23

Lady Anne

ANNE STUART WAS born on 6 February 1665, the year of the plague. Her mother’s labour was so fast that it is doubtful if King Charles II and his Queen and many of those who usually crowded into the lying-in chamber at a royal birth arrived at St James’s on time. As she was the fourth child and second daughter of the King’s brother, James, Duke of York, and his wife Anne, she was not considered likely to come to the throne. Besides, she was a weak little thing and looked likely to follow her elder brother to the grave.

On the birth of a second daughter to the Duchess of York, Charles II wrote to his sister the Duchess of Orléans in France, showing how undervalued a princess was:

I am very glad to hear that your indisposition of health is turned into a great belly. I hope you will have better luck with it than the Duchess here had, who was brought to bed Monday last of a girl. One part I shall wish you to have, which is that you may have an easy labour, for she despatched her business in little more than an hour. I am afraid your shape is not so advantageously made for that convenience as hers is; however, a boy will recompense two grunts more.

Lady Anne, as the younger daughter of the heir apparent was known throughout her childhood, was named in honour of her mother, Anne Hyde, the commoner who had lured a royal duke into marriage. Her christening took place in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace a few days later. Her godparents included her three-year-old sister, Mary, who was held up at the font by her governess. Edward Hyde, the Lord Chancellor, created Earl of Clarendon in the wake of his daughter’s marriage, seemed particularly pleased with this new granddaughter, perhaps because she resembled the Hydes and had such a placid temperament. But she was delicate and would need to survive the perils of infancy, the attentions of the royal physicians, and the plague which raged in London and then in the provinces through the first two years of her life.

The Duke and Duchess spent the summer of 1665 in York with their three children, Mary, James, Duke of Cambridge, and Anne, and in the autumn the family took up residence in the Oxford colleges with the rest of the court, avoiding the plague-ridden capital. When the court returned to London in the spring of 1666, the York children were sent to the healthier environment of Richmond Palace further up the Thames. A new baby, Charles, Duke of Kendal, soon joined them. Here they had their own ‘family’ or household. The world Lady Anne was most familiar with consisted of her siblings, her wet nurse Mrs Martha Farthing, her governess Lady Frances Villiers, the under-governess Mrs Mary Kilbert, and other servants including nurses, rockers, a dresser, a seamstress, a necessary woman, a laundress and a page of the backstairs. Mrs Dawson, an attendant of the Duchess’s who later joined Anne’s household, would be with her when she died forty-nine years later. As she grew up, her ‘family’ came to mean more to Lady Anne than her blood relatives, with whom her relations were increasingly political and fraught.

The Duchess of York was a handsome, rather magisterial figure, too preoccupied with the affairs of the court and keeping her errant, womanizing husband in check to take much notice of her children, although she did make something of a pet of Anne, inviting her to sip chocolate and feeding her titbits so that she became as round as a ball. When she was three, Anne was sent to live with her grandmother, the Dowager Queen Henrietta Maria, the widow of Charles I, in France. The purpose of the visit was to find a treatment for Anne’s ‘sore eyes’, which could not stand bright light and would not stop watering. Although there is no evidence of it in her portraits, according to contemporary accounts the disability made her squint, lending her face a sour, petulant expression. It added to her natural shyness. As she grew up, she preferred the closet to the drawing room, and would rather move in a small circle of known acquaintances than large gatherings where she would be unable to see people. Using poor eyesight as an excuse, she would rarely pick up a book, although she was able to manage an expansive correspondence.

A portrait of her during her sojourn in France shows a child with serious grey eyes in a stubborn little face under a halo of light auburn curls. There is already a hint of the self-protective survivor in the set of the vulnerable bare shoulders. Having been separated from her mother so young, the child now lost her grandmother to consumption. She was sent to live with her aunt, the charming Minette, Duchess of Orléans, who placed the chubby little girl in the nursery with her own two. Anne became fluent in French and seems to have been happy there, because in her will she fondly remembered the younger of these two cousins as her closest living relative. However, the security and comfort of the nursery world was abruptly shattered by the sudden death of Minette, and it was decided that it was time for the English Princess to go home. The Sun King, Louis XIV, gave the five-year-old a very handsome leaving present, ‘two braceletts of pearle besett with diamante valued at 10,000 crowns’. He could not have anticipated that this small girl, who was so shy and taciturn and had to screw up her eyes to look at a person, would grow up to be his great adversary.

When Anne returned to England, her life changed dramatically. During her absence, her parents had taken a step that was to have enormous and far-reaching consequences for James, his children and the nation. They had converted to Roman Catholicism. Before the secret leaked out, the Duchess died. Anne had just passed her sixth birthday and she had lost three crucial maternal figures – her grandmother, her aunt and her mother – all within two years of her short life. Inured to loss at such a young age, it was fortunate that she was a stoical character and not surprising that she would become very self-sufficient. She was brought up to accept God’s will, which, as a deeply religious person, gave her enough inner strength to survive the disappointments and sadness to come.

As the sole survivors of the eight children born to the Duke of York and his English commoner wife, after the death of their infant siblings, Mary and Anne rose in importance as second and third in line to the throne after their father. It was crucial that they should be removed from their father’s Catholic influence and brought up as good Protestants to appease the nation, and so they were made children of state, living apart from their father in their own household at Richmond. Their chaplains, Dr Edward Lake and Dr Doughty, indoctrinated them in the tenets of the Anglican Church. Every year without fail the anniversary of King Charles I’s execution on 30 January was held as a day of mourning, fast and prayer. Clad in black, Anne and her sister observed the occasion with the strictest solemnity. It was a timely reminder that their grandfather had died a martyr for the Anglican faith, even if their father appeared to have forgotten this, and of what happened to kings when they crossed the will of the people.

Later, their preceptor, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, left them in no doubt that Catholicism, their father’s faith, was the most dangerous evil in the world. They were lessons Anne took to heart. ‘I must tell you 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,’ she assured her sister a few years later. ‘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.’

Showing that she had absorbed all Compton’s teaching to the letter, she continued: ‘But God be thanked we were not bred up in that communion, but are of the 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.’

Her devoted adherence to the Church of England provided Anne with a much needed rock of stability from her insecure youth.

Unfortunately, in the Richmond household little attention was being paid to the York princesses’ other studies. Their education was woefully neglected. Even though one or both of these girls might later be Queen, it was assumed they would have husbands. The emphasis was placed on wifely accomplishments, although, noticing his niece’s mellifluous voice, Charles II had the celebrated actress Elizabeth Barry train her in public speaking. Later, after she had fallen out with Anne, Sarah Churchill was to complain that she was ‘ignorant of everything but what the parsons had taught her as a child’ and this might well have been true. Sarah’s vicious comments about Anne are largely responsible for the widespread belief that she was slow and dull-witted. Certainly she lacked her sister’s high intelligence, curiosity and infectious vivacity, but Anne was bright enough. Naturally reserved, she was quiet, an observer; later, as queen, this ability to watch and listen would prove useful. She also had a large modicum of common sense.

In the intense friendships that pervaded the girls’ school atmosphere of Richmond Palace, Anne was emotionally cautious, writing to her sister’s friend Frances Apsley: ‘I am not one of those who can express a great deale & therefore it may be thought I do not love so well but whoever thinks so is much mistaken for tho I have not may be so good a way of expressing my self as some people have yet I asure you I love you as well as those that do & perhaps more than some.’ It is interesting that where Mary, in her excessive protestations of love for Frances, was to play the ‘wife’ to Frances’s ‘husband’ Anne took the male lead in their playful correspondence.

Already imperceptibly alienated from their father because of his religion, the sisters’ relationship with him took a new twist when he married an Italian princess, Maria Beatrice D’Este of Modena, who was only a little older than themselves. The angry bonfires lit by the Londoners to protest at the marriage of the heir to the throne to a Roman Catholic must have made an impression on eight-year-old Anne, perhaps sowing the seeds of her future suspicion of her stepmother. Not possessing her sister’s Latin temperament, the more phlegmatic Anne never seems to have warmed to Mary Beatrice, although at first the relationship was at least superficially amicable.

The consequence of the Duke’s Catholicism was a series of hysterical anti-popish plots, scares and rumours, and a vigorous Whig campaign to exclude him from the throne. The King bowed to pressure to send the Duke and Duchess into exile, first in Brussels and then in Edinburgh. Apart from making brief visits to them in each place, Anne was not permitted to accompany them. By the time they returned from exile in May 1682, she was seventeen, already well past the age when a princess might expect to be married. There had been talk of her marrying her second cousin, George of Hanover, but their meeting seems to have been a stilted affair, conducted in French. Later, Anne’s critics maintained that his failure to propose accounted for her lifelong enmity, but there is no reason to think that she was anything but indifferent to the German prince.

George was short, blond, with bulging blue eyes, and rather dull, whereas Anne was at the height of her looks. With her rich dark brown auburn-tinted curls, the lovely arms and hands that contemporaries considered such an asset to a woman’s beauty, and a generous, sensual mouth, she soon attracted an unwanted suitor in John Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, one of the King’s favourite courtiers who shared his eye for the ladies. Although he protested that his crime was ‘only ogling’, the scandal of the mild flirtation was enough to get him sent to Tangiers in a leaky boat.

A more suitable husband for the King’s niece was found in Prince George of Denmark. He was twelve years older than his bride, a distant cousin, and the fact that he was a Protestant pleased Anne and the nation. John Evelyn noted that he ‘had the Danish countenance, blond; a young gentleman of few words, spake French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy; but reported valiant’. He had had a military career and shown courage in the field, but he was neither clever nor witty, as Charles soon discovered: ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober and there is nothing in him.’ Mulgrave quipped that the asthmatic Prince was forced to breathe hard, lest people think he was dead. But he was kind and considerate to Anne, prepared to take second place in her household and later as her consort, and she was delighted with him.

The wedding took place at ten o’clock at night on 28 July 1683 in the Chapel Royal at St James’s. Although henceforth she was to be known as the Princess of Denmark, Anne was to reside in England. Her generous dowry would enable her to live in some style, while the King gave her as an outright gift the Cockpit in Whitehall, approximately where Downing Street stands today, as her official London residence. The Denmarks were to spend their time in the idle pursuits of the aristocracy. Any activity at all seems to have been an effort for George. ‘We talk here of going to tea, of going to Winchester, and everything else except sitting still all summer which was the height of my ambition,’ he complained. Apart from endless games of cards and gambling for high stakes, Anne loved to hunt. She would join the King and her father at Newmarket, where she enjoyed both the racing and cock fighting. Just as Charles was responsible for Newmarket, Anne would later launch Royal Ascot.

Just prior to her marriage, she had the added joy of persuading her father to allow her friend, Sarah, Lady Churchill, to transfer from the Duchess’s household to her own. ‘The Duke of York came in just as you were gone, and made no difficulties, but has promised me that I shall have you, which I assure you is a great joy to me,’ she wrote excitedly. ‘I should say a great deal for your kindness in offering it, but I am not good at compliments. I will only say that I do take it extreme kindly, and shall be ready to do you all the service in my power.’

A little older than herself and a friend from her Richmond childhood, the vibrant Sarah provided all the passion and excitement that Anne lacked in her relationship with her cosy nonentity of a husband. During Sarah’s absences from court, Anne suggested they correspond as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman. In her Conduct Sarah recalled: ‘My frank, open temper naturally led me to pitch upon Freeman, and so the Princess took the other, and from this time Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman began to converse as equals, made so by affection and friendship.’

As a royal princess third in line to the throne, Anne’s duty was to provide heirs for the House of Stuart. Three months after her marriage, she embarked on the first of seventeen pregnancies which were to break her heart and wreck her health. In May 1684 she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. ‘I believe you will be sorry to hear of my daughter, the Princess of Denmark, being delivered of a dead child,’ James informed the Prince of Orange, ‘they say it had been dead some days before, so that it is a great mercy it come as it did, and that she is so well after it.’ By the end of the year she was pregnant again, which might have accounted for the fact that she does not seem to have been present when her uncle, King Charles II, died on 6 February 1685.

It was Anne’s twentieth birthday, and so intense was her dislike of Catholicism that she gave some credence to the ridiculous rumour that the Jesuits had poisoned her uncle to make way for her father, who became the first Roman Catholic king in over a century.