Читать книгу Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion - Anne Somerset - Страница 12

On 6 February 1685 King Charles II died. For his niece Princess Anne, the sudden snuffing out of her apparently healthy uncle – which coincided with her twentieth birthday – was a grim reminder of the precariousness of life. When Prince George became afflicted a few months later by ‘a giddiness in the head’, she was needlessly alarmed, confessing ‘I cannot help being frighted at the least thing ever since the late king’s death’.¹

The Duke of York now ascended the throne as King James II. At the outset of his reign he appeared to be in an exceptionally strong position. A Whig politician noted gloomily, ‘all the former heats and animosities against him … seemed to be now quite forgot amidst the loud acclamations’.²

For Anne, as for other sincere Protestants, the fact that James was a Catholic was, of course, disturbing. James refused to be discreet about his faith. ‘He went publicly to mass’, and work started on building a sumptuous new Catholic chapel at Whitehall, which eventually came into use at Christmas 1686. However, concerns about this were to some extent stilled by the King’s apparent respect for the Church of England. He ‘ordered the [Anglican] chapel at Whitehall to be kept in the same order as formerly, where the Princess of Denmark went daily’. Anne reported ‘Ever since the late King died, I have sat in the closet that was his in the chapel’. During the services the officiating clergy performed ‘the same bowing and ceremonies … to the place where she was as if his Majesty had been there in person’.³

The statement that James made at his first meeting with the Privy Council was also reassuring. He announced that although ‘I have been reported to be a man for arbitrary power’, he would nevertheless ‘make it my endeavour to preserve the government in Church and State as it is by law established’. He added that since he was aware that ‘the principles of the Church of England are for monarchy … I shall always take care to defend and support it’.⁴ His words were printed and circulated to widespread acclaim.

The outlook for Anne’s friends, the Churchills, appeared excellent as John Churchill was given an English barony and visibly enjoyed ‘a large share of his master’s good graces’. Her uncles on her mother’s side were both awarded important appointments, with Clarendon being made Lord Privy Seal, and Rochester becoming Lord Treasurer. Although Anne was not personally close to them, both men were looked on as devoted to ‘the interest of the King’s daughters and united to the Church party’, so it was heartening that they were in positions of trust.⁵

Prince George was made a member of the Privy Council by his father-in-law. However, it was a less significant advancement than it seemed, for most important decisions were made in the King’s chamber by an inner ring of royal advisers. In June 1687 a French diplomat reported that so little account was taken of George ‘he might as well not exist’.⁶

On 19 May 1685 Anne was present at the opening of Parliament. She heard her father make a speech that was slightly menacing, despite the fact that he reaffirmed his determination to protect the Church of England. He warned the Commons that they must not presume to keep him short of cash, and ‘to use him well’. His words went down surprisingly favourably, for very few members had been elected who were not well disposed towards the Crown. The only hint of trouble occurred on 26 May, when a parliamentary committee petitioned James to enforce the laws against religious nonconformists, including Catholics. However, when James summoned its members and rebuked them, they backed down.

Anne’s first child – a daughter, christened Mary – was born on 1 June 1685, and proved to be ‘always very sickly’.⁷ The Princess did not breastfeed the infant herself, for this would have been considered eccentric or even irresponsible. Instead, the baby was cared for by a full complement of servants, including a wet nurse, dry nurse, and rockers. The nursery was in the Cockpit, and Anne would later come to believe that London air had undermined the child’s health.

Mrs Barbara Berkeley, whose husband Colonel John Berkeley was Anne’s Master of the Horse, was appointed the child’s governess. Described by another member of the household as ‘as witty and pleasant a lady as any in England’ Mrs Berkeley had known the Princess since childhood and had also long been on very close terms with Sarah Churchill. Anne manifested surprisingly little faith in Mrs Berkeley’s childcare skills, telling Sarah, ‘Though she be Lady Governess, yet I rely more upon your goodness and sincerity to me than I could ever do upon her for anything’.⁸

Ten days after Anne had given birth, her father’s regime came under threat when the late King’s exiled illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, landed at Lyme Regis, intent on overthrowing James. In happier days the Duke had been one of the most glamorous figures at Charles II’s court, and as a child Anne had greatly admired his dancing. However, since Monmouth had allied himself with the exclusionists he had represented a threat to her as well as her father. This only became more explicit when he issued a proclamation on 20 June assuming the title of King for himself, but Anne’s main concern was for Sarah, whose husband was with the royal army sent to crush the insurrection. On 7 July ‘ye good news’ arrived not only that the rebels had been defeated at Sedgemoor but that Lord Churchill was unharmed.⁹ After being captured hiding in a ditch, Monmouth was brought to London and executed on 15 July.

Towards the end of July, Anne paid her second visit to Tunbridge Wells, leaving her daughter in London. The necessity of producing another child took priority over other maternal duties, and in hopes of promoting her fertility Anne took the waters for the customary six-week course. Prince George joined her for part of the time there, and by August there were hopeful signs that Anne had conceived again. The Princess herself was cautious, not wanting to raise hopes prematurely. She told Sarah, ‘The waters agree very well with me, but as for my being with child, I don’t believe it, though not having had anything since my month was out it is not altogether impossible’.¹⁰ Only in the autumn did she accept she was pregnant, and she remained confused about the date of conception.

While at Tunbridge, the Princess relied on Sarah to keep her informed about her daughter’s health, having begged Sarah to ‘let me know the least thing that ails her’. After receiving a worrying report the Princess wrote, ‘I am sorry my girl has any soreness in her eyes for fear she should take after me in that’. The child was so sickly that it was decided that medical intervention was necessary. In fact, this much increased the danger, for only the strongest children were capable of surviving the ministrations of seventeenth-century doctors. Anne agreed that the infant should be given an incision, or ‘issue’, through which evil humours could be drawn out, but was assailed by doubts after authorising the procedure. She wrote anxiously to Sarah that she was now in ‘a mind to put it off till I am at London myself, though if I thought the deferring of it could be of any ill consequence I would send presently to Mrs Berkeley to let it be done and therefore I desire you would let [me] know your opinion about it’. Fortunately by the time Anne returned to London in early September, the child was better. The Princess informed Sarah that she found little Mary ‘God be thanked, very well, and I think mightily grown since I saw her’, though displaying little of that ‘wit and awareness’ that Anne had been told to look for in her. She added, ‘She has at this time a scabby face which they tell me will do her a great deal of good. I beg a thousand pardons for giving you so particular a nasty account of her but … I could not hinder myself from doing it’.¹¹

Anne’s main worry at this time was financial, for despite having an income from England of £20,000 a year (with more coming from Denmark), she and her husband found themselves overstretched as both had large households. Anne had two ladies of the bedchamber, five dressers, four maids of honour, and a woman to look after them, a sempstress, starcher and laundress, two chaplains, four pages of the backstairs, two gentlemen ushers, two gentlemen waiters, plus a fully staffed stables with her own Master of the Horse. George had an even larger establishment and stables and coachmen of his own. In addition they had to pay kitchen staff. The documented wage bill came to more than £8,645 and this was almost certainly an underestimate. On top of these expenses were costs for food and clothing. According to Sarah, the Countess of Rochester spent additional enormous sums on Anne’s wardrobe. Although the Princess grumbled that she believed her clothes to ‘be much the worse for her looking after’, at the end of 1685 the Countess’s ‘accounts came to eight thousand pounds’.¹²

On top of this came Anne’s gambling costs, which were by no means inconsiderable. Cutting back on this was difficult, for if Anne had absented herself from the tables, there would have been complaints. Stakes were high: in the summer of 1686 the Princess told Sarah ‘Yesterday I won three hundred pound, but have lost almost half of it again this morning’. Sarah clearly made regular gains from her card games with her mistress, but years later she criticised the Princess for being dilatory about settling her debts. In addition she carped that when Anne did pay, ‘she would throw down more than was necessary’.¹³

By late 1685 Anne’s overspending had left her £10,000 in debt, ‘which was very uneasy to her’. According to a later account, she asked her uncle Lord Rochester to approach her father for more funds on her behalf, but he ‘excused himself … telling her she knew the King’s temper in relation to money matters, and such a proposal might do him hurt and her no good’. Thereafter Anne held a lasting grudge against him, complaining that neither he nor his brother Clarendon had ‘behaved … well to me … which one may think a little extraordinary’.¹⁴

James did, in fact, do his best to ease his daughter’s financial difficulties. In November 1685 he ordered that £16,000 of ‘royal bounty’ should be given to her to discharge her debts. Three months later he granted Anne and George an additional £10,000 a year. By that time the extravagant Lady Clarendon had left her service and had been succeeded by Lady Sarah Churchill as First Lady of the Bedchamber. Sarah claimed that by acting a ‘faithful and frugal part’ she reduced the Princess’s annual wardrobe expenses to £1,600. Even so, Anne remained short of money.¹⁵

Gilbert Burnet was shocked that Anne received ‘but thirty thousand pounds a year, which is so exhausted by a great establishment that she is really extreme poor for one of her rank’. Roger Morrice also thought that James treated Anne shabbily and was even under the illusion that she had had ‘no addition … to her pension since this King came to the throne’. Having heard in May 1687 that Prince George was so ‘greatly in debt’ that he could hardly pay for his visit to Denmark that summer, and that Anne had been ‘forced to put off many of her servants and two coaches and six horses and other appurtenances suitable to her quality’, Morrice noted indignantly, ‘the father starves Princess Anne and Prince George her husband’. Yet this was unfair, for shortly after this Anne and George were granted an additional £16,000 ‘as the King’s free gift and royal bounty’.¹⁶

Parliament had been adjourned while James dealt with Monmouth’s invasion, but when it reassembled on 9 November 1685, difficulties soon arose. The King had enlarged the army to help him suppress the rebellion, and when doing so had given commissions to several Catholics, despite the fact that this contravened the Test Act of 1673. In an arrogant speech he informed Parliament he had no intention of dismissing these officers now that peace had been restored. On 16 November the Commons presented an address respectfully reminding James that such commissions were illegal. ‘With great warmth’ James responded that ‘he did not expect such an address from the House of Commons’.¹⁷

When the King’s speech was debated in the House of Lords on 19 November, there were ‘high speeches’ from many peers, with Anne’s former preceptor Bishop Compton expressing himself particularly fiercely. The King prorogued Parliament the following day. Soon afterwards he began depriving men who expressed opposition of their employment. By December 1685, sixteen army officers who had supported the Commons’ address had been cashiered, and James also dismissed two Members of Parliament who held administrative posts. He indicated that ‘all persons that should hereafter offend’ could expect the same treatment. Bishop Compton was dismissed from the Privy Council and his court office of Dean of the Chapel Royal. It was believed he had been disgraced not just for too ‘freely speaking in the House of Lords’, but also ‘for his being industrious to preserve the Princess Anne in the Protestant religion, whom there were some endeavours to gain to the Church of Rome’.¹⁸

Those alarmed by James’s behaviour consoled themselves that he would be succeeded by the Protestant Mary of Orange. However, some people feared that if Anne converted to Catholicism, her father would reward her by disinheriting Mary and making his younger daughter his successor. The French ambassador Barrillon certainly saw this as the best way for James to proceed, though he acknowledged in March 1685 that some would regard the proposal as ‘chimerical and impracticable’. Another French diplomat named Bonrepos, who arrived in England at the end of the year, did his best to advance the scheme. In the spring of 1686 he asked the Danish envoy in England if Prince George would be interested in his wife succeeding to the throne in preference to Mary, which would be feasible if George changed faith. To Bonrepos’s delight, the Dane replied that he had already discussed the matter with George, who was ready to receive instruction. Bonrepos’s excitement mounted when he understood that Anne too wished to be instructed. To encourage her he presented her with some theological works, which she received politely. Bonrepos concluded that although Anne appeared ‘timid and speaks little’, she was ‘intelligent and highly ambitious’, and well aware of her own interests.¹⁹

It turned out that Bonrepos had been over optimistic. The King sounded a note of caution after receiving a message from the Pope urging him to do everything possible to bring about Anne’s conversion. He indicated that it would not be easy to achieve, for she had been ‘brought up by people who inspired in her a great aversion for the Catholic Church, and she has a very stubborn nature’. Nevertheless, being mindful of how her mother had been won over to Catholicism, James did not repress all hope of Anne undergoing a similar miraculous transformation. He gave his daughter testimonials written by her mother and the late King Charles II (who had been secretly received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed), explaining their reasons for converting, but Anne was unimpressed by what she read. Apart from this her father did not apply direct pressure on her to change faith. He only confronted her after noticing that whenever Anne dined at court, she made a point of talking while a Catholic priest was saying grace. When the Princess admitted she had done this deliberately, James was understandably annoyed. In a letter to her sister Mary, Anne recounted her father had protested ‘it was looking upon them as Turks … and he … saw very well what strange opinions I had of their religion’. However, he added that ‘he would not torment me about it, but hoped one day that God would open my eyes’.²⁰

Despite the fact that James had actually made no effort to intimidate Anne into abandoning her faith, it was widely feared that he was harassing her relentlessly. In the spring of 1686, a worried Mary of Orange started writing to her sister, urging her to remain true to her beliefs. Anne replied ‘I hope you don’t doubt but that I will be ever firm to my religion whatever happens … I do count it a very great blessing that I am of the Church of England, and as great a misfortune that the King is not’. This did not assuage Mary’s doubts, and a few months later Anne wrote again, promising ‘I will rather beg my bread than ever change’ religion. In the spring of 1687 she gave a fresh undertaking that ‘neither threatenings nor promises’ could alter her resolve.²¹

It was wounding for Anne that her sister believed her to be so weak. She could not take comfort in the fact that her father was being so considerate to her, for Mary suggested that this was just to lull her into a false sense of security, and upbraided Anne for being ‘too much at ease’. Denying that she was complacent, Anne agreed her father was more likely to ‘use fair means rather than force’. She told her sister that she remained in ‘great expectation of being tormented’ but ‘you may assure yourself that I will always be on my guard’. In late summer 1687 she told a court lady that James had ‘never in his life, no indeed, never in his life’ confronted her about religion, only to add, ‘But I expect he will’.²²

On 12 May 1686 Anne gave birth to another daughter at Windsor. Everyone was taken by surprise, for the baby – named Anne Sophia – had not been expected till mid June. The King and Queen at once went down to Windsor to see the new arrival. James reported cheerfully ‘I found both the mother and the girl very well, God be thanked, and though the child be not a big one yet most are of opinion it is not come before its time’. Unfortunately the sight of her father was far from agreeable to the Princess, for she feared he would consider this a propitious moment to raise the religious issue. It had indeed been rumoured that she had ‘agreed to [convert] after lying in’, and when, just before the baby’s christening, James appeared in his daughter’s chamber accompanied by a priest, Anne at once ‘fell a crying’. ‘The King seeing it, told her he came only on a fatherly visit and sent the priest away’. James dismissed his daughter’s tearfulness as being caused by ‘vapours, which sometimes trouble women in her condition’ and was relieved that Anne was once again ‘in a very good way’.²³

The delightful distractions of motherhood could not disguise the fact that the political situation was growing steadily more ominous. Events in France were providing a worrying example of what Protestants could expect from a Catholic monarch. In 1685 Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had afforded a degree of freedom to his Huguenot subjects. They were now required to convert, and were not even permitted to leave the country in order to continue practising their religion. Thousands of Huguenot refugees did in fact manage to emigrate, ensuring that their sufferings were well documented, but those who could not escape were subjected to what one outraged Englishman called ‘unheard of cruelties … such as hardly any age has done the like’.²⁴

Just as the persecution in France was stoking up fears of Popery, James took steps to strengthen the position of Catholics in England. He was understandably determined to repeal the penal laws dating from Elizabethan times which, though rarely enforced, theoretically rendered all Catholics liable to heavy punishments. In addition, however, he wanted to overturn the Test Acts passed in his brother’s reign, which barred Catholics from holding military or administrative office. Protestant objections to the repeal of the acts were not irrational, for James himself believed that the consequences would be far reaching. In May 1686 he told the Pope’s representative at his court that once Romanists were freed from their legal disabilities, England would become Catholic in two years.²⁵

Only Parliament could repeal laws, but as a preliminary James set about ensuring that the Test Act’s provisions ceased to be enforced. Having purged the judiciary, in June 1686 he arranged for a test case to be brought before the Court of King’s Bench, hinging on whether he could issue dispensations freeing individuals from their legal obligation to swear an oath repudiating transubstantiation before accepting office. The Court pronounced in the King’s favour, and James was swift to take advantage of the decision, appointing four Catholics to the Privy Council in July 1686.

As yet there were not many Catholics in the English army, but James caused alarm by enlarging it, arousing fears that he intended to enforce his will by military means. In August 1686 Anne was present ‘in tremendous dust and melting heat’ when James reviewed a sizeable body of troops encamped on Hounslow Heath. It was an alarming spectacle, for these forces were well placed to overawe the capital, and yet the King ‘had no enemies save the laws of the land’.²⁶

The King had also adopted a more aggressive stance towards Anne’s beloved Church of England. In March 1686 he had issued instructions forbidding clergymen from making controversial sermons. Soon afterwards he had been infuriated when John Sharp had attacked Catholics from his London pulpit. He became angrier still when his old adversary Henry Compton, Bishop of London, declined to suspend Sharp from preaching. Determined to bring the clergy under firmer control, in July 1686 James established an Ecclesiastical Commission, presided over by three bishops and three secular members. It was empowered to carry out James’s visitorial powers under the Act of Supremacy, but since prerogative courts had been abolished in 1641 it was at best of doubtful legality. Compton was summoned before the Commission and on 6 September was suspended from the function and execution of his ecclesiastical office.

Anne was concerned by these developments, but blamed her father’s priests and advisers for encouraging him to act in this undesirable fashion. She was not, however, prepared to make similar allowances for her stepmother, believing rather that Mary Beatrice’s fanatical Catholicism was responsible for James’s worst excesses. Anne was not alone in thinking this. Gilbert Burnet noted that Mary Beatrice had become ‘so bigoted and fierce in matters of religion that she is as much hated since she was Queen as she was beloved whilst she was Duchess’. Furthermore, although the King had refrained from tackling Anne about their religious differences, in September 1687 Barrillon reported that Mary Beatrice had raised the matter with her stepdaughter. Far from persuading the Princess to contemplate conversion, her stepmother’s intervention ‘only served to embitter her spirit’.²⁷

Anne’s dislike for Mary Beatrice had manifested itself long before this point. In July 1685 she told Sarah that the Queen had recently presented her with a watch adorned by a picture of herself set with diamonds, an offering that her stepdaughter found insultingly meagre. Anne wrote sarcastically that she would ‘return her most thankful acknowledgements, but among friends I think one may say without being vain that the goddess might have showered down her favours on her poor vassals with more liberality’. By May 1686 Anne’s antipathy towards her stepmother had attracted the attention of the French envoy Bonrepos, who reported in a despatch home that the Princess ‘hates the Queen of England and denigrates her when with her confidantes’.²⁸

If Anne was now estranged from Mary Beatrice, she was drawing ever closer to Sarah. To the Princess’s ‘sensible joy’, Lady Clarendon had retired from her service in September 1685. As a result Anne was able to install Sarah as her Groom of the Stole and First Lady of the Bedchamber, doubling her salary to £400. In May 1686 she signalled her affection by making Sarah a godmother to the baby Anne Sophia, and within a few months the strength of her devotion for her friend began attracting comment. In early March 1687 Barrillon alluded to Sarah being Anne’s ‘favourite’, and two months later his colleague, Bonrepos, wrote of the Princess’s ‘inordinate passion’ for Lady Churchill. An English observer described Sarah as Anne’s ‘special friend’, asserting in late 1687 that this ‘very great confidante of the Princess of Denmark … hath a greater influence upon her than any persons whatsoever’. Others too shared Barrillon’s belief that Anne was ‘governed by Madame Churchill’. Burnet declared ‘There never was a more absolute favourite in a court; [Lady Churchill] is indeed become the mistress of [Princess Anne’s] thoughts and affections and does with her, both in her court and in all her affairs what she pleases’.²⁹

It was assumed that Sarah and her husband bore a significant responsibility for Anne’s gradual estrangement from the court, but their letters provide little evidence of this. The only letter from Anne to Sarah that touches on politics during this period relates to the appointment of the four Catholic Privy Councillors in July 1686, which Anne said gave affairs ‘a very dismal prospect’. As yet, however, such concerns were of secondary importance to her. She blithely concluded, ‘Whatever changes there are in the world I hope you will never forsake me and I shall be happy’.³⁰

It is very clear that Sarah had a great influence when it came to ordering the Princess’s household. Sarah was given final say on the choice of a new Lady of the Bedchamber. Initially, the Queen suggested the Countess of Huntingdon, but the Princess rejected her because the Countess’s frequent pregnancies would interfere with her duties. When Lady Thanet’s name was mentioned, Anne scoffed to Sarah ‘I hope you know me too well to believe I would be so great a fool to accept of her’. The King then proposed some other candidates, whereupon Anne asked Sarah to choose between Lady Arabella Mercarty and Lady Frescheville: ‘I should be glad to know which you like best … for I desire in all things to please you’. It then emerged that Sarah favoured Lady Westmorland, and Anne at once concurred, enthusing, ‘I really believe her to be a pretty kind of a woman and, besides, my dear Lady Churchill desires it’.³¹

Just when the matter looked settled, things shifted again, and in October Lady Anne Spencer, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Sunderland, was given the place. It caused some surprise, for it was unusual for unmarried girls to become Ladies of the Bedchamber. The French ambassador interpreted the appointment purely as ‘a mark of favour for Milord Sunderland’, who was the King’s Secretary of State. Burnet assumed that the King and Queen had imposed Anne Spencer on the Princess, claiming that throughout her father’s reign Anne was ‘beset with spies’ in her household.³² In fact, the main reason for taking on Lady Anne Spencer had been to please Sarah.

Anne’s readiness to do this was curious in view of the fact that she had already expressed jealousy of Sarah’s relationship with the girl’s mother, the Countess of Sunderland. In September 1685, Anne had observed petulantly that whereas she had not received prompt replies to her recent letters, ‘I can’t help saying that you were not too hot to write to Lady Sunderland’. Anne acknowledged she was perhaps ‘too apt to complain’ about such things, particularly since Sarah had assured her she ‘had no reason to be jealous’, but stressed ‘I have been a little troubled at it’. Within a few days she was irked to hear that Sarah had met with the Countess while she was still bereft of her company. ‘I cannot help envying Lady Sunderland’, Anne wrote plaintively, ‘I am sure she cannot love you half so well as I do, though I know she has the art of saying a great deal’.³³

Anne would hardly have been reassured if she had known that Lady Sunderland had been working on Sarah, in the hope that her daughter could be appointed the Princess’s Lady of the Bedchamber. Anne’s welfare was not uppermost in Lady Sunderland’s mind; rather she wanted this because it would enable her to see more of Sarah. ‘Whenever the Princess went [on] any journeys, I would go too, by which I should be almost always where you were’ Lady Sunderland explained.³⁴ Not long afterwards, Lady Anne Spencer’s appointment was announced.

Ironically, within a few months Anne Spencer’s role in the Princess’s household had caused a coolness between Lady Churchill and the Countess of Sunderland. Sarah was not fitted by nature to be a lady-in-waiting. Royal service could be exceptionally arduous, entailing ‘more toil and trouble than content’. By the standards of the time, Sarah had good cause to be grateful to Anne, who was on the whole a considerate employer. She was mindful of Sarah’s obligations to her husband, telling her on one occasion ‘My dear Lady Churchill cannot think me so unreasonable as to be uneasy at anything you do on your Lord’s account. All I desire is to have as much of your company as I can without any inconvenience to your self’. Anne was also aware that Sarah would want to be with her young children as much as possible, making such generous allowances for this that Sarah was able to spend a good part of James II’s reign at her house at St Albans. Yet Sarah still found the demands of her position irksome. One reason why she had been so keen on appointing Anne Spencer was because her mother had assured Sarah that the girl ‘would gladly wait whenever you would have her’, enabling Sarah to ‘live easily’. Unfortunately the young lady then fell ill, and when Sarah had to take over her duties, she became ‘extremely out of humour’ to find herself ‘a slave’. Blaming Lady Sunderland for her daughter’s delinquency, she complained to her about being required ‘sick or well to wait, and be weary of my life’.³⁵

Sarah’s belief that she was overworked also gave rise to friction between her and Anne, and after a sharp exchange the Princess apologised for being too demanding. ‘I now see my error and don’t expect anything from you but what one friend may from another’, she wrote contritely. To solve the problem in April 1686 she undertook to go to the expense of having a Third Lady of the Bedchamber, ‘that you may have more ease and have no just cause to grow weary of me’.³⁶ True to her word, the Princess subsequently took Lady Frescheville of Staveley into her household.

Anne was able to justify her resentment of Lady Sunderland on political grounds, as her husband was the King’s Secretary of State, and was doing everything possible to help James achieve objectives damaging to the Church of England. She believed, wrongly, that everything Sunderland did had his wife’s approval.

The Princess vented her hatred of the whole Sunderland family when corresponding with her sister Mary. In August 1686 Mary had written to enquire whether she found it ‘troublesome’ to have Anne Spencer in her household. Anne replied that so far the young woman had given her no cause for complaint but, ‘knowing from whence she comes’, she was always very guarded about what she said in her presence. She continued, ‘To give everybody their due, I must needs say she has not been very impertinent nor I ever heard she has yet done anybody any injury; but I am very much of opinion that she will not degenerate from her noble parents’.³⁷

In the summer of 1686 Anne went back to Tunbridge Wells for another course of waters, but to her sorrow Sarah did not accompany her. George stayed there with her for some of the time but after his departure Anne wrote dejectedly she was leading ‘a very melancholy life’. Once again she begged Sarah to keep her informed about how her children were faring; when Sarah suggested that the Queen and Mrs Berkeley were better placed to keep the Princess up to date, Anne was adamant that only Sarah’s reports would suffice.³⁸

A few days later the Queen sent word to Anne that her eldest daughter had recently been ‘peevish’, and this worried the Princess. ‘I wish it may be her teeth, but I can’t help being in some pain for her since she has relapsed so often’, she told Sarah in distress. The Princess then began to contemplate bringing little Mary to join her in Tunbridge, wondering if Sarah agreed that ‘change of air might not do her good’. She had conceived the idea after seeing Lady Poultney’s sickly grandson develop into a ‘lusty child’ on spending a short time at the spa. However, the Princess was diffident about the proposal, begging Sarah to ‘tell me what you think and not speak of this to anybody, for ’tis a fancy that came into my head today, and maybe others that have not so much kindness for me as you have will laugh at me’.³⁹ Whether or not Sarah gave her approval, in the end the scheme came to nothing.

The baby Anne Sophia was healthier than her sister, and Anne was delighted to learn she ‘thrives so well’. However, after a time worrying reports arrived about her as well. As a result of some unspecified problem, Mrs Berkeley suggested the child should be weaned, despite the fact that she was barely seven weeks old. Although it was surely a disastrous idea, the royal physician Dr Waldegrave agreed with her. In great concern the Princess entreated Sarah to ‘ask some skilful people about it and tell me what you think of it too, for I do not understand these matters and would not willingly depend on her judgement only’. Sarah sensibly advised against weaning the child and Anne was grateful, begging her to ‘continue … hindering anything to be done that you think is not well’. In the end the infant did not escape being dosed with ‘physic’ (usually meaning purgatives) by Dr Waldegrave but surprisingly this did her no harm, and Sarah assured the Princess that on her return she would find that her baby daughter had developed into a great beauty.⁴⁰

It was not just her children’s health that worried Anne over the summer of 1686, for Sarah herself was less robust than usual, suffering from a nasty cold and ‘dismal thoughts’. Having extracted a promise that she would write to her daily, Anne became greatly alarmed when twenty-four hours went by without her receiving a letter. ‘For God’s sake if anything does ail you, find some way to let me know’, she begged her urgently, ‘for ’tis very uneasy to me to be from you and not to hear something of you every day’. It soon emerged that one reason why Sarah was feeling so unwell was that she was expecting another child. After excusing Sarah from waiting on her so frequently during her pregnancy, Anne was annoyed when she accepted an invitation to visit Lady Sunderland in Northamptonshire. She condemned Lady Sunderland’s thoughtlessness in suggesting this ‘great journey … which I must needs say according to my small understanding was a very strange undertaking for one in your condition’.⁴¹ In January 1687 Sarah gave birth to a much-desired son, but within six months another pregnancy again prevented her from being in attendance as often as the Princess would have liked.

In view of Anne’s unconditional devotion to Sarah, it was unfortunate that her sister Mary had a less enthusiastic attitude towards her. The Princess was decidedly ruffled when in late 1686 Mary suggested not just that Sarah was worryingly irreligious, but that it was impossible to trust her husband, on account of his being in such high favour with the King.

Anne herself had earlier felt bothered by the perfunctory way that Sarah practised her faith. Her friend’s hostility to Catholicism could not be faulted, for she professed herself disgusted by what she termed its ‘cheats and nonsense’, but her attachment to the Anglican Church was not stronger on that account. She was apt to mock individuals such as Lady Clarendon who ‘made a great rout with prayers’, and derided the hypocrisy of those who were ostentatious in their religious observance but struck her as deficient in the Christian virtues. Sarah’s irregular attendance at divine service had so perturbed Anne that when her friend apologised for cutting a letter short in order to go to church, the Princess wrote back that while she would have welcomed a longer letter, on this occasion ‘I can’t complain, for indeed I think you do not go to that place so often as you should do’. However, while she believed herself entitled to make such comments, she reacted fiercely to Mary’s strictures on the Churchills.⁴²

In December 1686 she wrote to her sister wanting to know who had ‘taken such pains to give you so ill a character of Lady Churchill’. She insisted ‘I don’t say this that I take it at all ill … but I think myself obliged to vindicate my friend’. Firmly, she continued ‘I believe there is nobody in the world has better notions of religion than she has’, even if Sarah did ‘not keep such a bustle with religion’ as others who paraded their piety. Lady Churchill not only had impeccable ‘moral principles’, but possessed ‘a true sense of the doctrine of our Church, and abhors all the principles of the Church of Rome’. As for her husband, he was certainly ‘a very faithful servant to the King, and … the King is very kind to him’. Yet while he would doubtless obey his master ‘in all things that are consistent with religion … rather than change that, I dare say, he will lose all his places and all he has’.⁴³ After receiving this spirited defence Mary did not raise the subject again, but her misgivings were not entirely allayed.

Despite the troubling political situation, at the outset of 1687 the Princess of Denmark had many reasons to be optimistic. Her father still lacked a male heir, so any damage effected by him was likely to be undone in the future. The waters of Tunbridge had once again had the desired result and she was several months into another pregnancy. Naturally she would have hoped that this time she would produce a son, but in the meantime she could take delight in her two daughters. The eldest one was now a toddler, ‘somewhat unhealthy, but most dearly beloved of the Princess’. On 10 January Anne wrote to Mary in Holland ‘to thank you for the plaything you sent my girl. It is the prettiest thing I ever saw, and too good for her yet, so I keep it locked up and only let her look on it when she comes to see me. She is the most delighted with it in the world and in her language gives you abundance of thanks. It might look ridiculous in me to tell you how much court she makes to your picture without being bid, and may sound like a lie, and therefore I won’t say anything more of her, but that I will make it my endeavour always to make her a very dutiful niece’.⁴⁴

Then a series of catastrophes happened in quick succession. After being ‘indisposed … two days’, on 21 January Anne lost the child she was expecting. Her pregnancy had been far enough advanced for the foetus to be identified as a male child. One report believed the Princess’s miscarriage had been precipitated by ‘a jolt in her coach’, but Anne herself attributed it to her having unwisely performed an energetic French dance with ‘a great deal of jumping in it’. Physically she made a swift recovery, but within days a still worse tragedy befell her, for her younger daughter caught smallpox. On 31 January Anne wrote to Mary ‘in so great trouble for my poor child’ that she could not focus on recent worrying political developments. ‘I must go again to my poor child presently, for I am much more uneasy to be from her’, she told Mary distractedly. Despite Anne’s best efforts, the child could not be saved, and by the time she died on 2 February her elder sister Mary had caught the disease too. For a time the little girl appeared to be withstanding the illness, but on 8 February she too succumbed. When autopsies were carried out on the tiny corpses, it was found that little Mary had already been suffering from consumption and was unlikely to have lived long in any case, but Anne Sophia had been in sound health.⁴⁵

Next, George caught smallpox, and seemed destined to follow his daughters to the grave. In the end he did not die, but the grim sequence of disasters that had befallen the couple prostrated them both. On 18 February 1687 Lady Rachel Russell reported, ‘The good Princess has taken her chastisement heavily; the first relief of that sorrow proceeded from the threatening of a greater, the Prince being ill. I never heard any relation more moving than that of seeing them together. Sometimes they wept, sometimes they mourned … then sat silent, hand in hand; he sick in his bed and she the carefullest nurse to him that can be imagined’. George’s health was permanently impaired by his illness and after this he suffered from severe asthma and congested lungs. In April an observer commented ‘I like not the unwholesomeness of his looks’ and many people prophesied that before long Anne would be a widow. The French ambassador noted that in that event, the King would want to marry her to a Catholic.⁴⁶

Although Anne was spared this, the pain of her losses was overwhelming, despite such terrible bereavements being relatively common in the seventeenth century. The infant and child mortality rate was appallingly high for all social classes, with an estimated one in three children dying before their fifth birthdays. The fate suffered by so many of Anne’s siblings illustrates just how precarious life was at the time. It could be argued that because Anne had not breastfed either of her children, and had been absent from them for quite long periods of their short lives, she would not have formed an exceptionally close bond with her daughters, making their deaths easier to bear. To assume this, however, would be rash, for though the anguish suffered by well-born women at the loss of their children is generally undocumented, this cannot be taken to mean that it did not exist. In France a royal contemporary of Anne’s, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans certainly felt distraught following the death of her eldest child in 1676, which left her feeling ‘as though her heart had been plucked from her body’.⁴⁷

Anne’s father and stepmother did their best to console her, treating her with ‘great tenderness’. The French ambassador reported that Mary Beatrice ‘has been always with the Princess as if she was her daughter’, but in view of Anne’s dislike of the Queen, these attentions can only have been unwelcome. The Princess’s religion afforded her better comfort, for as a believer she was able to tell herself her children had departed to a better place. Excessive mourning for a loved one could be interpreted as questioning something divinely ordained. In 1681, when Frances Apsley had been upset by the death of her sister-in-law, Anne had enjoined ‘dear Semandra, be a little comforted, for it may displease God Almighty to see you not submit to his will, and who knows but that he may lay some greater affliction on you. Death is a debt we must all pay when God is pleased to take us out of this wicked world’. Yet though inconsolable sorrow could be condemned as impious or even sinful, it proved difficult for Anne to endure her tribulations with fortitude. More than one source describes her as becoming ‘ill by reason of grief’ after the deaths of her two daughters, and George’s slow recovery was partly attributed to his profound distress. Having been described as ‘much indisposed, as well as much afflicted’ immediately following the event, Anne was still reportedly ‘in a very weak and declining state’ in May 1687.⁴⁸

There was little comfort to be derived from political events. In January 1687 Anne’s two uncles lost their jobs, and although they had done ‘a thousand little things’ to displease her, it was disturbing that the King rejected such loyal Anglicans. With the Hyde brothers out of the way, the power of Lord Sunderland was much increased. Anne already believed him to be ‘a great knave’, and as she saw him ‘working with all his might to bring in Popery’, her detestation of him grew apace.⁴⁹

It was becoming evident that James was not content simply to exempt individuals from observing the Test Acts; he was determined that the measures must be repealed by Parliament. For Anne this was a terrifying prospect, for she did not doubt the King’s ‘desire to take off the Test and all other laws against [the Catholics] is only a pretence to bring in Popery’. In early 1687 James started to summon Members of Parliament and peers for individual talks, asking them to pledge themselves to support the repeal of the Test Acts when Parliament next met. Many of those approached refused to commit themselves, whereupon they were dismissed from positions held at court, or in the administration and army. To one observer it appeared that ‘every post brought fresh news of gentlemen’s losing their employments both civil and military’, and another fervent Anglican pronounced ‘This was a time of great trial’.⁵⁰

Disappointed by the many rebuffs he had received, James announced that Parliament would not reassemble until November. In the meantime, however, he continued to do all he could to ensure that when it did meet, it would be an amenable body. As yet Lord Churchill had not been called upon to indicate where he stood with regard to the Test Acts, but in his wife’s view it was obvious that ‘everybody sooner or later must be ruined, who would not become a Roman Catholic’. Anne too was despondent, telling her sister in March, ‘I believe in a little while no Protestant will be able to live here’.⁵¹

In early March 1687 Anne went to her father to ask permission to visit her sister in Holland in the summer, while George would be in Denmark seeing his family. At first James had no objection, but subsequently the King’s advisers told him that a meeting between the two sisters ‘could only serve to bring them closer together and to strengthen them in their attachment to the Protestant religion’.⁵² Accordingly James withdrew permission for Anne to go overseas.

Furious at being denied her wish, the Princess tried hard to change her father’s mind, but he refused to lift his veto. However, he could not prevent Anne from communicating secretly with her sister. Her correspondence with Mary became increasingly controversial and indiscreet, and was transmitted through unofficial channels. ‘Since I am not to see my dear sister I think myself obliged to tell you the truth of everything this way’, she told Mary. She blamed Sunderland – ‘the subtillest workingest villain that is on the face of the earth’ – not just for the King’s reversal of his initial decision, but for ‘going on so fiercely for the interests of the Papists’. Though Anne had taken the precaution of entrusting her letter to a reliable messenger, she begged Mary not to disclose a word of its contents to anyone apart from her husband. Quite apart from the fact that the King had explicitly instructed her not to reveal that he had forbidden her to visit Mary, the Princess was guiltily conscious that ‘it is all treason I have spoke’.⁵³

Anne took care to be present when Anglican divines made sermons intended to emphasise the danger of Popish encroachments, ‘openly bearing witness to her zeal for the Protestant religion’ by going ‘incognito to individual churches to listen to the most popular and fashionable preachers’.⁵⁴ Having demonstrated her solidarity for her embattled faith, she withdrew to Richmond. George’s need to convalesce was used as a pretext for her spending several weeks there, but really she was signalling her estrangement from the court.

Although apparently living a quiet life at Richmond, the Princess was not cut off from the opposition movement that was gradually forming against the King. In February 1687 William of Orange had sent a diplomat named Dykvelt to England as his ‘ambassador extraordinary’, with orders to form links with those who opposed the repeal of the Test Acts. He brought with him a letter to Anne from William and Mary, but even after receiving this, the Princess thought it imprudent to meet with Dykvelt. On 13 March she explained to Mary that she had been fearful Lord Sunderland would hear about the meeting and besides, ‘I am not used to speak to people about business’. Instead she sent Lord Churchill to see the envoy. Two months later Churchill gave Dykvelt a letter to take back to Holland, stating that the Princess of Denmark ‘was resolved, by the assistance of God, to suffer all extremities, even to death itself, rather than be brought to change her religion’.⁵⁵

On 12 February 1687 King James had issued a Declaration of Indulgence to Tender Consciences in Scotland, suspending operation of the Test Act there. On 4 April he issued a similar Declaration for England. In this he stated that since he believed that ‘conscience ought not to be constrained’ he had decided to grant ‘free exercise of their religion’ not just to Catholics but also to Protestant nonconformists. The measure nullified the requirement that anyone employed in a court or government office, or other place of trust, should have to take an oath disavowing transubstantiation. For the moment this was done solely on the King’s authority, although the Declaration blandly concluded that James had ‘no doubt of the concurrence of our two houses of Parliament when we shall think it convenient for them to meet’.⁵⁶

The Declaration of Indulgence marked a change of direction on the King’s part. Until now he had hoped that he could abolish laws harmful to Catholics with the cooperation of Anglican Members of Parliament, but the disappointing outcome to James’s private interviews had indicated that this was unrealistic. Accordingly the King’s strategy was to form an alliance with the dissenters, who were far more numerous than Catholics. In the first eighteen months of the reign, the laws against Protestant nonconformists had been rigorously enforced, but James now set out to enlist their support. Recognising this as an astute change of tactics on his father-in-law’s part, William sought to convince the dissenters to be patient until Mary ascended the throne, for then they would be treated equitably without incurring the odium of coupling themselves with Catholics.

As a member of the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church, sympathy for English dissenters came naturally to William, and since her marriage Mary too had come to believe that the Anglican clergy were unnecessarily harsh to dissenters. Anne’s viewpoint was different. It is true that the Declaration of Indulgence appalled her primarily because she believed that it would enable Catholics to become dominant within the state. She told Mary, ‘In taking away the Test and Penal laws, they take away our religion; and if that be done, farewell to all happiness: for when once the Papists have everything in their hands, all we poor Protestants have but dismal times to hope for’. In addition, however, she considered the Declaration pernicious because of its concessions to nonconformists. Unaware that her sister was not wholly of her mind on this issue, she told her, ‘It is a melancholy prospect that all we of the Church of England have; all the sectaries may now do what they please. Every one has the free exercise of their religion, on purpose no doubt to ruin us’.⁵⁷

The King’s treatment of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge exacerbated fears that he was not merely trying to secure toleration for Catholics, but wanted all power to be concentrated in Catholic hands. The two universities were the principal educational establishments for Anglican clergymen and hence any attack on their rights ‘struck at the root of the Protestant Church’. The richest college in Oxford, Magdalen, was ordered to install a crypto-Catholic as its President. When the College Fellows declined, they were called before the Ecclesiastical Commission and their Vice President and another Fellow were suspended. Cambridge received similar treatment. After the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge had been removed from office for refusing to confer a degree on a Benedictine monk, a worried Anne wrote to Mary, ‘By this one may easily guess what one is to hope for henceforward, since the priests have so much power with the King as to make him do things so directly against the laws of the land’.⁵⁸

In late April Anne abandoned her earlier caution and had an interview with Dykvelt. She also continued to write regularly to Mary. For the sake of appearances she still occasionally sent letters using the official postal service, but because of the danger of interception these were trifling in content. One such communication was full of inane information about court etiquette and Anne’s routine at Richmond. After apologising for her untidy writing, which she attributed to being distracted by ‘a very pretty talking child’ of Lady Churchill’s, the Princess added unctuously, ‘Tomorrow the King and Queen does me the honour to dine here’.⁵⁹

The letters Anne sent secretly to Holland ‘by sure hands’ were very different in tone. As well as making plain her views on political matters, the Princess took this opportunity to express violent animosity towards the Sunderlands. The pen portrait Anne drew of the Countess was devastating in its malice, describing her as ‘a flattering, dissembling, false woman … [who] cares not at what rate she lives, but never pays anybody. She will cheat, though it be for a little’. Anne continued, ‘To hear her talk you would think she was a very good Protestant’, when in fact ‘she has no religion’. The Princess was sure Lady Sunderland took lovers, despite making ‘such a clatter with her devotions that it really turns one’s stomach’.⁶⁰

Next, Anne targeted her venom on Queen Mary Beatrice. Giving full rein to the virulence of her descriptive powers, she proved remarkably successful in poisoning her sister’s mind against their stepmother. In May 1687 she wrote,

The Queen, you must know, is of a very proud, haughty humour … though she pretends to hate all form and ceremony … She declares always that she loves sincerity and hates flattery, but when the grossest flattery in the world is said to her face, she seems extremely well pleased with it. It really is enough to turn one’s stomach.

Anne insisted that her views were widely shared, and that Mary Beatrice ‘is the most hated in the world of all sorts of people; for everybody believes that she pressed the King to be more violent than he would be of himself … for she is a very great bigot in her way’. Continuing with her remorseless character assassination, Anne declared ‘one may see … she hates all Protestants’, and that it was ‘a sad and very uneasy thing to be forced to live civilly and as it were freely with a woman that one knows hates one’. She went on, ‘She pretends to have a great deal of kindness to me, but I doubt it is not real, for I never see proofs of it’. Then, having lambasted Mary Beatrice for her lack of sincerity, she proclaimed that she herself would take great care to dissemble her feelings for her stepmother. ‘I am resolved always to … make my court very much to her, that she may not have any just cause against me’ she told Mary, apparently unaware of any contradiction. Though Anne’s hatred for her stepmother was so fierce, she still made excuses for her father, whom she depicted as led astray by malevolent influences.⁶¹

Anne prevailed upon George’s brother, King Christian V of Denmark, to submit a formal request to King James, asking that she might accompany her husband when he visited Denmark in the summer. However, by the time this arrived, in mid April 1687, Anne was pregnant again, and a long sea voyage was inadvisable. George did not cancel his trip, and Anne was apprehensive that her father would see this as a good opportunity to proselytise. She shared her concerns with Mary: ‘When he is away I fancy the King will speak to me about my religion, for then he will find me more alone than yet he has done’. Some considered it negligent of Prince George to abandon his wife at such a time. One London citizen noted in his journal ‘Very many wonder what can induce him … to leave … the Princess here to be exposed to all temptation’.⁶²

George sailed for Denmark on 17 June and was away for six weeks. For much of that time Anne withdrew to Hampton Court, using the excuse of her pregnancy to live quietly there. She could not avoid giving an audience on 10 July to the Papal nuncio, Count d’Adda, as a ‘mark of submission and respect to the King her father’, but the French ambassador was being fanciful when he opined that ‘this docility … must give hope of her conversion’. By this time Anne herself was starting to feel cautiously optimistic that she would be spared a paternal attempt to convert her, having told Mary on 22 June, ‘The King has not yet said anything to me about religion, and if he does not before the Prince comes back again, I shall begin to hope that he will not do it at all’.⁶³

Anne’s fear of Catholics nevertheless remained strong. Believing them capable of almost any wicked act that would advance their purposes, in March 1687 she had warned Mary against visiting England. ‘It would be better … not to do it’, she cautioned her sister, ‘for though I dare swear the K[ing] could have no thought against either of you, yet … one cannot help being afraid … Really, if you or the Prince should come, I should be frightened out of my wits for fear any harm should happen to either of you’. Now she became concerned that Catholics might menace the safety of the child she was carrying. In the past Anne had used a midwife recommended by her stepmother, but because the woman was a Catholic, Mary had urged her to make different arrangements. Anne agreed that this would be desirable, but did not dare to tell the Queen outright. Instead she proposed to employ ‘some sort of invention to bring it about, to give as little offence or obstruction in the thing as could be’. She even talked of ‘keeping her labour to herself as long as she could’ so that a more suitable accoucheur could be called in at the last minute. Alarmed by this proposal, Mary warned Anne of the risk that ‘out of too much precaution she might prejudice herself’.⁶⁴

The King dissolved Parliament on 2 July 1687, having become convinced that the current assembly would never vote to repeal the Test Acts. He set about ensuring that when another Parliament was elected, it would be more compliant. In late summer James set out on a progress through western England but though Prince George had returned home in mid August, Anne’s pregnancy gave the couple the perfect excuse not to accompany the King. Even when James returned from his travels and went to Windsor, they used George’s bad chest as a reason to avoid joining him there. Maintaining that the climate at Windsor was ‘too cold and piercing’, in early September they settled instead at Hampton Court, where conditions were allegedly more favourable. The Danish envoy in England, who was displeased that the Prince and Princess were deliberately distancing themselves from the court, sarcastically declared himself ‘surprised that a Dane could not live in the air of Windsor’.⁶⁵

Ten days after returning to London, Anne suffered another crushing blow. In the eighth month of her pregnancy she went into premature labour and on 22 October was delivered of a dead son. The fact that ‘the child was full grown and thought to have been alive in or near the princess’s travail’ only made the loss more agonising.⁶⁶ Her two previous miscarriages had not been considered especially significant but this one (which technically was not a miscarriage at all as it took place when she was more than twenty-eight weeks into pregnancy) was more worrying as it could not be attributed to an external cause. Tragically for Anne, this was far from the last time when she would have to endure such heartbreak.

Multiple miscarriages are sometimes caused by rhesus incompatibility. This occurs when the mother’s blood is rhesus negative, and the father’s rhesus positive. When they conceive a child together, its blood is rhesus positive. The mother responds to the presence of the child’s rhesus factor by forming antibodies, which then fatally interact with the child’s blood. However, such a diagnosis does not fit with the pattern of Anne’s pregnancies. Rhesus incompatibility does not usually affect a first pregnancy, but tends to manifest itself in second or third pregnancies. After that, all pregnancies are liable to end in failure, with miscarriage occurring earlier each time. As we have seen, Anne’s second and third pregnancies went to term and she produced two live children. This was followed by three miscarriages in close succession, but in 1689 she did succeed in having another child, which in a case of rhesus incompatibility would be an unlikely outcome. After that none of her children survived, but many of her pregnancies only terminated at a late stage.⁶⁷

A more plausible hypothesis is that Anne lost her babies as a result of intra-uterine growth retardation caused by an insufficiency of the placenta. This in turn could have been the consequence of Anne being afflicted by Hughes syndrome, also known as antiphospholipid syndrome, or ‘sticky blood’. This condition, only recently discovered by Dr Graham Hughes, is now thought to be responsible for one in five miscarriages. The mother’s blood, often as a result of genetic factors, is loaded with antibodies which overstimulate the immune system, increasing blood clotting. The thickened blood cannot pass through the small blood vessels in the placenta, depriving the foetus of nutrients and often causing miscarriage in late pregnancy. Today pregnant women with the condition are sometimes successfully treated by taking a single aspirin daily. Even in Anne’s time, herbal preparations containing willow bark (the active component of aspirin) were available, and might have had a good effect, but of course no one then was aware of this.⁶⁸

What makes this diagnosis more compelling is that there is a strong link between Hughes syndrome and disseminated lupus erythematosus. While it is possible to have Hughes syndrome without ever manifesting symptoms of lupus, it has been estimated that one fifth of those affected by Hughes syndrome subsequently develop this auto-immune disease, which is found particularly in young women. Its most notable symptoms include polyarthritis and facial eruption, both of which severely afflicted Anne in coming years.

The loss of another child, coming only months after Anne’s miscarriage at the start of the year and the deaths of her two daughters, was profoundly distressing for the Princess. Once again her father and stepmother were ‘deeply afflicted’ for her, but their sympathy afforded Anne scant consolation. Mary Beatrice’s sufferings as a mother had in many ways been similar to Anne’s, but the Princess was very far from feeling a sense of solidarity with her. Instead the possibility that Mary Beatrice might be blessed with offspring while she remained childless was almost intolerable. This, however, was the prospect that now faced the Princess. On the same day that Barrillon informed Louis XIV that Anne had lost her baby, he reported, ‘there is a slight suspicion that the Queen of England is pregnant’. He cautioned that this was as yet considered ‘highly doubtful’, but the news turned out to be true.⁶⁹

Mary Beatrice had last been pregnant in 1684, and English Protestants had optimistically assumed that her childbearing days were over. Recently, however, her health had much improved. In August 1687 she went to drink and bathe in the warm spa waters at Bath, which were renowned for promoting fertility. The King joined her there between 18–21 August, and then set off on his progress. He returned briefly to Bath on 6 September and – even though it was recommended that ladies should not sleep with their husbands while taking the waters – it was during this short visit that his son was conceived. However, it took longer than usual for this to become apparent. As Mary Beatrice herself later confided to her stepdaughter Mary, ‘I had libels [her period] after I was with child, which I never had before’.⁷⁰ It was only in late October that she and the King began to entertain hopes as to her condition, and once these were confirmed the baby’s expected date of arrival was calculated on the assumption that the Queen had conceived immediately after returning to London on 6 October.

For Anne this was a devastating development, both personally and politically. She was still in mourning for her two daughters, and suffering two miscarriages within a year had taken a terrible emotional toll. The implications were shattering: if the child was a boy – and as early as 3 November the French ambassador noted that Catholics at court were talking as if this was a foregone conclusion – he would supersede his sisters in the succession. James’s son would be brought up as a Catholic, and so James’s achievements would outlast his life. If the King died while his son was a minor, Mary Beatrice would become regent, and power would rest in the hands of a woman Anne saw as a fanatical enemy of the true Church. With her hopes for the future in shreds, Anne’s chagrin and dismay were painfully apparent. The Tuscan envoy noted in December, ‘No words can express the rage of the Princess of Denmark at the Queen’s condition; she can dissimulate it to no one’.⁷¹

Exactly when Anne persuaded herself that her stepmother was only pretending to be pregnant is unclear, but her sister Mary had some doubts on the subject from the outset. When her father wrote to her in late November confirming that the Queen was pregnant, it struck her as odd that he should be ‘talking in such an assured way … at a time when no woman could be certain’. It was enough to instil in her ‘the slightest suspicion’.⁷²

Mary insisted that the thought of being denied the crown left her ‘indifferent on her own account’, but concerned for ‘the interest of the Protestant religion’. She was also upset that her husband’s worldly prospects would be blighted if she did not ascend the throne. For Anne too, of course, the welfare of the Church was paramount, but whether she could have truthfully claimed that her fury at being ousted from the succession owed nothing to personal ambition is questionable. Despite being of a retiring disposition Anne had a strong sense of her entitlement to rule, and would not readily relinquish what she regarded as her rightful inheritance. In her case it would have stretched credibility to claim that she wanted to become Queen merely to enhance the power and prestige of her husband.

The news that Mary Beatrice was expecting a child was so unwelcome that many people elected not to believe it, and the French ambassador reported on 3 November that Londoners were scoffing at rumours that the Queen was pregnant. On 1 January 1688 the news was officially announced, but this did not diminish public scepticism. Already there were people who ‘impudently declare it a fiction’, and satires started appearing suggesting that Mary Beatrice was faking her pregnancy. The Earl of Clarendon noted on 15 January, ‘it is strange to see how the Queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scarce anybody believed it to be true. Good God help us!’.⁷³

Since the dissolution of July 1687, the King had dismissed several Lord Lieutenants he considered unreliable, and in autumn 1688 he ordered those still in office to put three questions to all men of substance in the counties. The questionnaire was designed to establish whether these individuals would vote to repeal the Test Act in the coming Parliament or, if they were not standing for election themselves, whether they would support candidates known to favour repeal. In the counties the answers served mainly to demonstrate the strength of opinion against royal policy, but in the municipal boroughs, where it was easier to meddle with the franchise, James’s electoral agents were optimistic that by remodelling corporations and filling the Commission of the Peace with dissenters and Catholics they could pack the House of Commons with men willing to do the King’s bidding.

Other provocative acts on James’s part demonstrated the King’s determination to press on with a Catholicising agenda. In November 1687 all the remaining Fellows of Magdalen College Oxford were dismissed. At least six of the men who replaced them were Catholics. A month later James’s Jesuit Clerk of the Closet, Father Petre, – who was regarded as the most extreme of the King’s Catholic advisers – was made a Privy Councillor.

When the Earl of Scarsdale, who was Prince George’s Groom of the Stool, was deprived of his Lord Lieutenancy after refusing to put the three questions to local gentlemen, the King was pleased when Anne asked whether Scarsdale should also be removed from his place in George’s household. Assuming that Anne and George would recognise the impropriety of employing a disgraced man, James left it to their discretion, but in the absence of explicit orders the Prince and Princess decided that it was permissible to retain Scarsdale. James then commanded that the Earl should be dismissed. This was duly done, but Anne made it clear she was acting under coercion.⁷⁴

In late 1687 Lord and Lady Churchill used the excuse of Sarah being pregnant again to withdraw to their house in the country. The French ambassador assumed this was because they did not want to be blamed for Anne’s conduct, but though Churchill had still not made it clear that he was opposed to a repeal of the Test Acts, his position was growing steadily more precarious.⁷⁵ All concerned were aware that if Churchill opposed the King in the House of Lords, he would inevitably lose his places at court and in the army.

Fortunately the outlook for Anne was not unremittingly bleak, for by 8 March 1688 it had been announced that she was expecting another baby. However, far from reconciling her to Mary Beatrice’s pregnancy, the renewed hope of motherhood only made the Princess more determined to protect her own, and her unborn child’s, hereditary rights. She was already facing the possibility that things would reach a point where it was impossible for her to remain quiescent. Her letters to Mary were now couched in a primitive code, in which the King was referred to as ‘Mansell’. On 20 March 1688 she wrote to her sister wanting to know ‘what you would have your friends to do if any alteration should come, as it is to be feared there will, especially if Mansell has a son’.⁷⁶

Anne was able to justify this by persuading herself that the Queen was engaged in a wicked conspiracy to impose an imposter on the nation. Until the spring of 1688 she had been wary of committing her thoughts on the subject to paper, but she now made up for her former caution by writing Mary a series of devastating letters. Even if she could not substantiate her statements, the virulence of her hatred of Mary Beatrice, and her certainty that Catholics were utterly unscrupulous, invested her arguments with a spurious persuasive power. Certainly Mary found them convincing, giving her ‘good reason to suspect trickery’.⁷⁷ This meant that when William of Orange decided to invade England, his wife could square her conscience with supporting the venture.

For Anne it was axiomatic that Catholics would not shrink from perpetrating such a gross deception, ‘the principles of that religion being such that they will stick at nothing, be it never so wicked, if it will promote their interest’. She claimed on 20 March that she now had ‘much reason to believe it is a false belly’, although the evidence she adduced was almost laughably meagre. She told Mary that her stepmother had grown very large, ‘but she looks better than ever she did, which is not usual … Besides, it is very odd that the Bath, that all the best doctors thought would do her a great deal of harm, should have had so very good effect so soon’. She contended that her stepmother was acting in a strangely furtive manner when, considering there had ‘been so many stories and jests made about it, she should, to convince the world, make either me or some of my friends feel her belly; but quite contrary, whenever one talks of her being with child, she looks as if she were afraid one should touch her. And whenever I happen to be in the room as she has been undressing, she has always gone into the next room to put on her smock.’

Mary Beatrice’s reluctance to expose herself to her stepdaughter’s inspection gave rise in Anne’s mind to ‘so much just cause for suspicion that I believe when she is brought to bed, nobody will be convinced it is her child, except it prove a daughter. For my part I declare I shall not, except I see the child and she parted’.⁷⁸

There was later some dispute as to whether Mary Beatrice had truly been so coy about undressing in front of other women. In the Life of James II, compiled posthumously by an authorised biographer using James’s Memoirs, it was stated that Anne saw Mary Beatrice’s belly regularly during the earlier stages of pregnancy when she attended the Queen ‘at her toilet, and put on her shift as usually’. Burnet, on the other hand, claimed that Prince George himself had told him that Mary Beatrice had deliberately frustrated Anne’s attempts to watch her dressing. According to him, the Princess ‘had sometimes stayed by her even indecently long in mornings, to see her rise, and to give her her shift, but she never did either’. However, much of Burnet’s evidence relating to the birth of the Prince of Wales is highly tendentious, so accepting this without reservation would be unwise. The Queen’s Woman of the Bedchamber Mrs Margaret Dawson was adamant that her mistress did not try to hide her body from her ladies at any time during her pregnancy. Mrs Dawson testified that ‘the Queen did shift her linen and expose her great belly every day to all the ladies that had the privilege of the dressing room … and she did never go into a closet or behind a bed to do it’. When Anne herself was pressed to be more precise about the Queen’s habits, she dredged up a lame report that Mary Beatrice had been angry when the Countess of Arran had unexpectedly entered her room, ‘because she did not care to be seen when she was shifting’.⁷⁹

Anne also made much of the claim that the only ladies Mary Beatrice permitted to touch her stomach so as to feel the child kicking were the Catholic Madam Mazarin and the Countess of Sunderland ‘who are people that nobody will give credit to’. There is evidence, however, that the Princess was wrong about this. The Protestant Isabella Wentworth later declared that in May 1688 the Queen had invited her to lay her hand on her belly, and she then ‘felt the child stir very strongly, as strongly … as ever I felt any of my own’. Anne later allegedly told Bishop Lloyd that during her stepmother’s previous pregnancies Mary Beatrice ‘would put the princess’s hand upon her belly and ask her if she felt how her brother kicks her, but she was never admitted to this … freedom at the time of this breeding’. Once again, however, Mrs Margaret Dawson had a different recollection, for she stated, ‘I am very sure that the Princess did not use to feel the Queen’s belly neither of this child nor of any other’. A few weeks after the birth of the Prince of Wales, Anne’s uncle the Earl of Clarendon challenged her on this very point. When Anne put it to him that it was ‘strange … that the Queen should never (as often as I am with her, mornings and evenings) speak to me to feel her belly’, Clarendon asked ‘if the Queen had at other times of her being with child bid her do it?’ Anne was obliged now to admit that she had not, to which Clarendon rejoined, ‘Why then, Madame … should you wonder she did not bid you do it this time?’⁸⁰

The King and Queen were certainly aware of the rumours but took the view that such slanders were best ignored. As far as James was concerned, in court circles ‘the report of her having a counterfeit big belly … was looked upon as a jest, and the talk of a cushion was the daily subject of mirth to those who attended upon them’. Anne herself agreed that her father made light of the matter and that when ‘sitting by me in my own chamber he would speak of the idle stories … of the Queen’s not being with child, laughing at them’. When questioned by Clarendon, she had to admit that she had given her father no clue that she found the stories anything other than risible.⁸¹

The Princess told her sister in March 1688 that her stepmother’s ‘being so positive it will be a son’ provided additional grounds to fear a deception was being planned. Not everyone, however, gained the impression that Mary Beatrice was confident of producing a male child. A spy stationed in England informed a close associate of William of Orange that the Queen had become so upset at being constantly told by the Jesuits that she must have a boy that she burst into tears. Margaret Dawson testified that Mary Beatrice professed not to mind about the sex of the child she was carrying. At one point ‘some of her servants told her they hoped to see a Prince of Wales born. She answered she would compound for a little girl with all her heart’.⁸²

Another view was that the Queen resorted to subterfuge only after suffering a miscarriage some months into her pregnancy. Burnet believed that this took place on Easter Monday, 16 April 1688, but some favoured 11 May as another possible date. On that day Mary Beatrice had fainted after being wrongly informed that her brother had died, but she soon revived and insisted that she had suffered no harm. According to the Life of James II, Anne ‘failed not to be there too’ when Mary Beatrice’s ladies flocked to tend their mistress. After appearing ‘so easy and kind that nothing could equal it’, she ‘talked of the Queen’s condition with mighty concern and was wanting in no manner of respect and care’.⁸³ If this account was accurate, Anne was remarkably accomplished at dissimulating her true feelings.

While we can dismiss the theory that Mary Beatrice had a miscarriage, Anne was less fortunate. On 10 April Clarendon visited his niece at the Cockpit because her health was giving cause for concern. He found her ‘very cheerful and [she] said she was pretty well, but the women were apprehensive she would miscarry’. There was a debate among her doctors as to how she should be treated. Dr Richard Lower, who was Anne’s favourite physician at the time, advocated ‘a steel diet’. Sir Charles Scarborough, who like Lower had been called in by her father to treat Anne after her first unsuccessful pregnancy, was ‘positively against it, but Lower’s prescription prevailed’. After briefly appearing to be better, Anne became so seriously unwell that her life was feared for during the nights of 12 and 13 April. At four in the morning on 16 April she miscarried.⁸⁴

Within a few hours Anne was strong enough to receive another visit from Clarendon, who found the King already by her side. The Princess told her uncle ‘she was as well as could be expected’, but her hopes had now been dashed so repeatedly that some despaired of her ability to reproduce. To make matters worse, some of the Princess’s attendants suggested that she had ‘had a false conception’, and merely imagined that she was pregnant. Anne’s most recent biographer has argued that this could have been correct, as most of the children from Anne’s other failed pregnancies are interred in Westminster Abbey, but there is no reference there to this one. It is possible, however, that this miscarriage occurred so early that it was impossible to determine the gender of the foetus, and so a burial in the Abbey was considered inappropriate. Whatever the truth of the matter, if the views expressed by her women reached Anne’s ears at the time, it can only have added to her misery. Having embraced so wholeheartedly the idea that her stepmother was not carrying a baby, it would have been profoundly humiliating to discover that she was the one now alleged to have had a false pregnancy.⁸⁵

Within a day of the Princess’s miscarriage it was known that she was planning to go to Bath as soon as she could travel. Anne’s eagerness to seek treatment there is surprising in view of the fact that only six weeks before she had ridiculed the idea that the spa’s therapeutic waters had enabled Mary Beatrice to conceive. Furthermore, it was obvious that if Anne was at Bath for the prescribed six weeks, she would only return a few days before the Queen had her baby, expected in mid July. When writing to Mary earlier in the year the Earl of Danby had attached particular importance to Anne being present when the child was delivered so that she could witness with her own eyes ‘the midwife discharge her duty with that care which ought to be had in a case of so great concern’. Despite this, it does not appear that Mary tried to persuade Anne to postpone her visit. While in theory it was possible for Anne to have a course of treatment and to be back in time, the schedule was alarmingly tight, and at least one person expressed surprise that ‘the Princess of Denmark would not complement the Queen and see her safely delivered before she went to the Bath’. One cannot but suspect that Anne subconsciously did not want to be there when the Queen’s time came, being reluctant ‘to be a witness of what she was resolved to question’.⁸⁶

Anne set out for Bath on 24 May, intending to stay there until the end of June. Apologists for the Princess later claimed she was not to blame for absenting herself, and that she had only gone to Bath at her father’s insistence. In fact, according to the King, he would have preferred her ‘to defer her journey … till after the Queen’s delivery’, but when told that Anne’s doctors believed her health depended on her leaving for Bath at once, he agreed ‘all other considerations must yield to that’. In later years Anne herself did not pretend that her father had pressured her into going to Bath, acknowledging that in fact ‘she went upon the advice of her physicians’.⁸⁷ Yet the myth that James had deliberately ensured that his daughter was out of London when the child arrived continued to be put forward as proof that there had been a premeditated conspiracy to foist an imposter on the realm.

The waters at Bath were famed for promoting fecundity. Barren ladies were advised both to immerse themselves for long periods, and to drink between one to three pints daily, taken ‘hot from the pump every morning’. As well as being good for rheumatism and pain in the bones, the waters were renowned for ‘warming, strengthening, cherishing, cleansing the womb … discharging the moist and viscous particles that rendered it incapable to perform its office of conception’. An added bonus was protection against miscarriage. One doctor said that the excellent properties of the waters were demonstrated by the fact that the female bath attendants continued to work even when pregnant. Despite staying in the water for hours, ‘seldom or never any one of them miscarried, unless their husbands chance to quarrel with them and throw them downstairs’. Having initially been sceptical that the waters had done Mary Beatrice any good, Anne soon became convinced that the spa regime was very beneficial. On her return she told Clarendon ‘she found herself much the better for the Bath’, and she would revisit the town on numerous occasions in hopes of improving her health.⁸⁸

Buoyed up by hopes that his regime would soon be consolidated by the birth of a male heir, the King had pressed on with his project to free Catholics from legal discrimination. In late April 1688 he had reissued his Declaration of Indulgence, which he now insisted must be read aloud on specified Sundays in churches throughout the land. On 18 May the Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops presented the King with a petition stating that they could not assist in distributing a declaration that contravened the law. In a fury the King declared this ‘the most seditious document I have ever seen’, and he was still more incensed when the petition appeared in print. To add to his chagrin, the Declaration of Indulgence was read in only four London churches on 20 May. On 8 June the seven bishops were summoned before the Privy Council and informed that they were to be charged with seditious libel. When the bishops declined to provide sureties they were sent to the Tower to await trial.

Although it had been understood that Anne would remain in Bath for a month, she had already decided to return to London much sooner than planned. Having been told by friends that it was inadvisable to be away at such a juncture, she applied to her father for permission to come home, claiming that the waters did not agree with her. Doubtless from a genuine concern for her welfare, James discouraged her from cutting short her stay at Bath, but Anne later ascribed a sinister motive to his reluctance to sanction her journey.⁸⁹ When Anne persisted, the King agreed that she could come back if she wished, and by 9 June it was known that she would be in the capital within days. Unfortunately she had not even set out when, on the morning of 10 June 1688, the Queen gave birth to a strong, healthy son.

Although Anne was not there to see the child born, there were numerous other witnesses, for the Queen’s bedchamber was ‘filled with curious spectators’ as soon as she went into labour. The King later remarked that ‘by particular providence scarce any prince was ever born where there were so many persons present’, and the Tuscan ambassador was confident that after such a well-attested event, ‘all the mischievous deceits respecting a fictitious pregnancy must now be dispelled’.⁹⁰ Amazingly however, many people, including Anne herself, remained convinced that a supposititious child had been smuggled into the Queen’s bed, possibly in a warming pan.

As soon as the child had been delivered, the King wasted no time in ordering an army officer named Colonel Oglethorp to take a letter in his own hand to Bath, informing Anne and George of the birth of his son. Before he set off, James took him to have a look at the baby so that Oglethorp could testify that he had seen it in the flesh. The Imperial ambassador questioned whether this would suffice to convince ill-disposed people, whose ‘malice was such that they are capable of believing whatever accords with their interests, even if their own eyes prove the opposite’.⁹¹ Events subsequently would prove him right.

In the weeks following the birth Anne outlined to Mary her reasons for suspecting that the birth had not been genuine. She made much of the fact that Mary Beatrice had changed her mind about where to have the baby: having originally intended to lie in at Windsor Castle, the Queen had subsequently decided that St James’s Palace would suit her better. To Anne’s mind, St James’s was ‘much the properest place to act … a cheat in’.⁹²

The fact that the baby had been delivered less than two hours after the Queen had felt the first pains was also deemed noteworthy, even though at least one of Mary Beatrice’s earlier children had arrived equally fast. Nor was it the first time that a child of hers had been born sooner than expected, for the same thing had happened in 1682. On that occasion too, the baby appeared fully developed, so it was concluded at the time that Mary Beatrice must have miscalculated the date of conception. Anne had better reason than most to be understanding about such mistakes, for in 1686 her own daughter Anne Sophia had arrived a month earlier than her official due date; since she was a good-sized and healthy child she was almost certainly not premature. Anne, however, was not disposed to make any allowances on this account. She told her sister, ‘That which to me seems the plainest thing in the world is [the Queen] being brought to bed two days after she heard of my coming to town, and saying that the child was come at the full time, when everybody knows, by her own reckoning, that she should have gone a month longer’.⁹³

Having arrived back in London on 15 June, Anne busied herself writing privately to her sister Mary, elaborating on her thoughts. ‘My dear sister can’t imagine the concern and vexation I have been in, that I should be so unfortunate to be out of town when the Queen was brought to bed, for I shall never now be satisfied whether the child be true or false’. While acknowledging ‘It may be it is our brother but God only knows’, she also stressed that ‘where one believes it a thousand do not’. Despite her pretence of retaining an open mind, she concluded, ‘for my part, except they do give very plain demonstrations, which is almost impossible now, I shall ever be of the number of unbelievers’.⁹⁴

To do Anne justice, she was far from alone in harbouring such opinions. The Imperial ambassador estimated that two thirds of the country did not think the baby was legitimate. In later years, however, many people who, in the febrile climate of 1688, had been ready to believe that the Prince of Wales was supposititious, would privately concede that the evidence for this was flawed to say the least. Anne, in contrast, clung to the views formed then with great tenacity. In 1702 Bishop Lloyd recalled having heard Anne ‘express her dissatisfaction of the truth of the Prince of Wales birth and give such reasons for it as would convince any man he was an imposter, except such as were obstinate’.⁹⁵ Since there is no evidence to show that she modified her outlook in later years, it can be argued that she did indeed remain ‘of the number of unbelievers’ to the end of her life.

On 15 June the seven bishops had been freed on bail, but much depended on the outcome of their trial, set for 29 June. ‘One cannot help having a thousand fears and melancholy thoughts’, Anne told her sister, but when the hearing took place in Westminster Hall the bishops were acquitted. The verdict was greeted with ‘wild huzzas and acclamations’ and that evening many more celebratory bonfires blazed than had been lit to mark the Prince of Wales’s birth.⁹⁶ The King appeared undaunted: soon afterwards he ordered the Ecclesiastical Commission to compile lists of all clergymen who had failed to read out the Declaration of Indulgence, with a view to penalising them.

In fact, however, the regime was now under threat. On the day that the bishops had been acquitted, seven prominent individuals, including Anne’s former mentor, Bishop Compton, had invited William of Orange to come to England with an army in order to salvage the country’s ‘religion, liberty and properties, all of which had been greatly invaded’. They assured him that if he did so he would be welcomed by large numbers of the nobility and gentry, and that most of James’s army would desert him.⁹⁷

For some time now William of Orange had been contemplating taking military action against his father-in-law. Since late 1687 he had been building up Holland’s navy and army, and though these forces could have been intended to defend his country against a French attack, intervention in England was henceforward a feasible option. Understandably James was reluctant to think that his son-in-law’s military preparations were directed against him. Still less did he imagine that Anne and George would support such a venture.

The announcement of Mary Beatrice’s pregnancy on New Year’s Day 1688 had helped convince William that action was necessary. In April the Prince had informed Edward Russell, who was visiting Holland, that if ‘some men of the best interest’ in England invited him ‘to come and rescue the nation and the religion he believed he could be ready by the end of September’ to sail there with an army.⁹⁸ On his return Russell had sounded out leading politicians, but it was not until the end of June that enough men of distinction pledged their support, and the desired invitation was despatched. William now felt justified in pressing forward with his plans.

As yet Anne remained unaware of all this. On 9 July, she wrote to Mary complaining that ‘the Papists are all so very insolent that it is insupportable living with them’, but concluded resignedly ‘there is no remedy but patience’. She told Mary that she now found it almost unbearable living in close proximity to her father and stepmother, and she therefore welcomed the fact that her doctors had pronounced that another visit to the spa at Tunbridge Wells would be the best way of guarding against another miscarriage. ‘I confess I am very glad’ she confided to her sister, ‘for it is very uneasy to me to be with people that every moment of one’s life one must be dissembling with and put on a face of joy when one’s heart has more cause to ache … You may easily imagine as the world goes now, to a sincere mind the court must be very disagreeable’.⁹⁹

Mary, however, had work for Anne to carry out prior to leaving for Tunbridge. She was deeply vexed that her sister had not been present when their stepmother gave birth, noting irritably in her journal that Anne had ‘committed an irreparable error by being far away’. She also considered that Anne had been remiss about collecting reliable information since her return. She had written to her sister upbraiding her for not being ‘more particular’ and making it plain that she considered she had been ‘negligent’ about keeping her informed. Mary then drew up a long questionnaire, demanding answers to twenty-three queries. She wanted to know precise details about all aspects of the Queen’s labour and the circumstances of the child’s birth, stressing that on every point ‘a critical answer, as near to a minute as it is possible, is desired’. Among other things she wanted to know whether Mary Beatrice had taken measures to stop the flow of milk, as was usual when mothers did not breastfeed; whether it was true, as reported, that the Queen’s bed curtains had been drawn during her labour so witnesses could see nothing; and exactly who had been present in the bedchamber.¹⁰⁰

Anne was understandably hurt, and while conceding ‘I am generally lazy’, she protested ‘I have never missed any opportunity of giving you all the intelligence I am able’. She decided the best way of proceeding was to approach the Queen’s dresser Mrs Dawson, a faithful old retainer who had been present at Anne’s birth and those of all her siblings. Anne calculated that the discreet Mrs Dawson was unlikely to mention their conversation, although she also took the precaution of asking questions ‘in such a manner that … in case she should betray me … the King and Queen might not be angry with me’.¹⁰¹

Having waited until the King and Queen had left London for Windsor and the baby prince had been installed in his nursery at Richmond, Anne asked Mrs Dawson to come and see her at the Cockpit. When they were alone together the Princess explained she had ‘heard strange reports concerning the birth of her brother the Prince of Wales’, and asked her what happened on that day. Mrs Dawson asked sharply if Anne herself entertained any doubts about the child’s legitimacy, at which Anne, ‘putting her hands together and lifting them up’, disingenuously assured her, ‘No, not in the least’.¹⁰² Mrs Dawson then told her everything she could recall about the Prince’s arrival.

Nothing that Mrs Dawson said supported the theory that a fraud had taken place. Anne reported to Mary that the Queen had not been screened from view, as her bed curtains had been open at the side. Twenty ladies had been present, as well as all the Privy Council, who ‘stood close at the bed’s feet’. Mrs Dawson not only remembered seeing milk run from the Queen’s breast but had also watched ‘the midwife cut the navel string’. Yet although Anne’s research had yielded such disappointing results, she would not modify her views on that account. ‘All that she says seems very clear, but one does not know what to think’ she told Mary, adding doggedly, ‘methinks it is wonderful if it is no cheat, that they never took no pains to convince me of it’.¹⁰³

There appeared to be quite a good chance that the baby Prince would resolve the crisis by dying. At birth he had been observed to be ‘a brave lusty boy and like to live’, but since then the doctors had nearly succeeded in killing him. They had decreed that he should not take milk from a wet nurse, and instead fed him ‘a sort of paste’ composed of ‘barley, flour, water and sugar, to which a few currants are sometimes added’. Hardly surprisingly, the baby was soon seriously ill, but the doctors insisted ‘they would not give him half an hour to live if he were suckled’. Instead they administered ‘violent remedies’ such as canary wine and Dr Goddard’s drops – ‘nothing less than liquid fire’ according to one despairing observer. With the child reduced to ‘a seeming dying condition’ they dosed him with an emetic. On 9 July Anne had reported hopefully, ‘the Prince of Wales has been ill these three or four days; and if he has been as bad as some people say, I believe it will not be long before he is an angel in heaven’.¹⁰⁴

At times Anne inclined to the view that the King and Queen were merely pretending the child was ill in order to keep him out of sight, but the few glimpses she had of the baby confirmed that he was truly very sickly. In her questionnaire Mary had wanted to know, ‘Is the Queen fond of it?’ and Anne did not scruple to imply that Mary Beatrice displayed a suspicious lack of maternal feeling. She noted that at one point when the child had been reported to be ‘very ill of a looseness, and it really looked so’, the Queen had appeared oddly unconcerned. ‘When she came from prayers she went to dinner without seeing it, and after that played at comet [a card game] and did not go to it till she was put out of the pool’. However, the Imperial ambassador reported that the Queen visited her ailing infant every day at Richmond, and only returned at one in the morning, ‘crying abundantly’.¹⁰⁵

When Anne left London for Tunbridge on 27 July the Prince was still clinging precariously to life. About a week later she received an urgent message there that the child was undergoing another crisis, and it was thought inevitable that he would die. However, once again the baby confounded all predictions. On next seeing him the doctors found him ‘strangely revived’, and some of them allegedly told Bishop Lloyd of St Asaph they could not believe it was the same child. This gave rise to new suspicions. Some people now propounded the idea that the child who had been smuggled into St James’s Palace on 10 June had died, and that another one had been substituted in its place. It was even suggested that this process had occurred more than once, and ‘a third imposter’ was currently masquerading as the Prince of Wales. Bishop Compton reportedly subscribed to the belief that several babies had been kept in readiness to be produced as needed, and he told Bishop Lloyd that he understood ‘a busy intriguing Papist woman’ had tried to buy the child of a London bricklayer for this purpose. A Jacobite sympathiser would later comment ‘To palm one child upon a nation is certainly a thing very difficult; but to palm three … next to impossible’. Nevertheless, when Bishop Lloyd subsequently discussed these stories with Anne, he received the impression that she gave them some credence.¹⁰⁶

In truth, the explanation for the baby’s sudden recovery was perfectly straightforward. The doctors had finally relented and agreed that a wet nurse could feed the baby. ‘Upon sucking, he visibly mended’.¹⁰⁷ Once it appeared that the succession issue would not be conveniently resolved by the baby’s death, it became clear that only drastic action could prevent James from implementing his plans. It was at this point that Churchill alerted Anne and George that William was planning to invade, and they gave the project their blessing.

Churchill had not been one of the seven men who signed the invitation to William, but during July the conspirators had approached him and two other leading army officers. Not only did all three give assurances that in the event of invasion the army would not stand by the King, but ‘Churchill did … undertake for Prince George and Princess Anne’, indicating that he could prevail on them to align themselves with William.¹⁰⁸

On 28 July Edward Russell wrote William a letter in rudimentary code, referring to Churchill as ‘Mr Roberts’. He explained that the latter had now proffered ‘his utmost service’ to William, and that he was ready to use his influence to good effect. Russell went on, ‘When your Highness thinks the time proper for Mr Roberts’s mistress [the Princess] to know your thoughts, be pleased to let him tell it her; it will be better in my humble opinion than by letter’. Churchill himself wrote to William on 4 August, declaring his intention to conduct himself in accordance with ‘what I owe God and my country’. It cannot have been long after this that Churchill let Anne and George into the secret of what was contemplated. There is no way of knowing whether the couple proved eager or reluctant to pledge support for William, but certainly they now committed themselves to the venture. Presumably Churchill enlisted the aid of his wife in this delicate matter, although she drew a veil over what happened at this time. King James, however, would later contend that Churchill bore sole responsibility for persuading Anne to withdraw her allegiance from him, commenting bitterly, ‘He and he alone has done this. He has corrupted my army. He has corrupted my child’.¹⁰⁹

Over the next few weeks all those privy to the conspiracy worked stealthily to bring in more adherents. Churchill and Bishop Compton, possibly assisted by Anne and George themselves, were able to attract the support of people in the Princess’s circle who were naturally of a conservative disposition, but whose patience with James was now exhausted. They included the Duke of Ormonde, Lord Scarsdale, and Anne’s Master of the Horse, Colonel John Berkeley. Clarendon’s son Lord Cornbury was also enlisted, as was another first cousin of the Princess, the Duke of Grafton. Anne and George’s involvement in the plot was reassuring to these individuals, who were instinctive supporters of monarchy. In September Bishop Compton travelled through England to Yorkshire, coordinating arrangements. Although all seven men who had invited William to England had promised to join him when he landed, it was agreed that Compton should be in London so that he could be on hand to take care of the Princess.¹¹⁰

On 17 September Anne returned to London, nursing the secret that the Prince of Orange would soon be invading. To justify leading a retired life she untruthfully gave out that she was pregnant, but she could not avoid all contact with her father and stepmother. After spending the day with them at Windsor on 18 September she travelled back to London that evening with James in his coach, managing not to arouse any suspicions regarding her loyalty.

Throughout August the King had been warned by the French that William of Orange was intending to invade, but he had remained in what the French Minister of the Marine described as ‘a surprising lethargy’. One reason for this was that James believed that William had left it too late in the year to mount such an operation. In addition, as he later acknowledged, ‘it was very long before I could believe that my nephew and son-in-law could be capable of so very ill an undertaking, and so began too late to provide against it’. Only towards the end of September, when despatches arrived from his ambassador in The Hague declaring categorically that the Prince would soon be on his way, did James wake up to the danger. On 23 September Anne told Clarendon that her father was ‘much disordered about the preparations which were making in Holland’, and by the following day James no longer had any doubt that an invasion was imminent.¹¹¹

The week before, it had been announced that a new Parliament would meet in November, but on 28 September the writs for elections were recalled. On the same day James issued a proclamation warning his subjects of the impending arrival of an ‘armed force of foreigners and strangers’, intent on effecting ‘an absolute conquest of our kingdoms and the utter subduing and subjecting us … to a foreign power’. The proclamation noted sorrowfully that this enterprise was ‘promoted (as we understand, although it may seem almost incredible) by some of our subjects, being persons of … implacable malice and desperate designs’, who sought ‘to embroil this kingdom in blood and ruin’.¹¹²

As yet the King still clung to the illusion that his daughters remained loyal to him. Having persuaded himself that Mary had been ignorant of her husband’s intentions, he wrote to her on 28 September saying he hoped the news had surprised her as much as it had him. In Anne’s case, however, her father deemed such appeals superfluous. Although it was claimed in James’s authorised biography that James was aware she was disaffected because she had ‘altered her way of living with the King and Queen for some time’, this was written with the benefit of hindsight.¹¹³ During the crisis itself there is no indication that James had any idea she was contemplating treachery.

Everyone’s attention became fixated on the weather, for the Dutch fleet could not sail until the wind changed. In the meantime Clarendon urged Anne to prevail upon her father to bring back loyal Anglicans into government and to make concessions so that people no longer looked to William of Orange to remedy grievances. Both requests were rejected on the grounds that ‘she never spoke to the King on business’. Clarendon said her father would be touched ‘to see her Royal Highness so concerned for him; to which she replied he had no reason to doubt her concern’. The more her uncle ‘pressed her, the more reserved she was; and said she must dress herself, it was almost prayer time’.¹¹⁴ He raised the subject with her several more times prior to William’s landing, but always with the same lack of success.

On 22 October James made a new attempt to shore up his regime. A week earlier his son had been christened James Francis Edward at a Catholic ceremony, and the King now tried to dissipate all doubts about the child’s legitimacy. He summoned an extraordinary meeting of the Privy Council, and all those present at the birth of the Prince were called before it. The King explained that because he was aware that ‘very many do not think this son with which God hath blessed me to be mine’, he had decided to convene this tribunal. Numerous witnesses were then heard, many of whom gave the most explicit evidence. The Protestant Lady Bellasyse, for example, testified that she ‘saw the child taken out of the bed with the navel string hanging to its belly’, while Dame Isabella Waldegrave ‘took the afterburthen and put it into a basin of water’. Anne was not to be present to hear any of this. Exploiting her father’s concern for her well-being, she told him that she feared miscarrying if she ventured out of her chamber, and accordingly the King excused her from attending. He told the council that his daughter would have been there but her health did not permit it, and he was ‘loth to hazard one child for the preservation of another’.¹¹⁵

When Clarendon visited his niece a day later, he found her treating the hearing as a cause for ribaldry. She teased her uncle for having ‘heard a great deal of fine discourse at council, and made herself very merry with that whole affair. She was dressing and all her women about her; many of whom put in their jests’. ‘Amazed at this’, Clarendon resolved to remonstrate with her in private, but over the next few days Anne avoided being on her own with him. When at last he taxed her about it, he was scarcely reassured by Anne’s remark that, ‘She must needs say the Queen’s behaviour during her being with child was very odd’. In public, however, she pretended that she had no worries on this score. When an official deputation presented her on 1 November with copies of the statements sworn before the council, she assured them, ‘My Lords, this was not necessary; for I have so much duty for the King that his word must be more to me than these depositions’.¹¹⁶

Prior to setting sail, William of Orange issued a manifesto, explaining why he had decided to invade. Entitled the Declaration of Reasons for Appearing in Arms in the Kingdom of England, this document recapitulated the ways in which James had ‘openly transgressed and annulled’ ‘the laws, liberties and customs’ of his realm. ‘To crown all’, there was ‘just and visible grounds of suspicion’ that ‘the pretended Prince of Wales was not born by the Queen’, and therefore William felt compelled to intervene. However, the Declaration insisted that William aimed at ‘nothing … but the preservation of the Protestant religion … and the securing the whole nation … their laws, rights and liberties’. He desired ‘to have a free and lawful Parliament assembled as soon as possible’, with authority not only to debate grievances but to mount an enquiry into the Prince of Wales’s birth.¹¹⁷

James at once rushed out a proclamation declaring that it was not only illegal to distribute this text but even to possess it. Anne, however, was exempted from the prohibition, for the King lent her his own copy. She may have been comforted to find that it contained nothing to suggest that her father would lose his throne as a result of the invasion, but there is no way of knowing this.

When the wind at last turned favourable, William and his army set sail on 1 November, landing at Torbay in Devon four days later. He then moved on to Exeter, where he stayed for nearly a fortnight. James promptly ordered his army to go to Salisbury. John Churchill was promoted to be a Lieutenant General, in charge of a brigade, and it was rumoured that Prince George would be named the King’s ‘generalissimo’, though in fact he had decided to turn down any command. After James’s nephew Lord Cornbury defected to William on 14 November, the King’s general Lord Feversham entreated James to come to Salisbury ‘to keep the infection amongst his army from spreading’. Anne, however, was confident that Cornbury would soon be followed by other officers. When Clarendon talked to her of his distress at his son’s disloyalty, she told him that ‘people were so apprehensive of Popery that she believed many more of the army would do the same’.¹¹⁸ Evidently she was counting on James’s forces being so reduced by mass defections that he would have to seek a settlement, rather than deciding the issue on the battlefield.

At this stage, however, the King appeared determined to fight. Just before he left to join his army on 17 November he was petitioned by eighteen lords and bishops to summon a free Parliament to ‘prevent the effusion of blood’, but James said that this was impossible while a foreign army was in the country. ‘Having taken his adieu of the Queen and of the Princess Anne of Denmark’ he left London in warlike mood, proclaiming his intention ‘to go on directly to the enemy and to give him no quarter’.¹¹⁹ This was the last time Anne saw her father. George accompanied his father-in-law, though Anne knew, as James did not, that he was planning to go over to William when an opportunity presented itself. Anne stayed behind at the Cockpit, uncomfortably close to the Queen at Whitehall. Bishop Compton was also in London, and it had been arranged that he would provide the Princess with a refuge in the capital if the need arose.

The day after her father’s departure, Anne wrote to William, assuring him she desired ‘your good success in this so just an undertaking’. She explained that her husband was accompanying the King to Salisbury but intended ‘to go from there to you as soon as his friends thought it proper. I am not yet certain if I shall continue here or remove into the city: that shall depend on the advice my friends will give me, but wherever I am I shall be ready to show you how much I am your humble servant’.¹²⁰

Within days, however, Anne had been thrown into disarray by an unforeseen turn of events. After arriving at Salisbury the King had been afflicted by debilitating nosebleeds, and his spirits had sunk further on hearing that much of the north of England had risen up against him. On 22 November James decided to return to London with his army. He started on his journey the following day, but on the night of 23 November John Churchill defected, taking with him the Duke of Grafton and Colonel John Berkeley – although they were not accompanied by as many common soldiers as they had hoped. If James’s nerve had held, he still had a reasonable chance of beating William in the field, but he was dreadfully shaken by the desertion of key officers. He was particularly shocked by Churchill’s behaviour, having ‘raised him from the mud’.¹²¹

George had hoped to leave James’s camp with the other men, but he had to wait a while longer. Just as he was mounting his horse to ride towards William, James had invited him to share his coach for the homeward journey. Seated opposite his father-in-law as they jolted down muddy roads, George had to maintain a facade of loyalty for the rest of the day. Every time that news came that another officer had defected, he exclaimed in his execrable French, ‘Est-il possible!’ That evening he had supper with the King at Andover and ‘made it his business … to condemn those that were gone, and how little such people were to be trusted, and sure the Prince [of Orange] could put no confidence in such’. When the meal was over ‘Prince George waited on [James] in his chamber very late’. The King urged George to get some rest, but his son-in-law insisted that he would wait ‘till he saw the King in bed’. Touched by his kindness, James told him ‘he should not forget the respects he paid him’. Yet as soon as the King had retired, George hurried off to find his horse, and he and the Duke of Ormonde galloped westwards to join William. The King was not yet asleep when the news was brought to him.¹²²

James wished it to be thought that he took the reverse calmly. His authorised biography states that though somewhat ‘troubled at the unnaturalness of the action’, he consoled himself ‘that the loss of a good trooper had been of greater consequence’. He even managed a grim quip, asking sardonically, ‘is est-il possible gone too?’ However, when the Danish envoy, who was in the royal camp at the time, informed Christian V what his brother had done, he reported ‘Your Majesty cannot imagine the King of England’s consternation at this news’.¹²³

George was able to send a courier to London to tell his wife that he had made his move. For Anne the good news that George had escaped was cancelled out by her horror at hearing that the King was on his way to London, for she dreaded a confrontation with him above all else. Summoning Sarah Churchill to the Cockpit, she ‘declared that rather than see her father she would jump out at the window’.¹²⁴

When the Queen had heard that John Churchill had abandoned the King, guards had been placed at the doors of Sarah’s lodgings, but their attitude was ‘very easy’, and they scarcely restricted her freedom of movement. On the evening of 25 November further instructions arrived from the King that Sarah and Mrs John Berkeley should be taken into custody but again nothing was done about this, possibly because Anne appealed to the Lord Chamberlain not to execute the order and he ‘suffered himself in complacence to be delayed by the Princess’. The upshot was that Sarah was able to pay a discreet visit to Bishop Compton at his house in Suffolk Street and an escape plan was devised. Further delay would have been disastrous, for after nightfall the Queen received another express from her husband, ordering her ‘to secure the Princess of Denmark’. Because it was so late ‘her Majesty out of her good nature only ordered a strict guard to be set about the Princess’s lodgings and she not to be disturbed till the morning’.¹²⁵

It soon turned out that these measures were too lax. Anne’s stepmother had assumed she was already asleep, for she had been ‘in her ordinary way laid abed’ at the usual time. Yet once all her other servants had left Anne, Sarah and Mrs Berkeley ‘came privately to her’. Anne dressed hastily, and at one in the morning the three women made a stealthy exit through a little room where Anne usually sat on her close stool. This led to some ‘backstairs by which the necessary woman uses to go in and out for the cleaning’. Anne herself had never gone down this way before, and even at this moment of extreme tension could not help noticing that the walls were very shabby. One of the first things she did on reaching safety was to send directions to Sir Benjamin Bathurst that they should be repainted.¹²⁶

Once the little party reached the street, they found Bishop Compton waiting for them in a coach. Watched by a dozy sentry, who did not think to challenge them, they climbed aboard and were driven to the house of Compton’s nephew Lord Dorset in Aldersgate Street. Even there, however, Anne did not feel safe. Still in a panic about her father’s imminent return, she was desperate to leave London, but realised that if she tried to reach William and her husband in the west she ran the risk of being intercepted by royal troops. Accordingly it was decided that she should go north, where Compton had a good network of contacts. On the morning of 26 November the Bishop and the three ladies set off by coach, stopping that night at Dorset’s country seat, Copt Hall in Essex. At Hitchin in Hertfordshire they sat ‘taking some refreshment’ in a brewery cart while their horses were changed, and Sarah was heard joking that they were fortunate that they were not being driven in it to execution. Having resolved to head for Nottingham, where William’s supporter Lord Devonshire had seized control a week earlier, they continued on their journey via Castle Ashby, Market Harborough, and Leicester. At Nottingham, where Anne’s arrival was eagerly awaited, the citizens were alarmed by a false report ‘that two thousand of the King’s dragoons were in close pursuit to bring her back prisoner to London’. On 2 December they sallied forth to rescue her, but had not advanced far when they met the Princess sitting unharmed in her coach with Sarah and Mrs Berkeley. Anne was then ‘conducted into Nottingham through the acclamations of the people’.¹²⁷

That night Lord Devonshire gave a banquet for the Princess. ‘All the noblemen and the other persons of distinction then in arms had the honour to sup at her royal highness’s table’. Anne was ‘very well pleased’ with her reception, and ‘seemed wonderful pleasant and cheerful’.¹²⁸

Hearing that Anne was in town, large numbers of local gentry and nobility arrived there, often bringing armed men with them. However, when Anne tried to enlist their support for the movement against James, she sometimes encountered difficulties. For example, the Earl of Chesterfield turned down her request that he subscribe to the ‘Association’, a document whose signatories pledged to exact retribution on all Catholics if William came to any harm. Since James himself theoretically could fall victim to such vengeance, Chesterfield refused, to Anne’s visible displeasure. The Earl noted wryly, ‘I have made my court very ill; but I have the satisfaction of having acted according to my conscience’.¹²⁹

On 8 December Bishop Compton received orders from William, instructing him to bring the Princess to meet him and her husband at Oxford. Accompanied by about 1,500 horsemen and two companies of foot soldiers, Anne set off the following day. One young man in her train recalled, ‘Through every town we passed the people came out … with such rural and rusty weapons as they had, to meet us in acclamations of welcome and good wishes’. The Princess spent two nights at Leicester before passing through Coventry, Warwick, and Banbury. At Warwick on 12 December she heard the momentous news that her father had fled the country and that his army had been disbanded. Her uncle Clarendon was pained to hear that ‘she seemed not at all moved, but called for cards and was as merry as she used to be’. Once she was back in London, Clarendon took her to task for this, but his niece told him sulkily that she had seen no reason to disrupt her usual routine as ‘she never loved to do anything that looked like an affected constraint’. The Princess was fortunate that Clarendon made no rejoinder, for he had recently become aware that Anne had known herself not to be pregnant when she had told her father that she could not attend the council meeting on 22 October. The discovery had profoundly shocked him, prompting him to declare ‘Good God! Nothing but lying and dissimulation in the world!’ Now he could, with justice, have retorted that Anne was scarcely entitled to maintain that she despised all forms of pretence.¹³⁰

The Princess was still in high spirits when she ‘made a splendid entry’ into Oxford on 15 December. The Bishop of London featured prominently in her impressive cavalcade, ‘riding in a purple cloak, martial habit, pistols before him and his sword drawn’, a ‘strange appearance’ that one observer considered ‘not conformable to … a Christian bishop’. George had already been in Oxford for a day or two, and Anne was reunited with him in Christchurch quadrangle. The couple greeted each other ‘with all possible demonstrations of love and affection’ and that evening they were ‘entertained by the university at a cost of £1,000 at the least’.¹³¹

After resting for a couple of days Anne and George moved on towards London. By the time they re-entered the capital on 19 December, Anne perhaps realised she had another cause to congratulate herself. Her earlier pretence that she was pregnant had been a cynical ploy. However, she had actually conceived around the end of October, and despite the stress and exertion of her flight, had not miscarried.

Anne had been away from London for less than a month, but much had happened during that time. On the morning of 26 November it had emerged that she was missing when her woman of the bedchamber Mrs Danvers went to wake her at eight o’clock. ‘Receiving no answer to her call, she opened the bed [curtains] and found the Princess gone’. Pandemonium ensued: her ladies assumed she had been abducted, and some even began shrieking ‘the Princess was murdered by the priests’. When the news was carried to the Queen, she too ‘screamed out as if she had been mad’.¹³² The truth only started to appear when the sentry on night duty was questioned and revealed the mysterious goings on he had seen outside the palace, but it was some time before Anne’s whereabouts could be established.

Anne’s escape caused a sensation. According to one observer ‘The Papists reckon the loss of the Princess as great as that of the army’. For the King, who arrived back in London that afternoon, it was a crushing personal blow. He was already emotionally shattered at being abandoned by men he had trusted, but this was ‘nothing in comparison of the Princess’s withdrawing herself’. The shock was the greater because, even though Prince George had already left him, he had been confident his daughter would not budge from Whitehall for fear of jeopardising her pregnancy. The news exacerbated ‘those most dreadful anguishes of spirit’ which already burdened him. Bursting into tears, he uttered the piteous cry, ‘God help me! My own children have forsaken me!’ One court lady formed the impression that James was ‘so … afflicted after the Princess Anne went away, that it disordered his understanding’, and others too talked of the King looking physically ill and appearing almost deranged over the next few days.¹³³

Two days after Anne’s flight a letter from her to the Queen was published in the London Gazette. In this deeply insincere document, Anne explained that when ‘the surprising news of the Prince’s being gone’ had arrived, she had spontaneously decided to absent herself ‘to avoid the King’s displeasures, which I am not able to bear’. ‘Never was anyone in such an unhappy condition, so divided between duty and affection to a father and a husband’, she lamented, before blaming ‘the violent counsels of the priests’ for having caused such trouble. She declared that she would not return until she heard ‘the happy news of a reconcilement’, but expressed confidence that a settlement satisfactory to all could be reached. ‘I am fully persuaded that the Prince of Orange designs the King’s safety and preservation and hope all things may be composed without more bloodshed by the calling a Parliament’. She concluded, ‘God grant a happy end to these troubles, that the King’s reign may be prosperous, and that I may shortly meet you in perfect peace and safety; till when, let me beg of you to continue the same favourable opinion that you have hitherto had of your most obedient daughter and servant’.¹³⁴

On 27 November the shattered King met with a group of about forty bishops and peers. They persuaded him to send commissioners to negotiate with William – who was now advancing with his army – and to summon a new Parliament to sit in January. However, although James did as they bid, he told the French ambassador that he intended that his wife and child should flee abroad, and when they were safe he would follow them. The baby Prince had been taken to Portsmouth earlier in the month and James now ordered the Earl of Dartmouth to send him to France. When Dartmouth refused, the King brought the child back to London and started making alternative travel arrangements.

The King’s commissioners met with the Prince of Orange at Hungerford on 8 December, and the following day William named his terms for a truce. All Catholics were to be dismissed from government and an amnesty granted to those who had supported William. Parliament must be summoned, and the Prince of Orange would be allowed to come to London while it sat. In the meantime the expenses of his army must be met out of the public revenue.

If James had been willing to accept these terms, he might have retained his throne. It was inevitable that Parliament would demand that the Prince of Wales be brought up as a Protestant but, if the King had swallowed this, there was a chance that his son would be recognised as his heir. William’s more ardent supporters were certainly appalled that he could conceive of a settlement that left the baby’s rights intact.

Late on the night of 9 December the Queen and her child slipped unseen out of the palace and were in France within twenty-four hours. The following afternoon James heard from his commissioners, but he still remained determined to follow the Queen. Realising what the King had in mind, the Earl of Ailesbury begged him to reconsider, but James would not listen. He told the Earl, ‘If I should go, who can wonder after the treatment I have found?’ naming his daughter’s desertion as a key factor in his thinking. Undeterred, Ailesbury urged the King to march with a body of horse to Nottingham. He argued that ‘Your daughter will receive you or she will not. If the latter, and that she retires perhaps towards Oxford, all will cry out on her; if she doth stay to receive your Majesty, you will be able to treat honourably with the Prince of Orange’.¹³⁵ It was fortunate for Anne that the King rejected this advice, so she was never given this dilemma.

Towards midnight on 10 December James left the palace and headed for Kent, where a boat was waiting for him. However, before the ship set sail, it was boarded by a party of local fishermen, who mistook James for a Catholic priest and carried him off as their prisoner to the Queen’s Head inn at Faversham. Meanwhile in James’s absence London had threatened to degenerate into anarchy, with anti-Catholic riots resulting in the destruction of much valuable property. When a committee of peers and bishops learned on 13 December that James was in custody they resolved to bring him back to the capital, even though the Common Council of London had recently invited William of Orange there as well. On 16 December James had been much heartened to be acclaimed by the crowds as he drove back into London and he now looked forward to meeting William at ‘a personal conference to settle the distracted nation’.¹³⁶

By now, however, William had decided it was too late for an arrangement of that kind. He had been delighted to hear that James had fled, and had at once decided to go to London, rather than meeting with Anne at Oxford. While on his way he was appalled when it emerged that James had been detained in Kent, and he was still more upset by the King’s return to London. At Windsor William had a conference with his supporters. He rejected advice from extremists to imprison James in the Tower or remove him to Holland, saying that Mary ‘would never bear it’, but he resolved to send his father-in-law out of London. Accordingly soldiers were despatched to Whitehall, where James was sleeping, and the King was informed that William expected him to leave the next day. On the morning of 18 December the King set off for Rochester, Kent, protesting bitterly at being ‘chased away from his own house by the Prince of Orange’. That afternoon William entered London, accompanied by a large number of cavalry, and took up residence at St James’s Palace ‘in extraordinary great grandeur’.¹³⁷

Anne and George returned from Oxford the following day, and William promptly ‘called to see them at the Cockpit’. By now some people were disquieted by the way the King had been treated, calling his eviction a ‘gross violation’. Burnet, who had come over from Holland with the Prince as his chaplain, noted in concern that ‘compassion has begun to work’ but Anne, for one, appeared proof against this emotion. One report even claimed she went to the theatre that evening, bedecked in orange ribbons.¹³⁸

For the moment, no one could tell how the situation would be resolved. The deadlock was broken by the King. As he explained to Lord Ailesbury, he was convinced that if he remained in England he would be imprisoned in the Tower ‘and no King ever went out of that place but to his grave’.¹³⁹ Since William had seen to it that his father-in-law was lightly guarded at Rochester, James was able to make another escape on the night of 23 December, and this time he made it to France. The next day a committee of peers agreed that a Convention Parliament should meet in a month’s time. William was invited to take over the administration of government in the interim, and he agreed to this on 28 December.

Events had moved very fast, and a backlash against William was only to be expected. One influential Member of Parliament told Clarendon that he had welcomed William on his arrival in the West Country, ‘thinking in a free parliament to redress all that was amiss; but that men now began to think that the Prince aimed at something else’. While Anne’s feelings are hard to define, she gave some indication of unease and perhaps even remorse when talking with the Bishop of Winchester. The Bishop told her he had visited her father at Rochester and that though in general he had appeared in good health ‘nothing troubled him so much as his daughter Anne lest she should for grief miscarry’. Since Anne knew that she had in fact been deceiving her father about her pregnancy, this could hardly fail to touch her conscience, but unfortunately our source for this story deliberately omitted her response, noting only ‘she concluded that discourse thus: “If he had not gone so suddenly to Rochester, she would have sent to him”’.¹⁴⁰

It is probably safe to say that Anne had never thought that the Prince of Orange might gain the throne following his invasion. Certainly Sarah Churchill maintained that the possibility had not occurred to her. ‘I do solemnly protest that … I was so very simple a creature that I never once dreamt of his being king’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I imagined that the Prince of Orange’s sole design was to provide for the safety of his own country by obliging King James to keep the laws of ours, and that he would go back as soon as he had made us all happy’.¹⁴¹ Yet while one can be sure that Anne had not foreseen that William would be crowned, it is less easy to know what sort of settlement she had anticipated. She was unlikely to have been satisfied by any settlement that left her brother’s right to the crown intact, although she could hardly have conceived that her father would agree to his son being disinherited. Perhaps she envisaged a solution along the lines proposed by Charles II back in 1681 whereby James would retain the nominal title of King but would be banished for life. William and Mary would serve as regents, and then, since the Prince of Wales would be rejected as an imposter, on James’s death, Mary would become Queen. On the other hand, Anne may not have thought things through in such detail.

Fortunately for Anne, by taking flight her father had ensured that his son’s claims could be ignored. On 24 December Clarendon had suggested that in accordance with William of Orange’s Declaration, an enquiry should be set up into the birth of the Prince of Wales. At this Lord Wharton exploded, ‘My Lords, I did not expect … to hear anybody mention that child who was called the Prince of Wales. Indeed I did not; and I hope we shall hear no more of him’.¹⁴² With that the matter was dropped.

Despite his earlier insistence that his expedition had not been motivated by personal ambition, William was aware that he now had a chance of grasping the crown, allowing him to rule England either jointly with Mary, or even as sole monarch. As yet he had to be circumspect, but he was angered by the very idea that Anne might try to thwart his aspirations. William had always had difficulty accepting the fact that Anne had a better right than him to the throne. In 1679 he had made a revealing slip when he described himself as ‘the third heir to the crown’.¹⁴³ He forgot he was actually fourth in line, after James, Mary, and Anne. Apart from this, William had long been troubled by the prospect that if his wife became Queen regnant of England, he would be her inferior, while the thought that he would have to make way for Anne in the event of Mary predeceasing him was intolerable.

When Burnet had taken up residence in Holland in 1686, he had privately asked Mary ‘what she intended the Prince should be’ if she became Queen. Mary had assumed that ‘whatever accrued to her would likewise accrue to [William] in right of marriage’ and was horrified to learn this did not apply to the crown. Not wanting to place her husband in ‘a very ridiculous posture for a man’, Mary was relieved when Burnet proposed she should make William King for life, so he could reign in conjunction with her. Burnet declared airily that ‘nobody could suffer by this but she and her sister’, and no account need be taken of Anne, as it was ‘but too probable’ that she would die before Mary. This was curious, since at that point Anne’s health was not causing general concern, but Mary showed no qualms about overriding her sister’s rights, presuming Anne would be as anxious to defer to William as she herself. She informed William she would follow Burnet’s advice as ‘she did not think that the husband was ever to be obedient to the wife’.¹⁴⁴

Mary stood by this undertaking. When one leading politician contacted her in Holland after her father’s flight to say that ‘if she desired it … he should be able to carry it for settling her alone on the throne’ she ‘made him a very sharp answer’. In England, however, William was dismayed to discover that he could not necessarily count on Anne being as self-effacing as her sister. When Lord Halifax suggested to William in late December that Lord Churchill ‘might perhaps prevail with the Princess of Denmark to give her consent’ to a settlement that technically infringed her rights, the Prince answered with ‘sharpness’, indicating that he expected nothing less than ‘compliance’ from Anne on such points.¹⁴⁵

Despite his strong feelings, William did not raise the matter with the Princess herself. As a result she felt that he was wilfully ignoring her, and this did not make her more amenable. Determined not to be sidelined, she asked Clarendon to keep her informed. In the days preceding the opening of the Convention Parliament there was much manoeuvring, with ‘frequent consults and cabals’ being held by those who were to sit there. Several strands of opinion were now discernible. Some people favoured a regency, while others were for making Mary sole Queen, on the grounds that James had deposed himself. A few traditionalists (probably including Clarendon) clung to the hope that it would be possible to bring James back to England with certain conditions. They may have counted on Anne’s support, but the Princess told Clarendon on 17 January ‘that she was very sorry the King had brought things to the pass they were at; but she was afraid it would not be safe for him ever to return again’. When her uncle demanded ‘if she thought her father could justly be deposed?’ she took refuge in the mulish obtuseness her uncle found so maddening, replying that ‘those were too great points for her to meddle with’.¹⁴⁶

Anne was still reluctant to accept that her own claim to the throne should be modified and it is not easy to establish exactly when she realised that she would have to give in about this. Sarah later took credit for Anne’s decision to yield, but she admitted that at first she ‘took a great deal of pains’ to encourage Anne’s pretensions. John Churchill clearly realised earlier than his wife that these were unsustainable.

On 17 January Anne had a discussion with her uncle Clarendon. He told her that proposals were afoot to make William and Mary joint sovereigns, and that William would remain on the throne if Mary died childless, prejudicing Anne’s hereditary right. When he warned his niece that she was reported to have endorsed this arrangement, the Princess said hotly ‘Nobody had ever spoken to her of such a thing … She would never consent to anything that should be to the prejudice of herself or her children’. Clarendon urged her to make her attitude known, and she said that she would think about it.¹⁴⁷

Ten days later Anne apparently remained obdurate. Clarendon had informed her that Lord Churchill was busy assuring influential men that she would agree to these arrangements, but the Princess said that she had challenged Churchill about this and he denied it. George was equally defiant, telling Clarendon that he had assured several peers ‘that neither he nor his wife would consent to alter the succession’.¹⁴⁸ Probably Churchill had already accepted the necessity for Anne to be more flexible, but since he not only had to convince his wife, but also to avoid alienating the Princess, he had to move cautiously.

The Convention Parliament assembled on 22 January 1689 and six days later began addressing constitutional issues. On 28 January the Commons passed a resolution that by leaving the kingdom James ‘had abdicated the government, and the throne is thereby vacant’. The House of Lords would have difficulty accepting this, but the following day a majority of peers voted for another Commons resolution ‘that it was found by experience inconsistent for a Protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince’. This was immensely significant, for it not only disabled James from ruling but meant that if his son was brought up as a Catholic, he could never be king. The promised ‘examination of the little gent’s title’ became unnecessary, for the child was now barred from the throne by ‘a legal incapacity as well as a natural’.¹⁴⁹ In December 1689 this provision would be enshrined in statute in an even more restrictive form when it was stated in the Bill of Rights that no one could succeed to the throne who was, or ever had been Catholic, or who was married to one.

In other respects the Lords shied away from radicalism. They only rejected, by the narrow margin of three votes, a proposal that James should retain the title of King but power should be exercised by a regency. Large numbers of peers proved reluctant to pass the Commons’ resolution of 28 January, being particularly worried by the concept that the throne was currently vacant. They passed various amendments to the resolution, but the Commons rejected these with ‘the greatest passion and violence’. It began to seem that matters could not be resolved peaceably, and a total breakdown of order appeared imminent when the London ‘rabble’ laid virtual siege to Parliament, demanding ‘in a tumultuous manner’ that William and Mary be named sovereigns. Just when things were at their most tense William made a move of his own, indicating to a group of influential politicians that he had no intention of becoming his wife’s ‘gentleman usher’. He warned them that ‘he would hold no power dependent upon the will of a woman’ and that, if left unsatisfied, he ‘would go back to Holland and meddle no more in their affairs’.¹⁵⁰

As late as 5 February Anne and George were still insisting ‘it was an abominable lie’ that they had agreed that William could be King for life. Meanwhile, Churchill persuaded his wife that ‘the settlement would be carried in Parliament whether the Princess consented to it or not’, and that Anne’s only option was to surrender gracefully.¹⁵¹ Sarah then used her influence with the Princess, who now accepted that those who had been encouraging her resistance did not have her interests at heart. To Clarendon’s fury, she disavowed her earlier dealings with him, maintaining that she had never encouraged him to act as her champion.

On 6 February another conference between the two Houses of Parliament was interrupted when Lord Churchill and Lord Dorset arrived, bearing a message from Anne. In this she requested that ‘her concern or interest might not hinder the mutual concurrence, for that she was willing to submit to whatever they should conclude for the good of the kingdom and security of the Protestant religion’. This ‘hastened the conclusion’ of a settlement. That afternoon, after an agitated debate, the House of Lords agreed that William and Mary should be declared King and Queen. They also dropped their attempts to amend the Commons’ resolution of 28 January, though only because some previously recalcitrant peers absented themselves ‘for fear of a civil war’.¹⁵²

Two days later, arrangements were finalised: Anne would become Queen after William and Mary if both died childless. It seems that William had hoped that in the event of Mary predeceasing him he could ‘set [the] Princess aside’ as his successor in favour of any children he produced by a second wife, but he failed to secure this. Instead it was laid down that if William remarried and had children when Mary was dead, his offspring would inherit the throne after Anne and her children. It was also specified that although William and Mary were joint sovereigns, William was to have ‘sole and full exercise of the regal power’.¹⁵³

On 12 February 1689 Anne and George were at Greenwich as Mary disembarked after travelling over from Holland. It was a joyous reunion, with ‘a great appearance of kindness between the sisters’. Mary noted, ‘I found my sister going on well with her big belly and was really extreme glad to see her’. It was assumed that the two women’s recent secret communications had fostered ‘a greater intimacy yet’ between them, but it would not be long before their relationship became strained.¹⁵⁴

The following day William and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen at a formal ceremony in the Banqueting House, Whitehall. The Declaration of Rights, condemning James for his illegal abuses, was read out, and then everyone present went to church. As Anne sat on William’s left, listening to the Bishop of London preach, she had many reasons to feel relieved. Her beloved Church had been protected against Catholic assault. There had been a massive invasion, but civil war had been averted and in England, at least, very little blood had been spilt. Her father had escaped to France, when he could have been imprisoned, killed in battle or even executed. The monarchy remained in being, with its powers scarcely diminished. Although she had agreed to defer her own accession to the throne, she was still in line to succeed, and her pregnancy afforded hopes of motherhood and of carrying on the dynasty.

It would be very odd if Anne had not experienced some private qualms at what had happened. Her sister Mary certainly felt an inner anguish about her father’s misfortunes, and though Anne gave no sign of it, she may have felt similarly troubled. She could of course console herself that her disloyalty as both a subject and a daughter was justified on principled grounds. As one sympathiser put it: ‘Notwithstanding the great duty she owed to the King her father [she] could not think it could come in competition with … the religion and liberty of her country, both which had been most monstrously invaded’.¹⁵⁵ On the other hand, the mechanics of treachery are rarely attractive, and despite her references to her ‘sincere mind’ one cannot but be struck by the guile and duplicity that Anne had at her command throughout the crisis. She had condoned rebellion on the specious grounds that James and Mary Beatrice’s son was an imposter. Plainly motivated not just by a disinterested concern for the good of her country, but also by ambition, she had been reluctant to relinquish any part of her own hereditary rights, while trampling on those of her half brother. James had undeniably brought calamity on himself but, even so, the part played by Anne in the revolution was far from wholly creditable.