The dowdy Queen Anne is back in fashion. Anne Somerset’s new biography of Queen Anne, that most enigmatic of monarchs, is published today. It is nearly 300 years since Anne’s death, and a popular account of her life is well overdue. She assumed the throne of a frankly second-rate power and left it a dominant force in global politics and commerce. That transformation is hugely important to the history of Britain as a nation state; and it merits widespread discussion because Anne’s crowning achievement, the Union of Scotland and England, is under threat.
The book is timely; and it is also exhaustive — covering both the general political picture and Anne’s intimate history. In today’s issue of the Spectator, the historian and author Maureen Waller has reviewed Somerset’s general account of Anne’s reign. You can read Maureen’s piece here. And, on the other hand, here is the historian Daisy Dunn’s take on Anne’s personality, as described by Somerset:
An unfortunate queen
When Queen Anne sought Union with Scotland, Daniel Defoe slipped into Edinburgh in disguise in an attempt to muster support for the cause. He didn’t get very far, but, following a volte face
on the part of the Whigs and Junto peers, the queen could soon claim to have created a ‘lasting and indissoluble’ Union between the two nations. She was hardly about to predict openly
that dissent at her Act of Union would outlive the Jacobites and her tenure of the throne by 300 years. Anne Somerset’s magnificent new biography, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion, could
not be more pertinent.
Scottish Independence was a battle right at the heart of Queen Anne’s rule, and one Somerset uses to transform the popular vision of the monarch as ‘not equal to the weight of the
crown’. As the youngest in her family, and a girl, Queen Anne was not as well educated as many of her forebears. She was self-confessedly introverted, and poor at articulating her thoughts.
For all that, she would compare herself to Queen Elizabeth I, a Protestant equally fearful of Catholic uprising, and adopt her motto semper eadem (‘always the same’) as her own. A lofty
comparison, perhaps, but one might at least credit her with the constancy and perseverance to which her motto aspired.
Some would say that these were her only qualities. Somerset’s biography charts with some sensitivity, for example, her determination to overcome the 17 miscarriages, stillbirths, and
premature deaths of her infant children she endured in her lifetime. Somerset proposes that this ill-fortune might have been caused by a biological abnormality which has only recently been
explained, Hughes Syndrome, in which blood clots form in the placenta and deprive the foetus of nutrients.
Anne had married Prince George of Denmark in 1683, and found him a good match. While he remains as much in the background of this book as he did Anne’s court, preoccupation with the
succession pervades it with a threatening urgency. Queen Anne is in many ways a domestic tale. Anne’s relationship with her father, James II, emerges as a particularly shady one. Anne was
determined that no offspring he should sire onto her stepmother should stand in the way of her only son Gloucester’s ascension to the throne. Somerset illustrates her attempts to trick her
father into believing that he would in fact benefit from his grandson’s rule. Gloucester, hydrocephalic since birth, died aged eleven. Anne later became convinced that her father was
attempting to trick her in turn when his wife conceived relatively late in life. The child, she’d always maintain, was suppositious. Anne’s throne would eventually fall to a distant
cousin, bringing to an end the Stuart dynasty.
In apposition to Anne’s evident heterosexuality, posterity has often made much of the ambiguous nature of her relationship with her serving women. But while this book is nominally a tale of
the queen’s Politics of Passion, Somerset is surprisingly cautious in any suggestion of lesbianism and enthral to controlling chambermaids. From the sundry letters which survive from the
period, many of those written by Queen Anne are to women and are seemingly saturated in love. Rumours circulated during the queen’s lifetime that she was intimately involved with her
maid-in-waiting’s cousin, Abigail Masham (née Hill). Lesbianism would be ripe for slander, but only after it had achieved recognition. In the mid to late seventeenth century,
Englishmen were loath to believe it existed at all.
Moreover, as Somerset observes, passionate but asexual love was considered admirable in both sexes at this time; anything uttered to the contrary in this context could easily have arisen as a result of the destructive furore that gradually evolved between Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill (who became Duchess of Marlborough), her lady-in-waiting and longtime friend. Somerset is right to be sceptical about the veracity of all the denigrating claims made by Sarah Churchill long after her friendship with the queen had broken down. By the same token, Somerset’s argument that Queen Anne was not nearly as dependent on her female servants for political advice as certain of these letters (and subsequent historical accounts) would have one believe is well-placed.
The queen that emerges from this closely worked account is a far cry from the invalided pushover her contemporaries delighted in colouring her as. Patient and determined, if not exactly amiable or independently spirited, one cannot deny that she was a firm risk-taker, especially as regards the succession and home affairs. Whether you like the character that emerges from Somerset’s elegant pages or not, Anne has at least been given a very fair trial indeed.
Comments