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The pleasures of the table helped console the Duchess for her husband’s infidelities. One observer recalled that she ‘had a heartier appetite than any other woman in the kingdom … It was an edifying spectacle to watch her Highness eat’. Whereas with every year the Duke of York grew progressively thinner, ‘his poor consort … waxed so fat that it was a marvel to see’. By 1668 an Italian diplomat reported that she was almost unrecognisable because ‘superfluous fat … has so altered the proportions of a very fine figure and a most lovely face’.
The Duchess’s daughters would both inherit her tendency to plumpness, with Anne in her later years being clinically obese.
The Duke and Duchess of York’s eldest son, whom the King had created Duke of Cambridge, only lived a few months. When he died in May 1661 the Venetian ambassador reported he was ‘lamented by his parents and all the court’, but Pepys commented heartlessly that his death ‘will please everybody; and I hear that the Duke and his lady themselves are not much troubled at it’. The reason for this was that owing to the controversial circumstances of his birth, the child’s legitimacy would always be open to question. It was true that in February 1661, Hyde, the child’s grandfather, had taken the precaution of establishing a formal record both of his daughter’s betrothal to James while in Holland (which, if properly attested, was as binding in law as a church wedding) and their subsequent marriage at Worcester House.
Nevertheless, problems might still have arisen in future.
Though convenient in some ways, the death of the little Duke of Cambridge did mean that the succession to the crown was not secured beyond the current generation. There was therefore relief when the Duchess of York became pregnant again. However, after she gave birth on 30 April 1662 to a daughter, christened Mary, Pepys reported ‘I find nobody pleased’. Women were not formally barred from inheriting the throne by Salic law, as in France, but it was agreed that a male monarch was infinitely preferable, and even the memory of the glorious reign of Elizabeth I, who had become Queen a century earlier, could not eradicate the idea that women were not really fitted to rule kingdoms. It was not until July 1663, when the Duchess of York produced a boy ‘to the great joy of the court’, that the outlook appeared better.
The child was named James after his father and in 1664 the King conferred on him the same title as his ill-fated brother.
When Anne was born in February 1665, few would have predicted that she would one day wear the crown. King Charles II had married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in May 1662, and though as yet she had borne him no children, there were still hopes she would do so. Any legitimate child of the King would of course take precedence in the line of succession to those of the Duke of York. Anne’s two older siblings also had a better claim to the throne than she, while any legitimate son of James born after her would inherit the crown before his sisters. She could only become Queen if she had no surviving brothers, and if her elder sister Mary predeceased her without leaving children. Only a pessimist would have considered this a likely eventuality, so Anne appeared destined to be no more than an insignificant princess belonging to a cadet branch of the royal family.
The royal nursery was supervised by the Duke of Cambridge’s governess, Lady Frances Villiers, but from the first Anne was allocated her own servants. On her accession in 1702 Anne’s former wet nurse, Margery Farthing, called attention to the fact ‘that she did give suck to her present majesty … for the space of fifteen months’ and successfully asked for financial recognition. In 1669 Anne was listed as having a dresser, three rockers, a sempstress, a page of the backstairs, and a necessary woman, whose board wages amounted to £260.
Anne’s parents cannot have seen much of their daughter during the first few months of her life. Following a period of active service at sea, the Duke of York went on a northern tour with his wife, leaving their children in the care of Lady Frances. Contemporaries would not have considered the Duke and Duchess to be negligent for absenting themselves. It was standard practice for aristocratic infants to be boarded out with wet nurses until weaned, so lengthy separations were considered the norm.
As an adult Anne would give the impression that she had almost no memory of her mother, who died when her daughter was only six. In 1693 she was shown a picture of her and commented ‘I … believe ’tis a very good one, though I do not remember enough of her to know whether it is like her or no; but it is very like one the King [Charles II] had, which everybody said was so’. Since Anne went abroad for two years when she was three and a half years old, and only returned when her mother’s health was in terminal decline, it is understandable that her recollection of her was very hazy.
In September 1664 Pepys had been delighted to see the Duke of York playing with Lady Mary, then aged two, ‘like an ordinary private father of a child’. The compiler of James’s authorised Life proclaimed him ‘the most affectionate father on earth’, and other sources concurred that he was ‘most indulgent’ towards his daughters. Even in 1688 Anne herself did not deny that James had always ‘been very kind and tender towards her’.
On the whole James was justified in priding himself on being a conscientious and benevolent parent. As will be seen, he was upset when circumstances forced him to live apart from his adolescent daughter Anne, and made strenuous efforts to ensure that their separation was as short as possible. When they were reunited he reported her activities with paternal pride in his letters, and he always showed a touching concern for her health. After she married he was generous to her financially, and was compassionate when she was distressed by the loss of her children. However, James did expect deference and compliance from his daughters, and Anne was always slightly scared of him. While there is no known instance when he lost his temper with her, she was cautious of what she said to him. By temperament ‘as stiff as a mule’, James was apt to flare up when anyone disagreed with him, and though a time would come when outspokenness on Anne’s part might have been construed as a virtue, by then the habit of circumspection was too deeply ingrained to be abandoned. When urged to give James the benefit of her advice, she answered that she had always deliberately avoided discussing weighty topics with him, protesting ‘if she had said anything … he would have been angry; and then God knows what might have happened’.
It is true that Anne would ultimately flagrantly defy James both as a father and a sovereign. It was to be an astonishing act for a woman who was by nature utterly conventional, and who was so politically conservative that her instinctive affinities lay with those who considered ‘obedience to kings, as to parents, a moral, nay a divine law’.
Even then, however, she eschewed a direct confrontation with James, who remained under the illusion that she was a dutiful daughter until the very moment of rupture.
The summer of 1667 was a ghastly time for the Duke and Duchess of York. The couple had had another son a year before, but in May 1667 both he and his elder brother fell seriously ill. On 22 May the little Duke of Kendal died of convulsion fits and a month later ‘some general disease’ carried off his brother the Duke of Cambridge. As far as most people were concerned, this once again plunged the Stuart dynasty into crisis. The Venetian ambassador’s report did not even mention that the Duke of York still had two daughters who could ascend the throne in due course, instead stating baldly, ‘The royal house of England is without posterity’.
On 8 August the Duchess of York’s mother died. Three weeks later, still reeling from the blow, the widowed Lord Chancellor – who had been created Earl of Clarendon six years earlier – fell from power; in late November he fled abroad to escape trumped-up charges of treason. The Duke of York had done his best to support his father-in-law, but the latter had long been unpopular, not least because it was falsely claimed that he had deliberately arranged for the King to marry a barren bride so that his own descendants would inherit the crown. Once Hyde had antagonised the King himself, his ruin was inevitable. Pepys noted the Duke of York’s prestige had been ‘wounded by it’, and that he was ‘much a less man than he was’.
Edward Hyde was never permitted to return from foreign exile. His departure to France and the death of her grandmother narrowed Anne’s family circle. Hyde and his wife had enjoyed seeing their grandchildren and had shown a keen interest in their welfare, but henceforth his two sons Henry (who became Earl of Clarendon on his father’s death in 1674) and Laurence (created Earl of Rochester in 1681) were the only relations on Anne’s maternal side who would feature in her life. Even they were not wholly on a family footing, for the disparity in rank between them and their niece acted as a barrier, and the Earl of Ailesbury observed that Anne never addressed either of them as ‘Uncle’. It was not only etiquette that created a distance, for on reaching maturity Anne would complain that they were not as attentive to her wishes as they should have been. At times she appeared to welcome the advice that her elder uncle proffered her, once telling him she valued the way that she ‘could talk freely’ with him. In general, however, she was guarded about consulting him and his brother.
Some consolation for the Duke and Duchess of York’s recent run of bad luck came on 14 September 1667 when the Duchess had another son, Edgar, who was soon created Duke of Cambridge. Pepys thought it a development that would ‘settle men’s minds mightily’ but unfortunately the child proved a frail bulwark for shoring up the dynasty. He was the ‘least and leanest child’ the Duchess had ever produced, and his ‘very delicate constitution and frequent attacks of deadly sickness’ did not augur well for the future.
Anne too was not a strong child, for she suffered from ‘a kind of defluxion in her eyes’. The medical term was used frequently in the seventeenth century, and could just describe a localised pain, supposedly caused by a ‘flow of humours’ to that area. Alternatively it is possible that her eyes constantly watered, or emitted a discharge. Whatever the cause, this ‘serious eye disorder’ was so worrying that Anne was sent abroad for treatment while still a toddler. The Duke of York believed that French doctors would offer the best chance of curing his daughter, an idea that probably came from his mother, now based in France. Accordingly Anne was entrusted to her grandmother’s care and would spend over a year at her country house at Colombes on the Seine. In July 1668 she was taken across the Channel ‘with her retinue’, and on landing was met at Dieppe by coaches sent by the Queen Mother. According to Anne’s early biographer, Abel Boyer, when it became known at home that she was in France, the ‘surmise that she was gone thither to be bred a Roman Catholic’ caused ‘no small alarm’. Since her grandmother was a known proselytiser, such fears were understandable, if unfounded.
By August 1669 the Queen Mother’s own health was causing concern, but her death on 10 September came as a surprise. Anne was taken in by her aunt Henrietta, who was married to King Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe Duc d’Orléans. When Anne joined the nursery at Saint Cloud, its other occupants were her seven-year-old first cousin Marie Louise – who grew up to become Queen of Spain and died young – and a baby girl, born a few weeks earlier, who would later marry the Duke of Savoy.
The Duchesse d’Orléans was far from robust, and on 20/30 June 1670 she died after a sudden collapse. There were dark rumours that she had been poisoned by her husband, although there can be little doubt that natural causes were to blame. Certainly the Duc was not greatly grieved by his loss, but he did take a meticulous interest in ensuring that his wife was mourned in accordance with court etiquette. When the Duchesse de Montpensier came to offer her condolences she was surprised to see that the Duc had fitted out not only his eldest daughter but also five-year-old Anne in miniature court mourning costumes, complete with long trains of purple velvet. The Duchesse found this absurd, but quite apart from the fact that children love dressing up, it is unlikely that Anne minded. As an adult she too would take such matters seriously. Jonathan Swift declared that she was ‘so exact an observer of forms that she seemed to have made it her study, and would often descend so low as to observe in her domestics of either sex who came into her presence whether a ruffle, a periwig or the lining of a coat were unsuitable at certain times’. Mourning rituals were important to her, and so was protocol, leading the Duchess of Marlborough to complain that Anne’s mind was so taken up with ‘ceremonies and customs of courts and such like insignificant trifles’ that her conversation turned chiefly ‘upon fashions and rules of precedence’.
The English officially accepted the French autopsy findings stating that the Duchesse had not been a victim of foul play, but it was judged best to bring Anne home without delay. Accordingly, Lady Frances Villiers was sent with her husband to escort Anne to England. Before she left France the child was presented with a pair of diamond and pearl bracelets from Louis XIV, the monarch who would later become her greatest adversary.
Following her return to England on 23 July 1670, Anne was judged ‘very much improved both in her constitution and personal accomplishments’. For a time she ‘appeared to acquire a healthful constitution of body’, but she did suffer occasional relapses, and in 1677 was reported to be ‘ill of her eyes again’. Her vision remained defective and as an adult she would try to remedy it by consulting oculists such as William Read, an itinerant tailor who recommended drinking beer in the morning to hydrate the brain, and who concocted an eyewash of sulphur, turpentine, vivum, and honey of roses. She suffered less than her sister Mary, whose letters abound with complaints of being plagued by ‘sore eyes’ which became particularly bad if she read or wrote by candlelight.
Anne’s ailment had left her slightly disfigured. Abel Boyer noted that she had acquired ‘a contraction in the upper lids that gave a cloudy air to her countenance’, indicating she had a slight squint. This made her look ill-tempered, creating an unfortunate impression. The Duchess of Marlborough declared that Anne’s features appeared set in a ‘sullen and constant frown’, and Anne herself was conscious that her face had a naturally grim expression. In 1683 she told a friend who thought she was displeased with her, ‘I have sometimes when I do not know it, a very grave look, which has made others as well as you, ask me if I was angry with them, … Therefore do not mind my looks for I really look grave and angry when I am not so’.
Meanwhile Anne’s mother was in poor physical condition with an ‘illness, under which she languished long’. This was probably cancer of the breast, for the fact that upon her death ‘one of her breasts burst, being a mass of corruption’ suggests that she had a tumour there.
The Duchess of York’s spiritual condition afforded equal grounds for concern. By this time, both of Anne’s parents had ceased to be firm believers in the Anglican faith. James had experienced a crisis of conscience in early 1669 and had begun secret discussions with a Catholic priest, but continued to attend Anglican services. Later that year the Duchess also began to gravitate towards Rome. She later recalled that until this point she had been ‘one of the greatest enemies’ the Catholic Church had, but reading The History of the Reformation by the Protestant divine, Peter Heylyn, had the unexpected effect of forcing her to re-examine her beliefs. After enduring ‘the most terrible agonies in the world’, she was ‘fully convinced and reconciled’ to the Catholic Church in August 1670. James felt inspired by the manner in which his wife’s hostility to the Roman faith had unexpectedly crumbled, and this memory would later encourage him to believe that the most unlikely candidates were ripe for conversion. In particular he clung to the hope that his younger daughter Anne’s ostensibly unshakeable commitment to the Anglican Church would prove as fragile as her mother’s.
Well aware that if her conversion became public she ‘must lose all the friends and credit I have here’, the Duchess of York tried to keep it secret. Inevitably, however, her failure to take communion attracted attention. In December 1670 the King took the matter up with his brother, who admitted his wife was a convert. James promised he would take great care to conceal this, but as the Duchess’s health worsened, her refusal to permit her Anglican chaplains to pray with her left little doubt that she had forsaken the English Church. Appalled by reports that his daughter had succumbed to the lure of Rome, her father wrote from abroad expressing horror at her readiness to ‘suck in that poison’. He warned her that her conversion would bring ‘ruin to your children, of whose company and conversation you must look to be deprived, for God forbid that after such an apostasy you should have any power in [their] education’.
The Duchess of York would not lose custody of her children because she was an unfit mother; instead, she would be parted from them by death. On 9 February 1671 she gave birth to a daughter, who lived less than a year. After that the Duchess’s illness entered its final phase, and ‘came at last to a quicker crisis than had been apprehended’. ‘All of the sudden she fell into the agony of death’ and her last hours proved dreadful, ‘full of unspeakable torture’.
The Duchess had secretly received Catholic last rites, but pious Anglicans lamented that she had rejected the consolations of true religion and died ‘like a poor wretch’. Having died on Friday 31 March 1671 the Duchess ‘was opened on Saturday, embalmed on Sunday and buried’ the day after that. Gilbert Burnet stated coldly that ‘the change of her religion made her friends reckon her death a blessing rather than a loss’. One of her maids of honour noted ‘None remembered her after one week; none sorry for her. She smelt extremely, was tossed and flung about, and everyone did what they would with that stately carcase’. Court mourning for her was curtailed so as not to interfere with celebrations for the King’s birthday.
The decade since the Restoration had been fraught with loss for the Duke of York as ‘hardly a year passed without some sensible mortification, as loss of children, mother, wife, sister’.
Apart from her older sister, Anne, aged six, was left bereft of all female members of her immediate family. Her grandmother, mother, and aunt had all been intelligent, vivacious women, and perhaps if they had lived longer they could have encouraged Anne to be less introverted. As it was, although her sister Mary was a chatterbox, Anne developed into a chronically shy child, and all her life was painfully inarticulate.
The Duchess of Marlborough later recalled that as a young woman ‘the Princess was so silent that she rarely spoke more than was necessary to answer a question’. At fourteen, Anne was already conscious that she was a poor communicator and acknowledged this as a failing, noting ruefully, ‘I have not, maybe, so good a way of expressing myself as some people have’. Four years later she was still lamenting ‘I can never express myself in words’. Even if Anne deprecated her lack of verbal skills, she did not accept that her thoughts and feelings could be dismissed on that account as insignificant, insisting that while ‘there may be people in the world that can say more for themselves … nobody’s heart I am sure is more sincere’.
Although words did not come easily, her diffidence did not spring from a complete absence of self-esteem, and she prided herself on being a person of sound instincts and honest convictions.
James had by now advanced far down the same spiritual road as his late wife. In 1672 it was noticed that for the first time he did not take the sacrament at Easter. He only ceased attending Anglican services of any kind in 1676, but there could be little doubt that he had, in effect, already abandoned the Church. This had become clear after anti-Catholic feeling had resulted in the passing of the Test Act on 29 March 1673. The bill prevented Catholics from holding official employments in England by insisting that all office holders had to take an oath repudiating the doctrine of transubstantiation ‘in full and positive words’.
James could not comply with this requirement and consequently had to resign from his position as Lord Admiral in June 1673.
The discovery that the heir apparent to the throne was a Catholic caused the greatest consternation. Fear of Popery was a force whose potency bore no relation to the number of Catholics in England. It is estimated that in 1676 Catholics constituted just over one percent of the population, although admittedly the figure for the peerage would have been higher. The memory of past outrages perpetrated by Catholics was kept alive by vicious propaganda. The events of Mary Tudor’s reign, a hundred and twenty years earlier, were used to stir up dread of the Popish menace. As alarm mounted at the prospect of a Catholic becoming King there were predictions that in that event England would again be subjected to ‘those bloody massacres and inhuman Smithfield butcheries’. It was suggested that James would prove to be ‘Queen Mary in breeches’, while another person warned ‘We must resolve when we have a prince of the Popish religion to be Papists or burn’.
Fears did not centre exclusively on the possibility that a Catholic ruler would deny his Protestant subjects the right to practise their faith. There were also secular considerations. Catholicism was seen as an autocratic religion, presided over by a Pope whose authority could not be questioned, and this gave rise to the idea that it had a natural affinity with repressive political systems. The prime example of an illiberal Catholic regime was absolutist France, where King Louis XIV ruled without having to secure the consent of a representative assembly to pass laws or levy taxes. France was very much on everyone’s mind at this time, for it was currently emerging as a new superpower, and its king seemed intent on oppressing his neighbours as well as his subjects. In 1672 he had launched a war of aggression with Holland, intending to crush that republic. Though victory did not come as easily as he had hoped, it was clear he aimed at nothing less than radically altering the European balance of power. It was feared that if James inherited the throne, far from trying to restrain Louis, he would instead emulate him by undermining his subjects’ rightful liberties. It was thought that as a Catholic he would be automatically predisposed to rule arbitrarily, for, as the Earl of Shaftesbury put it, ‘Popery and slavery like two sisters’ went ‘hand in hand’.
It took some years before disquiet about James’s religion became so marked that his opponents sought to prevent him becoming King. Since Anne was only eight when her father resigned as Lord High Admiral, it is unlikely that she was aware from the first of the implications of his being a Catholic convert. In time, however, it would define her relations with him.
After being constantly ‘subject to a variety of diseases beyond the endurance of the strongest constitution’ Anne’s brother Edgar had died in June 1671. The loss of what the Venetian ambassador called the ‘sole sprig’
of the royal family meant that Anne became a figure of greater significance. She was now third in line to the throne, and since the Queen showed no sign of providing an heir, Anne would not be moved lower down the order of succession unless her father remarried and had a son.
Anne’s education should thus, logically, have been a subject of national concern, and yet it was astonishingly inadequate. She and Mary were entrusted to the care of Lady Frances Villiers and spent much of their time in the crumbling Tudor palace at Richmond the royal governess shared with her husband, the Keeper of Richmond Park. Anne developed a marked ‘fondness for the house … where she … lived as a child’ and, believing ‘the air of that place good for children’, wanted her own son to be brought up there.
Royal daughters were no longer accorded the sort of education that had been deemed appropriate when Queen Elizabeth I had been in the schoolroom. Anne’s great grandfather James I of England had believed that it was undesirable to introduce women to the classics. Such views were still so prevalent that even the cultivated diarist and virtuoso, John Evelyn, would pronounce in 1676 that ‘learning does commonly but corrupt most women’, as in their case the study of ancient texts was ‘apt to turn to impertinence and vanity’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was slightly younger than Anne, observed, ‘There is hardly a creature in the world more despicable or more liable to universal ridicule than a learned woman’. Anne herself appears to have been suspicious of women with intellectual pretensions. The Duchess of Marlborough wrote that one reason Anne did not like her aunt Lady Clarendon was that she ‘looked like a madwoman and talked like a scholar, which the Princess thought agreed very well together’.
There was little likelihood that Anne’s father or uncle would try to counter convention by turning her and her sister into paragons of learning. Their own education had been disrupted by the Civil War, and neither James nor Charles was academically minded. The ideas of a former schoolmistress called Bashua Makin, who in 1673 published a pamphlet dedicated to the Lady Mary, would have seemed outlandish to both men. She wanted gentlewomen to be instructed in a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, ancient languages and rhetoric, whereas currently on emerging from the classroom they could only ‘polish their hands and feet … curl their locks … [and] dress and trim their bodies’.
The princesses’ parents both spoke French fluently and in that language, at least, the two girls received excellent instruction from a Frenchman, Peter de Laine. As a result when she was Queen, Anne would have no difficulty communicating with French diplomats in their own tongue.
Anne was taught enough basic arithmetic to be able to inspect her household accounts on marriage. She was careful about checking these and once picked up a discrepancy after noticing in 1698 that ‘the expenses of oil and vinegar were very extravagant’. Even so, the Duchess of Marlborough maintained that Anne was insufficiently vigilant to detect that her Treasurer of the Household, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, had tried to defraud her. Still less was Anne capable of understanding the complex financial arrangements that underpinned government during her reign.
The main emphasis in her education was on acquiring feminine accomplishments. Mrs Henrietta Bannister taught her music, for which Anne’s ‘ear was very exquisite’. Anne also received guitar lessons from Henry Delauney, who was paid £50 a year. Strumming on the guitar was currently a fashionable accomplishment for ladies, and Anne’s father ‘played passably’ on the instrument.
Dancing lessons were another important part of the curriculum. The Duchess of Marlborough would grudgingly concede that in her youth Anne had ‘a person and appearance not at all ungraceful’, and until she became physically incapable of doing the steps, Anne derived intense pleasure from dancing. In 1686, when the dissenter Roger Morrice noted in his journal that Anne had recently performed at a court ball, he added disapprovingly ‘as she does constantly’. Within a few years her burgeoning weight and attacks of lameness made dancing difficult. Nevertheless in 1691 she was reported to have taken to the floor during her birthday celebrations, and even in 1696 she managed to dance at a party for her brother-in-law. That was almost certainly the last time she was able to do so, and long before she became Queen dancing had ceased to be an option.
Anne’s dancing master was a Frenchman called Mr Gory. He instructed her in the latest Continental dances, but she did not despise native traditions, patriotically maintaining that some English country dances were ‘much finer’ than those imported from France. Years later, she would engage Mr Gory, by then old and rich, to teach dancing to her son, William, Duke of Gloucester. Unfortunately the little boy was badly coordinated, and so hated his lessons that he called Mr Gory ‘“Old Dog” for straining his joints a little’.
Anne and Mary were taught drawing by the dwarf artist Richard Gibson, with Mary outshining Anne in this and in needlework. Outdoor activities appealed more to Anne and by her teens she was a keen horse-woman, enjoying riding and hunting. She was also introduced to more frivolous recreations at an early age. Roger Morrice noted that Mary’s tastes had been shaped by what he termed ‘the prejudices of her education, which induced her to spend her time as other courtiers did in cards, dice, dances, plays and masques’. Anne liked all these pastimes as much as her sister. Card games such as basset played for high stakes were very much a feature of court life, and by the time Anne was fifteen she was a regular player at the tables.
Anne’s father would later advise that ‘young persons … should not … read romances, more especially the woman kind; ’tis but loss of time and is apt to put foolish and ridiculous thoughts into their head’. It is not clear whether he managed to stop his daughters reading novels, but they certainly derived literary pleasure from plays. In 1679 fourteen-year-old Anne reported that she was planning to watch a rehearsal of an amateur production of George Etherege’s cynical and immoral comedy The Man of Mode, and it is obvious that she already knew the piece well. She was displeased by the casting of one female role, writing scathingly ‘Mrs Watts is to be Lady Townley, which part I believe won’t much become her’. Some years before that, her imagination had been captured by another drama, Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates, which exerted a fascination on her for a long time. The play was a perennial ‘favourite of the tender hearted ladies’, and was a tale of sibling rivalry, tragic love, and court intrigue. Anne’s favourite character was the hero, Ziphares. This princely youth refuses to forsake his true love Semandra, while remaining loyal to his father, the eastern potentate Mithridates, who has designs on the girl himself. In 1681 Anne appeared in an amateur production of Mithridates put on at Holyrood House when her father was in exile in Scotland. James watched her proudly, fortunately unaware that Mithridates’s fall at the end of the play foreshadowed his own. After remarking ‘How swiftly fate can make or unmake kings’, one character laments in the final scene,
Where now are all the busy officers
The supple courtiers and big men of war,
That bustled here and made a little world?
Revolted all.
For James these lines would prove all too apposite.
The Duchess of Marlborough, who would be the recipient of a vast amount of correspondence from Anne, declared ‘Her letters were very indifferent, both in sense and spelling’.
The accusation of poor spelling was unfair given the standards of the day. Anne spelt better than many aristocratic ladies at the Stuart court and, for that matter, than Sarah’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough.
According to an early historian of Anne’s reign, ‘it was an unhappiness to this Queen that she was not much acquainted with our English history and the reigns and actions of her predecessors’. Despite ‘beginning to apply herself to it’ shortly before her accession, it proved too late to fill up all the gaps in her knowledge. She had nevertheless managed to learn enough about the Tudors to identify parallels between herself and Queen Elizabeth I. Some of the events of the recent Civil War were also familiar to her, although inevitably she viewed these from a royalist standpoint. The executed Charles I was now revered as a martyr who had died defending the Church of England. The anniversary of his death was observed by a ‘day of fast and humiliation’, and on that date Anne and her sister wore black. Church services were held to commemorate his murder, during which the congregation was reminded that ‘upon no pretext whatever, subjects might resist their lawful princes’. There was little recognition that Parliament had had some legitimate grievances, and that this had contributed to the outbreak of civil war.
The sufferings of the Church of England in the decade after the royalist cause collapsed were also much emphasised. Under the Commonwealth, the Book of Common Prayer had been outlawed, episcopacy had been abolished, and hundreds of Anglican clergymen had been deprived of their livings. At the Restoration of the monarchy, the reinstated bishops took revenge on their former oppressors. All those Protestants who could not comply with every tenet of the newly resurgent Church were penalised, and ‘rigid prelates … made it a matter of conscience to give … the least indulgence’ to dissenters.
By the terms of the Conventicle Act, those who worshipped in a manner not authorised by the state were liable to savage fines and imprisonment.
For much of Charles II’s reign, the tribulations of nonconformists far exceeded those imposed on Anglicans during the Interregnum, but Anne was brought up to have little sympathy for this sizeable minority. She accepted that dissenters posed a serious threat to the well-being of the Church of England, and the fact that nonconformity was associated in the mind of the court with political radicalism further predisposed her against them. Her upbringing helped shape her conservative outlook: Sarah Marlborough would claim Anne ‘sucked in with her milk’ a distaste for those who upheld the liberties of the subject, while the Roundheads who had executed her grandfather were viewed as little short of demonic.
There can be no doubt that had Anne been a boy she would have been taught very differently. The rigorous scholastic programme designed for her son William, Duke of Gloucester at the end of the seventeenth century shows what then comprised a princely education. Whether such a training, with its heavy emphasis on classical languages, would have made Anne a better ruler remains conjectural. As it was, she ascended the throne in what the Duchess of Marlborough scoffingly called ‘a state of helpless ignorance’.
Nevertheless, she never seems to have doubted her ability to take on the responsibilities of sovereignty.
Great care was at least taken over Anne’s religious education. When she returned to England from France in 1670, her father was already gravitating towards Catholicism. Fully aware it would cause political meltdown if Anne and Mary did likewise, Charles II saw to it that both his nieces were brought up as Protestants. James resented this, recalling bitterly ‘it was much against his will that his daughters went to church and were bred Protestants’, but it was made clear to him that if he ‘endeavoured to have them instructed in his own religion … they would have immediately been quite taken from him’.
James was particularly irked by the choice of Henry Compton to be his daughters’ spiritual preceptor. Compton came from an aristocratic family and had not been ordained until after the Restoration, when he was already in his thirties. Before that he had seen active service in the royalist army, and he still had such a soldierly manner that James complained he spoke ‘more like a colonel than a bishop’. He was militant in other ways, for he was a known ‘enemy to the Papists’,
and as Compton’s influence at court grew, James had many clashes with him. He could not prevent him becoming a Privy Councillor in January 1676, but a year later the Duke did succeed in blocking the then Bishop of London’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Compton was not just intolerant towards Catholics, for he was also ‘very severe upon the dissenting Protestants’. This hostility helped Anne form the idea that nonconformists were fanatical and untrustworthy. ‘As she was bred up in High Church principles, they were believed to be always predominant in her’, and all her life she was of the view that the Anglican Church needed protection against the dissenters.
Compton, known for his low, gruff voice, was not a particularly inspiring teacher, but his advocacy of unquestioning faith in preference to intellectual rigour was an approach that suited Anne. After marrying and going to live in Holland, her sister Mary came to feel that her spiritual education had been defective, and she set about compensating for this by intensive study. When her father later sought to convert her by sending her Catholic tracts, he was astounded by the learned way she marshalled arguments against him. Had Anne been called upon to do so, it is unlikely that she could have acquitted herself so competently. In 1687 she did commend to her sister some of the religious works currently being published in England, declaring ‘a great many of our side … are very well writ’, but in general she ‘never pursued any study in those points with much application’.
If complex theological debate was beyond Anne, her Anglican faith was firm and undeviating. ‘In all respects a true daughter of the Church of England’, she was a ‘devout worshipper’ who was ‘steadfast and regular in her devotions’. As well as setting aside time for private prayer, she assiduously attended church services and took the sacrament whenever appropriate. At the height of their friendship, almost the only thing that prompted her to criticise Sarah Churchill was Sarah’s infrequent church attendance.
Anne’s religion consoled and sustained her when she endured tragedies and bereavements that might have caused others to lose their trust in God.
When Anne’s faith was called in question, she reaffirmed it in simple and positive terms which not only left no doubt as to the strength of her convictions but also made clear the extent to which she had absorbed the anti-Catholic sentiments of Bishop Compton. She told Mary in 1686:
I abhor the principles of the Church of Rome as much as it is possible for any to do, and I as much value the doctrine of the Church of England. And certainly there is the greatest reason in the world to do so, for the doctrine of the Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous and directly contrary to the scriptures, and their ceremonies – most of them – plain downright idolatry. But God be thanked, we were not bred up in that communion, but are of a Church that is pious and sincere, and conformable in all its principles to the scriptures. Our Church teaches no doctrine but what is just, holy and good, or what is profitable to salvation; and the Church of England is, without all doubt, the only true Church.
A Venetian diplomat recorded that ‘The Duchess of York was not buried when negotiations were begun for a fresh one’. James’s eagerness to acquire a new spouse was partly because he wanted sons and heirs. It took him some time to find a bride, not least because he was adamant that candidates must be ‘young and beautiful’.
At length he decided to propose to an Italian princess, fifteen-year-old Mary Beatrice of Modena, who fulfilled both requirements. Negotiations dragged on because the girl had wanted to be a nun and it required the intervention of the Pope to persuade her that marriage to James represented a higher vocation. In September 1673 Mary Beatrice was wedded to James by proxy at a ceremony in Modena, but when news arrived in England that James had chosen a Catholic princess as his wife it was very ill received. After Parliament met on 20 October, a motion was passed urging that Mary Beatrice should be sent straight home on reaching England. Rather than heed these demands, Charles II prorogued Parliament before her arrival in November.
‘The offspring of this marriage will probably inherit the crown’, the Venetian ambassador noted, but there is no evidence that the likelihood of being superseded in the succession by Mary Beatrice’s sons upset Mary and Anne at this stage. Certainly their father assumed they would welcome their young stepmother, jovially telling eleven-year-old Mary ‘he had provided a playfellow for her’.
Once she had recovered from her homesickness and her initial distaste for her middle-aged husband, Mary Beatrice’s youthful high spirits manifested themselves. There had been fears that someone of her ‘Italian breeding’ would have very pronounced ideas about etiquette, but here too her informality came as a pleasant surprise as she enjoyed games of blind man’s buff and snowball fights. Lady Tuke said she would never have expected her to be ‘such a romp as she proves’.
Initially the signs were that Mary Beatrice had established an excellent relationship with her stepdaughters. In 1675 an observer reported she ‘diverts herself … with the princesses, whose conversation is much to her taste and satisfaction’. Three years later she would say of Mary, ‘I love her as if she was my own daughter’, and she gave every indication of being equally fond of Anne. When the Duchess of York accompanied her husband to Scotland in 1680 she complained not just about having to leave behind her own daughter Isabella, but also at being parted from Anne. The following year Mary Beatrice expressed delight when her stepdaughter was permitted to join her at Edinburgh, declaring herself ‘much pleased to have the Lady Anne with me’.
Anne was assumed to reciprocate these warm feelings, and in the early years it is indeed probable that they were genuinely on good terms. In time, however, Anne would come to detest Mary Beatrice.
The fact that Mary and Anne were being brought up in a Catholic household was a cause of concern to the public. When Parliament met in February 1674 the House of Lords attempted to pass a resolution that called for ‘the removal of the Duke of York’s daughters from his charge because the Duchess is a Catholic’.
Once again the King staved off trouble by proroguing Parliament before the measure was put to the vote.
Considering she was not even allowed to bring up her own children as Catholics, Mary Beatrice’s chances of converting her stepdaughters were surely slim. Having given birth in January 1675 to a baby girl (dismissed as ‘but a daughter’ by the disappointed father) she was appalled when her husband explained that ‘their children were the property of the nation’, and would be removed from their parents’ care unless raised as Protestants. Accordingly the child (who died that October) was christened according to Anglican rites, and her elder sisters stood as godmothers.
Mary and Anne’s energies at this time were absorbed elsewhere with an acting project. In the autumn of 1674 the King had commissioned Thomas Crowne to write a masque to be staged at Whitehall, entitled Calisto, or The Chaste Nymph. Intended to rival the ballets and entertainments put on by Louis XIV in France, it was hoped that the masque would serve as an extravagant showpiece, in which ‘the splendour of the English monarchy will be seen’. The seven speaking roles were all taken by young ladies of the court. Anne’s sister Mary was given the role of the eponymous nymph, Calisto, while Anne played Calisto’s younger sister Nyphe. Even in this supporting role there were quite a lot of lines for a nine-year-old to master, but fortunately Anne had an excellent memory. Like other members of the cast, she was coached by Mrs Betterton, wife of the actor-manager Thomas Betterton. When Anne was a bit older the training she received at this point would be supplemented by lessons from another celebrated actress, Elizabeth Barry, who was credited with much improving her pupil’s diction.
On 22 February 1675 the masque was staged ‘in all its bravery and pomp’ in the presence of the King and Queen, foreign ministers and anyone else who had been able to secure seats. It was a lavish production, in which the elaborately costumed female performers appeared ‘all covered with jewels’. Basking in the audience’s ‘great applause’, the delighted author enthused that the success of the play owed much to the ‘graceful action, incomparable beauty and rich and splendid habits of the princesses’.
Crowne had based his plot on a story from Ovid, relating how the nymph Calisto, servitor of the Goddess Diana, had been raped by Jupiter after the latter gained access to her by impersonating Diana. For decency’s sake, Crowne toned down the story so that Calisto successfully fends off Jupiter’s advances, but the script still contained much sexual innuendo. In particular the scenes in which Jupiter, masquerading as Diana, tries to force himself upon the unwilling nymph have an erotic subtext. Calisto is overcome with shame and confusion at finding herself an object of sexual attention from a woman, and even expresses dread that, like Diana, she might become infected by a ‘strange uncommon’ malady that will prompt her to commit ‘some horrid act’.
It is curious that Anne, whose reputation would later be compromised by allegations of lesbianism, should have appeared as a child in an entertainment which touched obliquely on such matters.
No one who when young had any experience of the Restoration court could be said to have had an entirely sheltered upbringing. Pepys memorably observed that there was ‘nothing almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom’. Marital infidelity was so much the norm that in her early teens Anne’s sister Mary would write nonchalantly to a friend: ‘in two or three years men are always weary of their wives and [go] for mistresses as soon as they can get them’. Perhaps it was the behaviour of her father which planted this idea, although the court was of course also swarming with Charles II’s paramours. Anne was well aware of their existence, and came to dislike the King’s principal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. Mary and Anne were not insulated from the gossip and scandal that periodically engulfed the Duchess of York’s maids of honour, many of whom were themselves barely out of adolescence.
Far from being corrupted by their early environment, Mary and Anne both developed strong moral values and never lost sight of them. In view of their position, they were obviously less vulnerable than other young women at court, and in many ways they were carefully protected. One obvious precaution was to limit their exposure to predatory men, and at Richmond and London their social circle was almost exclusively female. Yet even here the princesses proved emotionally susceptible, developing schoolgirl crushes which, though innocent enough, had an intensity startling to modern sensibilities.
Anne and Mary of course relied upon each other for companionship, and were very close when young. Mary once referred to Anne as ‘a creature … so double dear to me’, insisting that she had always cherished her with ‘a love too great to increase and too natural not to last always’. In a melodramatic moment she wrote of her protective feelings for ‘the only sister I have in the world, the sister I love like my own life’. Mary was apt to think that Anne was too easily swayed by others, although, somewhat paradoxically, she also complained of her stubbornness, a character trait that manifested itself at an early age. As an adult Mary liked recalling an occasion when they had been walking in the park and began arguing about whether a distant object was a man or a tree. Mary insisted it was a man, and as they drew closer it became apparent that she had been right. Mary demanded, ‘“Now sister, are you satisfied that it is a man?” But Lady Anne, after she saw what it was, turned away, and persisting still in her own side of the question, cried out, “No sister, it is a tree”’.
The sisters’ social circle included Lady Frances Villiers’s six daughters, and their stepmother’s maids of honour. Among them was the future Duchess of Marlborough, Sarah Jennings, who in 1673, aged thirteen, had become a maid of honour to Mary Beatrice. Sarah was five years older than Anne, but she later claimed that this did not discourage them from playing together, and that Anne ‘even then expressed a particular fondness for me’.
In both Anne and Mary’s case, however, the friendship that meant most to them in their early teens was with Frances Apsley, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, the Treasurer of the Duke of York’s household. The two of them wrote some remarkable letters to her, most of them undated, although the correspondence appears to have started around 1675, when Mary was thirteen and Frances Apsley was twenty-two. Mary’s letters are astonishingly ardent. She addressed Frances as ‘my dearest dear husband’ while styling herself ‘your faithful wife, true to your bed’. A typical effusion reads, ‘My much loved husband … How I dote on you, oh, I am in raptures of a sweet amaze, when I think of you I am in an ecstasy’. A little later Mary declares ‘I love you with a flame more lasting than the vestals’ fire … I love you with a love that ne’er was known by man; I have for you excess of friendship, more of love than any woman can for women’.
It is somewhat surprising that a woman of Frances’s age was happy to be the recipient of these fevered schoolgirl outpourings, but she gave the impression that she fully reciprocated Mary’s affection. She claimed to be as ‘lovesick’ as her teenage devotee, and that she had been moved to tears when she suspected Mary of wavering in her adoration. A year or so later, however, Mary and Frances’s relationship was disrupted when Anne – now aged about twelve – came between them ‘with her alluring charms’. After Frances wrote to Anne and gave her a ring, Mary accused Frances of having ‘forsaken me quite’. She lamented that Anne now possessed Frances’s ‘heart … and your letters too, oh thrice happy she! She is happier than ever I was, for she has triumphed over a rival that once was happy in your love’. Mary described sitting consumed with misery as Frances and Anne ‘whispered and then laughed as if you had said, now we are rid of her, let us be happy, whilst poor unhappy I sat reading of a play, my heart ready to break … It made me ready to cry but before my happy rival I would not show my weak[ness]’.
Ultimately the situation resolved itself. Even before going to Holland in 1677, Mary had ceased to be tormented with jealousy over Frances and Anne. After her marriage she continued to write to Frances, but in much more measured terms. She insisted she now had no objection to Anne’s having ‘some part’ of Frances’s love, confident that she herself still had ‘the greatest share of your heart’.
The letters that Anne sent to Frances Apsley are less overwrought than her sister’s, but they still have curious aspects. For the purposes of the correspondence they took on the identities of the tragic lovers at the centre of Nathaniel Lee’s melodrama, Mithridates. Anne adopted a male persona, taking as her alter ego Lee’s hero, Prince Ziphares, while Frances became ‘dear adored Semandra’. Anne clearly saw nothing wrong with this, for she was open about the conceit, and in a letter to Frances’s mother Lady Apsley (of whom she was also very fond) she referred without embarrassment to ‘my fair Semandra’. When Anne was sent abroad to Brussels in 1679, she wrote affectionately to Frances, and back in England the following summer she sought permission from Lady Apsley for Frances to stay overnight as her guest at Windsor. During her stay in Scotland in 1681 Anne resumed her correspondence with her Semandra, but there are signs that by this time her affection was slightly cooling. She still signed herself ‘your Ziphares’, and protested ‘I do love you dearly, and not with that kind of love that I love all others who proffer themselves to be my friends’. However it appears that Frances, conscious that she was losing ground with Anne, had requested this reassurance, and Anne’s letter is also full of excuses for not writing more often.
It would be wrong to focus too much attention on the adolescent fantasies of teenage girls. Of the two sisters, Mary appears to have been the more strongly emotionally involved with Frances Apsley. Yet after she went to Holland in 1677, Mary never formed a comparable relationship with a member of her own sex.
In Anne’s case, her youthful affection for Frances Apsley foreshadowed deeper attachments to women in her mature years.
In the autumn of 1677 the princesses’ girlish existence, hitherto dominated by petty dramas and private obsessions, was altered forever. Fifteen-year-old Mary had been of marriageable age for three years, and the King now decided it was time to provide her with a husband. He was concerned that the monarchy was losing popularity because his heir apparent was a Catholic and he himself was justly suspected of having Catholic sympathies. In hopes of proclaiming his Protestant credentials, he began to think of matching his niece to his Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, son of the late Princess Royal. Such a union would delight Parliament because it would distance Charles II from the French, who were still at war with Holland. At the outset of the war, Charles had allied himself with Louis XIV, but in 1674 had signed peace terms with Holland. The conflict between France and Holland had continued, with the Dutch putting up a heroic resistance under the leadership of their hereditary stadholder and commander-in-chief, Prince William of Orange. By bestowing Mary on his nephew, Charles would indicate that he no longer wanted the French to win the struggle.
The match had obvious advantages for William. For the moment, Mary remained second in line to the English throne. Admittedly, there was a possibility that she could be displaced, for the Duchess of York, who had produced a daughter named Isabella in July 1676, was currently expecting another child. As things stood, however, Mary had a good chance of inheriting the crown. If she died childless, in theory it then passed to Anne, and it was only if she too died without heirs that it descended to William, whose claim came through his late mother. William nevertheless calculated that marrying Mary would bring him ‘a great step to one degree nearer the crown, and to all appearance the next [in line]’.
William visited England in October 1677, and having insisted on having a brief preliminary meeting with Mary, he asked the King for her hand. Charles agreed, and the Duke of York, who had formerly cherished unrealistic hopes that Mary could be betrothed to the French Dauphin, was prevailed upon to give his consent. After dining at Whitehall on 21 October, James returned to St James’s and took Mary into his closet to tell her that her wedding had been arranged, and that she would be going to live with Prince William in Holland. Shattered to learn that she was to be married to a stranger and wrenched from her homeland, Mary ‘wept all that afternoon and the following day’.
There was public rapture at the news that ‘the eldest daughter of the crown should sleep in Protestant arms’. However, when the marriage took place at St James’s on 4 November, the atmosphere in the palace could hardly have been less festive. Mary was still in a state of great distress, and the heavily pregnant Mary Beatrice was also ‘much grieved’ at the prospect of being separated from a stepdaughter she held ‘in much affection’. As for Anne, she was already sickening with what turned out to be smallpox. The atmosphere was not lightened by Charles’s excruciating jokes, and his urging Bishop Compton, who was performing the marriage, to ‘make haste lest his sister[-in-law] should be delivered of a son, and the marriage be disappointed’.
Things did not improve over the next few days. When Mary appeared with William at her side, she gave the impression of being ‘a very coy bride’, and the Prince was soon being criticised for ‘sullenness and clownishness’ and for taking ‘no notice of his princess at the play and ball’. According to the French ambassador, his mood darkened further when the Duchess of York gave birth to a boy on 7 November.
