Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

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 £260.19

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.20

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’.21

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’.22

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’.23 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’.24

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’.25

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.26

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.27

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.28

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’.29

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.30

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.31

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’.32

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.33

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.34

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’.35

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’.36

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.37

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’.38 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’.39 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’.40 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’.41

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’.42

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’43 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.44

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’.45

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’.46

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.47

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.48