-tempered, creating an unfortunate impression. The Duchess of Marlborough declared that Anne’s features appeared set in a ‘sullen and constant frown’, and Anne herself was conscious that her face had a naturally grim expression. In 1683 she told a friend who thought she was displeased with her, ‘I have sometimes when I do not know it, a very grave look, which has made others as well as you, ask me if I was angry with them, … Therefore do not mind my looks for I really look grave and angry when I am not so’.
Meanwhile Anne’s mother was in poor physical condition with an ‘illness, under which she languished long’. This was probably cancer of the breast, for the fact that upon her death ‘one of her breasts burst, being a mass of corruption’ suggests that she had a tumour there.
The Duchess of York’s spiritual condition afforded equal grounds for concern. By this time, both of Anne’s parents had ceased to be firm believers in the Anglican faith. James had experienced a crisis of conscience in early 1669 and had begun secret discussions with a Catholic priest, but continued to attend Anglican services. Later that year the Duchess also began to gravitate towards Rome. She later recalled that until this point she had been ‘one of the greatest enemies’ the Catholic Church had, but reading The History of the Reformation by the Protestant divine, Peter Heylyn, had the unexpected effect of forcing her to re-examine her beliefs. After enduring ‘the most terrible agonies in the world’, she was ‘fully convinced and reconciled’ to the Catholic Church in August 1670. James felt inspired by the manner in which his wife’s hostility to the Roman faith had unexpectedly crumbled, and this memory would later encourage him to believe that the most unlikely candidates were ripe for conversion. In particular he clung to the hope that his younger daughter Anne’s ostensibly unshakeable commitment to the Anglican Church would prove as fragile as her mother’s.
Well aware that if her conversion became public she ‘must lose all the friends and credit I have here’, the Duchess of York tried to keep it secret. Inevitably, however, her failure to take communion attracted attention. In December 1670 the King took the matter up with his brother, who admitted his wife was a convert. James promised he would take great care to conceal this, but as the Duchess’s health worsened, her refusal to permit her Anglican chaplains to pray with her left little doubt that she had forsaken the English Church. Appalled by reports that his daughter had succumbed to the lure of Rome, her father wrote from abroad expressing horror at her readiness to ‘suck in that poison’. He warned her that her conversion would bring ‘ruin to your children, of whose company and conversation you must look to be deprived, for God forbid that after such an apostasy you should have any power in [their] education’.
The Duchess of York would not lose custody of her children because she was an unfit mother; instead, she would be parted from them by death. On 9 February 1671 she gave birth to a daughter, who lived less than a year. After that the Duchess’s illness entered its final phase, and ‘came at last to a quicker crisis than had been apprehended’. ‘All of the sudden she fell into the agony of death’ and her last hours proved dreadful, ‘full of unspeakable torture’.
The Duchess had secretly received Catholic last rites, but pious Anglicans lamented that she had rejected the consolations of true religion and died ‘like a poor wretch’. Having died on Friday 31 March 1671 the Duchess ‘was opened on Saturday, embalmed on Sunday and buried’ the day after that. Gilbert Burnet stated coldly that ‘the change of her religion made her friends reckon her death a blessing rather than a loss’. One of her maids of honour noted ‘None remembered her after one week; none sorry for her. She smelt extremely, was tossed and flung about, and everyone did what they would with that stately carcase’. Court mourning for her was curtailed so as not to interfere with celebrations for the King’s birthday.
The decade since the Restoration had been fraught with loss for the Duke of York as ‘hardly a year passed without some sensible mortification, as loss of children, mother, wife, sister’.
Apart from her older sister, Anne, aged six, was left bereft of all female members of her immediate family. Her grandmother, mother, and aunt had all been intelligent, vivacious women, and perhaps if they had lived longer they could have encouraged Anne to be less introverted. As it was, although her sister Mary was a chatterbox, Anne developed into a chronically shy child, and all her life was painfully inarticulate.
The Duchess of Marlborough later recalled that as a young woman ‘the Princess was so silent that she rarely spoke more than was necessary to answer a question’. At fourteen, Anne was already conscious that she was a poor communicator and acknowledged this as a failing, noting ruefully, ‘I have not, maybe, so good a way of expressing myself as some people have’. Four years later she was still lamenting ‘I can never express myself in words’. Even if Anne deprecated her lack of verbal skills, she did not accept that her thoughts and feelings could be dismissed on that account as insignificant, insisting that while ‘there may be people in the world that can say more for themselves … nobody’s heart I am sure is more sincere’.
Although words did not come easily, her diffidence did not spring from a complete absence of self-esteem, and she prided herself on being a person of sound instincts and honest convictions.
James had by now advanced far down the same spiritual road as his late wife. In 1672 it was noticed that for the first time he did not take the sacrament at Easter. He only ceased attending Anglican services of any kind in 1676, but there could be little doubt that he had, in effect, already abandoned the Church. This had become clear after anti-Catholic feeling had resulted in the passing of the Test Act on 29 March 1673. The bill prevented Catholics from holding official employments in England by insisting that all office holders had to take an oath repudiating the doctrine of transubstantiation ‘in full and positive words’.
James could not comply with this requirement and consequently had to resign from his position as Lord Admiral in June 1673.
The discovery that the heir apparent to the throne was a Catholic caused the greatest consternation. Fear of Popery was a force whose potency bore no relation to the number of Catholics in England. It is estimated that in 1676 Catholics constituted just over one percent of the population, although admittedly the figure for the peerage would have been higher. The memory of past outrages perpetrated by Catholics was kept alive by vicious propaganda. The events of Mary Tudor’s reign, a hundred and twenty years earlier, were used to stir up dread of the Popish menace. As alarm mounted at the prospect of a Catholic becoming King there were predictions that in that event England would again be subjected to ‘those bloody massacres and inhuman Smithfield butcheries’. It was suggested that James would prove to be ‘Queen Mary in breeches’, while another person warned ‘We must resolve when we have a prince of the Popish religion to be Papists or burn’.
Fears did not centre exclusively on the possibility that a Catholic ruler would deny his Protestant subjects the right to practise their faith. There were also secular considerations. Catholicism was seen as an autocratic religion, presided over by a Pope whose authority could not be questioned, and this gave rise to the idea that it had a natural affinity with repressive political systems. The prime example of an illiberal Catholic regime was absolutist France, where King Louis XIV ruled without having to secure the consent of a representative assembly to pass laws or levy taxes. France was very much on everyone’s mind at this time, for it was currently emerging as a new superpower, and its king seemed intent on oppressing his neighbours as well as his subjects. In 1672 he had launched a war of aggression with Holland, intending to crush that republic. Though victory did not come as easily as he had hoped, it was clear he aimed at nothing less than radically altering the European balance of power. It was feared that if James inherited the throne, far from trying to restrain Louis, he would instead emulate him by undermining his subjects’ rightful liberties. It was thought that as a Catholic he would be automatically predisposed to rule arbitrarily, for, as the Earl of Shaftesbury put it, ‘Popery and slavery like two sisters’ went ‘hand in hand’.
It took some years before disquiet about James’s religion became so marked that his opponents sought to prevent him becoming King. Since Anne was only eight when her father resigned as Lord High Admiral, it is unlikely that she was aware from the first of the implications of his being a Catholic convert. In time, however, it would define her relations with him.
After being constantly ‘subject to a variety of diseases beyond the endurance of the strongest constitution’ Anne’s brother Edgar had died in June 1671. The loss of what the Venetian ambassador called the ‘sole sprig’
of the royal family meant that Anne became a figure of greater significance. She was now third in line to the throne, and since the Queen showed no sign of providing an heir, Anne would not be moved lower down the order of succession unless her father remarried and had a son.
Anne’s education should thus, logically, have been a subject of national concern, and yet it was astonishingly inadequate. She and Mary were entrusted to the care of Lady Frances Villiers and spent much of their time in the crumbling Tudor palace at Richmond the royal governess shared with her husband, the Keeper of Richmond Park. Anne developed a marked ‘fondness for the house … where she … lived as a child’ and, believing ‘the air of that place good for children’, wanted her own son to be brought up there.
Royal daughters were no longer accorded the sort of education that had been deemed appropriate when Queen Elizabeth I had been in the schoolroom. Anne’s great grandfather James I of England had believed that it was undesirable to introduce women to the classics. Such views were still so prevalent that even the cultivated diarist and virtuoso, John Evelyn, would pronounce in 1676 that ‘learning does commonly but corrupt most women’, as in their case the study of ancient texts was ‘apt to turn to impertinence and vanity’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was slightly younger than Anne, observed, ‘There is hardly a creature in the world more despicable or more liable to universal ridicule than a learned woman’. Anne herself appears to have been suspicious of women with intellectual pretensions. The Duchess of Marlborough wrote that one reason Anne did not like her aunt Lady Clarendon was that she ‘looked like a madwoman and talked like a scholar, which the Princess thought agreed very well together’.
There was little likelihood that Anne’s father or uncle would try to counter convention by turning her and her sister into paragons of learning. Their own education had been disrupted by the Civil War, and neither James nor Charles was academically minded. The ideas of a former schoolmistress called Bashua Makin, who in 1673 published a pamphlet dedicated to the Lady Mary, would have seemed outlandish to both men. She wanted gentlewomen to be instructed in a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, ancient languages and rhetoric, whereas currently on emerging from the classroom they could only ‘polish their hands and feet … curl their locks … [and] dress and trim their bodies’.
The princesses’ parents both spoke French fluently and in that language, at least, the two girls received excellent instruction from a Frenchman, Peter de Laine. As a result when she was Queen, Anne would have no difficulty communicating with French diplomats in their own tongue.
Anne was taught enough basic arithmetic to be able to inspect her household accounts on marriage. She was careful about checking these and once picked up a discrepancy after noticing in 1698 that ‘the expenses of oil and vinegar were very extravagant’. Even so, the Duchess of Marlborough maintained that Anne was insufficiently vigilant to detect that her Treasurer of the Household, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, had tried to defraud her. Still less was Anne capable of understanding the complex financial arrangements that underpinned government during her reign.
The main emphasis in her education was on acquiring feminine accomplishments. Mrs Henrietta Bannister taught her music, for which Anne’s ‘ear was very exquisite’. Anne also received guitar lessons from Henry Delauney, who was paid £50 a year. Strumming on the guitar was currently a fashionable accomplishment for ladies, and Anne’s father ‘played passably’ on the instrument.
Dancing lessons were another important part of the curriculum. The Duchess of Marlborough would grudgingly concede that in her youth Anne had ‘a person and appearance not at all ungraceful’, and until she became physically incapable of doing the steps, Anne derived intense pleasure from dancing. In 1686, when the dissenter Roger Morrice noted in his journal that Anne had recently performed at a court ball, he added disapprovingly ‘as she does constantly’. Within a few years her burgeoning weight and attacks of lameness made dancing difficult. Nevertheless in 1691 she was reported to have taken to the floor during her birthday celebrations, and even in 1696 she managed to dance at a party for her brother-in-law. That was almost certainly the last time she was able to do so, and long before she became Queen dancing had ceased to be an option.
Anne’s dancing master was a Frenchman called Mr Gory. He instructed her in the latest Continental dances, but she did not despise native traditions, patriotically maintaining that some English country dances were ‘much finer’ than those imported from France. Years later, she would engage Mr Gory, by then old and rich, to teach dancing to her son, William, Duke of Gloucester. Unfortunately the little boy was badly coordinated, and so hated his lessons that he called Mr Gory ‘“Old Dog” for straining his joints a little’.
Anne and Mary were taught drawing by the dwarf artist Richard Gibson, with Mary outshining Anne in this and in needlework. Outdoor activities appealed more to Anne and by her teens she was a keen horse-woman, enjoying riding and hunting. She was also introduced to more frivolous recreations at an early age. Roger Morrice noted that Mary’s tastes had been shaped by what he termed ‘the prejudices of her education, which induced her to spend her time as other courtiers did in cards, dice, dances, plays and masques’. Anne liked all these pastimes as much as her sister. Card games such as basset played for high stakes were very much a feature of court life, and by the time Anne was fifteen she was a regular player at the tables.
Anne’s father would later advise that ‘young persons … should not … read romances, more especially the woman kind; ’tis but loss of time and is apt to put foolish and ridiculous thoughts into their head’. It is not clear whether he managed to stop his daughters reading novels, but they certainly derived literary pleasure from plays. In 1679 fourteen-year-old Anne reported that she was planning to watch a rehearsal of an amateur production of George Etherege’s cynical and immoral comedy The Man of Mode, and it is obvious that she already knew the piece well. She was displeased by the casting of one female role, writing scathingly ‘Mrs Watts is to be Lady Townley, which part I believe won’t much become her’. Some years before that, her imagination had been captured by another drama, Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates, which exerted a fascination on her for a long time. The play was a perennial ‘favourite of the tender hearted ladies’, and was a tale of sibling rivalry, tragic love, and court intrigue. Anne’s favourite character was the hero, Ziphares. This princely youth refuses to forsake his true love Semandra, while remaining loyal to his father, the eastern potentate Mithridates, who has designs on the girl himself. In 1681 Anne appeared in an amateur production of Mithridates put on at Holyrood House when her father was in exile in Scotland. James watched her proudly, fortunately unaware that Mithridates’s fall at the end of the play foreshadowed his own. After remarking ‘How swiftly fate can make or unmake kings’, one character laments in the final scene,
Where now are all the busy officers
The supple courtiers and big men of war,
That bustled here and made a little world?
Revolted all.
For James these lines would prove all too apposite.
The Duchess of Marlborough, who would be the recipient of a vast amount of correspondence from Anne, declared ‘Her letters were very indifferent, both in sense and spelling’.
The accusation of poor spelling was unfair given the standards of the day. Anne spelt better than many aristocratic ladies at the Stuart court and, for that matter, than Sarah’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough.
According to an early historian of Anne’s reign, ‘it was an unhappiness to this Queen that she was not much acquainted with our English history and the reigns and actions of her predecessors’. Despite ‘beginning to apply herself to it’ shortly before her accession, it proved too late to fill up all the gaps in her knowledge. She had nevertheless managed to learn enough about the Tudors to identify parallels between herself and Queen Elizabeth I. Some of the events of the recent Civil War were also familiar to her, although inevitably she viewed these from a royalist standpoint. The executed Charles I was now revered as a martyr who had died defending the Church of England. The anniversary of his death was observed by a ‘day of fast and humiliation’, and on that date Anne and her sister wore black. Church services were held to commemorate his murder, during which the congregation was reminded that ‘upon no pretext whatever, subjects might resist their lawful princes’. There was little recognition that Parliament had had some legitimate grievances, and that this had contributed to the outbreak of civil war.
The sufferings of the Church of England in the decade after the royalist cause collapsed were also much emphasised. Under the Commonwealth, the Book of Common Prayer had been outlawed, episcopacy had been abolished, and hundreds of Anglican clergymen had been deprived of their livings. At the Restoration of the monarchy, the reinstated bishops took revenge on their former oppressors. All those Protestants who could not comply with every tenet of the newly resurgent Church were penalised, and ‘rigid prelates … made it a matter of conscience to give … the least indulgence’ to dissenters.
By the terms of the Conventicle Act, those who worshipped in a manner not authorised by the state were liable to savage fines and imprisonment.
For much of Charles II’s reign, the tribulations of nonconformists far exceeded those imposed on Anglicans during the Interregnum, but Anne was brought up to have little sympathy for this sizeable minority. She accepted that dissenters posed a serious threat to the well-being of the Church of England, and the fact that nonconformity was associated in the mind of the court with political radicalism further predisposed her against them. Her upbringing helped shape her conservative outlook: Sarah Marlborough would claim Anne ‘sucked in with her milk’ a distaste for those who upheld the liberties of the subject, while the Roundheads who had executed her grandfather were viewed as little short of demonic.
There can be no doubt that had Anne been a boy she would have been taught very differently. The rigorous scholastic programme designed for her son William, Duke of Gloucester at the end of the seventeenth century shows what then comprised a princely education. Whether such a training, with its heavy emphasis on classical languages, would have made Anne a better ruler remains conjectural. As it was, she ascended the throne in what the Duchess of Marlborough scoffingly called ‘a state of helpless ignorance’.
Nevertheless, she never seems to have doubted her ability to take on the responsibilities of sovereignty.
Great care was at least taken over Anne’s religious education. When she returned to England from France in 1670, her father was already gravitating towards Catholicism. Fully aware it would cause political meltdown if Anne and Mary did likewise, Charles II saw to it that both his nieces were brought up as Protestants. James resented this, recalling bitterly ‘it was much against his will that his daughters went to church and were bred Protestants’, but it was made clear to him that if he ‘endeavoured to have them instructed in his own religion … they would have immediately been quite taken from him’.
James was particularly irked by the choice of Henry Compton to be his daughters’ spiritual preceptor. Compton came from an aristocratic family and had not been ordained until after the Restoration, when he was already in his thirties. Before that he had seen active service in the royalist army, and he still had such a soldierly manner that James complained he spoke ‘more like a colonel than a bishop’. He was militant in other ways, for he was a known ‘enemy to the Papists’,
and as Compton’s influence at court grew, James had many clashes with him. He could not prevent him becoming a Privy Councillor in January 1676, but a year later the Duke did succeed in blocking the then Bishop of London’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Compton was not just intolerant towards Catholics, for he was also ‘very severe upon the dissenting Protestants’. This hostility helped Anne form the idea that nonconformists were fanatical and untrustworthy. ‘As she was bred up in High Church principles, they were believed to be always predominant in her’, and all her life she was of the view that the Anglican Church needed protection against the dissenters.
Compton, known for his low, gruff voice, was not a particularly inspiring teacher, but his advocacy of unquestioning faith in preference to intellectual rigour was an approach that suited Anne. After marrying and going to live in Holland, her sister Mary came to feel that her spiritual education had been defective, and she set about compensating for this by intensive study. When her father later sought to convert her by sending her Catholic tracts, he was astounded by the learned way she marshalled arguments against him. Had Anne been called upon to do so, it is unlikely that she could have acquitted herself so competently. In 1687 she did commend to her sister some of the religious works currently being published in England, declaring ‘a great many of our side … are very well writ’, but in general she ‘never pursued any study in those points with much application’.
If complex theological debate was beyond Anne, her Anglican faith was firm and undeviating. ‘In all respects a true daughter of the Church of England’, she was a ‘devout worshipper’ who was ‘steadfast and regular in her devotions’. As well as setting aside time for private prayer, she assiduously attended church services and took the sacrament whenever appropriate. At the height of their friendship, almost the only thing that prompted her to criticise Sarah Churchill was Sarah’s infrequent church attendance.
Anne’s religion consoled and sustained her when she endured tragedies and bereavements that might have caused others to lose their trust in God.
When Anne’s faith was called in question, she reaffirmed it in simple and positive terms which not only left no doubt as to the strength of her convictions but also made clear the extent to which she had absorbed the anti-Catholic sentiments of Bishop Compton. She told Mary in 1686:
I abhor the principles of the Church of Rome as much as it is possible for any to do, and I as much value the doctrine of the Church of England. And certainly there is the greatest reason in the world to do so, for the doctrine of the Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous and directly contrary to the scriptures, and their ceremonies – most of them – plain downright idolatry. But God be thanked, we were not bred up in that communion, but are of a Church that is pious and sincere, and conformable in all its principles to the scriptures. Our Church teaches no doctrine but what is just, holy and good, or what is profitable to salvation; and the Church of England is, without all doubt, the only true Church.
A Venetian diplomat recorded that ‘The Duchess of York was not buried when negotiations were begun for a fresh one’. James’s eagerness to acquire a new spouse was partly because he wanted sons and heirs. It took him some time to find a bride, not least because he was adamant that candidates must be ‘young and beautiful’.
At length he decided to propose to an Italian princess, fifteen-year-old Mary Beatrice of Modena, who fulfilled both requirements. Negotiations dragged on because the girl had wanted to be a nun and it required the intervention of the Pope to persuade her that marriage to James represented a higher vocation. In September 1673 Mary Beatrice was wedded to James by proxy at a ceremony in Modena, but when news arrived in England that James had chosen a Catholic princess as his wife it was very ill received. After Parliament met on 20 October, a motion was passed urging that Mary Beatrice should be sent straight home on reaching England. Rather than heed these demands, Charles II prorogued Parliament before her arrival in November.
‘The offspring of this marriage will probably inherit the crown’, the Venetian ambassador noted, but there is no evidence that the likelihood of being superseded in the succession by Mary Beatrice’s sons upset Mary and Anne at this stage. Certainly their father assumed they would welcome their young stepmother, jovially telling eleven-year-old Mary ‘he had provided a playfellow for her’.
Once she had recovered from her homesickness and her initial distaste for her middle-aged husband, Mary Beatrice’s youthful high spirits manifested themselves. There had been fears that someone of her ‘Italian breeding’ would have very pronounced ideas about etiquette, but here too her informality came as a pleasant surprise as she enjoyed games of blind man’s buff and snowball fights. Lady Tuke said she would never have expected her to be ‘such a romp as she proves’.
Initially the signs were that Mary Beatrice had established an excellent relationship with her stepdaughters. In 1675 an observer reported she ‘diverts herself … with the princesses, whose conversation is much to her taste and satisfaction’. Three years later she would say of Mary, ‘I love her as if she was my own daughter’, and she gave every indication of being equally fond of Anne. When the Duchess of York accompanied her husband to Scotland in 1680 she complained not just about having to leave behind her own daughter Isabella, but also at being parted from Anne. The following year Mary Beatrice expressed delight when her stepdaughter was permitted to join her at Edinburgh, declaring herself ‘much pleased to have the Lady Anne with me’.
Anne was assumed to reciprocate these warm feelings, and in the early years it is indeed probable that they were genuinely on good terms. In time, however, Anne would come to detest Mary Beatrice.
The fact that Mary and Anne were being brought up in a Catholic household was a cause of concern to the public. When Parliament met in February 1674 the House of Lords attempted to pass a resolution that called for ‘the removal of the Duke of York’s daughters from his charge because the Duchess is a Catholic’.
Once again the King staved off trouble by proroguing Parliament before the measure was put to the vote.
Considering she was not even allowed to bring up her own children as Catholics, Mary Beatrice’s chances of converting her stepdaughters were surely slim. Having given birth in January 1675 to a baby girl (dismissed as ‘but a daughter’ by the disappointed father) she was appalled when her husband explained that ‘their children were the property of the nation’, and would be removed from their parents’ care unless raised as Protestants. Accordingly the child (who died that October) was christened according to Anglican rites, and her elder sisters stood as godmothers.
Mary and Anne’s energies at this time were absorbed elsewhere with an acting project. In the autumn of 1674 the King had commissioned Thomas Crowne to write a masque to be staged at Whitehall, entitled Calisto, or The Chaste Nymph. Intended to rival the ballets and entertainments put on by Louis XIV in France, it was hoped that the masque would serve as an extravagant showpiece, in which ‘the splendour of the English monarchy will be seen’. The seven speaking roles were all taken by young ladies of the court. Anne’s sister Mary was given the role of the eponymous nymph, Calisto, while Anne played Calisto’s younger sister Nyphe. Even in this supporting role there were quite a lot of lines for a nine-year-old to master, but fortunately Anne had an excellent memory. Like other members of the cast, she was coached by Mrs Betterton, wife of the actor-manager Thomas Betterton. When Anne was a bit older the training she received at this point would be supplemented by lessons from another celebrated actress, Elizabeth Barry, who was credited with much improving her pupil’s diction.
On 22 February 1675 the masque was staged ‘in all its bravery and pomp’ in the presence of the King and Queen, foreign ministers and anyone else who had been able to secure seats. It was a lavish production, in which the elaborately costumed female performers appeared ‘all covered with jewels’. Basking in the audience’s ‘great applause’, the delighted author enthused that the success of the play owed much to the ‘graceful action, incomparable beauty and rich and splendid habits of the princesses’.
Crowne had based his plot on a story from Ovid, relating how the nymph Calisto, servitor of the Goddess Diana, had been raped by Jupiter after the latter gained access to her by impersonating Diana. For decency’s sake, Crowne toned down the story so that Calisto successfully fends off Jupiter’s advances, but the script still contained much sexual innuendo. In particular the scenes in which Jupiter, masquerading as Diana, tries to force himself upon the unwilling nymph have an erotic subtext. Calisto is overcome with shame and confusion at finding herself an object of sexual attention from a woman, and even expresses dread that, like Diana, she might become infected by a ‘strange uncommon’ malady that will prompt her to commit ‘some horrid act’.
It is curious that Anne, whose reputation would later be compromised by allegations of lesbianism, should have appeared as a child in an entertainment which touched obliquely on such matters.
No one who when young had any experience of the Restoration court could be said to have had an entirely sheltered upbringing. Pepys memorably observed that there was ‘nothing almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom’. Marital infidelity was so much the norm that in her early teens Anne’s sister Mary would write nonchalantly to a friend: ‘in two or three years men are always weary of their wives and [go] for mistresses as soon as they can get them’. Perhaps it was the behaviour of her father which planted this idea, although the court was of course also swarming with Charles II’s paramours. Anne was well aware of their existence, and came to dislike the King’s principal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. Mary and Anne were not insulated from the gossip and scandal that periodically engulfed the Duchess of York’s maids of honour, many of whom were themselves barely out of adolescence.
Far from being corrupted by their early environment, Mary and Anne both developed strong moral values and never lost sight of them. In view of their position, they were obviously less vulnerable than other young women at court, and in many ways they were carefully protected. One obvious precaution was to limit their exposure to predatory men, and at Richmond and London their social circle was almost exclusively female. Yet even here the princesses proved emotionally susceptible, developing schoolgirl crushes which, though innocent enough, had an intensity startling to modern sensibilities.
Anne and Mary of course relied upon each other for companionship, and were very close when young. Mary once referred to Anne as ‘a creature … so double dear to me’, insisting that she had always cherished her with ‘a love too great to increase and too natural not to last always’. In a melodramatic moment she wrote of her protective feelings for ‘the only sister I have in the world, the sister I love like my own life’. Mary was apt to think that Anne was too easily swayed by others, although, somewhat paradoxically, she also complained of her stubbornness, a character trait that manifested itself at an early age. As an adult Mary liked recalling an occasion when they had been walking in the park and began arguing about whether a distant object was a man or a tree. Mary insisted it was a man, and as they drew closer it became apparent that she had been right. Mary demanded, ‘“Now sister, are you satisfied that it is a man?” But Lady Anne, after she saw what it was, turned away, and persisting still in her own side of the question, cried out, “No sister, it is a tree”’.
The sisters’ social circle included Lady Frances Villiers’s six daughters, and their stepmother’s maids of honour. Among them was the future Duchess of Marlborough, Sarah Jennings, who in 1673, aged thirteen, had become a maid of honour to Mary Beatrice. Sarah was five years older than Anne, but she later claimed that this did not discourage them from playing together, and that Anne ‘even then expressed a particular fondness for me’.
In both Anne and Mary’s case, however, the friendship that meant most to them in their early teens was with Frances Apsley, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, the Treasurer of the Duke of York’s household. The two of them wrote some remarkable letters to her, most of them undated, although the correspondence appears to have started around 1675, when Mary was thirteen and Frances Apsley was twenty-two. Mary’s letters are astonishingly ardent. She addressed Frances as ‘my dearest dear husband’ while styling herself ‘your faithful wife, true to your bed’. A typical effusion reads, ‘My much loved husband … How I dote on you, oh, I am in raptures of a sweet amaze, when I think of you I am in an ecstasy’. A little later Mary declares ‘I love you with a flame more lasting than the vestals’ fire … I love you with a love that ne’er was known by man; I have for you excess of friendship, more of love than any woman can for women’.
It is somewhat surprising that a woman of Frances’s age was happy to be the recipient of these fevered schoolgirl outpourings, but she gave the impression that she fully reciprocated Mary’s affection. She claimed to be as ‘lovesick’ as her teenage devotee, and that she had been moved to tears when she suspected Mary of wavering in her adoration. A year or so later, however, Mary and Frances’s relationship was disrupted when Anne – now aged about twelve – came between them ‘with her alluring charms’. After Frances wrote to Anne and gave her a ring, Mary accused Frances of having ‘forsaken me quite’. She lamented that Anne now possessed Frances’s ‘heart … and your letters too, oh thrice happy she! She is happier than ever I was, for she has triumphed over a rival that once was happy in your love’. Mary described sitting consumed with misery as Frances and Anne ‘whispered and then laughed as if you had said, now we are rid of her, let us be happy, whilst poor unhappy I sat reading of a play, my heart ready to break … It made me ready to cry but before my happy rival I would not show my weak[ness]’.
Ultimately the situation resolved itself. Even before going to Holland in 1677, Mary had ceased to be tormented with jealousy over Frances and Anne. After her marriage she continued to write to Frances, but in much more measured terms. She insisted she now had no objection to Anne’s having ‘some part’ of Frances’s love, confident that she herself still had ‘the greatest share of your heart’.
The letters that Anne sent to Frances Apsley are less overwrought than her sister’s, but they still have curious aspects. For the purposes of the correspondence they took on the identities of the tragic lovers at the centre of Nathaniel Lee’s melodrama, Mithridates. Anne adopted a male persona, taking as her alter ego Lee’s hero, Prince Ziphares, while Frances became ‘dear adored Semandra’. Anne clearly saw nothing wrong with this, for she was open about the conceit, and in a letter to Frances’s mother Lady Apsley (of whom she was also very fond) she referred without embarrassment to ‘my fair Semandra’. When Anne was sent abroad to Brussels in 1679, she wrote affectionately to Frances, and back in England the following summer she sought permission from Lady Apsley for Frances to stay overnight as her guest at Windsor. During her stay in Scotland in 1681 Anne resumed her correspondence with her Semandra, but there are signs that by this time her affection was slightly cooling. She still signed herself ‘your Ziphares’, and protested ‘I do love you dearly, and not with that kind of love that I love all others who proffer themselves to be my friends’. However it appears that Frances, conscious that she was losing ground with Anne, had requested this reassurance, and Anne’s letter is also full of excuses for not writing more often.
It would be wrong to focus too much attention on the adolescent fantasies of teenage girls. Of the two sisters, Mary appears to have been the more strongly emotionally involved with Frances Apsley. Yet after she went to Holland in 1677, Mary never formed a comparable relationship with a member of her own sex.
In Anne’s case, her youthful affection for Frances Apsley foreshadowed deeper attachments to women in her mature years.
In the autumn of 1677 the princesses’ girlish existence, hitherto dominated by petty dramas and private obsessions, was altered forever. Fifteen-year-old Mary had been of marriageable age for three years, and the King now decided it was time to provide her with a husband. He was concerned that the monarchy was losing popularity because his heir apparent was a Catholic and he himself was justly suspected of having Catholic sympathies. In hopes of proclaiming his Protestant credentials, he began to think of matching his niece to his Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, son of the late Princess Royal. Such a union would delight Parliament because it would distance Charles II from the French, who were still at war with Holland. At the outset of the war, Charles had allied himself with Louis XIV, but in 1674 had signed peace terms with Holland. The conflict between France and Holland had continued, with the Dutch putting up a heroic resistance under the leadership of their hereditary stadholder and commander-in-chief, Prince William of Orange. By bestowing Mary on his nephew, Charles would indicate that he no longer wanted the French to win the struggle.
The match had obvious advantages for William. For the moment, Mary remained second in line to the English throne. Admittedly, there was a possibility that she could be displaced, for the Duchess of York, who had produced a daughter named Isabella in July 1676, was currently expecting another child. As things stood, however, Mary had a good chance of inheriting the crown. If she died childless, in theory it then passed to Anne, and it was only if she too died without heirs that it descended to William, whose claim came through his late mother. William nevertheless calculated that marrying Mary would bring him ‘a great step to one degree nearer the crown, and to all appearance the next [in line]’.
William visited England in October 1677, and having insisted on having a brief preliminary meeting with Mary, he asked the King for her hand. Charles agreed, and the Duke of York, who had formerly cherished unrealistic hopes that Mary could be betrothed to the French Dauphin, was prevailed upon to give his consent. After dining at Whitehall on 21 October, James returned to St James’s and took Mary into his closet to tell her that her wedding had been arranged, and that she would be going to live with Prince William in Holland. Shattered to learn that she was to be married to a stranger and wrenched from her homeland, Mary ‘wept all that afternoon and the following day’.
There was public rapture at the news that ‘the eldest daughter of the crown should sleep in Protestant arms’. However, when the marriage took place at St James’s on 4 November, the atmosphere in the palace could hardly have been less festive. Mary was still in a state of great distress, and the heavily pregnant Mary Beatrice was also ‘much grieved’ at the prospect of being separated from a stepdaughter she held ‘in much affection’. As for Anne, she was already sickening with what turned out to be smallpox. The atmosphere was not lightened by Charles’s excruciating jokes, and his urging Bishop Compton, who was performing the marriage, to ‘make haste lest his sister[-in-law] should be delivered of a son, and the marriage be disappointed’.
Things did not improve over the next few days. When Mary appeared with William at her side, she gave the impression of being ‘a very coy bride’, and the Prince was soon being criticised for ‘sullenness and clownishness’ and for taking ‘no notice of his princess at the play and ball’. According to the French ambassador, his mood darkened further when the Duchess of York gave birth to a boy on 7 November.
Three days after this Anne, who had been ill since 5 November, was confirmed as suffering from smallpox.
Smallpox was a dreaded scourge and a virulent epidemic was sweeping through the court. A few days after Anne was diagnosed, Lady Frances caught the disease, which in her case proved fatal. Anne’s life was also feared for, and many at court believed that her soul too was imperilled. To avoid spreading infection her chaplain Dr Edward Lake had been ordered not to read prayers in her bedchamber, but he worried this would leave her vulnerable to the blandishments of her nurse, ‘a very busy, zealous Roman Catholic’. He alerted Bishop Compton to the danger, and the latter promptly ordered him ‘to wait constantly on her highness and do all the offices ministerial which were incumbent’. Quarantine precautions meant that after being with Anne, Lake could have no further contact with Mary. On going to take his leave of her, he found her ‘very disconsolate, not only for her sister’s illness’, but because she was worried that Anne was in need of her guidance. Lake did his best to reassure her, but Mary remained so haunted by the possibility that Anne would be converted that on her own deathbed, seventeen years later, she was tormented by visions of a Papist nurse lurking in the shadows.
Initially it had seemed that Anne’s attack of smallpox would be relatively mild. On 12 November, however, the disease grew much worse. She became covered with spots, and Lake found ‘her highness somewhat giddy and very much disordered’. Alarmed for her own safety, she begged Lake not to leave her. She remained ‘very ill’ for some days.
As more and more people at court were stricken with smallpox, William grew desperate to take his wife home to Holland. Utterly distraught at her impending departure, Mary was also still bothered by fears for her sister’s physical and spiritual well-being. She was unable to say goodbye herself, but charged the Duchess of Monmouth to take care of Anne and to accompany her often to chapel, and she left behind her two letters to be given to Anne when she was better. Mary bade farewell to the rest of her family at Gravesend. An onlooker reported ‘there was a very sad parting between the Princess and her father, but especially the Duchess and her, who wept both with that excess of sorrow’ that everyone present was moved.
However, within a fortnight of arriving in the Netherlands Mary had recovered from her homesickness and fallen deeply in love with her dour and uncommunicative husband.
During Anne’s illness, her father showed a touching solicitude for her. He ‘visited her every day … and commanded that her sister’s departure should be concealed from her; wherefore there was a feigned message sent every morning from the Princess to her Highness to know how she did’. Only on 4 December was she told that Mary had long since left the country, ‘which she appeared to bear very patiently’. In due course Anne made a full recovery, although there were fears her complexion would be permanently pitted. On 3 December she was allowed to visit her stepmother, who was still resting in her bedchamber after her confinement. Nine days later her little brother, who had been ‘sprightly and like to live’ at birth, died. It is often stated that Anne had unwittingly infected him with smallpox when she saw him for the first time, but this is questionable. It is not even certain that the child would have been present when she went to see Mary Beatrice; all the contemporary reports of his death blame negligence on the part of his nurses. Whatever the cause of his demise, the loss of the little male heir left the Duke and Duchess of York emotionally shattered. ‘The Duke was never known to grieve so much at the death of any of his other children’, while his wife was ‘inconsolable’.
With the death of Lady Frances, Anne needed a new governess. Lady Henrietta Hyde, wife of Anne’s uncle Laurence Hyde, was chosen. Known as a ‘great adversary of the Catholics’, she was well qualified to protect Anne against Popish influences but her appointment was not popular with other members of the household. On learning who was to replace Lady Frances, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake commented glumly, ‘Seldom comes a better’. In one respect, however, Anne’s life now improved, for she took over the lodgings at St James’s Palace which Mary had vacated.
On Easter Sunday 1678, Anne took communion for the first time. Much to the annoyance of her father, she had been confirmed some time before with her sister. Knowing that the Duke of York still felt aggrieved about this, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake was mortified when she drained the contents of the chalice on receiving the sacrament. In great embarrassment he recorded in his diary, ‘Her Highness was not (through negligence) instructed how much of the wine to drink, but drank of it twice or thrice, whereat I was much concerned, lest the Duke should have notice of it’.
In the autumn of 1678 Anne had a chance to see her sister again. Having already lost a baby in April 1678, Mary was believed to be pregnant once more, but was ill and feeling low. In hopes that a sisterly visit would cheer her up, James gave permission for his wife and younger daughter to travel to Holland while he and the King were at Newmarket. The Duchess of York reported delightedly that she understood that Mary was ‘very anxious to see me and her sister; we have as great a wish to see her’.
On 1 October they set out accompanied by a ‘little company’ of high ranking ladies and courtiers, including the Duchesses of Monmouth, Richmond, and Buckingham, and Anne’s new governess Lady Henrietta Hyde. When informing William that they were on their way, the Duke of York had stressed that they did not want a tremendous fuss to be made of them, as the ‘incognito ladies … desire to be very incognito’. Despite this Prince William of Orange, who was not by nature the most open-handed of men, made a great effort to be hospitable. A member of the his staff was surprised when William spent ‘a pretty penny’ making Noordeinde Palace comfortable for his guests. By 17 October the party was back in England, and in his letter thanking William for his ‘kind usage’ of his womenfolk James reported that the Duchess was ‘so satisfied with her journey and with you as I never saw anybody’. For Anne too, the outing had been a success. She was much impressed by the immaculate cleanliness of the streets in Dutch towns, and observers commented on the affectionate reception she received from her sister. The visit also afforded her the first real opportunity of becoming acquainted with her brother-in-law. In later years there was a strong mutual antipathy between them, and William is supposed to have ‘often said, if he had married her, he should have been the miserablest man upon earth’. However, since he was noted to be in the gayest possible humour throughout her stay in Holland, one can perhaps conclude that he did not take against her instantly.
Anne and Mary Beatrice returned from this pleasant excursion to find England in the grip of wild panic. A charlatan named Titus Oates had alleged that he had uncovered a Jesuit plot to kill the King and overturn the government. When the magistrate who had recorded Oates’s depositions was found murdered on 17 October, this prompted an outbreak of anti-Catholic hysteria. On 1 November the Earl of Shaftesbury declared in Parliament that a ‘damnable plot’ had been uncovered, and in the ensuing frenzy Catholic peers were disabled from sitting in the House of Lords. The Duke of York was at least exempted from the bill’s provisions, but he was aware that he was ‘far from being secure by having gained that point’.
In December Catholic priests supposedly guilty of conspiracy were tried and executed, as was James’s former secretary, Edward Coleman, who was discovered to have been in treasonable correspondence with Louis XIV’s confessor.
Fear of Popery now reached such a peak that a sizeable section of the political nation was no longer prepared to tolerate the prospect of a Catholic king. In January 1679 Charles II dissolved Parliament, but a new one was summoned for the spring, and it was clear that when it met, the King would face calls to disinherit his brother. The country became so polarised that political parties emerged, with allegiances divided between those who favoured excluding James from the throne, and those who wished to preserve intact the hereditary succession. The two groupings soon acquired names, originally intended as insults. Those hostile to the Duke of York were known as ‘Whigs’, short for ‘Whiggamore’, a term formerly applied to extremist Presbyterian rebels in Scotland. Their more traditionalist opponents were dubbed ‘Tories’, after the lawless Catholic bandits who rampaged in Ireland. The labels would outlast the Exclusion Crisis, and bitter divisions along these lines would become so entrenched a feature of political life that when Anne came to the throne the two parties became her declared ‘bugbears’.
Because the situation in England was so fraught, the King decided that his brother must be sent out of the country prior to the meeting of the new Parliament in March 1679. Permission was initially granted for James to take Anne abroad with him, but this was rescinded after concerns were expressed that her religion would be endangered if she accompanied her father. On 3 March 1679 James and Mary Beatrice bid an emotional farewell to friends and family, upsetting Anne so much that she ‘cried as much as the rest to part company’. After briefly visiting his daughter and son-in-law at The Hague, James settled in Brussels, capital of the Spanish Netherlands. He ignored the advice of those who cautioned him that it would look bad if he based himself in a Popish country, curtly pointing out that ‘I cannot be more a Catholic than I am’.
When the English Parliament assembled, James’s absence did not appear to have made them more tractable. The King indicated that he was willing ‘to pare the nails’ of a Popish successor by giving Parliament the right to approve appointments to the Privy Council and to name judges if the monarch was a Catholic. However he insisted he would never allow them ‘to impeach the right of succession’ or interfere with ‘the descent of the crown in the true line’.
These concessions were rejected and an Exclusion Bill was introduced which passed its second reading in the Commons on 21 May. Six days later the King once again dissolved Parliament.
Charles believed that as yet it would be unwise to permit his brother to return to England, but in August he agreed to James’s request that his daughters Anne and Isabella could visit, ‘to help me bear my banishment with somewhat more patience’. Every precaution was taken to ensure that the two girls were not seduced into Popery while abroad. They were forbidden to visit Catholic churches and monasteries, and two Anglican chaplains who travelled with them read daily prayers in a chapel set aside for their use. Even the most limited contact with the outward manifestations of Catholicism filled Anne with distaste, and she professed herself shocked by glimpsing ‘images … in every shop and corner of the street. The more I see of those fooleries, and the more I hear of that religion, the more I dislike it’.
Anne and Isabella set out for Brussels on 20 August, but their father was not there to greet them. Two days after their departure Charles II had fallen seriously ill, and James had rushed back to England to be at his brother’s bedside. Anne and her younger sister remained in Brussels with the Duchess, and the letters Anne sent to Frances Apsley and her mother show that she was worried about her father’s difficulties. When Lady Apsley suggested that all the family would soon be permitted to return, she wrote ‘I wish it were so indeed’ but dismissed it as unlikely because now that the King was better, James was being sent back to Brussels. However, she refused to be discouraged, ‘for I have a good heart, thank God, or else it would have been down long ago’. She admitted too, that she was quite enjoying some aspects of life abroad. She was pleased with her accommodation in the Hotel des Hornes, which was ‘better than I expected, and so is all this place’. Brussels was ‘a great and fine town’ and ‘all the people here are very civil, and except you be otherways to them, they will be so to you … Though the streets are not so clean as they are in Holland, yet they are not so dirty as ours … They only have odd kinds of smells’. She had also been impressed when taken to ‘see a ball at the court incognito, which I liked very well’. The fireworks, dancing, and celebrations in honour of the King of Spain’s marriage to her cousin Marie Louise d’Orléans – with whom Anne had shared a nursery in France – ‘far surpassed my expectations’, and the ‘lemonade, cinnamon water and chocolate sweetmeats, all very good’, also met with her approval.
James was back in Brussels by the end of September. Since Anne and Isabella were scheduled to return to England after paying a brief visit to William and Mary, he decided to accompany them to The Hague, for ‘I would be glad to be with them as long as I could’. While he and the Duchess were there, a message arrived from Charles agreeing that James could now base himself in Scotland. On 8 October 1679 the Duke and Duchess of York left Holland with Anne and Isabella, fortunately unaware that they would never see William and Mary again. Having dropped off their two daughters in London, they travelled overland to Scotland, arriving in Edinburgh on 24 November. Three months later, they were permitted to return to England, but when Parliament met again in the autumn of 1680, the King decided that James must leave the country once more. On 20 October the Duke and Duchess were forced to set out for Scotland, this time by sea.
Parliament opened on 21 October and at once the Commons drafted a new Exclusion Bill, providing for James to be barred from the throne and perpetually banished. The implications were serious for Mary and Anne: as James put it, if the measure became law it ‘would not only affect himself, but his children too’ since those who had voted for it ‘would never think themselves secure under the government of those whose father they have excluded’. Some of the Whigs, possibly including their leader the Earl of Shaftesbury, would have liked Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to become king after his father. Whereas the first Exclusion Bill had expressly stated that on Charles’s death the crown should devolve upon the ‘next lawful heir’ who was Protestant – meaning Mary – the bill now introduced left the matter vague. After being modified in committee it once again specified that after James had been bypassed, the line of succession would carry on unaltered, but from Mary and Anne’s point of view the earlier ambiguity on this point was an ominous development.
As it was, the bill did not become law, for after passing the House of Commons without a division, it was thrown out by the Lords. In January the King dissolved Parliament and announced that a new one would meet in Oxford in the spring.
While the Duke of York was in Scotland, a suitor appeared on the scene for the Lady Anne. This was Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, who like Anne was a great grandchild of King James I. He was the son of the Duke of Hanover and his wife Sophia, the youngest daughter of Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia. By the spring of 1680 he was already being ‘much talked of for a husband for Lady Anne’, and in many ways he seemed an ideal choice, as he was ‘a Protestant, very young, gallant and handsome and indifferent rich’. One English diplomat described it as the ‘more fit match for her of any prince I know in Christendom’.
Sophia’s brother, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, lived in England, and in January 1680 he had set things in motion by writing to tell his sister that he had been approached about a marriage between George and Anne. ‘All the realm would like it, so think about it’, he urged her. Sophia and her husband were slightly sceptical that the ‘fine things’ her brother promised of the marriage would actually materialise, but they were ready to give it serious consideration. Later that year Prince George went on a European tour, and arrived in England on 6 December. The King was very welcoming, providing him with apartments at Whitehall. The next day Prince George was introduced to Anne, and ‘saluted her by kissing her with the consent of the King’. Since the Prince did not leave the country until 11 March 1681, he almost certainly saw Anne on other occasions, but with James absent and the monarchy in crisis there could be no question of concluding anything. Even after George Ludwig’s departure, however, the idea of a union was by no means abandoned, and an Italian diplomat stationed in England believed that Anne had fallen in love with the Prince.
On 21 March 1681 Parliament met at Oxford. To avoid a complete rupture, the King offered a series of ‘expedients’ designed to safeguard the kingdom if his brother inherited the crown. James would become King in name, but would be declared unfit to rule. A regency would be set up to govern the country, with William and Mary installed as joint protectors of the realm. Despite bearing the title of King, James would be banished from his own dominions during his lifetime. Even these far-reaching proposals failed to satisfy the Commons. Instead they introduced another Bill of Exclusion, and disquietingly it once again failed to name a successor.
Charles was not prepared to accept this, and without warning dissolved Parliament a week after it had opened. The failure to reach a settlement, thought by some to presage disaster, marked the start of a royal recovery.
Bolstered by skilful financial management and payments from Louis XIV, with whom he had negotiated a secret agreement, Charles was able to survive without summoning another Parliament. By late May a royal adviser reported that ‘his majesty’s position has improved considerably since the dissolution’,
but the King did not yet feel sufficiently confident to bring his brother back to England. Instead he agreed that Anne could join her father. In March, her little sister Isabella had died, leaving both her parents desolate. Being reunited with Anne would, it was hoped, afford some consolation.
Anne went by sea, arriving at Edinburgh on 17 July, accompanied by a sizeable suite. At Holyrood Palace her father and stepmother kept ‘almost as great a court as at Whitehall’, shocking some Scots by giving balls and masquerades at which, allegedly, ‘promiscuous dancing’ took place. Riding, playing cards, and being ‘often with the Duchess’ left Anne with little time to write letters to friends such as Frances Apsley. Theatrical entertainments also kept her busy. After seeing his daughter and four of the maids of honour who had accompanied her give a performance of Mithridates to celebrate Mary Beatrice’s birthday in November, James reported proudly that all ‘did their parts very well, and they were very well dressed, so that they made a very fine show, and such a one as had not been seen in this country before’.
Despite the ‘gaiety and brilliancy of the court of Holyrood House’, they still felt homesick. In a letter to Frances Apsley, Anne said she hoped she would be reunited with her before too long, ‘though God and the King only knows when’. In the meantime, she asked Frances to ‘write me all the news you know, send me the Gazette and other printed papers that are good’.
In March 1682 James was allowed back to England for what was meant to be a short visit, but once there he was able to persuade the King that he should bring his wife and daughter home. James set sail on 3 May and only narrowly avoided drowning after his ship was wrecked with great loss of life, but he survived and was able to collect Anne and Mary Beatrice. They all sailed back to England in the aptly named Happy Return, reaching London on 27 May. James declared cheerfully that from now on ‘We will fix ourselves in this country, as we have travelled quite enough during the last three years’.
The outlook for the monarchy became so much better that within a few months James triumphantly informed Prince William of Orange ‘That seditious and turbulent party now lose ground every day’.
Charles had struck at his opponents in various ways, such as cancelling town charters, purging the judiciary and magistracy, and interfering with the urban electoral franchise. A combination of subsidies from France and increased customs revenue meant that the King could avoid summoning Parliaments, denying his enemies an arena in which to voice opposition. Having successfully resolved the political crisis, Charles now felt able to turn his attention to arranging a marriage for his niece Anne.
In August 1682 Prince Rupert renewed his match-making efforts on behalf of Anne and Prince George Ludwig of Hanover. He wrote his sister Sophia another letter on the subject of the ‘marriage in question’, telling her that ‘as for the young lady, I assure you she is intelligent and very well brought up’. By the end of the month Rupert reported that he had secured what he considered to be excellent terms, with the Duke of York offering to give Anne a dowry of £40,000 and an income of £10,000 a year. However, George Ludwig’s parents were simultaneously engaged in negotiations to marry their son to his first cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle. The girl’s mother was not of royal birth, but Sophia of Hanover was mindful that ‘Miss Hyde’s lineage was no better’, and the Celle match was politically and financially advantageous.
The news of Prince George’s betrothal to Sophia Dorothea arrived in England early in September 1682, whereupon King Charles took ‘some exception’ at being ‘disappointed in our expectation of having the Prince of Hanover for the Lady Anne’. A British diplomat stationed in Hanover considered this unreasonable, as the negotiations for Anne’s hand had remained on an informal footing. He pointed out that ‘there never was any proposals made of either side’, but this envoy had other motives: he was about to be posted to another country, and he did not want to be forbidden from receiving the generous presents customarily given to departing envoys.
It would be alleged that Anne herself never forgot the ‘supposed slight’ of being spurned by Prince George Ludwig of Hanover. One account suggested that she had been offended because he had come to England with a view to marrying her and then ‘not liking her person he left the kingdom’. In fact, it was duty not desire that had led the Prince away from Anne: his mother noted he would ‘marry a cripple if he could serve the house’, while he felt a private ‘repugnance’ at the prospect of marrying Sophia Dorothea.
Conceivably, however, Anne did gain some inkling that George Ludwig’s parents did not consider her birth to be sufficiently illustrious, and this would hardly have made her better disposed to the House of Hanover.
It is possible too that the collapse of the marriage plan did cause her some pain. A letter from George to Prince Rupert’s mistress Peg Hughes suggests that she had been teasing him about Anne, telling him that he would do well to marry a girl who was so keen on him. After becoming engaged he wrote to Peg thanking her for the advice but saying that it was no longer possible for him to follow it. He continued stolidly,
I have never really been aware of the intentions of Madam the Princess Anne, and I do not know them now … It’s true that I recall you talked to me of her on several occasions, but as I took that as a joke I paid no attention. However you may be sure, Madam, that no one could be more the servitor of Madam the Princess than I, and the marriage I am about to make will not hinder that.
In the long term, Anne had no cause to regret the failure of the Hanover match. Her own later marriage to Prince George of Denmark was a source of great happiness, and was certainly more successful than George of Hanover’s union, which ended after his wife’s lover was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Having divorced Sophia Dorothea, George imprisoned her for life; as Queen, Anne would be dragged into the affair when Sophia Dorothea’s mother vainly appealed to her to secure her daughter’s freedom.
In autumn 1682, with her future still uncertain, Anne became involved in an embarrassing scandal. At the end of October the Earl of Mulgrave was expelled from court and deprived of his official posts and army regiment for ‘writing to the Lady Anne’. Mulgrave was a thirty-four-year-old rake whose arrogance had earned him the nickname ‘Haughty’. He prided himself on being ‘the terror of husbands’, and two years before this he had been sent to Tangier in a leaky boat for behaving too amorously towards the King’s mistresses. How far matters had gone between him and Anne was a matter for speculation. There was fanciful talk of a secret marriage, but Mulgrave himself insisted that his crime was ‘only ogling’. Others were sure he ‘had often presented her with songs and letters under hand’, and that the King had confiscated one compromising document. It was whispered too that Mulgrave had made ‘brisk attempts’ on Anne’s virtue and some thought he had gone ‘so far as to spoil her marrying to anybody else’.
The French ambassador reported that Mulgrave’s disgrace was ‘as complete as it ever can be in this country’. It turned out not to be permanent, for having been awarded another regiment in 1684 he was made Lord Chamberlain a few months after James II’s accession. At the time, however, the episode not only exposed Anne to humiliation but was potentially very damaging. ‘Extraordinary rumours are current about this affair’ Louis XIV was told by his ambassador, and unflattering verses mocking Anne and Mulgrave were soon in circulation. One anonymous rhyme sneered that
‘Naughty Nan
Is mad to marry Haughty’.
For young women and girls the Restoration court was ‘a perilous climate … to breathe in’. In some ways it was a place of astonishingly lax morals. The sexual habits of the King and the Duke of York were widely emulated by rakes and libertines who looked ‘on the maids of honour as playthings’. One young lady in the Duchess of York’s household complained of ‘the impunity with which they attack our innocence’, but the same latitude was not extended to women. Even minor transgressions could result in disgrace and ruin, and their virtue was compromised by the merest hint of scandal. The Marquis of Halifax warned his daughter ‘It will not be enough for you to keep yourself free from any criminal engagements; for if you do that which either raises hopes or createth discourse, there is a spot thrown upon your good name … Your reputation … may be deeply wounded, though your conscience is unconcerned’.
Judged by these criteria, Anne had opened herself to censure.
Halifax cautioned his daughter that other women would be the first to criticise if she found herself in trouble, and certainly Anne’s sister Mary made a meal of her tribulations. When Frances Apsley (by this time a married woman herself) wrote to Holland to inform her of the scandal, Mary professed herself aghast. ‘For my part I never knew what it was to be so vexed and troubled’ she declared, adding, ‘Not but that I believe my sister very innocent; however, I am so nice upon the point of reputation that it makes me mad she should be exposed to such reports, and now what will not this insolent man say, being provoked?’
Another ramification of the affair was that Mrs Mary Cornwallis, of the Duchess of York’s Bedchamber – who was said to be ‘in great favour with the Princess Anne’ – was dismissed from her post and ‘ordered never to come into her presence more’. The French ambassador assumed that Mrs Cornwallis had acted as Anne’s confidante, and that ‘there had been a secret correspondence between her and Milord Mulgrave’. However, there might have been other reasons behind her dismissal. Mrs Cornwallis was a Catholic, and Bishop Compton reportedly voiced fears at the Council table ‘of the dangerous consequence such a woman’s being about the princess might have’. Much later the Duchess of Marlborough insinuated that there had been additional grounds for concern. She described Mrs Cornwallis as Anne’s ‘first favourite’ and noted that ‘the fondness of the young lady to her was very great and passionate’. The Duchess recounted that over the past three or four years ‘Lady Anne had written … above a thousand letters full of the most violent professions of everlasting kindness’, to this favoured companion, adding that King Charles ‘used to say “No man ever loved his mistress, as his niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis”’. Having thus implied that there had been something perverted about Anne’s affection for Mrs Cornwallis, the Duchess went on to suggest that the episode provided evidence of Anne’s inherent disloyalty. She observed that despite her ostensible ‘tenderness and passion’ for her female friend, Anne’s only gesture of solidarity was ‘sending a footman once or twice to desire [Mrs Cornwallis] to stand at her window’ so Anne could glimpse her as she went to walk in Hyde Park. Within a fortnight she ‘seemed as perfectly to have forgot this woman as if she had never heard of her’.
Anne wrote to Mary in Holland of her distress at being forced to part with her friend, but she received scant sympathy. Mary confided to Frances Apsley, ‘Had I known of the friendship at first I should have done all I could in the world to have broke it off, but I never knew anything … till such time as she was forbid when I heard it from my sister herself, and was very much surprised and troubled to find her concern as great’. She asked Frances to inform her if Anne formed another unsuitable connection ‘that I may endeavour to stop it … for I think nothing more prejudicial to a young woman than ill company’. It appeared that Mary now believed it was incumbent on her to monitor Anne’s friendships, an idea that would later lead to serious trouble.
The Mulgrave affair had underlined the desirability of finding a husband for Anne, now aged eighteen. The problem was that not many suitable Protestant princes were available. The King knew it would be almost suicidally provocative to follow up one adviser’s suggestion that Anne be married to Louis XIV’s cousin, the Catholic Prince de la Roche sur Yon, but Charles did want to match her with someone agreeable to Louis. In recent years there had been a diplomatic realignment as the King and the Duke of York had grown disenchanted with Prince William of Orange, whom they suspected of favouring exclusion. Instead Charles had accepted financial aid from the French King that enabled him to live without Parliament and acquiesced in his aggressive foreign policy.
Prince George of Denmark, younger brother of King Christian V of Denmark, was a suitor likely to meet with Louis XIV’s approval, because Denmark was an ally of France, and on poor terms with Holland. A distant cousin of Anne – who, like him, was a great grandchild of King Frederick II of Denmark – this George was nearly twelve years older than her. He had been ‘educated in a Prince-like manner’ and when only sixteen had impressed one diplomat with his ‘well grounded acquaintance with several sciences’. Unfortunately a harsh tutor had permanently dented his confidence. After struggling, when very young, to sustain a conversation with Sophia of Hanover, he explained he had been ‘brought up in so much fear that he could not rid himself of’ his shyness. She nevertheless concluded that he had ‘a very good nature and will not lack judgement’, and thought he would make a fine husband.
In 1668, aged fifteen, Prince George of Denmark had embarked on a European tour, visiting Holland, France, England, and Italy. When in England he was received at court by Charles II and the Queen, although he would not have seen Anne as she was in France at the time. He returned to Copenhagen in 1670, and a few years later ‘gained much reputation’ when he fought in the war between Denmark and Sweden. Having commanded part of the Danish army at Landskrona in 1676, the following year ‘he greatly hazarded his royal person and signalised his valour’ by saving his brother’s life at the Battle of Lunden. When peace returned to Europe he went travelling again, but his future remained unclear. In 1674 he had been talked of as a possible King of Poland, but the Poles had rejected him because he was a Lutheran, and alternative career opportunities were far from numerous. The Elector Palatine commented after meeting George that he did not envy ‘the fate of a brother of a King with children’, although he thought that George probably did not realise how bleak the outlook was.
It could be assumed that George would regard marriage to the English King’s niece as an enticing prospect. The French ambassador to England, Barrillon, played Cupid by putting George’s name forward as a husband for Anne in February 1683. The King received the idea warmly, and James too was enthusiastic, as this would undermine the Prince of Orange’s position in England. In March Barrillon reported that the English were ‘waiting impatiently’ for the Danes to make overtures on George’s behalf, and within a few weeks Charles II’s Secretary of State, the Earl of Sunderland, was discussing terms with the Danish envoy, the Sieur de Lente. By the end of April matters were far enough advanced for the Danes to be told that George’s lack of wealth was not a problem, as Anne would be provided with money for his upkeep. The only hitch came when the Sieur de Lente sounded out Barrillon as to whether the King could be prevailed upon to alter the succession in George’s favour by disqualifying William of Orange from inheriting the crown. Barrillon replied that at the present juncture the King was doing everything possible to preserve intact the hereditary succession, so it would be most inopportune to try and modify it in this way.
On 3 May the Danes made a formal proposal, which was ‘very well received’. Later that day it was publicly announced that the King ‘had admitted of a proposal of marriage between Prince George and his niece, for which purpose he was coming over’. Until this point even the majority of the Council had been kept in ignorance of the negotiations, for fear they would oppose the match. A portrait of Anne was sent to Denmark for George to inspect prior to setting out, and possibly Anne was shown a painting of George too. Even if she had not liked what she saw, there was little she could have done, for when it came to marriage a princess could not realistically expect to have any account taken of her preferences. In one respect, however, Anne was fortunate. It was agreed that George would ‘live and keep his court in England’, freeing Anne from the necessity of starting life anew in a foreign country.
It was settled that Anne and George would receive an annual income of £20,000, comprising £10,000 a year from the King and the remainder from her father. This was to be supplemented by George’s own revenues, which derived from lands confiscated from the Duke of Holstein and conferred on him at the end of the last war between Denmark and Sweden. The income was estimated at £15,000, but rarely yielded so much in practice. As a wedding present the King also conferred on his niece the grant of the Cockpit lodgings at Whitehall, ensuring that she and her new husband were comfortably accommodated.
The news of Anne’s forthcoming marriage was not universally well received. Some people expressed concern that George was a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist, but, according to Gilbert Burnet, the main reason the marriage ‘did not at all please the nation’ was that ‘we knew that the proposition came from France’. The French, meanwhile, congratulated themselves on having arranged a match designed ‘to imbue the Prince of Orange with bitter distress and to put a curb on the Dutch’.
As expected, Prince William of Orange was duly ‘filled with consternation’ when his father-in-law informed him that the Danish proposal had been accepted. Quite apart from the unfavourable political implications, he knew Prince George and considered him a dolt, and had no desire to have him as a brother-in-law. William at once requested permission to come to England, but since it was clear that his object was to avert the marriage, he was told that a visit would not be convenient at this point. William had to settle for writing to his uncle Charles, warning of the perils of letting French power go unchecked, but the King felt free to ignore this. Charles was equally unimpressed when he was informed that William had been enraged to learn that as the son of a king, Prince George would take precedence over him at the English court. William was told there could be no question of modifying the rules in his favour, whereupon his emissary declared that he would never come to England while George was there.
Some people concluded that Louis XIV’s whole object in arranging this marriage was to match Anne with a prince who would not ‘be able ever to prejudice him or strengthen the Protestant interest’. However, as the Duke of Ormonde pointed out, France and Denmark would not necessarily remain allies forever. In his view it was undeniably ‘time the lady should be married and … fit she should have a Protestant, and where to find one so readily, they that mislike this match cannot tell’. And indeed, in time Prince George grew ‘strongly opposed’ to the power of France. After Charles II’s death he even criticised the late King for having been too much in pocket of Louis XIV.
Having been urged by King Charles to come to England without delay, George set out as soon as the terms of the marriage contract had been outlined to him, arriving on 19 July. He found England in a state of alert, for a ‘horrid conspiracy’ had recently been thwarted. Various notables had planned to stage risings in different parts of the country, while a subset of extremists had actually proposed to assassinate the King. Consequently the atmosphere at court was somewhat strained, and ‘his majesty very melancholic and not stirring without redoubled guards’. On 13 July Lord Russell had been tried and found guilty of treason, and another suspect, Lord Essex, had committed suicide in the Tower. The day after Prince George’s arrival in England several minor figures in the plot were executed, and Lord Russell’s black-draped scaffold was being constructed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, ready for his execution on 21 July.
It hardly formed the ideal backdrop to a royal wedding celebration.
After landing Prince George was taken to meet the King, the Duke of York and their respective wives. ‘From thence he waited on the Lady Anne’ at St James’s Palace where he ‘saluted her cheek’ with a kiss. One observer declared that the ‘handsome fresh coloured young prince’ made a good impression on all he encountered. ‘I think nobody could please better and more universally in one afternoon than he hath done’ declared an enthusiast, and another approving report described George as ‘a very comely person, fair hair, a few pock holes in his visage, but of very decent and graceful behaviour’. Others were more guarded. John Evelyn summed him up as having ‘the Danish countenance, blond, a young gentleman of few words, spake French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy’. The French ambassador, who should have been basking in his diplomatic triumph, was very sparing in his praise. ‘His person has nothing shocking about it, he appears sensible and reserved’, was his initial tepid comment. A little later he added that George struck people as ‘neither good nor bad, but he is a bit fat’.
On 23 July Anne and George went to the theatre and sat in one box together. Over the next few days they got to know one another better, with Anne informing Frances Apsley ‘the Prince stays with me every day from dinner to prayers’. After prayers, they would see one another again until the time came for Anne to go to Whitehall to play cards. On the strength of this brief acquaintance Anne was able to form a positive opinion of her prospective bridegroom, and the day before the wedding Frances Apsley wrote to Mary to let her know. Mary replied ‘You may believe ’twas no small joy to me to hear she liked him and I hope she will do so every day more and more, for else I am sure she can’t love him, and without that ’tis impossible to be happy’.
The wedding took place on 28 July 1683 at St James’s. It was a muted affair, as the King had said ‘he did not want any pomp and ceremony’. The service was performed by Bishop Compton, and was attended only by Anne’s immediate family. Afterwards the King and Queen were guests of honour at the wedding supper, and stayed at St James’s till the couple were bedded. It is not recorded if Charles showed the same exuberance as he had on William and Mary’s wedding night, when he had drawn the bed curtains with a lusty cry of ‘Now nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’
Almost immediately the royal family left London for their summer holidays, and the newlyweds accompanied them to Windsor. After a time they moved on to Winchester, where the King was planning to build a great palace. As Queen, Anne had hopes of bringing this project to conclusion, but it was never finished. In Hampshire she and George had a bucolic honeymoon, during which Anne enjoyed buck and hare hunting.
Afterwards, the court continued on a westward progress, stopping to see Salisbury Cathedral and Wilton. They then sailed along a stretch of the South coast on the royal yacht before returning to London via Winchester.
Back in the capital, Anne and George moved into the suite of rooms allocated them at the Cockpit in Whitehall. This was part of a complex of buildings situated on the western side of King Street, spanned by Whitehall Palace. As its name suggested, Henry VIII had built it as an arena for cock fights, but it had long since been converted into lodgings for favoured courtiers. It was a spacious and luxurious apartment, measuring 210 feet in length and 140 feet at its widest part, and overlooked St James’s Park. The King had paid £6,500 to buy back the lease from its most recent occupant, and then conferred it in perpetuity on ‘Lady Anne … and … her heirs male’ in return for a peppercorn rent of 6s. 8d.
As Anne and George settled down to married life together, it soon became apparent that they were remarkably compatible. With the sole exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, everyone agreed that they were an exceptionally devoted couple. Twenty-five years later it was said at George’s funeral, ‘Never did a happier pair come together’. Anne was described as ‘an extraordinarily tender and affectionate wife’ while George ‘lived in all respects the happiest with his princess that was possible’. George was so notable for his marital fidelity, ‘a virtue … not often to be found in courts in these degenerate and licentious ages’, that it was said that envy itself would ‘bear witness to the chastity and entire love of this most happy pair’. He and Anne had an admirable ‘conformity of humour, preferring privacy and a retired life to high society and grand entertainments’. They were both (as Anne herself put it) ‘poor in words’, but with each other they were completely at ease. At a time when some aristocratic husbands and wives led virtually separate existences Anne and George were unusual for their companionable way of life. One observer noted ‘The Prince and she use to spend extraordinary much time together in conversation daily, scarce any occurrent can cause an intermission’.
George was an amiable and undemanding man. ‘Blessed from heaven with … a mild and sweet temper’, he was ‘mighty easy to all his servants’ and invariably ‘affable and kind in … his addresses’. At a time when men were entitled to act as domestic tyrants, he was a particularly easy-going husband, permitting himself, in the opinion of some people, to be ‘entirely governed’ by his wife. His conciliatory disposition was so well known that when Anne and her sister Mary fell out after the Revolution, Sophia of Hanover had no doubt that George bore no responsibility for the rift. Only the Duchess of Marlborough stuck a discordant note, alleging that Anne loved the Prince less than commonly supposed, and that he had a spiteful side. According to her ‘His great employment, when he was not engaged in play, was to stand upon a stair head or at a window and make ill natured remarks upon all that passed by. And this became so remarkable that the Princess was often known to be uneasy at the figure his highness made whilst he was entertaining himself with so princely an amusement’.
George came to look on England as ‘my native country … by the most endearing tie become so’, and developed into ‘so hardy an Englishman that it was visible to all who were about him’. He acquired a reputation for being ‘the most indolent of all mankind’, but he did enjoy country sports such as hunting and shooting. Unfortunately he was not active enough to counter his tendency to plumpness. On his arrival Charles had advised him ‘Walk with me, hunt with my brother and do justice to my niece and you will not be fat’, but though Anne’s numerous pregnancies show that George conscientiously carried out the last injunction, this did not prevent him becoming alarmingly overweight.
One reason for this was that he was a heavy drinker, even for the time. During Anne’s reign he was summarised as a man who was ‘very fat, loves news, his bottle and the Queen’. His prodigious intake of alcohol does not seem to have soured his temper, but neither did it make him particularly convivial. The Duchess of Marlborough stated that Charles II had hoped to ‘discover of what he was made, in the way of drinking; but declared upon the experiment that he could compare him to nothing but a great jar or vessel, standing still and receiving unmoved and undisturbed so much liquor whenever it came to its turn’. Lord Dartmouth recorded a similar anecdote of George, writing that King Charles had told his father ‘he had tried him, drunk and sober, but “God’s fish! There was nothing in him”’. It would have wounded George had he heard this, for he admired Charles as a shrewd politician. After his death he often approvingly quoted the late King’s maxims, fortunately without realising that he himself was the subject of one of Charles’s most celebrated aphorisms.
Prior to George’s coming to England, Charles had told some courtiers that ‘on enquiry he appeared to be … a quiet man, which was a very good thing in a young man’. George certainly appreciated a restful existence. Soon after his arrival he wrote fretfully that the court would soon be on the move, whereas ‘sitting still all summer … was the height of my ambition. God send me a quiet life somewhere, for I shall not be long able to bear this perpetual motion’. His inertia led people to dismiss him as dull, stupid, and lazy, though possibly he was underestimated because he never acquired a perfect grasp of English. Bishop Burnet noted that George ‘knew much more than he could well express; for he spoke acquired languages ill and ungracefully’. Not everyone dismissed his intellect as negligible: a German diplomat who encountered him shortly before Anne’s accession reported that George had been lucid when discussing state affairs, ‘about which he appeared to me to be very knowledgeable’. He added that although George did not meddle in politics ‘he gave me to understand that he was very particularly informed of all that happened and very curious to know everything about the disputes between the two parties’. A French ambassador also paid tribute to George in 1686, noting that although he appeared ‘ponderous … he has very good sense’.
Anne herself was always furious if people were dismissive of her husband and had a touching faith in his abilities.
Initially George hoped to prove himself by occupying an important post. When the marriage terms were being negotiated the Danish envoy had suggested to Barrillon, the French ambassador, that the Prince should be made Lord High Admiral. Barrillon had made it clear this was out of the question, but said that in time George would surely be given a prestigious job. This never materialised. Although George was made a Knight of the Garter in 1684, he was not given a place on the Privy Council. When he proposed sending a personal emissary to see Louis XIV, the idea was quashed on the grounds ‘he should not think of becoming a figure in his own right’.
During William and Mary’s reign George became resentful when his merits were overlooked and, in the Duchess of Marlborough’s sarcastic words, ‘took it exceedingly to heart that his great accomplishments had never yet raised him above pity or contempt’.
In his early years in England, however, he accepted his nondescript status without protest.
The Princess Anne of Denmark, as she was officially styled, was now in a position to perform a favour to Frances Apsley, her old friend. Frances had married a former financier (rudely described by a critic as an ‘old city sponger’) named Sir Benjamin Bathurst, and had written to the Princess begging that her husband might be given a post in her establishment. Anne wrote back to assure Frances that she could still rely on ‘your Ziphares, for though he changes his condition yet nothing shall ever alter him from being the same to his dear Semandra that he ever was’.
She applied to her father and was granted permission to appoint Bathurst as Treasurer of her Household.
Anne had to accept ‘a person very disagreeable to her’ as her First Lady of the Bedchamber. This was her aunt the Countess of Clarendon, who was imposed upon her by another of her Hyde relations, the Earl of Rochester. He insisted that his sister-in-law was given this prestigious position, even though ‘she was not a likely woman to please a young princess’. The Countess was ‘very learned but … she had such an awkward stiffness it greatly disgusted the Princess’. However, Anne was permitted to exercise some choice over the appointment of her Second Lady of the Bedchamber. Initially her father and Rochester had wanted the post to be awarded to Lady Thanet but the Princess ‘begged she might not have her’, having conceived a desperate longing to appoint the woman who had now become her greatest friend.
Anne had known Sarah Jennings since 1673 when she had come to court to be one of the Duchess of York’s maids of honour. After she had been at court a couple of years Sarah began to be courted by an army officer who was ten years older than her, named John Churchill. Prior to this he had been garrisoned in Tangier, had fought in the war against Holland, and served for some months in the French army after England made peace with the Dutch. As the brother of the Duke of York’s mistress, Arabella Churchill, he had opportunities, being ‘a very smooth man, made for a court’, to ingratiate himself with James. After being appointed one of James’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber in 1673, Churchill became his Master of the Robes four years later, and by 1680 was described as ‘ye only favourite of his master’.
With the patronage of the Duke of York, he went from being a Lieutenant Colonel of the Duke of York’s regiment in 1675 to senior brigadier three years later. He was not, however, a wealthy man, and his hopes of marrying Sarah Jennings had initially seemed slight as his parents had been determined to match him with an heiress. It was only when Sarah’s brother died, improving her own financial expectations, that this difficulty was resolved. With the encouragement of the Duchess of York the couple were able to marry, probably in late 1677. It was a love match on both sides, and though in subsequent years Sarah would test his patience to an extraordinary degree, her husband’s devotion to her never wavered.
John Churchill accompanied the Duke of York on many of his travels, and when possible his wife went with him, so she and Anne saw a lot of one another over the years. Sarah was in Brussels when Anne visited her father in 1679, and they were also together in Scotland in late 1681. However it does not seem to have been until after the Mulgrave affair and the sacking of Mary Cornwallis that Anne became really attached to Sarah. When Sarah had a second daughter in February 1683 Anne accepted an invitation to become godmother to the child, who was named after her. The following month John Churchill (who had been created Lord Churchill in December 1682) informed his wife ‘Lady Anne asks for you very often, so that I think you would do well if you writ to her to thank her for her kindness in enquiring after your health’.
Sarah was truly an extraordinary woman. As a boy the actor Colley Cibber was transfixed when he caught sight of her in 1688, becoming utterly enraptured by ‘so clear an emanation of beauty, such a commanding grace of aspect’. With her red-gold hair, she was physically dazzling, and she also radiated vitality. She was not well educated, and said herself that throughout her youth she ‘never read, nor employed my time in anything but playing at cards’ but, even so, her mind was her most singular feature. She had an alert intelligence and a lacerating wit, and though her humour was always abrasive, it was undeniably entertaining to those who were not objects of her scorn. Endowed with what she called ‘a very great sprightliness and cheerfulness of nature, joined with a true taste for conversation’,
she had a gift for memorable expressions, coupled with utter confidence in her opinions. In time her outspokenness and her inability to see things from other people’s point of view would become destructive, but to Anne at this point Sarah’s vibrancy and exuberance seemed supremely attractive qualities. Despite the fact that their personalities could hardly have been more different, Anne found herself irresistibly drawn to this self-assured and dynamic woman.
It appears that it was Sarah herself who suggested to a delighted Anne that she should become her lady-in-waiting. The Princess was already so slavishly devoted to Sarah that she wrote humbly thanking her ‘for your kindness in offering it’ and assuring her ‘’tis no trouble to me to obey your commands’. Knowing that she had to secure her father’s consent to the appointment, she urged Sarah to ‘pray for success and assure your self that whatever lies in my power shall not be wanting’. Since Lord Churchill was in such favour with the Duke of York, one might have thought that the Duke would have had no objection to Sarah’s advancement, but unfortunately James was taking advice from the Earl of Rochester about who should have the place. Sarah said that Rochester wanted ‘one … that would be entirely obedient to him’ in the household, ‘which he had experienced I would not be’ and therefore he and his wife ‘did all they could to hinder’ her appointment.
When it appeared that she would not be able to give Sarah the position, Anne grew distraught. She sent Sarah a letter that was almost incoherent with emotion, imploring her not to blame her for the setback. ‘Oh dear Lady Churchill’, she wrote frantically, ‘let me beg you once more not to believe that I am in fault, though I must confess you may have some reason to believe it because I gave you my word so often that I would never give my consent to any, no more I have not, but have said all that was possible for one to say’. Anne explained that she had delayed telling Sarah how gloomy the outlook appeared because
I was yet in hopes that I might prevail with the Duke, and I will try once more, be he never so angry; but oh, do not let this take away your kindness from me, for I assure you ’tis the greatest trouble in the world to me and I am sure you have not a faithfuller friend on earth nor that loves you better than I do; my eyes are full, I cannot say a word more.
She became even more agitated when she heard that Sarah was about to go to Windsor, leaving her behind, and protested ‘this cruel disappointment is too much to be borne without the loss of your company’. Anne’s next letter, however, brought better news, for, as she had promised, she had raised the matter again with her father, and this time won him over. Jubilantly Anne reported, ‘The Duke came just as you were gone and made no difficulties but has promised me that I shall have you, which I assure you is a great joy to me’.
As Anne’s Second Lady of the Bedchamber Sarah received a modest salary of £200 a year, but the real value of the position lay in Anne’s assurance to her that she would be ‘ready at any time to do you all the service that lies in my power’. Sarah admitted that she cultivated the relationship with great care, and ‘now began to employ all her wit, all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert and entertain and serve the Princess’. She succeeded triumphantly, for Anne’s liking for her ‘quickly became a passion, and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid’. Being with Sarah afforded her such intense delight that Anne begrudged letting her out of her sight. One account of their relationship based on Sarah’s own reminiscences described how ‘They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of a tedious, lifeless state … This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. [The Princess] used to say She desired to possess her wholly and could hardly bear that [Sarah] should ever escape … into any other company’.
In retrospect Sarah claimed that the hours she spent closeted with Anne were ‘a confinement indeed for her’ and even stated that Anne’s ‘extremely tedious’ company ensured that she would ‘rather have been in a dungeon’ than with her mistress. Since Anne was not naturally talkative, Sarah had to work hard to keep the conversation flowing, but Sarah also complained that anything the Princess did have to say was characterised by ‘an insipid heaviness’. Sarah was nevertheless careful to hide from the Princess that she found her a bore. Anne was led to believe that even if her passion for Sarah was not reciprocated in full, neither was it completely unrequited. One of Anne’s earliest letters to her friend refers to ‘poor me (who you say you love)’. In 1706, four years after Anne’s accession to the throne, Sarah wrote to her, reminding her of the ‘passion and tenderness’ she had ‘once had’ for Anne.
Anne once protested ‘’tis impossible for you ever to believe how much I love you except you saw my heart’; on another occasion she declared ‘If I writ whole volumes I could never express how well I love you’. She insisted that ‘Nothing can ever alter me’, and that her ‘kindness’ for Sarah could ‘never end but with my life’. Years later, once it had emerged that Anne had overstated the immutability of her love, Sarah noted bitterly, ‘Such vows … strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards’.
The Princess submitted to frequent separations to enable Sarah to spend time at her own house at St Albans and to be with her husband when he was waiting on the Duke of York. ‘This absence … though be it never so short, it will appear a great while to me’, Anne declared when Sarah was away. She consoled herself by keeping in touch by letter, saying it constituted her ‘greatest pleasure’. Sarah later complained that Anne’s letters were never interesting, even if ‘enlivened with a few passionate expressions, sometimes pretty enough’. At the time, however, Sarah was more appreciative, delighting Anne by being ‘so kind [as] to be satisfied with my dull letters’. Anne herself conceded ‘I am the worst in the world at invention’, but since Sarah encouraged her to write to her at length the Princess was able to convince herself that her letters were welcome.
Anne admitted that there was something compulsive about the way she wrote so frequently to her friend, sometimes more than once a day. ‘You will think me mad, I believe, for troubling you so often’, she told Sarah apologetically, but despite acknowledging that her behaviour was slightly odd, she expected prompt replies to every letter, notwithstanding the burden it placed on her friend. The Princess explained, ‘If I could tell how to hinder myself from writing to you every day I would, that you need not be at the trouble of writing so often to me, because you say it does you hurt, but really I cannot … for when I am from you I cannot be at ease without enquiring after you’. She would declare petulantly that unless she received a letter the next morning ‘I shall conclude with reason that I am quite forgot and ne’er trouble you any more with my dull letters’.
Anne asked Sarah to show her letters to nobody else, but Sarah insisted that hers to Anne were destroyed. As a result we do not know the tenor of her replies. Sarah later encouraged the assumption that they were more restrained in tone than Anne’s effusions, but this is open to question. Towards the end of her life Anne told a third party that Sarah ‘wrote to me as [I] used to do to her’.
The Princess accepted that Sarah’s strongest feelings were reserved for her husband, and she let it be understood that the same applied to her and George. When telling Sarah that she had ‘no greater satisfaction’ than being in her company she qualified this by saying that this was ‘next [to] being with the Prince’. However her love for George hardly had the same needy intensity that characterised her relationship with Sarah. Although she missed him when they were apart, she bore his absence with an equanimity that was lacking during separations from Sarah.
If Anne did not contest that Churchill took priority over her in Sarah’s eyes, she nevertheless claimed ‘the little corner of your heart that my Lord Churchill has left empty’. Believing herself entitled to ‘possession of the second place’, she was reluctant to share it with other women, but to her distress found herself contending with ‘a great many rivals’ who vied with her for Sarah’s attention. Anne’s jealousy and resentment of these ladies who were ‘more entertaining than I can ever pretend to be’ made her ‘sometimes fear losing what I so much value’, and would cause tension in years to come.
Sarah would later assert that Anne very early in their relationship sought to eliminate the awkwardness arising from the disparity in rank between them by proposing that they adopt pen names when corresponding with one another. In fact the arrangement whereby they referred to each other as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman only came into being about two or three years after the 1688 Revolution. Before that Anne invariably addressed Sarah as ‘my dear Lady Churchill’, and Sarah’s style towards her remained markedly deferential. By September 1684 Anne was uneasy enough about this to entreat Sarah ‘not to call me your Highness at every word, but be as free with me as one friend ought to be with another’, but Sarah was very cautious about taking up her offer. The following July the Princess again protested at Sarah’s ‘calling me at every three words your Highness’. Yet even when Anne insisted, ‘Ceremony is a thing you know I hate with anybody and especially with you’, Sarah would not abandon the formal tone. She affected to believe that Anne had been joking when she had urged her to be less mindful of etiquette, and a few months later Anne felt impelled to tell her friend, ‘I hope you are not so unjust to me as to believe … that I did it to laugh at you, for I am sure … I never will be so base’.
In view of Sarah’s punctilious observance of protocol when writing to the Princess, it is surely right to be sceptical of her claim that from the very beginning of their relationship, she was always forthright with Anne. In her memoirs she boasted that having ‘laid it down for a maxim that flattery was falsehood to my trust and ingratitude to my greatest friend’, she decided that she could best serve Anne ‘by speaking the truth’. Thinking ‘it was part of flattery not to tell her everything that was in any sort amiss in her’, Sarah took pains to be ‘not only honest, but open and frank, perhaps to a fault’.
Sarah claimed that her lack of sycophancy caused no problems as Anne promised ‘never to be offended at it, but to love me the better for my frankness’. Early on in the relationship the Princess assured Sarah ‘you can never give me any greater proof of your friendship than in telling me your mind freely in all things’. Not long afterwards Anne noted appreciatively ‘I do not believe there is so much truth in anybody as there is in you’ but, in fact, it does not seem that Sarah had yet tested Anne’s devotion by being over-critical. The only indication of anything amiss between them comes in one of Anne’s first letters to Sarah, when Anne upbraids Sarah for having a groundless ‘unkind thought’ about her. She expresses incredulity that ‘my dear Lady Churchill’ could ‘be so cruel as to believe what she told me’ and begs distractedly, ‘Oh come to me tomorrow … that I may clear myself’.
According to Sarah, a major cause of tension between them had arisen just at the time she entered Anne’s employment. Sarah felt passionately that many of those arrested in the summer of 1683 for having conspired against the King had been falsely charged with treason, and she was overcome ‘with an horror and an aversion to all such arbitrary proceedings’. However it transpired that ‘these notions … [were] very disagreeable and contrary to those of her mistress’. Anne accepted that those accused were guilty, and not only approved of the death sentences meted out, but also endorsed the subsequent crackdown on ‘fanatics’ or dissenters, who were held to have been associated with the plot. It is not clear whether Lady Churchill dared remonstrate with her about this. In one account it is stated that Sarah could not keep silent on the subject as ‘it was impossible for one of her open temper not to declare, with some warmth, her real sentiments of things’. Far from reproving her lady-in-waiting for being so outspoken, Anne ‘seemed … not to be displeased with this open sincerity’. Another version of Sarah’s memoirs suggests, however, that despite being ‘sorry not to find that compassion in the breast of another person’, Sarah had been much more circumspect. She recalled, ‘All I could prevail on my self to do was to say nothing, but I could not commend and flatter and rail at the unfortunate sufferers’.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that it was not until much later in their relationship that Sarah became more confrontational in her dealings with Anne.
The Princess of Denmark was undeniably besotted with Lady Churchill. This raises the question of whether Anne was also sexually attracted to her, particularly since Sarah herself later insinuated that Anne had lesbian tendencies and had a physical relationship with her dresser, Abigail Masham. However, it never seems to have occurred to Sarah that it could be inferred from this that Anne’s passion for her had likewise been erotically charged. She clearly differentiated between her relationship with Anne in which, in her own eyes, there had been not a hint of deviancy, and Anne’s baser connection with Abigail.
The fact that Anne and Sarah were both happily married could be seen to militate against the possibility that there was a sexual component to their relationship. Their regular pregnancies leave no room for doubt that both were sexually active with their husbands. The two of them were acutely conscious that it was part of their wifely duties to produce as many offspring as possible, and they unselfconsciously exchanged information about the likelihood that they were expecting babies.
There is much debate both as to the existence of lesbianism in seventeenth-century England and regarding the extent of awareness that women could sexually desire other women. According to the memoirs of the French Comte de Gramont, at the court of Charles II, ‘they were simple enough … never to have heard tell of such Grecian refinements in the art of love’. However, as the century progressed, imported translations of French pornography appear to have widened consciousness of lesbian eroticism. References in literature suggest that awareness of the phenomenon was growing, and with that came the notion that it was socially subversive and something to be feared. In 1667 the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle published The Convent of Love in which the heroine is horrified to find herself falling in love with a foreign princess, and fears being punished by the goddess Nature for transgressing her laws. Only when the princess is revealed as a man in disguise is the situation resolved.
It may be that women who were erotically drawn towards their own sex were able to indulge their desires without fear of detection, because men were blind to the existence of lesbian passion. A poem written for another girl at court by Anne Finch, a maid of honour to the Duchess of York, has been cited as an instance of this. In these verses the author wishes she could be transformed into a mouse (a symbol of female lust) so as to nestle unobtrusively in her friend’s bosom and enjoy her ‘soft caresses’ without been suspected by ‘jealous [male] lover’.
Whether or not the men of the period deluded themselves in imagining that women could never be their sexual rivals, it was by no means unusual for women to enjoy what has been termed ‘romantic friendships’ with one another. Because it was assumed that these relationships were platonic, this was generally condoned. In the course of what Lord Halifax called these ‘violent intimacies’ and ‘great dearnesses’ it was regarded as perfectly acceptable for women to employ endearments when addressing one another that nowadays would be considered only appropriate between lovers. For example, when Lady Shaftesbury wrote to her friend Lady Rachel Russell in 1683 she signed her letter ‘unimaginably, passionately, affectionately yours’. It is worth noting, too, that Anne was not the only female correspondent of Sarah who addressed her in impassioned terms. Lady Sunderland wrote to her on one occasion ‘I long to embrace you … I love you beyond expression’, while another letter assures Sarah that she cannot imagine ‘how full my heart is of love and tenderness for thee … I am for ever and ever my dearest with a heart flowing, tender and sincere’.
It must be stressed that during the seventeenth century, impassioned, asexual love was looked on as admirable in both sexes, and friendship was idealised. The views expressed by the sixteenth-century sage Michel de Montaigne in his essay ‘On Friendship’ were widely influential. While deploring homosexuality, he praised the kind of ‘highest friendship’ that ‘takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway’. Anne’s grandfather the Earl of Clarendon declared that friendship was ‘more a sacrament than marriage’, and John Evelyn took a similar view. He pointed out that marriage was an unequal partnership subject to law and contract, whereas a freely undertaken friendship was ‘implanted by God alone’ and hence innately virtuous. The poetess Katherine Philips, whose verses were first published three years after her death in 1664, has been called ‘the high priestess of the cult of friendship’. Her poems expressed passionate love for other women, but stressed that the bond between them was sublimely spiritual and unsullied by any carnal element. In recent years there has been much debate as to whether her poems actually had an erotic subtext, but Philips’s contemporaries never doubted her purity.
It might seem farfetched to suggest that in forming such a close attachment to Sarah, Anne was influenced by these ideas. She was not a wide reader, and nor was she closely attuned to the intellectual currents of the time. Nevertheless these theories were swirling about the court, and were so much in vogue that Anne could hardly fail to be aware of them. Certainly she had either read, or had some acquaintance with Montaigne’s essay on friendship, and regularly quoted his maxim that passing on information to a friend ‘was no breach of promise of secrecy … because it was no more than telling it to oneself’. As well as being personally drawn to Sarah, she was interested in the abstract concept of friendship. She was aware of its obligations, and eager to be bound by what a contemporary called its ‘reciprocal and eternal’ laws. She was determined that her rank should not prevent her from achieving the personal fulfilment that friendship could provide, and believed that her bond with Sarah would add an emotional richness to her life which it was unrealistic to expect from marriage. Sarah herself stressed that Anne deliberately set out to cross the boundaries that customarily isolated royalty from lesser beings. As she recalled, ‘Kings and princes for the most part imagine they have a dignity peculiar to their birth and station which ought to raise them above all connection of friendship with an inferior … The Princess had a different taste. A friend was what she most coveted, and for the sake of friendship, a relation which she did not disdain to have with me, she was fond even of that equality which she thought belonged to it’.
Having married a man to whom she was ideally suited and found a friend in Sarah, all appeared well in Anne’s life. By late 1683 she was known to be pregnant, completing the rosy picture. The pressure on her to produce an heir – preferably male – was immense. In 1680 the physician of her sister Mary (who remained childless) complained of being constantly pestered on the orders of Charles II, who wanted to know whether his niece was pregnant, ‘since the future of three crowns depended on it’. In early May 1684 the King and Queen came up to London, intending to stay until Anne was delivered, but on 12 May the Princess had a stillborn child. While this was obviously upsetting, no one could know that this would be the first of a heartbreaking sequence of miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality that Anne was fated to endure. At the time her family’s disappointment was tempered by the fact that the baby appeared to have been dead in the womb for some days, which could have endangered her own life. In Holland Mary declared that she regarded her sister’s escape as ‘almost a miracle’.
In June Anne accompanied her stepmother to Tunbridge. Mary Beatrice had herself suffered a miscarriage about the same time as Anne had lost her child, and was going to take the waters in order to aid her recovery. It was the first time that Anne had visited this fashionable spa, to which she subsequently returned on numerous occasions in hopes of increasing her fertility. On this visit, however, she did not drink the waters, as her underlying health was good. Although Tunbridge Wells was a popular resort, Anne was bored there, particularly after Sarah and George, who joined her for part of the time, left her alone with her stepmother. She was relieved when Mary Beatrice decided the waters did not agree with her and returned to court.
The rest of the summer was again spent touring southern England with the court. Towards the end of the year a rumour became current that Anne and George would go to Scotland on a visit, but when asked about this her father insisted ‘’twas never thought of’. He added happily, ‘God be thanked, she is not in a condition to make such a voyage, being four months gone with child’.
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Anne Somerset
Often derided as weak-willed and insecure, Queen Anne was in fact one of Britain’s most remarkable monarchs. In many ways a stolid, conventional woman, she nevertheless presided over some of the most momentous events in British history and led a personal life riven by passion, illness and intrigue.In 1702, fourteen years after she helped oust her father from his throne and deprived her newborn half-brother of his birthright, Queen Anne inherited the crowns of England and Scotland. Childless, despite seventeen pregnancies that had either ended in failure or produced heartrendingly short-lived offspring, in some respects she was a pitiable figure. But against all expectation she proved Britain’s most successful Stuart ruler.Her reign was marked by many triumphs, including union with Scotland and glorious victories in war against France. Yet while her great general, the Duke of Marlborough, was performing feats of military genius, Anne’s relationship with his outspoken wife Sarah was becoming ever more rancorous. Political differences partly explained why the Queen’s earlier adoration for Sarah transformed to loathing, but the final rupture was precipitated by Sarah’s startling claim that it was the Queen’s lesbian infatuation with another lady-in-waiting, Abigail Masham, that had destroyed their friendship.Having lost the will to continue an expensive war that the Marlboroughs and their political allies favoured, the Queen embarked upon a peace process that some condemned as a betrayal of the national interest. And, as it became clear that Anne did not have long to live, the nation became polarised by fears that she intended to bequeath her crown to her Catholic half brother, rather than the German Protestant cousin whom Parliament had designated her heir.Drawing widely on unpublished sources, Anne Somerset vividly depicts the clashes of personality and party rivalries that aroused such strong feelings at the time. Traditionally depicted as a weak ruler dominated by female favourites and haunted by remorse at having deposed her father, Queen Anne emerges as a woman whose unshakeable commitment to duty enabled her to overcome private tragedy and painful disabilities, setting her kingdom on the path to greatness.
Queen Anne
The Politics of Passion
A Biography
Anne Somerset
OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE SOMERSET
The Life and Times of King William IV
Elizabeth I
Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I
The Affair of the Poisons
Ladies in Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day
For Dad, with love
The book is also dedicated to the memory of my husband, Matthew Carr. He was always the first person to be shown the typescript of my books and although he died before he could read it all, he delighted me with his enthusiasm for the sections he did see. It is one of many ways in which he is greatly missed.
Contents
Cover (#ulink_2dc48b01-8f16-5c1f-bf41-dc0ce045c1ef)
Title Page
Other Books by Anne Somerset
Dedication
The House of Stuart
List of Illustrations
Author’s Note
1 But a Daughter
2 Religion Before Her Father
3 Sure Never Anybody Was Used So
4 We Are Now in a New World
5 These Fatal Distinctions of Whig and Tory
6 The Weight and Charge of a Kingdom
7 Nothing But Uneasiness
8 Entire and Perfect Union
9 Guided by Other Hands
10 Passions Between Women
11 Making the Breach Wider
12 The Heat and Ferment that is in This Poor Nation
13 I Do Not Like War
14 The Great Work of Peace
15 The Last Troublesome Scene of Contention
16 Not Equal to the Weight of a Crown?
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE HOUSE OF STUART
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
James II, when Duke of York, with Anne Hyde and their two daughters, Princess Mary and Princess Anne c. 1674–80. By Sir Peter Lely and Benedetto Gennari. (The Royal Collection © 2011)
The Lady Anne as a child. Artist Unknown. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Queen Anne when Princess of Denmark. By Willem Wissing and Jan van der Vaardt. (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery)
Sarah Churchill (later the Duchess of Marlborough) with Lady Fitzharding, 1691. By Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Prince George of Denmark on horseback, 1704. By Michael Dahl. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Princess Anne of Denmark with the Duke of Gloucester, c. 1694. After Kneller (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Queen Mary II. After Willem Wissing. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
William, the Duke of Gloucester, with his friend, Benjamin Bathurst. After Thomas Murray © The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Queen Anne, 1703. By Edmund Lilly. (© Queen Anne, 1703, Lilly, Edmund (fl.1702–d.1716)/Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Sidney Godolphin. After Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
The Duke of Marlborough. By Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Queen Anne with Prince George of Denmark. By Charles Boit, 1706. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Print of ‘Her Majesties Royal Palace at Kensington’. (© British Museum)
Tapestry showing the French Marshal Tallard surrendering his baton to the Duke of Marlborough after the Battle of Blenheim in August 1704. (Image reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace Image Library)
Robert Harley Earl of Oxford. By Jonathan Richardson. (© Private Collection/Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Sophia Electress of Hanover. (Royal Collection © 2011)
Portrait believed to be of Abigail Masham. (© Philip Mould Ltd London/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. By George White, after Thomas Murray. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Prince James Francis Edward Stuart (the Pretender). Studio of Alexis Simon Belle. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Anne in the House of Lords. By Peter Tillemanns. (Royal Collection © 2011)
The Battle of Malplaquet, 11 September 1709, c. 1713. By Louise Laguerre. (© National Army Museum, London/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Satirical print of Bolingbroke dictating business relating to the Treaty of Utrecht. (© British Museum)
Queen Anne and the Knights of the Garter. By Peter Angelis. (© The National Portrait Gallery)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For the sake of clarity I have updated spelling and punctuation used in original documents. Furthermore, in almost all cases when Anne or her contemporaries used the abbreviations ‘ye’ and ‘yt’ in their letters, I have modernised the archaic usage by substituting ‘the’ and ‘that’. Very often Anne and her ministers ciphered their letters by substituting numbers for names. In such cases I have omitted the numbers and replaced them with the relevant name in square brackets.
Throughout Anne’s lifetime, England used the Julian Calendar, while continental Europe followed the Gregorian system. During the seventeenth century, the date in Europe was ten days ahead of England’s; with the start of the eighteenth century the gap between England and Europe widened to a difference of eleven days. When dealing with events that took place in England, I give dates according to the Julian Calendar. However, when describing events that occurred on the Continent, or when quoting letters sent from abroad, I generally give a composite date, separated by a forward slash, indicating the date according to both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Whereas in Stuart England, the calendar year started on 25 March, I have simplified things by taking it to begin on 1 January.
It is notoriously difficult to compare the value of money in the past with modern monetary values. However, as a very rough guide it should be noted that the National Archives’ Currency Converter Service calculates that £1 in 1710 would have a spending worth of £76.59 in 2005.
1
But a Daughter
The opening weeks of the year 1665 were particularly cold, and the sub-zero temperatures had discouraged the King of England, Charles II, from writing to his sister Henrietta in France. He was always a lazy correspondent, and having little news to impart thought it pointless ‘to freeze my fingers for nothing’. In early February, however, he took up his pen to report that the two of them had acquired a new niece. On 6 February, shortly before midnight at St James’s Palace in London, their younger brother James, Duke of York, had become a father to a healthy baby girl. Being without a legitimate heir, the King would have preferred a boy, and since Henrietta herself was expecting a child, Charles told her that he trusted she would have ‘better luck’ in this respect. In one way, however, the Duchess of York had been fortunate, for she had had a remarkably quick labour, having ‘despatched her business in little more than an hour’. Charles wrote that he wished Henrietta an equally speedy delivery when her time came, though he feared that her slender frame meant that she was ‘not so advantageously made for that convenience’ as the far more substantially built Duchess. The King concluded that in that event, ‘a boy will recompense two grunts more’.
The child was named Anne, after her mother, and if her birth was a disappointment, at least it did not cause the sort of furore that had greeted the appearance in the world of the Duke and Duchess of York’s firstborn child in 1660. That baby had initially been assumed to have been born out of wedlock, but when it emerged that the infant’s parents had in fact secretly married just before the child’s birth, there was fury that the Duke of York had matched himself with a loose woman who was not of royal blood. Many people shared the view expressed by the diarist Samuel Pepys ‘that he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward, it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’.
The scandal was particularly regrettable because the monarchy was fragile. Charles II had only been on his throne since May 1660, after an eleven-year interregnum. In 1649 his father, King Charles I, had been executed. This followed his defeat in a civil war that had started in 1642 when political and religious tensions had caused a total breakdown in relations between King and Parliament. During that conflict an estimated 190,000 people – nearly four percent of the population – had lost their lives in England and Wales alone; in Scotland and Ireland the proportion of inhabitants who perished was still higher. Charles I had been taken prisoner in 1646, but refused to come to terms with his opponents and so the war had continued. By 1648, however, the royalists had been vanquished. Angered at the way the King had prolonged the bloodshed, the leaders of the parliamentary forces brought him to trial and sentenced him to death. England became a republic ruled by a Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and it seemed that its monarchy had been extinguished forever.
When the royalists’ principal stronghold of Oxford had fallen in the summer of 1646, Charles I’s twelve-year-old son, James, Duke of York, had been taken into the custody of Parliament. However, in April 1648 he had managed to escape abroad, dressed as a girl. His older brother Charles was already on the Continent, having been sent overseas by their father two years earlier. James was only fourteen when news arrived that his father had been executed on 30 January 1649. In the ensuing decade all attempts to place Charles on his late father’s throne failed, and a lifetime in exile appeared inevitable for the royal brothers.
In 1656 James spent some time at the French court. While there, he met with his elder sister Mary, widow of the Dutch prince, William II of Orange, who was visiting Paris, accompanied by her maid of honour, Anne Hyde. Anne was the daughter of Edward Hyde, a pompous and severe lawyer from Wiltshire who had become a leading adviser to Charles I shortly before the outbreak of civil war. After his master’s execution, he offered his services to the late King’s eldest son, now styled Charles II by his adherents. Hyde moved his family to Holland and in 1653 they took up residence at Breda at the invitation of the widowed Mary of Orange, who bore the title Princess Royal of England. Two years later the Princess suggested that Hyde’s eighteen-year-old daughter Anne should become one of her maids of honour. Hyde had been reluctant to accept her offer, partly because he feared angering the late King’s widow, Queen Henrietta Maria, who detested him. Finally he consented, whereupon the Queen Mother was duly incensed, little guessing that within a few years she would become more intimately connected to his daughter.
After their initial encounter, James had other opportunities to see Anne when he visited his sister at Breda. He was soon passionately attracted to her, for though Anne was ‘not absolutely a beauty … there was nobody at the court of Holland capable of putting her in the shade’. At this stage she had a ‘pretty good’ figure, and was also universally agreed to be exceptionally witty and intelligent. ‘Always of an amorous disposition’, James tried to seduce her, but she did not prove an easy conquest. Even after he had ‘for many months solicited Anne … in the way of marriage’, it was only after he formally contracted himself to her at Breda on 24 November 1659 that she let him sleep with her.
In the spring of 1660 royalist fortunes were suddenly transformed. Oliver Cromwell had died in September 1658, and over the next fifteen months England descended into near anarchy. In late April 1660 the chaotic situation was resolved when the English Parliament invited Charles II to return to England and assume the crown. On 25 May Charles – now King in more than name only – landed at Dover. Four days later he made a triumphant entry into London, accompanied by James, Duke of York.
Anne Hyde left the Princess Royal’s service and came back to England with her family. Her father was now the King’s chief minister, with the official position of Lord Chancellor. Unaware that Anne was pregnant by the Duke of York, he began making arrangements to wed her to a ‘well-bred hopeful young gentleman’, but before these came to fruition James went to the King and tearfully begged permission to marry Anne. ‘Much troubled’ by this development, Charles initially refused to authorise the union but ‘at last, after much importunity, consented’. On 3 September 1660 James and Anne Hyde were married at a private ceremony in the dead of night at Worcester House, the Lord Chancellor’s London residence. The only witnesses were James’s friend the Earl of Ossory and Anne Hyde’s maidservant, Ellen Stroud.
Anne was now in the advanced stages of pregnancy, but curiously her father had failed to notice this. He was therefore shocked and appalled when the King alerted him to the fact that his daughter was expecting the Duke of York’s child and had married without his knowledge. Hyde demanded that Anne should be ‘sent to the Tower … and then that an act of Parliament should be immediately passed for the cutting off her head’, and was surprised when the King demurred.
However, although Charles told Hyde that he was sure the marriage could not be undone, the union was still not officially acknowledged. Anne continued to await her baby at her father’s house, where she was kept confined to her room.
Towards the end of September the Princess Royal arrived in England, enraged by the prospect of having her former servant for a sister-in-law. Unnerved by this, James’s commitment to Anne began to waver. He now accepted that he had been imprudent to pledge himself so precipitately, and instead of the marriage being publicly proclaimed ‘there grew to be a great silence in that affair’. James’s doubts became more pronounced when members of his court started to suggest that Anne was a woman of bad character. His best friend Sir Charles Berkeley claimed ‘that he and others have lain with her often’, and another young man testified that once, when riding pillion behind him, ‘she rid with her hand on his ———’.
An assortment of courtiers provided additional explicit details of alleged trysts with Anne during her time in Holland. Richard Talbot claimed to have had an assignation with her in her father’s study, recalling that as he was fondling her on the desk a bottle of ink had overturned, causing an appalling mess. Later the pair of them had artfully put the blame on the King’s pet monkey. After hearing such stories the French ambassador declared it ‘as clear as day that she has had other lovers’, and James too apparently became convinced of this. On 10 October the Duke informed Hyde ‘that he had learned things about his daughter which he could not say to him’, and that consequently he had decided never to see her again.
On 22 October Anne went into labour at Worcester House, and the King sent four high ranking court ladies and four bishops to witness the birth. The Bishop of Winchester interrogated the poor young woman, demanding to know who the father was, and whether Anne had slept with more than one man. Between contractions Anne gasped out that James was the father, that she had never had another lover, and that she and the Duke of York were lawfully married.
After Anne gave birth to a son the ladies present declared they were sure she had spoken the truth, but James still declined to own the child.
When the Queen Mother arrived in England in early November she encouraged courtiers to come forward with further stories to discredit Anne. Now James professed himself disgusted with the young woman’s ‘whoredom’, and having assured his mother that he ‘had now such evidence of her unworthiness that he should no more think of her’, he gave it out that it was untrue that he had already taken Anne as his wife.
Despite James’s public denial of the marriage, the King knew otherwise. The Venetian ambassador reported ‘he seems to have taken the lady’s side, telling his brother that having lacked caution at first he could not draw back … at this stage’. Charles had no doubt that the stories sullying Anne’s reputation could be dismissed as ‘a wicked conspiracy set on foot by villains’, and he signified his support for his Lord Chancellor by creating him Baron Hyde on 3 November. Charles informed the Queen Mother that both ‘seemliness and conscience’ required him to uphold a marriage he had no doubt was valid, while to Hyde he declared, ‘the thing was remediless’. James was bluntly instructed to ‘drink as he brewed and lie with her whom he had made his wife’.
Shaken by his brother’s attitude, James’s resolve to disavow Anne faltered. It did not take much to persuade him that the stories about her had all been slanders for, as a French diplomat shrewdly observed, ‘this young prince is still in love with this girl’. By December, he was stealing out of court to spend nights with Anne at her father’s house. When Anne’s mother began referring to her as ‘Madam the Duchess of York’, it was clear that matters were on the verge of being settled, and the French ambassador noted that people were now resigned to the inevitable.
On 20 December James officially acknowledged Anne as his wife, and people came to court to kiss her hand. Four days later the Princess Royal was killed by an attack of smallpox, and died expressing remorse for the harsh things she had said of Anne. Even the Queen Mother relented. Before returning to France, she received Anne and James together on 1 January 1661 ‘with the same grace as if she had liked it [the marriage] from the beginning’. That afternoon the baby prince was christened Charles, and the King and Queen Mother stood as godparents.
Although Anne had now been absorbed into the royal family, inevitably memories lingered of the unpleasantness that had attended her entrance into it. As late as 1679 James’s cousin Sophia of Hanover made a sneering reference to Anne Hyde’s lack of chastity, and she also mocked her low birth. Years later, when a marriage was mooted between the Duke and Duchess of York’s daughter Anne and Sophia’s eldest son Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, Sophia was not very keen on the idea because ‘the Princess Anne on her mother’s side [was] born of a very mediocre family’. James’s Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, was also mindful of such matters. At one point he even flattered himself that the English would prefer him as their sovereign before either of James’s daughters by Anne Hyde, despite the fact the two girls were nearer in blood to the throne than he was. While William was soon disabused of this idea, he was not alone in thinking that Anne Hyde’s progeny were unfit to succeed to the crown. In 1669 the Venetian ambassador to England reported that the Lord Chancellor’s grandchildren were ‘universally denounced as unworthy of the office and of such honour’.
These objections had no basis in law, but Anne Hyde’s daughters would always face prejudice because they were not pure-bred royalty.
The Duke and Duchess of York had a suite of lodgings in the King’s principal London palace, Whitehall, and they were also allocated St James’s Palace for summer use. With great forbearance the Duchess resisted taking revenge on those courtiers who had defamed her, astonishing everybody by accepting that they had acted ‘out of pure devotion’ to James. Yet while her graciousness in this instance could not be faulted, some people felt that she sought to compensate for her humble origins by taking ‘state on her rather too much’. ‘Her haughtiness … raised her many enemies’ and an Italian diplomat reported complaints of her ‘scorn … ingratitude and her arrogance’.
The King, however, was not among her critics. He enjoyed her company, for the Duchess was a lively conversationalist, an asset her daughter Anne did not inherit. Samuel Pepys was much impressed by the clever answers the Duchess gave when playing a parlour game, and she was certainly a good deal more amusing than her husband, whose sense of humour was non-existent. She had a forceful personality, but the Duke did not seem to mind her assertiveness: contemporaries were surprised that he appeared ‘more in awe of the Duchess than considering the inequality of their rank could have been imagined’.
Unfortunately, there were limits to the Duchess’s power over him, for James was constantly unfaithful, despite her being ‘very troublesome to him by her jealousy’. It was said that ‘having laid his conscience to rest by the declaration of his marriage he thought that this generous effort entitled him to give his inconstancy a little scope’. He was renowned for being ‘the most reckless ogler of his day’ and was ‘perpetually in one amour or other without being very nice in his choice’. He had affairs with, among others, Lady Carnegie, Goditha Price, Lady Denham, and Arabella Churchill. In 1662, the Duke’s affair with Lady Carnegie led to a disagreeable rumour that her husband had deliberately infected himself with venereal disease, and thereby ensured his wife passed it on to her lover. The Duchess of York was supposed to have contracted the illness in her turn, and this was blamed for so many of her children proving ‘sickly and infirm’. Even the pains that afflicted her daughter Anne as an adult were sometimes attributed to her having inherited ‘the dregs of a tainted original’.
In fact, as James had healthy children by his mistress Arabella Churchill, it seems unlikely that he was syphilitic, and that this caused his daughters’ ailments.
The pleasures of the table helped console the Duchess for her husband’s infidelities. One observer recalled that she ‘had a heartier appetite than any other woman in the kingdom … It was an edifying spectacle to watch her Highness eat’. Whereas with every year the Duke of York grew progressively thinner, ‘his poor consort … waxed so fat that it was a marvel to see’. By 1668 an Italian diplomat reported that she was almost unrecognisable because ‘superfluous fat … has so altered the proportions of a very fine figure and a most lovely face’.
The Duchess’s daughters would both inherit her tendency to plumpness, with Anne in her later years being clinically obese.
The Duke and Duchess of York’s eldest son, whom the King had created Duke of Cambridge, only lived a few months. When he died in May 1661 the Venetian ambassador reported he was ‘lamented by his parents and all the court’, but Pepys commented heartlessly that his death ‘will please everybody; and I hear that the Duke and his lady themselves are not much troubled at it’. The reason for this was that owing to the controversial circumstances of his birth, the child’s legitimacy would always be open to question. It was true that in February 1661, Hyde, the child’s grandfather, had taken the precaution of establishing a formal record both of his daughter’s betrothal to James while in Holland (which, if properly attested, was as binding in law as a church wedding) and their subsequent marriage at Worcester House.
Nevertheless, problems might still have arisen in future.
Though convenient in some ways, the death of the little Duke of Cambridge did mean that the succession to the crown was not secured beyond the current generation. There was therefore relief when the Duchess of York became pregnant again. However, after she gave birth on 30 April 1662 to a daughter, christened Mary, Pepys reported ‘I find nobody pleased’. Women were not formally barred from inheriting the throne by Salic law, as in France, but it was agreed that a male monarch was infinitely preferable, and even the memory of the glorious reign of Elizabeth I, who had become Queen a century earlier, could not eradicate the idea that women were not really fitted to rule kingdoms. It was not until July 1663, when the Duchess of York produced a boy ‘to the great joy of the court’, that the outlook appeared better.
The child was named James after his father and in 1664 the King conferred on him the same title as his ill-fated brother.
When Anne was born in February 1665, few would have predicted that she would one day wear the crown. King Charles II had married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in May 1662, and though as yet she had borne him no children, there were still hopes she would do so. Any legitimate child of the King would of course take precedence in the line of succession to those of the Duke of York. Anne’s two older siblings also had a better claim to the throne than she, while any legitimate son of James born after her would inherit the crown before his sisters. She could only become Queen if she had no surviving brothers, and if her elder sister Mary predeceased her without leaving children. Only a pessimist would have considered this a likely eventuality, so Anne appeared destined to be no more than an insignificant princess belonging to a cadet branch of the royal family.
The royal nursery was supervised by the Duke of Cambridge’s governess, Lady Frances Villiers, but from the first Anne was allocated her own servants. On her accession in 1702 Anne’s former wet nurse, Margery Farthing, called attention to the fact ‘that she did give suck to her present majesty … for the space of fifteen months’ and successfully asked for financial recognition. In 1669 Anne was listed as having a dresser, three rockers, a sempstress, a page of the backstairs, and a necessary woman, whose board wages amounted to £260.
Anne’s parents cannot have seen much of their daughter during the first few months of her life. Following a period of active service at sea, the Duke of York went on a northern tour with his wife, leaving their children in the care of Lady Frances. Contemporaries would not have considered the Duke and Duchess to be negligent for absenting themselves. It was standard practice for aristocratic infants to be boarded out with wet nurses until weaned, so lengthy separations were considered the norm.
As an adult Anne would give the impression that she had almost no memory of her mother, who died when her daughter was only six. In 1693 she was shown a picture of her and commented ‘I … believe ’tis a very good one, though I do not remember enough of her to know whether it is like her or no; but it is very like one the King [Charles II] had, which everybody said was so’. Since Anne went abroad for two years when she was three and a half years old, and only returned when her mother’s health was in terminal decline, it is understandable that her recollection of her was very hazy.
In September 1664 Pepys had been delighted to see the Duke of York playing with Lady Mary, then aged two, ‘like an ordinary private father of a child’. The compiler of James’s authorised Life proclaimed him ‘the most affectionate father on earth’, and other sources concurred that he was ‘most indulgent’ towards his daughters. Even in 1688 Anne herself did not deny that James had always ‘been very kind and tender towards her’.
On the whole James was justified in priding himself on being a conscientious and benevolent parent. As will be seen, he was upset when circumstances forced him to live apart from his adolescent daughter Anne, and made strenuous efforts to ensure that their separation was as short as possible. When they were reunited he reported her activities with paternal pride in his letters, and he always showed a touching concern for her health. After she married he was generous to her financially, and was compassionate when she was distressed by the loss of her children. However, James did expect deference and compliance from his daughters, and Anne was always slightly scared of him. While there is no known instance when he lost his temper with her, she was cautious of what she said to him. By temperament ‘as stiff as a mule’, James was apt to flare up when anyone disagreed with him, and though a time would come when outspokenness on Anne’s part might have been construed as a virtue, by then the habit of circumspection was too deeply ingrained to be abandoned. When urged to give James the benefit of her advice, she answered that she had always deliberately avoided discussing weighty topics with him, protesting ‘if she had said anything … he would have been angry; and then God knows what might have happened’.
It is true that Anne would ultimately flagrantly defy James both as a father and a sovereign. It was to be an astonishing act for a woman who was by nature utterly conventional, and who was so politically conservative that her instinctive affinities lay with those who considered ‘obedience to kings, as to parents, a moral, nay a divine law’.
Even then, however, she eschewed a direct confrontation with James, who remained under the illusion that she was a dutiful daughter until the very moment of rupture.
The summer of 1667 was a ghastly time for the Duke and Duchess of York. The couple had had another son a year before, but in May 1667 both he and his elder brother fell seriously ill. On 22 May the little Duke of Kendal died of convulsion fits and a month later ‘some general disease’ carried off his brother the Duke of Cambridge. As far as most people were concerned, this once again plunged the Stuart dynasty into crisis. The Venetian ambassador’s report did not even mention that the Duke of York still had two daughters who could ascend the throne in due course, instead stating baldly, ‘The royal house of England is without posterity’.
On 8 August the Duchess of York’s mother died. Three weeks later, still reeling from the blow, the widowed Lord Chancellor – who had been created Earl of Clarendon six years earlier – fell from power; in late November he fled abroad to escape trumped-up charges of treason. The Duke of York had done his best to support his father-in-law, but the latter had long been unpopular, not least because it was falsely claimed that he had deliberately arranged for the King to marry a barren bride so that his own descendants would inherit the crown. Once Hyde had antagonised the King himself, his ruin was inevitable. Pepys noted the Duke of York’s prestige had been ‘wounded by it’, and that he was ‘much a less man than he was’.
Edward Hyde was never permitted to return from foreign exile. His departure to France and the death of her grandmother narrowed Anne’s family circle. Hyde and his wife had enjoyed seeing their grandchildren and had shown a keen interest in their welfare, but henceforth his two sons Henry (who became Earl of Clarendon on his father’s death in 1674) and Laurence (created Earl of Rochester in 1681) were the only relations on Anne’s maternal side who would feature in her life. Even they were not wholly on a family footing, for the disparity in rank between them and their niece acted as a barrier, and the Earl of Ailesbury observed that Anne never addressed either of them as ‘Uncle’. It was not only etiquette that created a distance, for on reaching maturity Anne would complain that they were not as attentive to her wishes as they should have been. At times she appeared to welcome the advice that her elder uncle proffered her, once telling him she valued the way that she ‘could talk freely’ with him. In general, however, she was guarded about consulting him and his brother.
Some consolation for the Duke and Duchess of York’s recent run of bad luck came on 14 September 1667 when the Duchess had another son, Edgar, who was soon created Duke of Cambridge. Pepys thought it a development that would ‘settle men’s minds mightily’ but unfortunately the child proved a frail bulwark for shoring up the dynasty. He was the ‘least and leanest child’ the Duchess had ever produced, and his ‘very delicate constitution and frequent attacks of deadly sickness’ did not augur well for the future.
Anne too was not a strong child, for she suffered from ‘a kind of defluxion in her eyes’. The medical term was used frequently in the seventeenth century, and could just describe a localised pain, supposedly caused by a ‘flow of humours’ to that area. Alternatively it is possible that her eyes constantly watered, or emitted a discharge. Whatever the cause, this ‘serious eye disorder’ was so worrying that Anne was sent abroad for treatment while still a toddler. The Duke of York believed that French doctors would offer the best chance of curing his daughter, an idea that probably came from his mother, now based in France. Accordingly Anne was entrusted to her grandmother’s care and would spend over a year at her country house at Colombes on the Seine. In July 1668 she was taken across the Channel ‘with her retinue’, and on landing was met at Dieppe by coaches sent by the Queen Mother. According to Anne’s early biographer, Abel Boyer, when it became known at home that she was in France, the ‘surmise that she was gone thither to be bred a Roman Catholic’ caused ‘no small alarm’. Since her grandmother was a known proselytiser, such fears were understandable, if unfounded.
By August 1669 the Queen Mother’s own health was causing concern, but her death on 10 September came as a surprise. Anne was taken in by her aunt Henrietta, who was married to King Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe Duc d’Orléans. When Anne joined the nursery at Saint Cloud, its other occupants were her seven-year-old first cousin Marie Louise – who grew up to become Queen of Spain and died young – and a baby girl, born a few weeks earlier, who would later marry the Duke of Savoy.
The Duchesse d’Orléans was far from robust, and on 20/30 June 1670 she died after a sudden collapse. There were dark rumours that she had been poisoned by her husband, although there can be little doubt that natural causes were to blame. Certainly the Duc was not greatly grieved by his loss, but he did take a meticulous interest in ensuring that his wife was mourned in accordance with court etiquette. When the Duchesse de Montpensier came to offer her condolences she was surprised to see that the Duc had fitted out not only his eldest daughter but also five-year-old Anne in miniature court mourning costumes, complete with long trains of purple velvet. The Duchesse found this absurd, but quite apart from the fact that children love dressing up, it is unlikely that Anne minded. As an adult she too would take such matters seriously. Jonathan Swift declared that she was ‘so exact an observer of forms that she seemed to have made it her study, and would often descend so low as to observe in her domestics of either sex who came into her presence whether a ruffle, a periwig or the lining of a coat were unsuitable at certain times’. Mourning rituals were important to her, and so was protocol, leading the Duchess of Marlborough to complain that Anne’s mind was so taken up with ‘ceremonies and customs of courts and such like insignificant trifles’ that her conversation turned chiefly ‘upon fashions and rules of precedence’.
The English officially accepted the French autopsy findings stating that the Duchesse had not been a victim of foul play, but it was judged best to bring Anne home without delay. Accordingly, Lady Frances Villiers was sent with her husband to escort Anne to England. Before she left France the child was presented with a pair of diamond and pearl bracelets from Louis XIV, the monarch who would later become her greatest adversary.
Following her return to England on 23 July 1670, Anne was judged ‘very much improved both in her constitution and personal accomplishments’. For a time she ‘appeared to acquire a healthful constitution of body’, but she did suffer occasional relapses, and in 1677 was reported to be ‘ill of her eyes again’. Her vision remained defective and as an adult she would try to remedy it by consulting oculists such as William Read, an itinerant tailor who recommended drinking beer in the morning to hydrate the brain, and who concocted an eyewash of sulphur, turpentine, vivum, and honey of roses. She suffered less than her sister Mary, whose letters abound with complaints of being plagued by ‘sore eyes’ which became particularly bad if she read or wrote by candlelight.
Anne’s ailment had left her slightly disfigured. Abel Boyer noted that she had acquired ‘a contraction in the upper lids that gave a cloudy air to her countenance’, indicating she had a slight squint. This made her look ill-tempered, creating an unfortunate impression. The Duchess of Marlborough declared that Anne’s features appeared set in a ‘sullen and constant frown’, and Anne herself was conscious that her face had a naturally grim expression. In 1683 she told a friend who thought she was displeased with her, ‘I have sometimes when I do not know it, a very grave look, which has made others as well as you, ask me if I was angry with them, … Therefore do not mind my looks for I really look grave and angry when I am not so’.
Meanwhile Anne’s mother was in poor physical condition with an ‘illness, under which she languished long’. This was probably cancer of the breast, for the fact that upon her death ‘one of her breasts burst, being a mass of corruption’ suggests that she had a tumour there.
The Duchess of York’s spiritual condition afforded equal grounds for concern. By this time, both of Anne’s parents had ceased to be firm believers in the Anglican faith. James had experienced a crisis of conscience in early 1669 and had begun secret discussions with a Catholic priest, but continued to attend Anglican services. Later that year the Duchess also began to gravitate towards Rome. She later recalled that until this point she had been ‘one of the greatest enemies’ the Catholic Church had, but reading The History of the Reformation by the Protestant divine, Peter Heylyn, had the unexpected effect of forcing her to re-examine her beliefs. After enduring ‘the most terrible agonies in the world’, she was ‘fully convinced and reconciled’ to the Catholic Church in August 1670. James felt inspired by the manner in which his wife’s hostility to the Roman faith had unexpectedly crumbled, and this memory would later encourage him to believe that the most unlikely candidates were ripe for conversion. In particular he clung to the hope that his younger daughter Anne’s ostensibly unshakeable commitment to the Anglican Church would prove as fragile as her mother’s.
Well aware that if her conversion became public she ‘must lose all the friends and credit I have here’, the Duchess of York tried to keep it secret. Inevitably, however, her failure to take communion attracted attention. In December 1670 the King took the matter up with his brother, who admitted his wife was a convert. James promised he would take great care to conceal this, but as the Duchess’s health worsened, her refusal to permit her Anglican chaplains to pray with her left little doubt that she had forsaken the English Church. Appalled by reports that his daughter had succumbed to the lure of Rome, her father wrote from abroad expressing horror at her readiness to ‘suck in that poison’. He warned her that her conversion would bring ‘ruin to your children, of whose company and conversation you must look to be deprived, for God forbid that after such an apostasy you should have any power in [their] education’.
The Duchess of York would not lose custody of her children because she was an unfit mother; instead, she would be parted from them by death. On 9 February 1671 she gave birth to a daughter, who lived less than a year. After that the Duchess’s illness entered its final phase, and ‘came at last to a quicker crisis than had been apprehended’. ‘All of the sudden she fell into the agony of death’ and her last hours proved dreadful, ‘full of unspeakable torture’.
The Duchess had secretly received Catholic last rites, but pious Anglicans lamented that she had rejected the consolations of true religion and died ‘like a poor wretch’. Having died on Friday 31 March 1671 the Duchess ‘was opened on Saturday, embalmed on Sunday and buried’ the day after that. Gilbert Burnet stated coldly that ‘the change of her religion made her friends reckon her death a blessing rather than a loss’. One of her maids of honour noted ‘None remembered her after one week; none sorry for her. She smelt extremely, was tossed and flung about, and everyone did what they would with that stately carcase’. Court mourning for her was curtailed so as not to interfere with celebrations for the King’s birthday.
The decade since the Restoration had been fraught with loss for the Duke of York as ‘hardly a year passed without some sensible mortification, as loss of children, mother, wife, sister’.
Apart from her older sister, Anne, aged six, was left bereft of all female members of her immediate family. Her grandmother, mother, and aunt had all been intelligent, vivacious women, and perhaps if they had lived longer they could have encouraged Anne to be less introverted. As it was, although her sister Mary was a chatterbox, Anne developed into a chronically shy child, and all her life was painfully inarticulate.
The Duchess of Marlborough later recalled that as a young woman ‘the Princess was so silent that she rarely spoke more than was necessary to answer a question’. At fourteen, Anne was already conscious that she was a poor communicator and acknowledged this as a failing, noting ruefully, ‘I have not, maybe, so good a way of expressing myself as some people have’. Four years later she was still lamenting ‘I can never express myself in words’. Even if Anne deprecated her lack of verbal skills, she did not accept that her thoughts and feelings could be dismissed on that account as insignificant, insisting that while ‘there may be people in the world that can say more for themselves … nobody’s heart I am sure is more sincere’.
Although words did not come easily, her diffidence did not spring from a complete absence of self-esteem, and she prided herself on being a person of sound instincts and honest convictions.
James had by now advanced far down the same spiritual road as his late wife. In 1672 it was noticed that for the first time he did not take the sacrament at Easter. He only ceased attending Anglican services of any kind in 1676, but there could be little doubt that he had, in effect, already abandoned the Church. This had become clear after anti-Catholic feeling had resulted in the passing of the Test Act on 29 March 1673. The bill prevented Catholics from holding official employments in England by insisting that all office holders had to take an oath repudiating the doctrine of transubstantiation ‘in full and positive words’.
James could not comply with this requirement and consequently had to resign from his position as Lord Admiral in June 1673.
The discovery that the heir apparent to the throne was a Catholic caused the greatest consternation. Fear of Popery was a force whose potency bore no relation to the number of Catholics in England. It is estimated that in 1676 Catholics constituted just over one percent of the population, although admittedly the figure for the peerage would have been higher. The memory of past outrages perpetrated by Catholics was kept alive by vicious propaganda. The events of Mary Tudor’s reign, a hundred and twenty years earlier, were used to stir up dread of the Popish menace. As alarm mounted at the prospect of a Catholic becoming King there were predictions that in that event England would again be subjected to ‘those bloody massacres and inhuman Smithfield butcheries’. It was suggested that James would prove to be ‘Queen Mary in breeches’, while another person warned ‘We must resolve when we have a prince of the Popish religion to be Papists or burn’.
Fears did not centre exclusively on the possibility that a Catholic ruler would deny his Protestant subjects the right to practise their faith. There were also secular considerations. Catholicism was seen as an autocratic religion, presided over by a Pope whose authority could not be questioned, and this gave rise to the idea that it had a natural affinity with repressive political systems. The prime example of an illiberal Catholic regime was absolutist France, where King Louis XIV ruled without having to secure the consent of a representative assembly to pass laws or levy taxes. France was very much on everyone’s mind at this time, for it was currently emerging as a new superpower, and its king seemed intent on oppressing his neighbours as well as his subjects. In 1672 he had launched a war of aggression with Holland, intending to crush that republic. Though victory did not come as easily as he had hoped, it was clear he aimed at nothing less than radically altering the European balance of power. It was feared that if James inherited the throne, far from trying to restrain Louis, he would instead emulate him by undermining his subjects’ rightful liberties. It was thought that as a Catholic he would be automatically predisposed to rule arbitrarily, for, as the Earl of Shaftesbury put it, ‘Popery and slavery like two sisters’ went ‘hand in hand’.
It took some years before disquiet about James’s religion became so marked that his opponents sought to prevent him becoming King. Since Anne was only eight when her father resigned as Lord High Admiral, it is unlikely that she was aware from the first of the implications of his being a Catholic convert. In time, however, it would define her relations with him.
After being constantly ‘subject to a variety of diseases beyond the endurance of the strongest constitution’ Anne’s brother Edgar had died in June 1671. The loss of what the Venetian ambassador called the ‘sole sprig’
of the royal family meant that Anne became a figure of greater significance. She was now third in line to the throne, and since the Queen showed no sign of providing an heir, Anne would not be moved lower down the order of succession unless her father remarried and had a son.
Anne’s education should thus, logically, have been a subject of national concern, and yet it was astonishingly inadequate. She and Mary were entrusted to the care of Lady Frances Villiers and spent much of their time in the crumbling Tudor palace at Richmond the royal governess shared with her husband, the Keeper of Richmond Park. Anne developed a marked ‘fondness for the house … where she … lived as a child’ and, believing ‘the air of that place good for children’, wanted her own son to be brought up there.
Royal daughters were no longer accorded the sort of education that had been deemed appropriate when Queen Elizabeth I had been in the schoolroom. Anne’s great grandfather James I of England had believed that it was undesirable to introduce women to the classics. Such views were still so prevalent that even the cultivated diarist and virtuoso, John Evelyn, would pronounce in 1676 that ‘learning does commonly but corrupt most women’, as in their case the study of ancient texts was ‘apt to turn to impertinence and vanity’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was slightly younger than Anne, observed, ‘There is hardly a creature in the world more despicable or more liable to universal ridicule than a learned woman’. Anne herself appears to have been suspicious of women with intellectual pretensions. The Duchess of Marlborough wrote that one reason Anne did not like her aunt Lady Clarendon was that she ‘looked like a madwoman and talked like a scholar, which the Princess thought agreed very well together’.
There was little likelihood that Anne’s father or uncle would try to counter convention by turning her and her sister into paragons of learning. Their own education had been disrupted by the Civil War, and neither James nor Charles was academically minded. The ideas of a former schoolmistress called Bashua Makin, who in 1673 published a pamphlet dedicated to the Lady Mary, would have seemed outlandish to both men. She wanted gentlewomen to be instructed in a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, ancient languages and rhetoric, whereas currently on emerging from the classroom they could only ‘polish their hands and feet … curl their locks … [and] dress and trim their bodies’.
The princesses’ parents both spoke French fluently and in that language, at least, the two girls received excellent instruction from a Frenchman, Peter de Laine. As a result when she was Queen, Anne would have no difficulty communicating with French diplomats in their own tongue.
Anne was taught enough basic arithmetic to be able to inspect her household accounts on marriage. She was careful about checking these and once picked up a discrepancy after noticing in 1698 that ‘the expenses of oil and vinegar were very extravagant’. Even so, the Duchess of Marlborough maintained that Anne was insufficiently vigilant to detect that her Treasurer of the Household, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, had tried to defraud her. Still less was Anne capable of understanding the complex financial arrangements that underpinned government during her reign.
The main emphasis in her education was on acquiring feminine accomplishments. Mrs Henrietta Bannister taught her music, for which Anne’s ‘ear was very exquisite’. Anne also received guitar lessons from Henry Delauney, who was paid £50 a year. Strumming on the guitar was currently a fashionable accomplishment for ladies, and Anne’s father ‘played passably’ on the instrument.
Dancing lessons were another important part of the curriculum. The Duchess of Marlborough would grudgingly concede that in her youth Anne had ‘a person and appearance not at all ungraceful’, and until she became physically incapable of doing the steps, Anne derived intense pleasure from dancing. In 1686, when the dissenter Roger Morrice noted in his journal that Anne had recently performed at a court ball, he added disapprovingly ‘as she does constantly’. Within a few years her burgeoning weight and attacks of lameness made dancing difficult. Nevertheless in 1691 she was reported to have taken to the floor during her birthday celebrations, and even in 1696 she managed to dance at a party for her brother-in-law. That was almost certainly the last time she was able to do so, and long before she became Queen dancing had ceased to be an option.
Anne’s dancing master was a Frenchman called Mr Gory. He instructed her in the latest Continental dances, but she did not despise native traditions, patriotically maintaining that some English country dances were ‘much finer’ than those imported from France. Years later, she would engage Mr Gory, by then old and rich, to teach dancing to her son, William, Duke of Gloucester. Unfortunately the little boy was badly coordinated, and so hated his lessons that he called Mr Gory ‘“Old Dog” for straining his joints a little’.
Anne and Mary were taught drawing by the dwarf artist Richard Gibson, with Mary outshining Anne in this and in needlework. Outdoor activities appealed more to Anne and by her teens she was a keen horse-woman, enjoying riding and hunting. She was also introduced to more frivolous recreations at an early age. Roger Morrice noted that Mary’s tastes had been shaped by what he termed ‘the prejudices of her education, which induced her to spend her time as other courtiers did in cards, dice, dances, plays and masques’. Anne liked all these pastimes as much as her sister. Card games such as basset played for high stakes were very much a feature of court life, and by the time Anne was fifteen she was a regular player at the tables.
Anne’s father would later advise that ‘young persons … should not … read romances, more especially the woman kind; ’tis but loss of time and is apt to put foolish and ridiculous thoughts into their head’. It is not clear whether he managed to stop his daughters reading novels, but they certainly derived literary pleasure from plays. In 1679 fourteen-year-old Anne reported that she was planning to watch a rehearsal of an amateur production of George Etherege’s cynical and immoral comedy The Man of Mode, and it is obvious that she already knew the piece well. She was displeased by the casting of one female role, writing scathingly ‘Mrs Watts is to be Lady Townley, which part I believe won’t much become her’. Some years before that, her imagination had been captured by another drama, Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates, which exerted a fascination on her for a long time. The play was a perennial ‘favourite of the tender hearted ladies’, and was a tale of sibling rivalry, tragic love, and court intrigue. Anne’s favourite character was the hero, Ziphares. This princely youth refuses to forsake his true love Semandra, while remaining loyal to his father, the eastern potentate Mithridates, who has designs on the girl himself. In 1681 Anne appeared in an amateur production of Mithridates put on at Holyrood House when her father was in exile in Scotland. James watched her proudly, fortunately unaware that Mithridates’s fall at the end of the play foreshadowed his own. After remarking ‘How swiftly fate can make or unmake kings’, one character laments in the final scene,
Where now are all the busy officers
The supple courtiers and big men of war,
That bustled here and made a little world?
Revolted all.
For James these lines would prove all too apposite.
The Duchess of Marlborough, who would be the recipient of a vast amount of correspondence from Anne, declared ‘Her letters were very indifferent, both in sense and spelling’.
The accusation of poor spelling was unfair given the standards of the day. Anne spelt better than many aristocratic ladies at the Stuart court and, for that matter, than Sarah’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough.
According to an early historian of Anne’s reign, ‘it was an unhappiness to this Queen that she was not much acquainted with our English history and the reigns and actions of her predecessors’. Despite ‘beginning to apply herself to it’ shortly before her accession, it proved too late to fill up all the gaps in her knowledge. She had nevertheless managed to learn enough about the Tudors to identify parallels between herself and Queen Elizabeth I. Some of the events of the recent Civil War were also familiar to her, although inevitably she viewed these from a royalist standpoint. The executed Charles I was now revered as a martyr who had died defending the Church of England. The anniversary of his death was observed by a ‘day of fast and humiliation’, and on that date Anne and her sister wore black. Church services were held to commemorate his murder, during which the congregation was reminded that ‘upon no pretext whatever, subjects might resist their lawful princes’. There was little recognition that Parliament had had some legitimate grievances, and that this had contributed to the outbreak of civil war.
The sufferings of the Church of England in the decade after the royalist cause collapsed were also much emphasised. Under the Commonwealth, the Book of Common Prayer had been outlawed, episcopacy had been abolished, and hundreds of Anglican clergymen had been deprived of their livings. At the Restoration of the monarchy, the reinstated bishops took revenge on their former oppressors. All those Protestants who could not comply with every tenet of the newly resurgent Church were penalised, and ‘rigid prelates … made it a matter of conscience to give … the least indulgence’ to dissenters.
By the terms of the Conventicle Act, those who worshipped in a manner not authorised by the state were liable to savage fines and imprisonment.
For much of Charles II’s reign, the tribulations of nonconformists far exceeded those imposed on Anglicans during the Interregnum, but Anne was brought up to have little sympathy for this sizeable minority. She accepted that dissenters posed a serious threat to the well-being of the Church of England, and the fact that nonconformity was associated in the mind of the court with political radicalism further predisposed her against them. Her upbringing helped shape her conservative outlook: Sarah Marlborough would claim Anne ‘sucked in with her milk’ a distaste for those who upheld the liberties of the subject, while the Roundheads who had executed her grandfather were viewed as little short of demonic.
There can be no doubt that had Anne been a boy she would have been taught very differently. The rigorous scholastic programme designed for her son William, Duke of Gloucester at the end of the seventeenth century shows what then comprised a princely education. Whether such a training, with its heavy emphasis on classical languages, would have made Anne a better ruler remains conjectural. As it was, she ascended the throne in what the Duchess of Marlborough scoffingly called ‘a state of helpless ignorance’.
Nevertheless, she never seems to have doubted her ability to take on the responsibilities of sovereignty.
Great care was at least taken over Anne’s religious education. When she returned to England from France in 1670, her father was already gravitating towards Catholicism. Fully aware it would cause political meltdown if Anne and Mary did likewise, Charles II saw to it that both his nieces were brought up as Protestants. James resented this, recalling bitterly ‘it was much against his will that his daughters went to church and were bred Protestants’, but it was made clear to him that if he ‘endeavoured to have them instructed in his own religion … they would have immediately been quite taken from him’.
James was particularly irked by the choice of Henry Compton to be his daughters’ spiritual preceptor. Compton came from an aristocratic family and had not been ordained until after the Restoration, when he was already in his thirties. Before that he had seen active service in the royalist army, and he still had such a soldierly manner that James complained he spoke ‘more like a colonel than a bishop’. He was militant in other ways, for he was a known ‘enemy to the Papists’,
and as Compton’s influence at court grew, James had many clashes with him. He could not prevent him becoming a Privy Councillor in January 1676, but a year later the Duke did succeed in blocking the then Bishop of London’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Compton was not just intolerant towards Catholics, for he was also ‘very severe upon the dissenting Protestants’. This hostility helped Anne form the idea that nonconformists were fanatical and untrustworthy. ‘As she was bred up in High Church principles, they were believed to be always predominant in her’, and all her life she was of the view that the Anglican Church needed protection against the dissenters.
Compton, known for his low, gruff voice, was not a particularly inspiring teacher, but his advocacy of unquestioning faith in preference to intellectual rigour was an approach that suited Anne. After marrying and going to live in Holland, her sister Mary came to feel that her spiritual education had been defective, and she set about compensating for this by intensive study. When her father later sought to convert her by sending her Catholic tracts, he was astounded by the learned way she marshalled arguments against him. Had Anne been called upon to do so, it is unlikely that she could have acquitted herself so competently. In 1687 she did commend to her sister some of the religious works currently being published in England, declaring ‘a great many of our side … are very well writ’, but in general she ‘never pursued any study in those points with much application’.
If complex theological debate was beyond Anne, her Anglican faith was firm and undeviating. ‘In all respects a true daughter of the Church of England’, she was a ‘devout worshipper’ who was ‘steadfast and regular in her devotions’. As well as setting aside time for private prayer, she assiduously attended church services and took the sacrament whenever appropriate. At the height of their friendship, almost the only thing that prompted her to criticise Sarah Churchill was Sarah’s infrequent church attendance.
Anne’s religion consoled and sustained her when she endured tragedies and bereavements that might have caused others to lose their trust in God.
When Anne’s faith was called in question, she reaffirmed it in simple and positive terms which not only left no doubt as to the strength of her convictions but also made clear the extent to which she had absorbed the anti-Catholic sentiments of Bishop Compton. She told Mary in 1686:
I abhor the principles of the Church of Rome as much as it is possible for any to do, and I as much value the doctrine of the Church of England. And certainly there is the greatest reason in the world to do so, for the doctrine of the Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous and directly contrary to the scriptures, and their ceremonies – most of them – plain downright idolatry. But God be thanked, we were not bred up in that communion, but are of a Church that is pious and sincere, and conformable in all its principles to the scriptures. Our Church teaches no doctrine but what is just, holy and good, or what is profitable to salvation; and the Church of England is, without all doubt, the only true Church.
A Venetian diplomat recorded that ‘The Duchess of York was not buried when negotiations were begun for a fresh one’. James’s eagerness to acquire a new spouse was partly because he wanted sons and heirs. It took him some time to find a bride, not least because he was adamant that candidates must be ‘young and beautiful’.
At length he decided to propose to an Italian princess, fifteen-year-old Mary Beatrice of Modena, who fulfilled both requirements. Negotiations dragged on because the girl had wanted to be a nun and it required the intervention of the Pope to persuade her that marriage to James represented a higher vocation. In September 1673 Mary Beatrice was wedded to James by proxy at a ceremony in Modena, but when news arrived in England that James had chosen a Catholic princess as his wife it was very ill received. After Parliament met on 20 October, a motion was passed urging that Mary Beatrice should be sent straight home on reaching England. Rather than heed these demands, Charles II prorogued Parliament before her arrival in November.
‘The offspring of this marriage will probably inherit the crown’, the Venetian ambassador noted, but there is no evidence that the likelihood of being superseded in the succession by Mary Beatrice’s sons upset Mary and Anne at this stage. Certainly their father assumed they would welcome their young stepmother, jovially telling eleven-year-old Mary ‘he had provided a playfellow for her’.
Once she had recovered from her homesickness and her initial distaste for her middle-aged husband, Mary Beatrice’s youthful high spirits manifested themselves. There had been fears that someone of her ‘Italian breeding’ would have very pronounced ideas about etiquette, but here too her informality came as a pleasant surprise as she enjoyed games of blind man’s buff and snowball fights. Lady Tuke said she would never have expected her to be ‘such a romp as she proves’.
Initially the signs were that Mary Beatrice had established an excellent relationship with her stepdaughters. In 1675 an observer reported she ‘diverts herself … with the princesses, whose conversation is much to her taste and satisfaction’. Three years later she would say of Mary, ‘I love her as if she was my own daughter’, and she gave every indication of being equally fond of Anne. When the Duchess of York accompanied her husband to Scotland in 1680 she complained not just about having to leave behind her own daughter Isabella, but also at being parted from Anne. The following year Mary Beatrice expressed delight when her stepdaughter was permitted to join her at Edinburgh, declaring herself ‘much pleased to have the Lady Anne with me’.
Anne was assumed to reciprocate these warm feelings, and in the early years it is indeed probable that they were genuinely on good terms. In time, however, Anne would come to detest Mary Beatrice.
The fact that Mary and Anne were being brought up in a Catholic household was a cause of concern to the public. When Parliament met in February 1674 the House of Lords attempted to pass a resolution that called for ‘the removal of the Duke of York’s daughters from his charge because the Duchess is a Catholic’.
Once again the King staved off trouble by proroguing Parliament before the measure was put to the vote.
Considering she was not even allowed to bring up her own children as Catholics, Mary Beatrice’s chances of converting her stepdaughters were surely slim. Having given birth in January 1675 to a baby girl (dismissed as ‘but a daughter’ by the disappointed father) she was appalled when her husband explained that ‘their children were the property of the nation’, and would be removed from their parents’ care unless raised as Protestants. Accordingly the child (who died that October) was christened according to Anglican rites, and her elder sisters stood as godmothers.
Mary and Anne’s energies at this time were absorbed elsewhere with an acting project. In the autumn of 1674 the King had commissioned Thomas Crowne to write a masque to be staged at Whitehall, entitled Calisto, or The Chaste Nymph. Intended to rival the ballets and entertainments put on by Louis XIV in France, it was hoped that the masque would serve as an extravagant showpiece, in which ‘the splendour of the English monarchy will be seen’. The seven speaking roles were all taken by young ladies of the court. Anne’s sister Mary was given the role of the eponymous nymph, Calisto, while Anne played Calisto’s younger sister Nyphe. Even in this supporting role there were quite a lot of lines for a nine-year-old to master, but fortunately Anne had an excellent memory. Like other members of the cast, she was coached by Mrs Betterton, wife of the actor-manager Thomas Betterton. When Anne was a bit older the training she received at this point would be supplemented by lessons from another celebrated actress, Elizabeth Barry, who was credited with much improving her pupil’s diction.
On 22 February 1675 the masque was staged ‘in all its bravery and pomp’ in the presence of the King and Queen, foreign ministers and anyone else who had been able to secure seats. It was a lavish production, in which the elaborately costumed female performers appeared ‘all covered with jewels’. Basking in the audience’s ‘great applause’, the delighted author enthused that the success of the play owed much to the ‘graceful action, incomparable beauty and rich and splendid habits of the princesses’.
Crowne had based his plot on a story from Ovid, relating how the nymph Calisto, servitor of the Goddess Diana, had been raped by Jupiter after the latter gained access to her by impersonating Diana. For decency’s sake, Crowne toned down the story so that Calisto successfully fends off Jupiter’s advances, but the script still contained much sexual innuendo. In particular the scenes in which Jupiter, masquerading as Diana, tries to force himself upon the unwilling nymph have an erotic subtext. Calisto is overcome with shame and confusion at finding herself an object of sexual attention from a woman, and even expresses dread that, like Diana, she might become infected by a ‘strange uncommon’ malady that will prompt her to commit ‘some horrid act’.
It is curious that Anne, whose reputation would later be compromised by allegations of lesbianism, should have appeared as a child in an entertainment which touched obliquely on such matters.
No one who when young had any experience of the Restoration court could be said to have had an entirely sheltered upbringing. Pepys memorably observed that there was ‘nothing almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom’. Marital infidelity was so much the norm that in her early teens Anne’s sister Mary would write nonchalantly to a friend: ‘in two or three years men are always weary of their wives and [go] for mistresses as soon as they can get them’. Perhaps it was the behaviour of her father which planted this idea, although the court was of course also swarming with Charles II’s paramours. Anne was well aware of their existence, and came to dislike the King’s principal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. Mary and Anne were not insulated from the gossip and scandal that periodically engulfed the Duchess of York’s maids of honour, many of whom were themselves barely out of adolescence.
Far from being corrupted by their early environment, Mary and Anne both developed strong moral values and never lost sight of them. In view of their position, they were obviously less vulnerable than other young women at court, and in many ways they were carefully protected. One obvious precaution was to limit their exposure to predatory men, and at Richmond and London their social circle was almost exclusively female. Yet even here the princesses proved emotionally susceptible, developing schoolgirl crushes which, though innocent enough, had an intensity startling to modern sensibilities.
Anne and Mary of course relied upon each other for companionship, and were very close when young. Mary once referred to Anne as ‘a creature … so double dear to me’, insisting that she had always cherished her with ‘a love too great to increase and too natural not to last always’. In a melodramatic moment she wrote of her protective feelings for ‘the only sister I have in the world, the sister I love like my own life’. Mary was apt to think that Anne was too easily swayed by others, although, somewhat paradoxically, she also complained of her stubbornness, a character trait that manifested itself at an early age. As an adult Mary liked recalling an occasion when they had been walking in the park and began arguing about whether a distant object was a man or a tree. Mary insisted it was a man, and as they drew closer it became apparent that she had been right. Mary demanded, ‘“Now sister, are you satisfied that it is a man?” But Lady Anne, after she saw what it was, turned away, and persisting still in her own side of the question, cried out, “No sister, it is a tree”’.
The sisters’ social circle included Lady Frances Villiers’s six daughters, and their stepmother’s maids of honour. Among them was the future Duchess of Marlborough, Sarah Jennings, who in 1673, aged thirteen, had become a maid of honour to Mary Beatrice. Sarah was five years older than Anne, but she later claimed that this did not discourage them from playing together, and that Anne ‘even then expressed a particular fondness for me’.
In both Anne and Mary’s case, however, the friendship that meant most to them in their early teens was with Frances Apsley, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, the Treasurer of the Duke of York’s household. The two of them wrote some remarkable letters to her, most of them undated, although the correspondence appears to have started around 1675, when Mary was thirteen and Frances Apsley was twenty-two. Mary’s letters are astonishingly ardent. She addressed Frances as ‘my dearest dear husband’ while styling herself ‘your faithful wife, true to your bed’. A typical effusion reads, ‘My much loved husband … How I dote on you, oh, I am in raptures of a sweet amaze, when I think of you I am in an ecstasy’. A little later Mary declares ‘I love you with a flame more lasting than the vestals’ fire … I love you with a love that ne’er was known by man; I have for you excess of friendship, more of love than any woman can for women’.
It is somewhat surprising that a woman of Frances’s age was happy to be the recipient of these fevered schoolgirl outpourings, but she gave the impression that she fully reciprocated Mary’s affection. She claimed to be as ‘lovesick’ as her teenage devotee, and that she had been moved to tears when she suspected Mary of wavering in her adoration. A year or so later, however, Mary and Frances’s relationship was disrupted when Anne – now aged about twelve – came between them ‘with her alluring charms’. After Frances wrote to Anne and gave her a ring, Mary accused Frances of having ‘forsaken me quite’. She lamented that Anne now possessed Frances’s ‘heart … and your letters too, oh thrice happy she! She is happier than ever I was, for she has triumphed over a rival that once was happy in your love’. Mary described sitting consumed with misery as Frances and Anne ‘whispered and then laughed as if you had said, now we are rid of her, let us be happy, whilst poor unhappy I sat reading of a play, my heart ready to break … It made me ready to cry but before my happy rival I would not show my weak[ness]’.
Ultimately the situation resolved itself. Even before going to Holland in 1677, Mary had ceased to be tormented with jealousy over Frances and Anne. After her marriage she continued to write to Frances, but in much more measured terms. She insisted she now had no objection to Anne’s having ‘some part’ of Frances’s love, confident that she herself still had ‘the greatest share of your heart’.
The letters that Anne sent to Frances Apsley are less overwrought than her sister’s, but they still have curious aspects. For the purposes of the correspondence they took on the identities of the tragic lovers at the centre of Nathaniel Lee’s melodrama, Mithridates. Anne adopted a male persona, taking as her alter ego Lee’s hero, Prince Ziphares, while Frances became ‘dear adored Semandra’. Anne clearly saw nothing wrong with this, for she was open about the conceit, and in a letter to Frances’s mother Lady Apsley (of whom she was also very fond) she referred without embarrassment to ‘my fair Semandra’. When Anne was sent abroad to Brussels in 1679, she wrote affectionately to Frances, and back in England the following summer she sought permission from Lady Apsley for Frances to stay overnight as her guest at Windsor. During her stay in Scotland in 1681 Anne resumed her correspondence with her Semandra, but there are signs that by this time her affection was slightly cooling. She still signed herself ‘your Ziphares’, and protested ‘I do love you dearly, and not with that kind of love that I love all others who proffer themselves to be my friends’. However it appears that Frances, conscious that she was losing ground with Anne, had requested this reassurance, and Anne’s letter is also full of excuses for not writing more often.
It would be wrong to focus too much attention on the adolescent fantasies of teenage girls. Of the two sisters, Mary appears to have been the more strongly emotionally involved with Frances Apsley. Yet after she went to Holland in 1677, Mary never formed a comparable relationship with a member of her own sex.
In Anne’s case, her youthful affection for Frances Apsley foreshadowed deeper attachments to women in her mature years.
In the autumn of 1677 the princesses’ girlish existence, hitherto dominated by petty dramas and private obsessions, was altered forever. Fifteen-year-old Mary had been of marriageable age for three years, and the King now decided it was time to provide her with a husband. He was concerned that the monarchy was losing popularity because his heir apparent was a Catholic and he himself was justly suspected of having Catholic sympathies. In hopes of proclaiming his Protestant credentials, he began to think of matching his niece to his Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, son of the late Princess Royal. Such a union would delight Parliament because it would distance Charles II from the French, who were still at war with Holland. At the outset of the war, Charles had allied himself with Louis XIV, but in 1674 had signed peace terms with Holland. The conflict between France and Holland had continued, with the Dutch putting up a heroic resistance under the leadership of their hereditary stadholder and commander-in-chief, Prince William of Orange. By bestowing Mary on his nephew, Charles would indicate that he no longer wanted the French to win the struggle.
The match had obvious advantages for William. For the moment, Mary remained second in line to the English throne. Admittedly, there was a possibility that she could be displaced, for the Duchess of York, who had produced a daughter named Isabella in July 1676, was currently expecting another child. As things stood, however, Mary had a good chance of inheriting the crown. If she died childless, in theory it then passed to Anne, and it was only if she too died without heirs that it descended to William, whose claim came through his late mother. William nevertheless calculated that marrying Mary would bring him ‘a great step to one degree nearer the crown, and to all appearance the next [in line]’.
William visited England in October 1677, and having insisted on having a brief preliminary meeting with Mary, he asked the King for her hand. Charles agreed, and the Duke of York, who had formerly cherished unrealistic hopes that Mary could be betrothed to the French Dauphin, was prevailed upon to give his consent. After dining at Whitehall on 21 October, James returned to St James’s and took Mary into his closet to tell her that her wedding had been arranged, and that she would be going to live with Prince William in Holland. Shattered to learn that she was to be married to a stranger and wrenched from her homeland, Mary ‘wept all that afternoon and the following day’.
There was public rapture at the news that ‘the eldest daughter of the crown should sleep in Protestant arms’. However, when the marriage took place at St James’s on 4 November, the atmosphere in the palace could hardly have been less festive. Mary was still in a state of great distress, and the heavily pregnant Mary Beatrice was also ‘much grieved’ at the prospect of being separated from a stepdaughter she held ‘in much affection’. As for Anne, she was already sickening with what turned out to be smallpox. The atmosphere was not lightened by Charles’s excruciating jokes, and his urging Bishop Compton, who was performing the marriage, to ‘make haste lest his sister[-in-law] should be delivered of a son, and the marriage be disappointed’.
Things did not improve over the next few days. When Mary appeared with William at her side, she gave the impression of being ‘a very coy bride’, and the Prince was soon being criticised for ‘sullenness and clownishness’ and for taking ‘no notice of his princess at the play and ball’. According to the French ambassador, his mood darkened further when the Duchess of York gave birth to a boy on 7 November.
Three days after this Anne, who had been ill since 5 November, was confirmed as suffering from smallpox.
Smallpox was a dreaded scourge and a virulent epidemic was sweeping through the court. A few days after Anne was diagnosed, Lady Frances caught the disease, which in her case proved fatal. Anne’s life was also feared for, and many at court believed that her soul too was imperilled. To avoid spreading infection her chaplain Dr Edward Lake had been ordered not to read prayers in her bedchamber, but he worried this would leave her vulnerable to the blandishments of her nurse, ‘a very busy, zealous Roman Catholic’. He alerted Bishop Compton to the danger, and the latter promptly ordered him ‘to wait constantly on her highness and do all the offices ministerial which were incumbent’. Quarantine precautions meant that after being with Anne, Lake could have no further contact with Mary. On going to take his leave of her, he found her ‘very disconsolate, not only for her sister’s illness’, but because she was worried that Anne was in need of her guidance. Lake did his best to reassure her, but Mary remained so haunted by the possibility that Anne would be converted that on her own deathbed, seventeen years later, she was tormented by visions of a Papist nurse lurking in the shadows.
Initially it had seemed that Anne’s attack of smallpox would be relatively mild. On 12 November, however, the disease grew much worse. She became covered with spots, and Lake found ‘her highness somewhat giddy and very much disordered’. Alarmed for her own safety, she begged Lake not to leave her. She remained ‘very ill’ for some days.
As more and more people at court were stricken with smallpox, William grew desperate to take his wife home to Holland. Utterly distraught at her impending departure, Mary was also still bothered by fears for her sister’s physical and spiritual well-being. She was unable to say goodbye herself, but charged the Duchess of Monmouth to take care of Anne and to accompany her often to chapel, and she left behind her two letters to be given to Anne when she was better. Mary bade farewell to the rest of her family at Gravesend. An onlooker reported ‘there was a very sad parting between the Princess and her father, but especially the Duchess and her, who wept both with that excess of sorrow’ that everyone present was moved.
However, within a fortnight of arriving in the Netherlands Mary had recovered from her homesickness and fallen deeply in love with her dour and uncommunicative husband.
During Anne’s illness, her father showed a touching solicitude for her. He ‘visited her every day … and commanded that her sister’s departure should be concealed from her; wherefore there was a feigned message sent every morning from the Princess to her Highness to know how she did’. Only on 4 December was she told that Mary had long since left the country, ‘which she appeared to bear very patiently’. In due course Anne made a full recovery, although there were fears her complexion would be permanently pitted. On 3 December she was allowed to visit her stepmother, who was still resting in her bedchamber after her confinement. Nine days later her little brother, who had been ‘sprightly and like to live’ at birth, died. It is often stated that Anne had unwittingly infected him with smallpox when she saw him for the first time, but this is questionable. It is not even certain that the child would have been present when she went to see Mary Beatrice; all the contemporary reports of his death blame negligence on the part of his nurses. Whatever the cause of his demise, the loss of the little male heir left the Duke and Duchess of York emotionally shattered. ‘The Duke was never known to grieve so much at the death of any of his other children’, while his wife was ‘inconsolable’.
With the death of Lady Frances, Anne needed a new governess. Lady Henrietta Hyde, wife of Anne’s uncle Laurence Hyde, was chosen. Known as a ‘great adversary of the Catholics’, she was well qualified to protect Anne against Popish influences but her appointment was not popular with other members of the household. On learning who was to replace Lady Frances, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake commented glumly, ‘Seldom comes a better’. In one respect, however, Anne’s life now improved, for she took over the lodgings at St James’s Palace which Mary had vacated.
On Easter Sunday 1678, Anne took communion for the first time. Much to the annoyance of her father, she had been confirmed some time before with her sister. Knowing that the Duke of York still felt aggrieved about this, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake was mortified when she drained the contents of the chalice on receiving the sacrament. In great embarrassment he recorded in his diary, ‘Her Highness was not (through negligence) instructed how much of the wine to drink, but drank of it twice or thrice, whereat I was much concerned, lest the Duke should have notice of it’.
In the autumn of 1678 Anne had a chance to see her sister again. Having already lost a baby in April 1678, Mary was believed to be pregnant once more, but was ill and feeling low. In hopes that a sisterly visit would cheer her up, James gave permission for his wife and younger daughter to travel to Holland while he and the King were at Newmarket. The Duchess of York reported delightedly that she understood that Mary was ‘very anxious to see me and her sister; we have as great a wish to see her’.
On 1 October they set out accompanied by a ‘little company’ of high ranking ladies and courtiers, including the Duchesses of Monmouth, Richmond, and Buckingham, and Anne’s new governess Lady Henrietta Hyde. When informing William that they were on their way, the Duke of York had stressed that they did not want a tremendous fuss to be made of them, as the ‘incognito ladies … desire to be very incognito’. Despite this Prince William of Orange, who was not by nature the most open-handed of men, made a great effort to be hospitable. A member of the his staff was surprised when William spent ‘a pretty penny’ making Noordeinde Palace comfortable for his guests. By 17 October the party was back in England, and in his letter thanking William for his ‘kind usage’ of his womenfolk James reported that the Duchess was ‘so satisfied with her journey and with you as I never saw anybody’. For Anne too, the outing had been a success. She was much impressed by the immaculate cleanliness of the streets in Dutch towns, and observers commented on the affectionate reception she received from her sister. The visit also afforded her the first real opportunity of becoming acquainted with her brother-in-law. In later years there was a strong mutual antipathy between them, and William is supposed to have ‘often said, if he had married her, he should have been the miserablest man upon earth’. However, since he was noted to be in the gayest possible humour throughout her stay in Holland, one can perhaps conclude that he did not take against her instantly.
Anne and Mary Beatrice returned from this pleasant excursion to find England in the grip of wild panic. A charlatan named Titus Oates had alleged that he had uncovered a Jesuit plot to kill the King and overturn the government. When the magistrate who had recorded Oates’s depositions was found murdered on 17 October, this prompted an outbreak of anti-Catholic hysteria. On 1 November the Earl of Shaftesbury declared in Parliament that a ‘damnable plot’ had been uncovered, and in the ensuing frenzy Catholic peers were disabled from sitting in the House of Lords. The Duke of York was at least exempted from the bill’s provisions, but he was aware that he was ‘far from being secure by having gained that point’.
In December Catholic priests supposedly guilty of conspiracy were tried and executed, as was James’s former secretary, Edward Coleman, who was discovered to have been in treasonable correspondence with Louis XIV’s confessor.
Fear of Popery now reached such a peak that a sizeable section of the political nation was no longer prepared to tolerate the prospect of a Catholic king. In January 1679 Charles II dissolved Parliament, but a new one was summoned for the spring, and it was clear that when it met, the King would face calls to disinherit his brother. The country became so polarised that political parties emerged, with allegiances divided between those who favoured excluding James from the throne, and those who wished to preserve intact the hereditary succession. The two groupings soon acquired names, originally intended as insults. Those hostile to the Duke of York were known as ‘Whigs’, short for ‘Whiggamore’, a term formerly applied to extremist Presbyterian rebels in Scotland. Their more traditionalist opponents were dubbed ‘Tories’, after the lawless Catholic bandits who rampaged in Ireland. The labels would outlast the Exclusion Crisis, and bitter divisions along these lines would become so entrenched a feature of political life that when Anne came to the throne the two parties became her declared ‘bugbears’.
Because the situation in England was so fraught, the King decided that his brother must be sent out of the country prior to the meeting of the new Parliament in March 1679. Permission was initially granted for James to take Anne abroad with him, but this was rescinded after concerns were expressed that her religion would be endangered if she accompanied her father. On 3 March 1679 James and Mary Beatrice bid an emotional farewell to friends and family, upsetting Anne so much that she ‘cried as much as the rest to part company’. After briefly visiting his daughter and son-in-law at The Hague, James settled in Brussels, capital of the Spanish Netherlands. He ignored the advice of those who cautioned him that it would look bad if he based himself in a Popish country, curtly pointing out that ‘I cannot be more a Catholic than I am’.
When the English Parliament assembled, James’s absence did not appear to have made them more tractable. The King indicated that he was willing ‘to pare the nails’ of a Popish successor by giving Parliament the right to approve appointments to the Privy Council and to name judges if the monarch was a Catholic. However he insisted he would never allow them ‘to impeach the right of succession’ or interfere with ‘the descent of the crown in the true line’.
These concessions were rejected and an Exclusion Bill was introduced which passed its second reading in the Commons on 21 May. Six days later the King once again dissolved Parliament.
Charles believed that as yet it would be unwise to permit his brother to return to England, but in August he agreed to James’s request that his daughters Anne and Isabella could visit, ‘to help me bear my banishment with somewhat more patience’. Every precaution was taken to ensure that the two girls were not seduced into Popery while abroad. They were forbidden to visit Catholic churches and monasteries, and two Anglican chaplains who travelled with them read daily prayers in a chapel set aside for their use. Even the most limited contact with the outward manifestations of Catholicism filled Anne with distaste, and she professed herself shocked by glimpsing ‘images … in every shop and corner of the street. The more I see of those fooleries, and the more I hear of that religion, the more I dislike it’.
Anne and Isabella set out for Brussels on 20 August, but their father was not there to greet them. Two days after their departure Charles II had fallen seriously ill, and James had rushed back to England to be at his brother’s bedside. Anne and her younger sister remained in Brussels with the Duchess, and the letters Anne sent to Frances Apsley and her mother show that she was worried about her father’s difficulties. When Lady Apsley suggested that all the family would soon be permitted to return, she wrote ‘I wish it were so indeed’ but dismissed it as unlikely because now that the King was better, James was being sent back to Brussels. However, she refused to be discouraged, ‘for I have a good heart, thank God, or else it would have been down long ago’. She admitted too, that she was quite enjoying some aspects of life abroad. She was pleased with her accommodation in the Hotel des Hornes, which was ‘better than I expected, and so is all this place’. Brussels was ‘a great and fine town’ and ‘all the people here are very civil, and except you be otherways to them, they will be so to you … Though the streets are not so clean as they are in Holland, yet they are not so dirty as ours … They only have odd kinds of smells’. She had also been impressed when taken to ‘see a ball at the court incognito, which I liked very well’. The fireworks, dancing, and celebrations in honour of the King of Spain’s marriage to her cousin Marie Louise d’Orléans – with whom Anne had shared a nursery in France – ‘far surpassed my expectations’, and the ‘lemonade, cinnamon water and chocolate sweetmeats, all very good’, also met with her approval.
James was back in Brussels by the end of September. Since Anne and Isabella were scheduled to return to England after paying a brief visit to William and Mary, he decided to accompany them to The Hague, for ‘I would be glad to be with them as long as I could’. While he and the Duchess were there, a message arrived from Charles agreeing that James could now base himself in Scotland. On 8 October 1679 the Duke and Duchess of York left Holland with Anne and Isabella, fortunately unaware that they would never see William and Mary again. Having dropped off their two daughters in London, they travelled overland to Scotland, arriving in Edinburgh on 24 November. Three months later, they were permitted to return to England, but when Parliament met again in the autumn of 1680, the King decided that James must leave the country once more. On 20 October the Duke and Duchess were forced to set out for Scotland, this time by sea.
Parliament opened on 21 October and at once the Commons drafted a new Exclusion Bill, providing for James to be barred from the throne and perpetually banished. The implications were serious for Mary and Anne: as James put it, if the measure became law it ‘would not only affect himself, but his children too’ since those who had voted for it ‘would never think themselves secure under the government of those whose father they have excluded’. Some of the Whigs, possibly including their leader the Earl of Shaftesbury, would have liked Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to become king after his father. Whereas the first Exclusion Bill had expressly stated that on Charles’s death the crown should devolve upon the ‘next lawful heir’ who was Protestant – meaning Mary – the bill now introduced left the matter vague. After being modified in committee it once again specified that after James had been bypassed, the line of succession would carry on unaltered, but from Mary and Anne’s point of view the earlier ambiguity on this point was an ominous development.
As it was, the bill did not become law, for after passing the House of Commons without a division, it was thrown out by the Lords. In January the King dissolved Parliament and announced that a new one would meet in Oxford in the spring.
While the Duke of York was in Scotland, a suitor appeared on the scene for the Lady Anne. This was Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, who like Anne was a great grandchild of King James I. He was the son of the Duke of Hanover and his wife Sophia, the youngest daughter of Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia. By the spring of 1680 he was already being ‘much talked of for a husband for Lady Anne’, and in many ways he seemed an ideal choice, as he was ‘a Protestant, very young, gallant and handsome and indifferent rich’. One English diplomat described it as the ‘more fit match for her of any prince I know in Christendom’.
Sophia’s brother, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, lived in England, and in January 1680 he had set things in motion by writing to tell his sister that he had been approached about a marriage between George and Anne. ‘All the realm would like it, so think about it’, he urged her. Sophia and her husband were slightly sceptical that the ‘fine things’ her brother promised of the marriage would actually materialise, but they were ready to give it serious consideration. Later that year Prince George went on a European tour, and arrived in England on 6 December. The King was very welcoming, providing him with apartments at Whitehall. The next day Prince George was introduced to Anne, and ‘saluted her by kissing her with the consent of the King’. Since the Prince did not leave the country until 11 March 1681, he almost certainly saw Anne on other occasions, but with James absent and the monarchy in crisis there could be no question of concluding anything. Even after George Ludwig’s departure, however, the idea of a union was by no means abandoned, and an Italian diplomat stationed in England believed that Anne had fallen in love with the Prince.
On 21 March 1681 Parliament met at Oxford. To avoid a complete rupture, the King offered a series of ‘expedients’ designed to safeguard the kingdom if his brother inherited the crown. James would become King in name, but would be declared unfit to rule. A regency would be set up to govern the country, with William and Mary installed as joint protectors of the realm. Despite bearing the title of King, James would be banished from his own dominions during his lifetime. Even these far-reaching proposals failed to satisfy the Commons. Instead they introduced another Bill of Exclusion, and disquietingly it once again failed to name a successor.
Charles was not prepared to accept this, and without warning dissolved Parliament a week after it had opened. The failure to reach a settlement, thought by some to presage disaster, marked the start of a royal recovery.
Bolstered by skilful financial management and payments from Louis XIV, with whom he had negotiated a secret agreement, Charles was able to survive without summoning another Parliament. By late May a royal adviser reported that ‘his majesty’s position has improved considerably since the dissolution’,
but the King did not yet feel sufficiently confident to bring his brother back to England. Instead he agreed that Anne could join her father. In March, her little sister Isabella had died, leaving both her parents desolate. Being reunited with Anne would, it was hoped, afford some consolation.
Anne went by sea, arriving at Edinburgh on 17 July, accompanied by a sizeable suite. At Holyrood Palace her father and stepmother kept ‘almost as great a court as at Whitehall’, shocking some Scots by giving balls and masquerades at which, allegedly, ‘promiscuous dancing’ took place. Riding, playing cards, and being ‘often with the Duchess’ left Anne with little time to write letters to friends such as Frances Apsley. Theatrical entertainments also kept her busy. After seeing his daughter and four of the maids of honour who had accompanied her give a performance of Mithridates to celebrate Mary Beatrice’s birthday in November, James reported proudly that all ‘did their parts very well, and they were very well dressed, so that they made a very fine show, and such a one as had not been seen in this country before’.
Despite the ‘gaiety and brilliancy of the court of Holyrood House’, they still felt homesick. In a letter to Frances Apsley, Anne said she hoped she would be reunited with her before too long, ‘though God and the King only knows when’. In the meantime, she asked Frances to ‘write me all the news you know, send me the Gazette and other printed papers that are good’.
In March 1682 James was allowed back to England for what was meant to be a short visit, but once there he was able to persuade the King that he should bring his wife and daughter home. James set sail on 3 May and only narrowly avoided drowning after his ship was wrecked with great loss of life, but he survived and was able to collect Anne and Mary Beatrice. They all sailed back to England in the aptly named Happy Return, reaching London on 27 May. James declared cheerfully that from now on ‘We will fix ourselves in this country, as we have travelled quite enough during the last three years’.
The outlook for the monarchy became so much better that within a few months James triumphantly informed Prince William of Orange ‘That seditious and turbulent party now lose ground every day’.
Charles had struck at his opponents in various ways, such as cancelling town charters, purging the judiciary and magistracy, and interfering with the urban electoral franchise. A combination of subsidies from France and increased customs revenue meant that the King could avoid summoning Parliaments, denying his enemies an arena in which to voice opposition. Having successfully resolved the political crisis, Charles now felt able to turn his attention to arranging a marriage for his niece Anne.
In August 1682 Prince Rupert renewed his match-making efforts on behalf of Anne and Prince George Ludwig of Hanover. He wrote his sister Sophia another letter on the subject of the ‘marriage in question’, telling her that ‘as for the young lady, I assure you she is intelligent and very well brought up’. By the end of the month Rupert reported that he had secured what he considered to be excellent terms, with the Duke of York offering to give Anne a dowry of £40,000 and an income of £10,000 a year. However, George Ludwig’s parents were simultaneously engaged in negotiations to marry their son to his first cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle. The girl’s mother was not of royal birth, but Sophia of Hanover was mindful that ‘Miss Hyde’s lineage was no better’, and the Celle match was politically and financially advantageous.
The news of Prince George’s betrothal to Sophia Dorothea arrived in England early in September 1682, whereupon King Charles took ‘some exception’ at being ‘disappointed in our expectation of having the Prince of Hanover for the Lady Anne’. A British diplomat stationed in Hanover considered this unreasonable, as the negotiations for Anne’s hand had remained on an informal footing. He pointed out that ‘there never was any proposals made of either side’, but this envoy had other motives: he was about to be posted to another country, and he did not want to be forbidden from receiving the generous presents customarily given to departing envoys.
It would be alleged that Anne herself never forgot the ‘supposed slight’ of being spurned by Prince George Ludwig of Hanover. One account suggested that she had been offended because he had come to England with a view to marrying her and then ‘not liking her person he left the kingdom’. In fact, it was duty not desire that had led the Prince away from Anne: his mother noted he would ‘marry a cripple if he could serve the house’, while he felt a private ‘repugnance’ at the prospect of marrying Sophia Dorothea.
Conceivably, however, Anne did gain some inkling that George Ludwig’s parents did not consider her birth to be sufficiently illustrious, and this would hardly have made her better disposed to the House of Hanover.
It is possible too that the collapse of the marriage plan did cause her some pain. A letter from George to Prince Rupert’s mistress Peg Hughes suggests that she had been teasing him about Anne, telling him that he would do well to marry a girl who was so keen on him. After becoming engaged he wrote to Peg thanking her for the advice but saying that it was no longer possible for him to follow it. He continued stolidly,
I have never really been aware of the intentions of Madam the Princess Anne, and I do not know them now … It’s true that I recall you talked to me of her on several occasions, but as I took that as a joke I paid no attention. However you may be sure, Madam, that no one could be more the servitor of Madam the Princess than I, and the marriage I am about to make will not hinder that.
In the long term, Anne had no cause to regret the failure of the Hanover match. Her own later marriage to Prince George of Denmark was a source of great happiness, and was certainly more successful than George of Hanover’s union, which ended after his wife’s lover was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Having divorced Sophia Dorothea, George imprisoned her for life; as Queen, Anne would be dragged into the affair when Sophia Dorothea’s mother vainly appealed to her to secure her daughter’s freedom.
In autumn 1682, with her future still uncertain, Anne became involved in an embarrassing scandal. At the end of October the Earl of Mulgrave was expelled from court and deprived of his official posts and army regiment for ‘writing to the Lady Anne’. Mulgrave was a thirty-four-year-old rake whose arrogance had earned him the nickname ‘Haughty’. He prided himself on being ‘the terror of husbands’, and two years before this he had been sent to Tangier in a leaky boat for behaving too amorously towards the King’s mistresses. How far matters had gone between him and Anne was a matter for speculation. There was fanciful talk of a secret marriage, but Mulgrave himself insisted that his crime was ‘only ogling’. Others were sure he ‘had often presented her with songs and letters under hand’, and that the King had confiscated one compromising document. It was whispered too that Mulgrave had made ‘brisk attempts’ on Anne’s virtue and some thought he had gone ‘so far as to spoil her marrying to anybody else’.
The French ambassador reported that Mulgrave’s disgrace was ‘as complete as it ever can be in this country’. It turned out not to be permanent, for having been awarded another regiment in 1684 he was made Lord Chamberlain a few months after James II’s accession. At the time, however, the episode not only exposed Anne to humiliation but was potentially very damaging. ‘Extraordinary rumours are current about this affair’ Louis XIV was told by his ambassador, and unflattering verses mocking Anne and Mulgrave were soon in circulation. One anonymous rhyme sneered that
‘Naughty Nan
Is mad to marry Haughty’.
For young women and girls the Restoration court was ‘a perilous climate … to breathe in’. In some ways it was a place of astonishingly lax morals. The sexual habits of the King and the Duke of York were widely emulated by rakes and libertines who looked ‘on the maids of honour as playthings’. One young lady in the Duchess of York’s household complained of ‘the impunity with which they attack our innocence’, but the same latitude was not extended to women. Even minor transgressions could result in disgrace and ruin, and their virtue was compromised by the merest hint of scandal. The Marquis of Halifax warned his daughter ‘It will not be enough for you to keep yourself free from any criminal engagements; for if you do that which either raises hopes or createth discourse, there is a spot thrown upon your good name … Your reputation … may be deeply wounded, though your conscience is unconcerned’.
Judged by these criteria, Anne had opened herself to censure.
Halifax cautioned his daughter that other women would be the first to criticise if she found herself in trouble, and certainly Anne’s sister Mary made a meal of her tribulations. When Frances Apsley (by this time a married woman herself) wrote to Holland to inform her of the scandal, Mary professed herself aghast. ‘For my part I never knew what it was to be so vexed and troubled’ she declared, adding, ‘Not but that I believe my sister very innocent; however, I am so nice upon the point of reputation that it makes me mad she should be exposed to such reports, and now what will not this insolent man say, being provoked?’
Another ramification of the affair was that Mrs Mary Cornwallis, of the Duchess of York’s Bedchamber – who was said to be ‘in great favour with the Princess Anne’ – was dismissed from her post and ‘ordered never to come into her presence more’. The French ambassador assumed that Mrs Cornwallis had acted as Anne’s confidante, and that ‘there had been a secret correspondence between her and Milord Mulgrave’. However, there might have been other reasons behind her dismissal. Mrs Cornwallis was a Catholic, and Bishop Compton reportedly voiced fears at the Council table ‘of the dangerous consequence such a woman’s being about the princess might have’. Much later the Duchess of Marlborough insinuated that there had been additional grounds for concern. She described Mrs Cornwallis as Anne’s ‘first favourite’ and noted that ‘the fondness of the young lady to her was very great and passionate’. The Duchess recounted that over the past three or four years ‘Lady Anne had written … above a thousand letters full of the most violent professions of everlasting kindness’, to this favoured companion, adding that King Charles ‘used to say “No man ever loved his mistress, as his niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis”’. Having thus implied that there had been something perverted about Anne’s affection for Mrs Cornwallis, the Duchess went on to suggest that the episode provided evidence of Anne’s inherent disloyalty. She observed that despite her ostensible ‘tenderness and passion’ for her female friend, Anne’s only gesture of solidarity was ‘sending a footman once or twice to desire [Mrs Cornwallis] to stand at her window’ so Anne could glimpse her as she went to walk in Hyde Park. Within a fortnight she ‘seemed as perfectly to have forgot this woman as if she had never heard of her’.
Anne wrote to Mary in Holland of her distress at being forced to part with her friend, but she received scant sympathy. Mary confided to Frances Apsley, ‘Had I known of the friendship at first I should have done all I could in the world to have broke it off, but I never knew anything … till such time as she was forbid when I heard it from my sister herself, and was very much surprised and troubled to find her concern as great’. She asked Frances to inform her if Anne formed another unsuitable connection ‘that I may endeavour to stop it … for I think nothing more prejudicial to a young woman than ill company’. It appeared that Mary now believed it was incumbent on her to monitor Anne’s friendships, an idea that would later lead to serious trouble.
The Mulgrave affair had underlined the desirability of finding a husband for Anne, now aged eighteen. The problem was that not many suitable Protestant princes were available. The King knew it would be almost suicidally provocative to follow up one adviser’s suggestion that Anne be married to Louis XIV’s cousin, the Catholic Prince de la Roche sur Yon, but Charles did want to match her with someone agreeable to Louis. In recent years there had been a diplomatic realignment as the King and the Duke of York had grown disenchanted with Prince William of Orange, whom they suspected of favouring exclusion. Instead Charles had accepted financial aid from the French King that enabled him to live without Parliament and acquiesced in his aggressive foreign policy.
Prince George of Denmark, younger brother of King Christian V of Denmark, was a suitor likely to meet with Louis XIV’s approval, because Denmark was an ally of France, and on poor terms with Holland. A distant cousin of Anne – who, like him, was a great grandchild of King Frederick II of Denmark – this George was nearly twelve years older than her. He had been ‘educated in a Prince-like manner’ and when only sixteen had impressed one diplomat with his ‘well grounded acquaintance with several sciences’. Unfortunately a harsh tutor had permanently dented his confidence. After struggling, when very young, to sustain a conversation with Sophia of Hanover, he explained he had been ‘brought up in so much fear that he could not rid himself of’ his shyness. She nevertheless concluded that he had ‘a very good nature and will not lack judgement’, and thought he would make a fine husband.
In 1668, aged fifteen, Prince George of Denmark had embarked on a European tour, visiting Holland, France, England, and Italy. When in England he was received at court by Charles II and the Queen, although he would not have seen Anne as she was in France at the time. He returned to Copenhagen in 1670, and a few years later ‘gained much reputation’ when he fought in the war between Denmark and Sweden. Having commanded part of the Danish army at Landskrona in 1676, the following year ‘he greatly hazarded his royal person and signalised his valour’ by saving his brother’s life at the Battle of Lunden. When peace returned to Europe he went travelling again, but his future remained unclear. In 1674 he had been talked of as a possible King of Poland, but the Poles had rejected him because he was a Lutheran, and alternative career opportunities were far from numerous. The Elector Palatine commented after meeting George that he did not envy ‘the fate of a brother of a King with children’, although he thought that George probably did not realise how bleak the outlook was.
It could be assumed that George would regard marriage to the English King’s niece as an enticing prospect. The French ambassador to England, Barrillon, played Cupid by putting George’s name forward as a husband for Anne in February 1683. The King received the idea warmly, and James too was enthusiastic, as this would undermine the Prince of Orange’s position in England. In March Barrillon reported that the English were ‘waiting impatiently’ for the Danes to make overtures on George’s behalf, and within a few weeks Charles II’s Secretary of State, the Earl of Sunderland, was discussing terms with the Danish envoy, the Sieur de Lente. By the end of April matters were far enough advanced for the Danes to be told that George’s lack of wealth was not a problem, as Anne would be provided with money for his upkeep. The only hitch came when the Sieur de Lente sounded out Barrillon as to whether the King could be prevailed upon to alter the succession in George’s favour by disqualifying William of Orange from inheriting the crown. Barrillon replied that at the present juncture the King was doing everything possible to preserve intact the hereditary succession, so it would be most inopportune to try and modify it in this way.
On 3 May the Danes made a formal proposal, which was ‘very well received’. Later that day it was publicly announced that the King ‘had admitted of a proposal of marriage between Prince George and his niece, for which purpose he was coming over’. Until this point even the majority of the Council had been kept in ignorance of the negotiations, for fear they would oppose the match. A portrait of Anne was sent to Denmark for George to inspect prior to setting out, and possibly Anne was shown a painting of George too. Even if she had not liked what she saw, there was little she could have done, for when it came to marriage a princess could not realistically expect to have any account taken of her preferences. In one respect, however, Anne was fortunate. It was agreed that George would ‘live and keep his court in England’, freeing Anne from the necessity of starting life anew in a foreign country.
It was settled that Anne and George would receive an annual income of £20,000, comprising £10,000 a year from the King and the remainder from her father. This was to be supplemented by George’s own revenues, which derived from lands confiscated from the Duke of Holstein and conferred on him at the end of the last war between Denmark and Sweden. The income was estimated at £15,000, but rarely yielded so much in practice. As a wedding present the King also conferred on his niece the grant of the Cockpit lodgings at Whitehall, ensuring that she and her new husband were comfortably accommodated.
The news of Anne’s forthcoming marriage was not universally well received. Some people expressed concern that George was a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist, but, according to Gilbert Burnet, the main reason the marriage ‘did not at all please the nation’ was that ‘we knew that the proposition came from France’. The French, meanwhile, congratulated themselves on having arranged a match designed ‘to imbue the Prince of Orange with bitter distress and to put a curb on the Dutch’.
As expected, Prince William of Orange was duly ‘filled with consternation’ when his father-in-law informed him that the Danish proposal had been accepted. Quite apart from the unfavourable political implications, he knew Prince George and considered him a dolt, and had no desire to have him as a brother-in-law. William at once requested permission to come to England, but since it was clear that his object was to avert the marriage, he was told that a visit would not be convenient at this point. William had to settle for writing to his uncle Charles, warning of the perils of letting French power go unchecked, but the King felt free to ignore this. Charles was equally unimpressed when he was informed that William had been enraged to learn that as the son of a king, Prince George would take precedence over him at the English court. William was told there could be no question of modifying the rules in his favour, whereupon his emissary declared that he would never come to England while George was there.
Some people concluded that Louis XIV’s whole object in arranging this marriage was to match Anne with a prince who would not ‘be able ever to prejudice him or strengthen the Protestant interest’. However, as the Duke of Ormonde pointed out, France and Denmark would not necessarily remain allies forever. In his view it was undeniably ‘time the lady should be married and … fit she should have a Protestant, and where to find one so readily, they that mislike this match cannot tell’. And indeed, in time Prince George grew ‘strongly opposed’ to the power of France. After Charles II’s death he even criticised the late King for having been too much in pocket of Louis XIV.
Having been urged by King Charles to come to England without delay, George set out as soon as the terms of the marriage contract had been outlined to him, arriving on 19 July. He found England in a state of alert, for a ‘horrid conspiracy’ had recently been thwarted. Various notables had planned to stage risings in different parts of the country, while a subset of extremists had actually proposed to assassinate the King. Consequently the atmosphere at court was somewhat strained, and ‘his majesty very melancholic and not stirring without redoubled guards’. On 13 July Lord Russell had been tried and found guilty of treason, and another suspect, Lord Essex, had committed suicide in the Tower. The day after Prince George’s arrival in England several minor figures in the plot were executed, and Lord Russell’s black-draped scaffold was being constructed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, ready for his execution on 21 July.
It hardly formed the ideal backdrop to a royal wedding celebration.
After landing Prince George was taken to meet the King, the Duke of York and their respective wives. ‘From thence he waited on the Lady Anne’ at St James’s Palace where he ‘saluted her cheek’ with a kiss. One observer declared that the ‘handsome fresh coloured young prince’ made a good impression on all he encountered. ‘I think nobody could please better and more universally in one afternoon than he hath done’ declared an enthusiast, and another approving report described George as ‘a very comely person, fair hair, a few pock holes in his visage, but of very decent and graceful behaviour’. Others were more guarded. John Evelyn summed him up as having ‘the Danish countenance, blond, a young gentleman of few words, spake French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy’. The French ambassador, who should have been basking in his diplomatic triumph, was very sparing in his praise. ‘His person has nothing shocking about it, he appears sensible and reserved’, was his initial tepid comment. A little later he added that George struck people as ‘neither good nor bad, but he is a bit fat’.
On 23 July Anne and George went to the theatre and sat in one box together. Over the next few days they got to know one another better, with Anne informing Frances Apsley ‘the Prince stays with me every day from dinner to prayers’. After prayers, they would see one another again until the time came for Anne to go to Whitehall to play cards. On the strength of this brief acquaintance Anne was able to form a positive opinion of her prospective bridegroom, and the day before the wedding Frances Apsley wrote to Mary to let her know. Mary replied ‘You may believe ’twas no small joy to me to hear she liked him and I hope she will do so every day more and more, for else I am sure she can’t love him, and without that ’tis impossible to be happy’.
The wedding took place on 28 July 1683 at St James’s. It was a muted affair, as the King had said ‘he did not want any pomp and ceremony’. The service was performed by Bishop Compton, and was attended only by Anne’s immediate family. Afterwards the King and Queen were guests of honour at the wedding supper, and stayed at St James’s till the couple were bedded. It is not recorded if Charles showed the same exuberance as he had on William and Mary’s wedding night, when he had drawn the bed curtains with a lusty cry of ‘Now nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’
Almost immediately the royal family left London for their summer holidays, and the newlyweds accompanied them to Windsor. After a time they moved on to Winchester, where the King was planning to build a great palace. As Queen, Anne had hopes of bringing this project to conclusion, but it was never finished. In Hampshire she and George had a bucolic honeymoon, during which Anne enjoyed buck and hare hunting.
Afterwards, the court continued on a westward progress, stopping to see Salisbury Cathedral and Wilton. They then sailed along a stretch of the South coast on the royal yacht before returning to London via Winchester.
Back in the capital, Anne and George moved into the suite of rooms allocated them at the Cockpit in Whitehall. This was part of a complex of buildings situated on the western side of King Street, spanned by Whitehall Palace. As its name suggested, Henry VIII had built it as an arena for cock fights, but it had long since been converted into lodgings for favoured courtiers. It was a spacious and luxurious apartment, measuring 210 feet in length and 140 feet at its widest part, and overlooked St James’s Park. The King had paid £6,500 to buy back the lease from its most recent occupant, and then conferred it in perpetuity on ‘Lady Anne … and … her heirs male’ in return for a peppercorn rent of 6s. 8d.
As Anne and George settled down to married life together, it soon became apparent that they were remarkably compatible. With the sole exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, everyone agreed that they were an exceptionally devoted couple. Twenty-five years later it was said at George’s funeral, ‘Never did a happier pair come together’. Anne was described as ‘an extraordinarily tender and affectionate wife’ while George ‘lived in all respects the happiest with his princess that was possible’. George was so notable for his marital fidelity, ‘a virtue … not often to be found in courts in these degenerate and licentious ages’, that it was said that envy itself would ‘bear witness to the chastity and entire love of this most happy pair’. He and Anne had an admirable ‘conformity of humour, preferring privacy and a retired life to high society and grand entertainments’. They were both (as Anne herself put it) ‘poor in words’, but with each other they were completely at ease. At a time when some aristocratic husbands and wives led virtually separate existences Anne and George were unusual for their companionable way of life. One observer noted ‘The Prince and she use to spend extraordinary much time together in conversation daily, scarce any occurrent can cause an intermission’.
George was an amiable and undemanding man. ‘Blessed from heaven with … a mild and sweet temper’, he was ‘mighty easy to all his servants’ and invariably ‘affable and kind in … his addresses’. At a time when men were entitled to act as domestic tyrants, he was a particularly easy-going husband, permitting himself, in the opinion of some people, to be ‘entirely governed’ by his wife. His conciliatory disposition was so well known that when Anne and her sister Mary fell out after the Revolution, Sophia of Hanover had no doubt that George bore no responsibility for the rift. Only the Duchess of Marlborough stuck a discordant note, alleging that Anne loved the Prince less than commonly supposed, and that he had a spiteful side. According to her ‘His great employment, when he was not engaged in play, was to stand upon a stair head or at a window and make ill natured remarks upon all that passed by. And this became so remarkable that the Princess was often known to be uneasy at the figure his highness made whilst he was entertaining himself with so princely an amusement’.
George came to look on England as ‘my native country … by the most endearing tie become so’, and developed into ‘so hardy an Englishman that it was visible to all who were about him’. He acquired a reputation for being ‘the most indolent of all mankind’, but he did enjoy country sports such as hunting and shooting. Unfortunately he was not active enough to counter his tendency to plumpness. On his arrival Charles had advised him ‘Walk with me, hunt with my brother and do justice to my niece and you will not be fat’, but though Anne’s numerous pregnancies show that George conscientiously carried out the last injunction, this did not prevent him becoming alarmingly overweight.
One reason for this was that he was a heavy drinker, even for the time. During Anne’s reign he was summarised as a man who was ‘very fat, loves news, his bottle and the Queen’. His prodigious intake of alcohol does not seem to have soured his temper, but neither did it make him particularly convivial. The Duchess of Marlborough stated that Charles II had hoped to ‘discover of what he was made, in the way of drinking; but declared upon the experiment that he could compare him to nothing but a great jar or vessel, standing still and receiving unmoved and undisturbed so much liquor whenever it came to its turn’. Lord Dartmouth recorded a similar anecdote of George, writing that King Charles had told his father ‘he had tried him, drunk and sober, but “God’s fish! There was nothing in him”’. It would have wounded George had he heard this, for he admired Charles as a shrewd politician. After his death he often approvingly quoted the late King’s maxims, fortunately without realising that he himself was the subject of one of Charles’s most celebrated aphorisms.
Prior to George’s coming to England, Charles had told some courtiers that ‘on enquiry he appeared to be … a quiet man, which was a very good thing in a young man’. George certainly appreciated a restful existence. Soon after his arrival he wrote fretfully that the court would soon be on the move, whereas ‘sitting still all summer … was the height of my ambition. God send me a quiet life somewhere, for I shall not be long able to bear this perpetual motion’. His inertia led people to dismiss him as dull, stupid, and lazy, though possibly he was underestimated because he never acquired a perfect grasp of English. Bishop Burnet noted that George ‘knew much more than he could well express; for he spoke acquired languages ill and ungracefully’. Not everyone dismissed his intellect as negligible: a German diplomat who encountered him shortly before Anne’s accession reported that George had been lucid when discussing state affairs, ‘about which he appeared to me to be very knowledgeable’. He added that although George did not meddle in politics ‘he gave me to understand that he was very particularly informed of all that happened and very curious to know everything about the disputes between the two parties’. A French ambassador also paid tribute to George in 1686, noting that although he appeared ‘ponderous … he has very good sense’.
Anne herself was always furious if people were dismissive of her husband and had a touching faith in his abilities.
Initially George hoped to prove himself by occupying an important post. When the marriage terms were being negotiated the Danish envoy had suggested to Barrillon, the French ambassador, that the Prince should be made Lord High Admiral. Barrillon had made it clear this was out of the question, but said that in time George would surely be given a prestigious job. This never materialised. Although George was made a Knight of the Garter in 1684, he was not given a place on the Privy Council. When he proposed sending a personal emissary to see Louis XIV, the idea was quashed on the grounds ‘he should not think of becoming a figure in his own right’.
During William and Mary’s reign George became resentful when his merits were overlooked and, in the Duchess of Marlborough’s sarcastic words, ‘took it exceedingly to heart that his great accomplishments had never yet raised him above pity or contempt’.
In his early years in England, however, he accepted his nondescript status without protest.
The Princess Anne of Denmark, as she was officially styled, was now in a position to perform a favour to Frances Apsley, her old friend. Frances had married a former financier (rudely described by a critic as an ‘old city sponger’) named Sir Benjamin Bathurst, and had written to the Princess begging that her husband might be given a post in her establishment. Anne wrote back to assure Frances that she could still rely on ‘your Ziphares, for though he changes his condition yet nothing shall ever alter him from being the same to his dear Semandra that he ever was’.
She applied to her father and was granted permission to appoint Bathurst as Treasurer of her Household.
Anne had to accept ‘a person very disagreeable to her’ as her First Lady of the Bedchamber. This was her aunt the Countess of Clarendon, who was imposed upon her by another of her Hyde relations, the Earl of Rochester. He insisted that his sister-in-law was given this prestigious position, even though ‘she was not a likely woman to please a young princess’. The Countess was ‘very learned but … she had such an awkward stiffness it greatly disgusted the Princess’. However, Anne was permitted to exercise some choice over the appointment of her Second Lady of the Bedchamber. Initially her father and Rochester had wanted the post to be awarded to Lady Thanet but the Princess ‘begged she might not have her’, having conceived a desperate longing to appoint the woman who had now become her greatest friend.
Anne had known Sarah Jennings since 1673 when she had come to court to be one of the Duchess of York’s maids of honour. After she had been at court a couple of years Sarah began to be courted by an army officer who was ten years older than her, named John Churchill. Prior to this he had been garrisoned in Tangier, had fought in the war against Holland, and served for some months in the French army after England made peace with the Dutch. As the brother of the Duke of York’s mistress, Arabella Churchill, he had opportunities, being ‘a very smooth man, made for a court’, to ingratiate himself with James. After being appointed one of James’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber in 1673, Churchill became his Master of the Robes four years later, and by 1680 was described as ‘ye only favourite of his master’.
With the patronage of the Duke of York, he went from being a Lieutenant Colonel of the Duke of York’s regiment in 1675 to senior brigadier three years later. He was not, however, a wealthy man, and his hopes of marrying Sarah Jennings had initially seemed slight as his parents had been determined to match him with an heiress. It was only when Sarah’s brother died, improving her own financial expectations, that this difficulty was resolved. With the encouragement of the Duchess of York the couple were able to marry, probably in late 1677. It was a love match on both sides, and though in subsequent years Sarah would test his patience to an extraordinary degree, her husband’s devotion to her never wavered.
John Churchill accompanied the Duke of York on many of his travels, and when possible his wife went with him, so she and Anne saw a lot of one another over the years. Sarah was in Brussels when Anne visited her father in 1679, and they were also together in Scotland in late 1681. However it does not seem to have been until after the Mulgrave affair and the sacking of Mary Cornwallis that Anne became really attached to Sarah. When Sarah had a second daughter in February 1683 Anne accepted an invitation to become godmother to the child, who was named after her. The following month John Churchill (who had been created Lord Churchill in December 1682) informed his wife ‘Lady Anne asks for you very often, so that I think you would do well if you writ to her to thank her for her kindness in enquiring after your health’.
Sarah was truly an extraordinary woman. As a boy the actor Colley Cibber was transfixed when he caught sight of her in 1688, becoming utterly enraptured by ‘so clear an emanation of beauty, such a commanding grace of aspect’. With her red-gold hair, she was physically dazzling, and she also radiated vitality. She was not well educated, and said herself that throughout her youth she ‘never read, nor employed my time in anything but playing at cards’ but, even so, her mind was her most singular feature. She had an alert intelligence and a lacerating wit, and though her humour was always abrasive, it was undeniably entertaining to those who were not objects of her scorn. Endowed with what she called ‘a very great sprightliness and cheerfulness of nature, joined with a true taste for conversation’,
she had a gift for memorable expressions, coupled with utter confidence in her opinions. In time her outspokenness and her inability to see things from other people’s point of view would become destructive, but to Anne at this point Sarah’s vibrancy and exuberance seemed supremely attractive qualities. Despite the fact that their personalities could hardly have been more different, Anne found herself irresistibly drawn to this self-assured and dynamic woman.
It appears that it was Sarah herself who suggested to a delighted Anne that she should become her lady-in-waiting. The Princess was already so slavishly devoted to Sarah that she wrote humbly thanking her ‘for your kindness in offering it’ and assuring her ‘’tis no trouble to me to obey your commands’. Knowing that she had to secure her father’s consent to the appointment, she urged Sarah to ‘pray for success and assure your self that whatever lies in my power shall not be wanting’. Since Lord Churchill was in such favour with the Duke of York, one might have thought that the Duke would have had no objection to Sarah’s advancement, but unfortunately James was taking advice from the Earl of Rochester about who should have the place. Sarah said that Rochester wanted ‘one … that would be entirely obedient to him’ in the household, ‘which he had experienced I would not be’ and therefore he and his wife ‘did all they could to hinder’ her appointment.
When it appeared that she would not be able to give Sarah the position, Anne grew distraught. She sent Sarah a letter that was almost incoherent with emotion, imploring her not to blame her for the setback. ‘Oh dear Lady Churchill’, she wrote frantically, ‘let me beg you once more not to believe that I am in fault, though I must confess you may have some reason to believe it because I gave you my word so often that I would never give my consent to any, no more I have not, but have said all that was possible for one to say’. Anne explained that she had delayed telling Sarah how gloomy the outlook appeared because
I was yet in hopes that I might prevail with the Duke, and I will try once more, be he never so angry; but oh, do not let this take away your kindness from me, for I assure you ’tis the greatest trouble in the world to me and I am sure you have not a faithfuller friend on earth nor that loves you better than I do; my eyes are full, I cannot say a word more.
She became even more agitated when she heard that Sarah was about to go to Windsor, leaving her behind, and protested ‘this cruel disappointment is too much to be borne without the loss of your company’. Anne’s next letter, however, brought better news, for, as she had promised, she had raised the matter again with her father, and this time won him over. Jubilantly Anne reported, ‘The Duke came just as you were gone and made no difficulties but has promised me that I shall have you, which I assure you is a great joy to me’.
As Anne’s Second Lady of the Bedchamber Sarah received a modest salary of £200 a year, but the real value of the position lay in Anne’s assurance to her that she would be ‘ready at any time to do you all the service that lies in my power’. Sarah admitted that she cultivated the relationship with great care, and ‘now began to employ all her wit, all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert and entertain and serve the Princess’. She succeeded triumphantly, for Anne’s liking for her ‘quickly became a passion, and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid’. Being with Sarah afforded her such intense delight that Anne begrudged letting her out of her sight. One account of their relationship based on Sarah’s own reminiscences described how ‘They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of a tedious, lifeless state … This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. [The Princess] used to say She desired to possess her wholly and could hardly bear that [Sarah] should ever escape … into any other company’.
In retrospect Sarah claimed that the hours she spent closeted with Anne were ‘a confinement indeed for her’ and even stated that Anne’s ‘extremely tedious’ company ensured that she would ‘rather have been in a dungeon’ than with her mistress. Since Anne was not naturally talkative, Sarah had to work hard to keep the conversation flowing, but Sarah also complained that anything the Princess did have to say was characterised by ‘an insipid heaviness’. Sarah was nevertheless careful to hide from the Princess that she found her a bore. Anne was led to believe that even if her passion for Sarah was not reciprocated in full, neither was it completely unrequited. One of Anne’s earliest letters to her friend refers to ‘poor me (who you say you love)’. In 1706, four years after Anne’s accession to the throne, Sarah wrote to her, reminding her of the ‘passion and tenderness’ she had ‘once had’ for Anne.
Anne once protested ‘’tis impossible for you ever to believe how much I love you except you saw my heart’; on another occasion she declared ‘If I writ whole volumes I could never express how well I love you’. She insisted that ‘Nothing can ever alter me’, and that her ‘kindness’ for Sarah could ‘never end but with my life’. Years later, once it had emerged that Anne had overstated the immutability of her love, Sarah noted bitterly, ‘Such vows … strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards’.
The Princess submitted to frequent separations to enable Sarah to spend time at her own house at St Albans and to be with her husband when he was waiting on the Duke of York. ‘This absence … though be it never so short, it will appear a great while to me’, Anne declared when Sarah was away. She consoled herself by keeping in touch by letter, saying it constituted her ‘greatest pleasure’. Sarah later complained that Anne’s letters were never interesting, even if ‘enlivened with a few passionate expressions, sometimes pretty enough’. At the time, however, Sarah was more appreciative, delighting Anne by being ‘so kind [as] to be satisfied with my dull letters’. Anne herself conceded ‘I am the worst in the world at invention’, but since Sarah encouraged her to write to her at length the Princess was able to convince herself that her letters were welcome.
Anne admitted that there was something compulsive about the way she wrote so frequently to her friend, sometimes more than once a day. ‘You will think me mad, I believe, for troubling you so often’, she told Sarah apologetically, but despite acknowledging that her behaviour was slightly odd, she expected prompt replies to every letter, notwithstanding the burden it placed on her friend. The Princess explained, ‘If I could tell how to hinder myself from writing to you every day I would, that you need not be at the trouble of writing so often to me, because you say it does you hurt, but really I cannot … for when I am from you I cannot be at ease without enquiring after you’. She would declare petulantly that unless she received a letter the next morning ‘I shall conclude with reason that I am quite forgot and ne’er trouble you any more with my dull letters’.
Anne asked Sarah to show her letters to nobody else, but Sarah insisted that hers to Anne were destroyed. As a result we do not know the tenor of her replies. Sarah later encouraged the assumption that they were more restrained in tone than Anne’s effusions, but this is open to question. Towards the end of her life Anne told a third party that Sarah ‘wrote to me as [I] used to do to her’.
The Princess accepted that Sarah’s strongest feelings were reserved for her husband, and she let it be understood that the same applied to her and George. When telling Sarah that she had ‘no greater satisfaction’ than being in her company she qualified this by saying that this was ‘next [to] being with the Prince’. However her love for George hardly had the same needy intensity that characterised her relationship with Sarah. Although she missed him when they were apart, she bore his absence with an equanimity that was lacking during separations from Sarah.
If Anne did not contest that Churchill took priority over her in Sarah’s eyes, she nevertheless claimed ‘the little corner of your heart that my Lord Churchill has left empty’. Believing herself entitled to ‘possession of the second place’, she was reluctant to share it with other women, but to her distress found herself contending with ‘a great many rivals’ who vied with her for Sarah’s attention. Anne’s jealousy and resentment of these ladies who were ‘more entertaining than I can ever pretend to be’ made her ‘sometimes fear losing what I so much value’, and would cause tension in years to come.
Sarah would later assert that Anne very early in their relationship sought to eliminate the awkwardness arising from the disparity in rank between them by proposing that they adopt pen names when corresponding with one another. In fact the arrangement whereby they referred to each other as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman only came into being about two or three years after the 1688 Revolution. Before that Anne invariably addressed Sarah as ‘my dear Lady Churchill’, and Sarah’s style towards her remained markedly deferential. By September 1684 Anne was uneasy enough about this to entreat Sarah ‘not to call me your Highness at every word, but be as free with me as one friend ought to be with another’, but Sarah was very cautious about taking up her offer. The following July the Princess again protested at Sarah’s ‘calling me at every three words your Highness’. Yet even when Anne insisted, ‘Ceremony is a thing you know I hate with anybody and especially with you’, Sarah would not abandon the formal tone. She affected to believe that Anne had been joking when she had urged her to be less mindful of etiquette, and a few months later Anne felt impelled to tell her friend, ‘I hope you are not so unjust to me as to believe … that I did it to laugh at you, for I am sure … I never will be so base’.
In view of Sarah’s punctilious observance of protocol when writing to the Princess, it is surely right to be sceptical of her claim that from the very beginning of their relationship, she was always forthright with Anne. In her memoirs she boasted that having ‘laid it down for a maxim that flattery was falsehood to my trust and ingratitude to my greatest friend’, she decided that she could best serve Anne ‘by speaking the truth’. Thinking ‘it was part of flattery not to tell her everything that was in any sort amiss in her’, Sarah took pains to be ‘not only honest, but open and frank, perhaps to a fault’.
Sarah claimed that her lack of sycophancy caused no problems as Anne promised ‘never to be offended at it, but to love me the better for my frankness’. Early on in the relationship the Princess assured Sarah ‘you can never give me any greater proof of your friendship than in telling me your mind freely in all things’. Not long afterwards Anne noted appreciatively ‘I do not believe there is so much truth in anybody as there is in you’ but, in fact, it does not seem that Sarah had yet tested Anne’s devotion by being over-critical. The only indication of anything amiss between them comes in one of Anne’s first letters to Sarah, when Anne upbraids Sarah for having a groundless ‘unkind thought’ about her. She expresses incredulity that ‘my dear Lady Churchill’ could ‘be so cruel as to believe what she told me’ and begs distractedly, ‘Oh come to me tomorrow … that I may clear myself’.
According to Sarah, a major cause of tension between them had arisen just at the time she entered Anne’s employment. Sarah felt passionately that many of those arrested in the summer of 1683 for having conspired against the King had been falsely charged with treason, and she was overcome ‘with an horror and an aversion to all such arbitrary proceedings’. However it transpired that ‘these notions … [were] very disagreeable and contrary to those of her mistress’. Anne accepted that those accused were guilty, and not only approved of the death sentences meted out, but also endorsed the subsequent crackdown on ‘fanatics’ or dissenters, who were held to have been associated with the plot. It is not clear whether Lady Churchill dared remonstrate with her about this. In one account it is stated that Sarah could not keep silent on the subject as ‘it was impossible for one of her open temper not to declare, with some warmth, her real sentiments of things’. Far from reproving her lady-in-waiting for being so outspoken, Anne ‘seemed … not to be displeased with this open sincerity’. Another version of Sarah’s memoirs suggests, however, that despite being ‘sorry not to find that compassion in the breast of another person’, Sarah had been much more circumspect. She recalled, ‘All I could prevail on my self to do was to say nothing, but I could not commend and flatter and rail at the unfortunate sufferers’.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that it was not until much later in their relationship that Sarah became more confrontational in her dealings with Anne.
The Princess of Denmark was undeniably besotted with Lady Churchill. This raises the question of whether Anne was also sexually attracted to her, particularly since Sarah herself later insinuated that Anne had lesbian tendencies and had a physical relationship with her dresser, Abigail Masham. However, it never seems to have occurred to Sarah that it could be inferred from this that Anne’s passion for her had likewise been erotically charged. She clearly differentiated between her relationship with Anne in which, in her own eyes, there had been not a hint of deviancy, and Anne’s baser connection with Abigail.
The fact that Anne and Sarah were both happily married could be seen to militate against the possibility that there was a sexual component to their relationship. Their regular pregnancies leave no room for doubt that both were sexually active with their husbands. The two of them were acutely conscious that it was part of their wifely duties to produce as many offspring as possible, and they unselfconsciously exchanged information about the likelihood that they were expecting babies.
There is much debate both as to the existence of lesbianism in seventeenth-century England and regarding the extent of awareness that women could sexually desire other women. According to the memoirs of the French Comte de Gramont, at the court of Charles II, ‘they were simple enough … never to have heard tell of such Grecian refinements in the art of love’. However, as the century progressed, imported translations of French pornography appear to have widened consciousness of lesbian eroticism. References in literature suggest that awareness of the phenomenon was growing, and with that came the notion that it was socially subversive and something to be feared. In 1667 the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle published The Convent of Love in which the heroine is horrified to find herself falling in love with a foreign princess, and fears being punished by the goddess Nature for transgressing her laws. Only when the princess is revealed as a man in disguise is the situation resolved.
It may be that women who were erotically drawn towards their own sex were able to indulge their desires without fear of detection, because men were blind to the existence of lesbian passion. A poem written for another girl at court by Anne Finch, a maid of honour to the Duchess of York, has been cited as an instance of this. In these verses the author wishes she could be transformed into a mouse (a symbol of female lust) so as to nestle unobtrusively in her friend’s bosom and enjoy her ‘soft caresses’ without been suspected by ‘jealous [male] lover’.
Whether or not the men of the period deluded themselves in imagining that women could never be their sexual rivals, it was by no means unusual for women to enjoy what has been termed ‘romantic friendships’ with one another. Because it was assumed that these relationships were platonic, this was generally condoned. In the course of what Lord Halifax called these ‘violent intimacies’ and ‘great dearnesses’ it was regarded as perfectly acceptable for women to employ endearments when addressing one another that nowadays would be considered only appropriate between lovers. For example, when Lady Shaftesbury wrote to her friend Lady Rachel Russell in 1683 she signed her letter ‘unimaginably, passionately, affectionately yours’. It is worth noting, too, that Anne was not the only female correspondent of Sarah who addressed her in impassioned terms. Lady Sunderland wrote to her on one occasion ‘I long to embrace you … I love you beyond expression’, while another letter assures Sarah that she cannot imagine ‘how full my heart is of love and tenderness for thee … I am for ever and ever my dearest with a heart flowing, tender and sincere’.
It must be stressed that during the seventeenth century, impassioned, asexual love was looked on as admirable in both sexes, and friendship was idealised. The views expressed by the sixteenth-century sage Michel de Montaigne in his essay ‘On Friendship’ were widely influential. While deploring homosexuality, he praised the kind of ‘highest friendship’ that ‘takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway’. Anne’s grandfather the Earl of Clarendon declared that friendship was ‘more a sacrament than marriage’, and John Evelyn took a similar view. He pointed out that marriage was an unequal partnership subject to law and contract, whereas a freely undertaken friendship was ‘implanted by God alone’ and hence innately virtuous. The poetess Katherine Philips, whose verses were first published three years after her death in 1664, has been called ‘the high priestess of the cult of friendship’. Her poems expressed passionate love for other women, but stressed that the bond between them was sublimely spiritual and unsullied by any carnal element. In recent years there has been much debate as to whether her poems actually had an erotic subtext, but Philips’s contemporaries never doubted her purity.
It might seem farfetched to suggest that in forming such a close attachment to Sarah, Anne was influenced by these ideas. She was not a wide reader, and nor was she closely attuned to the intellectual currents of the time. Nevertheless these theories were swirling about the court, and were so much in vogue that Anne could hardly fail to be aware of them. Certainly she had either read, or had some acquaintance with Montaigne’s essay on friendship, and regularly quoted his maxim that passing on information to a friend ‘was no breach of promise of secrecy … because it was no more than telling it to oneself’. As well as being personally drawn to Sarah, she was interested in the abstract concept of friendship. She was aware of its obligations, and eager to be bound by what a contemporary called its ‘reciprocal and eternal’ laws. She was determined that her rank should not prevent her from achieving the personal fulfilment that friendship could provide, and believed that her bond with Sarah would add an emotional richness to her life which it was unrealistic to expect from marriage. Sarah herself stressed that Anne deliberately set out to cross the boundaries that customarily isolated royalty from lesser beings. As she recalled, ‘Kings and princes for the most part imagine they have a dignity peculiar to their birth and station which ought to raise them above all connection of friendship with an inferior … The Princess had a different taste. A friend was what she most coveted, and for the sake of friendship, a relation which she did not disdain to have with me, she was fond even of that equality which she thought belonged to it’.
Having married a man to whom she was ideally suited and found a friend in Sarah, all appeared well in Anne’s life. By late 1683 she was known to be pregnant, completing the rosy picture. The pressure on her to produce an heir – preferably male – was immense. In 1680 the physician of her sister Mary (who remained childless) complained of being constantly pestered on the orders of Charles II, who wanted to know whether his niece was pregnant, ‘since the future of three crowns depended on it’. In early May 1684 the King and Queen came up to London, intending to stay until Anne was delivered, but on 12 May the Princess had a stillborn child. While this was obviously upsetting, no one could know that this would be the first of a heartbreaking sequence of miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality that Anne was fated to endure. At the time her family’s disappointment was tempered by the fact that the baby appeared to have been dead in the womb for some days, which could have endangered her own life. In Holland Mary declared that she regarded her sister’s escape as ‘almost a miracle’.
In June Anne accompanied her stepmother to Tunbridge. Mary Beatrice had herself suffered a miscarriage about the same time as Anne had lost her child, and was going to take the waters in order to aid her recovery. It was the first time that Anne had visited this fashionable spa, to which she subsequently returned on numerous occasions in hopes of increasing her fertility. On this visit, however, she did not drink the waters, as her underlying health was good. Although Tunbridge Wells was a popular resort, Anne was bored there, particularly after Sarah and George, who joined her for part of the time, left her alone with her stepmother. She was relieved when Mary Beatrice decided the waters did not agree with her and returned to court.
The rest of the summer was again spent touring southern England with the court. Towards the end of the year a rumour became current that Anne and George would go to Scotland on a visit, but when asked about this her father insisted ‘’twas never thought of’. He added happily, ‘God be thanked, she is not in a condition to make such a voyage, being four months gone with child’.
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Anne Somerset
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Often derided as weak-willed and insecure, Queen Anne was in fact one of Britain’s most remarkable monarchs. In many ways a stolid, conventional woman, she nevertheless presided over some of the most momentous events in British history and led a personal life riven by passion, illness and intrigue.In 1702, fourteen years after she helped oust her father from his throne and deprived her newborn half-brother of his birthright, Queen Anne inherited the crowns of England and Scotland. Childless, despite seventeen pregnancies that had either ended in failure or produced heartrendingly short-lived offspring, in some respects she was a pitiable figure. But against all expectation she proved Britain’s most successful Stuart ruler.Her reign was marked by many triumphs, including union with Scotland and glorious victories in war against France. Yet while her great general, the Duke of Marlborough, was performing feats of military genius, Anne’s relationship with his outspoken wife Sarah was becoming ever more rancorous. Political differences partly explained why the Queen’s earlier adoration for Sarah transformed to loathing, but the final rupture was precipitated by Sarah’s startling claim that it was the Queen’s lesbian infatuation with another lady-in-waiting, Abigail Masham, that had destroyed their friendship.Having lost the will to continue an expensive war that the Marlboroughs and their political allies favoured, the Queen embarked upon a peace process that some condemned as a betrayal of the national interest. And, as it became clear that Anne did not have long to live, the nation became polarised by fears that she intended to bequeath her crown to her Catholic half brother, rather than the German Protestant cousin whom Parliament had designated her heir.Drawing widely on unpublished sources, Anne Somerset vividly depicts the clashes of personality and party rivalries that aroused such strong feelings at the time. Traditionally depicted as a weak ruler dominated by female favourites and haunted by remorse at having deposed her father, Queen Anne emerges as a woman whose unshakeable commitment to duty enabled her to overcome private tragedy and painful disabilities, setting her kingdom on the path to greatness.