Queens of Britain Series: Queen Anne

By Michael Dahl via Wikimedia Commons

The second daughter of a second son. It had happened before when Queen Elizabeth became the last of Tudor monarchs. Now, a century after Elizabeth's death her cousin many times removed was ascending the throne as the last of the Stuart monarchs. Queen Anne's life had been less tragic and terror-filled than Elizabeth's but her rise to the throne was perhaps even more complicated.

Anne was born five years after the restoration of the monarchy. Her grandfather King Charles I had been beheaded in the midst of a civil war. Then followed a 10-year interregnum ruled by the Puritanical Cromwell's while the royal family wandered the Continent in exile. For Anne, however, those were just stories. The monarchy of her childhood was dominated by her bon vivant uncle King Charles II, who is remembered as the "Merry Monarch." However, it was still a monarchy torn by religion. Anne's father James Duke of York was Catholic. Uncle Charles was officially Protestant and, for the sake of the longevity of the crown, he insisted that Anne and her older sister Mary be raised as Protestants. Since Charles' wife Queen Catherine had no children (See my post Catherine: An Unhappy Queen), Charles knew that one of James' children would eventually ascend to the throne. He believed in order to avoid another civil war, the monarch needed to be Protestant.

Anne's father had other ideas. After her mother died when Anne was still a little girl, he married a Catholic princess and tried to have sons who would supplant his daughters in the line of succession. He was initially unsuccessful.

In the meantime, Anne was being moved from place to place, primarily because of her health. She had been sent to France to live with her grandmother, Queen Henrietta Maria. A French-born princess, Henrietta Maria opted to stay in her birth country rather than live in the country that had beheaded her husband. After the queen died, Anne was left in the care of her father's sister Henrietta Anne who had married the French king's brother. When Henrietta Anne died suddenly, young Anne returned to England to join her sister Mary in the care of the Edward and Frances Villiers. A year later, her mother died. Then, her father remarried. Then, Mary married and left to live in Holland. Anne was 12 years old and she was fairly alone except for a dear friend she had made, Sarah Jennings, who was five years her senior. 

Anne's relationship with Sarah would come to be one of the defining elements of Anne's life, her reign, and even her memory today. The two were very close throughout their youth. They wrote to each other using the sobriquets Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Morley. Anne thought this would make them more equal. It seems, however, that Sarah often had the upper hand. She married the military genius John Churchill, who defended Anne's father in the Monmouth Rebellion but later stood against him in the Glorious Revolution and won his lasting fame in the Battle of Blenheim, for which Anne would create him Duke of Marlborough.

The question of Anne's own marriage arose early as it often did for princesses. At first, it was thought that she would marry her second cousin Prince George of Hanover. As a descendant of King James I, George, like Mary's husband, William of Orange, was in the British Line of Succession. In fact, he was the next male after William. However, King Charles' preference for French alliances caused a change of plan. Mary's marriage into the Dutch naval superpower had made France uncomfortable. Charles needed an ally to counterbalance any possible future problems with the Dutch. Denmark was selected and Anne was offered to the Danish king's younger son, Prince George. The match infuriated William of Orange but ultimately delighted Anne, despite George's well-earned reputation for dullness and his complete lack of ambition.

The newlyweds fell immediately to the chief task of royal marriages: baby making. Anne would have 17 pregnancies in as many years. The first, a stillborn daughter, devastated the young couple. The birth of their daughter Mary 13 months later and Anne Sophia 11 months after that brought them great joy. Early the next year, Anne suffered a miscarriage. Shortly after that George and both of their tiny daughters were stricken with smallpox. Anne, who had survived smallpox as a child, nursed them all. George slowly recovered but the babies died within a week of each other. (See my post The Daughters of Queen Anne.) The couple was distraught at this tremendous double lost followed by another miscarriage that fall and a stillbirth the following spring. Finally, just a few days before their sixth wedding anniversary in the summer of 1689, their son William was born.

By then, the entire landscape of the British monarchy had changed, in part due to Anne's interference. Many Protestant leaders were concerned when Anne's Catholic father James acceded the throne in 1685. The fact that his heirs, Mary and Anne, were both Protestants married to Protestants kept their worries at bay. Eventually, they thought, he will die and Protestants will reign again. James, however, had made different plans. He had remarried a young Catholic princess Mary of Modena in an attempt to beget male heirs who would supersede his daughters in the Line of Succession. Mary's first 10 pregnancies resulted in stillbirths or babies who died young. When her eleventh pregnancy was announced in 1688, something seemed different. Especially to Anne. She and others started rumors that the King was planning to foist a false heir on Britain in order to maintain Catholic control. Anne even claimed that the Queen was not really pregnant. As evidence, she said her stepmother would not allow her to touch her pregnant belly as she had done in the past. By the time, Mary gave birth to a healthy son in June 1688, the conspiracy theories grew to include accusations of an infant being smuggled into the birth chamber in a warming pan. (See my post When Protestant Princesses Have Catholic Daddies.) 

By the end of the next year, Parliament had invited William of Orange to invade and James had fled the country. Parliament deemed his departure an abdication and offered a joint throne to Anne's older sister Mary and William under certain conditions. The most important of these was that Parliament would now and always hold the upper hand in governance. Another condition was that either spouse would reign to the end of life regardless of who died first and that Anne would be their heir, unless Mary had a surviving child, which she never did.

During William and Mary's reign, their relationship with Anne became strained. In the beginning, they rewarded her loyalty by making her husband Duke of Cumberland and her best friend Sarah's husband Earl of Marlborough. However, they tried to prevent her from having too much financial independence. They also began to fear that the Marlboroughs were supporting the Jacobites, supporters of King James and his return to power. Despite this, Anne grew even closer to Sarah and would not comply with Mary's order to dismiss her from her household. When Sarah was dismissed by the Lord Chamberlain, Anne left the royal palace. Courtiers were forbidden from visiting her. When she then gave birth to another dead baby, Mary went to her but berated her for her defiance. That was the last time the sisters would ever see each other. Mary died a year and a half later.

Mary's death led to reconciliation with King William, who never remarried. He accepted Anne and her son William as his heirs. After William died at age 11 in 1700, he began to worry about the future of the monarchy. The Jacobites were still strong and would spend another half century attempting to bring James II or his son or grandson to the throne. With such a threat to the Protestant throne, the Act of Settlement of 1701 was adopted. It determined that the throne would bypass all of the potential heirs who were Catholic and settled the succession on Sophia Electress of Hanover and her descendants. Sophia was a granddaughter of King James I in the female line and matriarch of a family with two more generations of Protestant male heirs. 

From the Almanac Royal Amsterdam
via Wikimedia Commons

The following year, William died and the 37-year-old Anne became Queen with Prince George as consort. Her long history of troubled health reared its head on her coronation day with an attack of gout that required her to be carried to the ceremony.

Anne showered her lifelong friend Sarah's and her husband with honors. Always tempestuous, Sarah controlled the Queen's household and served as a chief advisor. After Prince George's death, Sarah attempted to exert even more control, even removing portraits of George against Anne's wishes. Sarah's haughty ways continued to disturb others and eventually became more than even Anne could tolerate. When Anne showed favor befriend Sarah's cousin Abigail Masham, the two had a final blowout in 1711. Although frequently portrayed as a girl fight or even a spat between lovers, the row had much deeper roots in Anne and Sarah's political differences and Sarah's presumption to dictate to the Queen.

Today, Anne is one of the least well-remembered monarchs but her reign was active and full of historic events. Perhaps the most important of these was the 1707 Acts of Union that united all of the nations of the British Isles into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As the last Stuart monarch, it is perhaps fitting that she was the first to be Queen of a united Scotland and England rather than serving as Queen of each. 

She also had to face some karma from her early denials about her younger half-brother, Prince James Francis Stuart. When their father died in 1701, the King of France had pronounced James as his rightful successor. By 1708, the "Old Pretender" as he came to be called, had raised an army and attempted an invasion that was deflected by Anne's forces. Anne's government later had James exiled from France as a condition of a peace treaty between the countries.

Anne also was a patron of the arts and sciences. She supporting the work of some of the most famous men of the age, including Isaac Newton and George Frederick Handel. 

By 1713, Anne's health was rapidly declining. Some say she forced herself to stay alive long enough to prevent her cousin Electress Sophia from succeeding her. Whether true or not, Sophia died in May 1714 and Anne suffered a final stroke less about eight weeks later. She was succeeded by Sophia's oldest son, King George I, whom Anne had never allowed to visit Britain. He beheld his new kingdom for the very first time six weeks later. 

QUEENS OF BRITAIN SERIES
Boudica, Queen of the Iceni 
Empress Matilda 
Margaret Maid of Norway 
Lady Jane Grey
Queen Mary I
Queen Elizabeth I
Mary Queen of Scots 
Queen Mary II
Queen Anne
Queen Victoria - coming soon
Queen Elizabeth II - coming soon

MORE ABOUT ANNE
10 Surprising Facts About Queen Anne on Historical Medallions
The Death of Queen Anne on The National Archives
It's Not That Easy Being Queen on Tom Reeder's Blog
Mary II and Queen Anne: The Representations of Two Sisters on Team Queens
Queen Anne on The British Monarchy
Queen Anne on Historic Royal Palaces
Queen Anne on Historic UK
Queen Anne is Dead! on Untold Lives Blog
Queen Anne and the Favourite on Royal Museums Greenwich
Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill's Last Stand-Off at Kensington Palace on Historic Royal Palaces
Queen Anne's Love Life on University of Cambridge Museum & Botanic Gardens
The Stuart Dynasty - William, Mary, and Anne on A Royal Heraldry