Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

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.49

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.50

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’.51

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.52

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.53

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’.54 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.55

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.56 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.57

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’.58 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’.59

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’,60 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.61

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’.62

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.63 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.64

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’.65 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’.66

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’.67

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’.68 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’.69 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.70

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.71

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’.72

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’.73 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.74

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”’.75

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’.76

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’.77

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]’.78

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’.79

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.80