I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance I received from the Arts Council, through their Grants for the Arts scheme, and from the Society of Authors, who awarded me an Authors’ Foundation Grant to help with the research towards this book. Lucy Sheerman at Arts Council East and the staff at the Writers’ Centre Norwich provided invaluable support throughout the Grants for the Arts application process.
I am also grateful to historians Robert O. Bucholz and Adrian Tinniswood for answering my questions, to Polly Clark and my husband Chris Hadley for being my first readers, to my agent Louise Greenberg for her advice and support, and to Karen Duffy, Maddie West and Sam Redman at Atlantic Books.
Although this book was conceived as a work of fiction, it is based upon the life of a real historical figure, and I have chosen to include real documents, where I felt this to be the best way of telling the story I had set out to tell. All the letters in the book, except for Anne’s to Mrs Cornwallis and her first letter to her sister, are real and mostly quoted verbatim. The main sources for these are two books – Ben Bathurst’s Letters of Two Queens and Beatrice Curtis Brown’s The Letters of Queen Anne – along with unpublished material from the Blenheim Papers, held in the British Library. I am grateful to Steve Cook at the Royal Literary Fund for helping me to gain access to this material, and to the staff at the British Library for all their assistance.
There are other primary sources I should acknowledge. The account of the Rye House plot is a précis of the story as it was printed in the London Gazette of that year; King James’s first speech to his Privy Council is quoted verbatim, and was taken from this very useful website: http://www.jacobite.ca/documents/. I have also made use of Parliamentary and State Papers held at British History Online, and various phrases have been lifted from letters and debates reproduced there. This collage technique reflects my desire to use whenever possible the language that was written and spoken at the time: to my mind, one of the best ways to understand an era is to try out the words and imagery that were available to them to make sense of themselves and their world. With this in mind, I have also drawn heavily from certain texts that would have been very familiar to Anne and her contemporaries, in particular the King James’s Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and a popular devotional text, Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man. Queen Mary and – notoriously – Sarah Churchill – both left memoirs, and I have also drawn on these.
Secondary sources that have been most useful to me have included biographies of Queen Anne by Edward Gregg, David Green and Anne Somerset; biographies of Sarah Churchill by Frances Harris and Ophelia Field; Maureen Waller’s book Ungrateful Daughters; Hester W Chapman’s biographies of Queen Mary and the Duke of Gloucester; the double biography William and Mary by Henri and Barbara van der Zee, Mary of Modena by Carole Oman, James II, a Study in Kingship by James Miller and King Charles II by Antonia Fraser. Medicine and midwifery were – unfortunately for Anne – central themes in this story, and I found the following books essential: Patient’s Progress and In Sickness and in Health, both by Roy and Dorothy Porter, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 by Hannah Newton, Sufferers and Healers by
Lucinda McCray Beier, Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox by Gareth Williams, The Sickly Stuarts by Frederick Holmes and a17th Century text, The Midwives’Book, by Jane Sharp. For the general political context, I have relied on The Routledge Companion to the Stuart Age, 1603–1714. If you are looking for further reading, you would do well to start with these.
Joanne Limburg, October 2014