24
THE ACCESSION OF King James II triggered the gradual awakening of Anne’s political conscience. With Charles dead and her married sister Mary in the Dutch Republic, she had become the sole member of the royal family participating in Anglican services in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall. Conscious of her political significance as second in line to the throne, she became ostentatious in her support of the Established Church. As her father’s policies increasingly threatened its supremacy, Anne, the assiduous churchgoer, also attended sermons given by some of the more vociferous anti-Catholic preachers. Seeing herself as a Protestant heroine, she became a magnet to the silent opposition.
The personal antipathy in which Anne now held her stepmother could not be divorced from the religious question. While Anne was increasingly seen as the representative of Anglicanism, Mary Beatrice was regarded by many as the leader of the opposing Catholic party. Anne felt that she influenced the King to be more bigoted than he would otherwise have been, although she also blamed Lord Sunderland and the priests for her father’s extremism. Her greatest fear was that James would try to enforce her conversion. ‘I am of your opinion that it is more likely he will use fair means rather than force,’ she wrote to Princess Mary in Holland, ‘and I am in as great expectation of being tormented if he had not some hopes that in time he may gain either you or me.’ When Mary exhorted her sister to stay firm to her religion, Anne assured her that she would ‘rather beg my bread than ever change’.
The birth of her child, Lady Mary, on 1 June 1685 at Whitehall increased Anne’s political importance. Her sister’s marriage to Prince William of Orange had produced no children, so that the future of the dynasty seemed to rest with Anne. Anne might never, so far, have been ambitious of the crown for herself, but the arrival of children undoubtedly gave her a stake in it. Lady Mary, named for her aunt, was a poor scrap of a child. A second daughter, Lady Anne Sophia, was born prematurely on 12 May 1686. When the King visited her lying-in chamber with a Catholic priest in tow, Anne promptly burst into tears. She spent the summer convalescing at Tunbridge Wells and by the end of the year she was pregnant for the fourth time in her four-year marriage.
Early in the New Year of 1687 Anne wrote a letter to her sister that, as things turned out, was unbelievably poignant: ‘I have always forgot 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 most delighted with it in the world and in her language gives you abundance of thanks.’
A few days later Anne suffered a miscarriage, brought on, she suspected, by a new dance called the rigadoon. ‘I have no reason to like it now,’ she concluded sadly, ‘for I believe it was the dance that made me miscarry for there is a great deal of jumping in it.’ She was still recovering when Prince George and their two infant daughters fell sick with the smallpox. Anne nursed her family devotedly, but first Anne Sophia and then Mary died within days of each other. A few days later the bereaved couple withdrew to Richmond to mourn their children. ‘The good Princess has taken her chastisement very heavily,’ Rachel Russell wrote, observing of the grieving parents: ‘Sometimes they wept, sometimes they mourned in words; then sat silent, hand in hand; he sick in bed, and she the carefullest nurse to him that can be imagined.’
Childless again, Anne asked her father’s permission to visit her sister, which was refused. He already had spies in Anne’s household and, clearly, he did not think it a good idea to have the two Protestant heirs to the throne colluding. Furious, Anne now indicated her intention of communicating with Everard van Weede van Dijkvelt, the agent William had sent to England to sound out the nobility about his plans to bring James to heel. As Anne knew she was being watched, she sent John Churchill to speak to Dijkvelt on her behalf. Two months later Churchill was writing to William to assure him that the Princess was prepared ‘to suffer all extremities, even to death itself, rather than be brought to change her religion’.
Anne knew she had made an irrevocable step in joining the opposition to her father. ‘Pray don’t let anybody see this,’ she urged Mary in a letter of 13 March 1687, ‘nor speak of it: pray let me desire you not to take notice of what I have said to anybody except the Prince of Orange, for it is all treason that I have spoke.’ She warned ‘one dares not write anything by the post’, so that, henceforth, the sisters used trusted messengers to carry their letters. When Dijkvelt returned to Holland in June 1687, he brought a secret code for the sisters to use. Their father became ‘Mansell’ in their increasingly disrespectful and dangerous correspondence.
From the discovery of her pregnancy in the spring of 1687, Anne absented herself from court as much as she decently could, dividing her time between Richmond and Hampton Court. On 22 October, two months before her time, Anne gave birth to a stillborn son who had apparently lain dead inside her for a month. It was shortly after this latest disappointment that she heard the disquieting rumour that her stepmother, after a gap of several years, was pregnant. Perhaps this child would survive where the others had all died. Worried for her religion, still grieving for the loss of her own children, her body and emotions in turmoil from repeated pregnancies that came to nothing, Anne now turned all her furious jealousy and pent-up anger on her hated stepmother, whose child – if a boy – would continue the Catholic tyranny.
Far from there being a Catholic plot to perpetrate a false pregnancy and smuggle a changeling into the Queen’s bed, it seems much more likely that there was a Protestant plot to discredit the pregnancy and throw doubt on the child’s legitimacy from the first. The chief perpetrator was Princess Anne, whose support lent the malicious rumours credibility. Princess Mary’s side of the correspondence no longer exists, but it seems that it was Anne who first implied that the pregnancy was a hoax and persuaded her sister to believe it. On 14 March 1688 she wrote a highly seditious and damaging letter to Mary:
I must tell you I can’t help thinking Mansell’s wife’s great belly is a little suspicious. It is true indeed she is very big, but she looks better than she ever did, which is not usual: for people when they are so far gone, for the most part, look very ill. 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, as that she should prove with child from the first minute she and Mansell met, after her coming from thence. Her being so positive it will be a son, and the principles of that religion being such that they will stick at nothing, be it never so wicked, if it will promote their interest, give some cause to fear there may be foul play intended. I will do all I can to find it out, if it be so: and if I should make any discovery, you shall be sure to have an account of it.
The following month, Anne was reported to be so ill her life was in danger. In the early hours of the morning of 16 April she apparently suffered another miscarriage. Her uncle, Lord Clarendon, went to visit her and found the King at her bedside. In his diary entry, Clarendon made an interesting comment, namely that ‘the rumour among the women was, that she had only had a false conception.’ It is possible that Anne was so overwrought by events and so desperate to bear a child after the failure of so many pregnancies that she had been experiencing a false pregnancy. Given that she was so busy implying that the Queen’s pregnancy was false, it would be ironic if it were true.
She needed to convalesce. The advice of the royal physicians was sought as to whether or not it was a good idea for her to attend a spa. They gave different opinions, perhaps prompted by conflicting interests, Anne’s Sir John Lowther thinking it was a good idea, the Queen’s Sir Charles Scarborough being against it for the time being. In his History Gilbert Burnet claimed that Anne’s friends urged her to stay in London. According to his account, it was James who ‘pressed her to go to the Bath, since that had so good an effect on the Queen’, the implication being that there was some conspiracy to get Anne out of the way just when the Queen’s confinement was due.
Far from wanting his daughter away from court at this time, James had everything to gain from her attendance at the birth. But he was concerned for her health. Even Burnet, one of his severest critics, had to agree that James was a kind and indulgent father. It is most unlikely that James ever succeeded in making his obstinate daughter do anything she did not want to do, so that it was probably he who acceded to her wishes to leave London for a period of recuperation. He might well have hoped that she would return in time for the birth, but Anne had no intention of being a witness or offering her word as proof of its authenticity. She had nothing whatsoever to gain from the perpetuation of a Catholic dynasty and possibly something to gain from its overthrow. It must have been with a great deal of satisfaction, therefore, that she took her leave of the heavily pregnant Queen in the third week of May, offering as her parting shot the meaningful words: ‘Madam, I think you will be brought to bed before I return.’
With the Queen’s confinement safely out of the way on 10 June 1688, Anne lost no time in returning to London, all thoughts of convalescence apparently forgotten. Soon after her arrival, she dashed off a letter to her sister, full of hypocrisy and malice:
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. It may be it is our brother, but God only knows, for she never took care to satisfy the world, or give people any demonstration of it. It is wonderful, if she had really been with child, that nobody was suffered to feel [it] stir but Madam Mazarin and Lady Sunderland, who are people that nobody will give credit to. If out of pride she would not have let me touch [her] methinks it would have been very natural for her sometimes, when she has been undressing, to have let Mrs Robarts … see her belly … But that which to me seems the plainest thing in the world, is her being brought to bed two days after she heard of my coming to town [my being about to come back 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. After all this, ’tis possible it may be her child; but where one believes it, a thousand do not. For my part, except they do give very plain demonstrations, which is almost impossible now, I shall ever be of the number of unbelievers.
James was slow to react to the persistent rumours surrounding the birth of his son and heir. At first he had been incredulous that anything so public as a royal birth should be called into question, or that he should be considered so wicked as to contrive to alter the hereditary succession. How could anyone, he asked, think him so unnatural a father that ‘he would debar his own daughters from the right of succeeding him, to give his kingdoms to a suppositious son?’
At a special meeting of the Privy Council on 22 October, James called forty witnesses who were present at the Queen’s confinement to swear on oath as to what they had seen. No gynaecological detail was spared. There was one notable absence from the meeting. James was anxious that Princess Anne should be present to hear what the witnesses had to say and to ‘depose her own knowledge, which (before so many witnesses of her being privy to the Queen’s being with child) she durst not have disown’d’. Had she not, after all, been present several times at the Queen’s dressing and handed her her shift? She declined to attend, on the pretext that she was pregnant and not strong enough to leave her chamber.
The next day Lord Clarendon found his niece with her ladies, making jokes about what had transpired at the meeting. He was appalled and asked to speak to her in private, but she made an excuse that it was late and she had to go to prayers. When he finally managed to pin her down, he told her he was ‘extremely surprised and troubled the other day, to find Her Royal Highness speak so slightingly of the Prince of Wales’s affairs, and to suffer her women to make their jests upon it’. She replied that surely he had heard the common rumours about him. ‘Is it not strange,’ she mused, ‘that the Queen should never (as often as I am with her, mornings and evenings) speak to me to feel her belly?’ He asked if she had been invited to do so during the Queen’s other pregnancies, and when she replied that she had not, her uncle asked why, then, she should have expected to do so on this occasion. ‘I cannot but wonder there was no more care taken to satisfy the world,’ she persisted.
James sent the Privy Counsellors to Anne with copies of the depositions. She did not even glance at them. ‘My lords, this was not necessary,’ she told them ingenuously, ‘for I have so much duty for the King, that his word must be more to me than these depositions.’
It was not until 17 November, nearly two weeks after his son-in-law Prince William of Orange had landed in the West Country with a massive armed force, that James left London to join his army assembled on Salisbury Plain. It was now that his leading officers, notably John, Lord Churchill, but also the Prince of Denmark, deserted him in the face of the invader. The effect of their disloyalty on James’s morale was so devastating that he refused to engage the enemy but retreated to the capital, so losing the military advantage. Any lingering hope he retained that his younger daughter was loyal, despite her husband’s desertion, was shattered when he returned to Whitehall to find she too had defected. She had stolen out of the Cockpit in the early hours of 27 November with her friends Lady Churchill and Mrs Berkeley, leaving a note of explanation for the Queen. ‘Never was anyone in such an unhappy condition, so divided between duty and affection to a father and husband,’ she moaned:
and therefore I know not what I must do, but to follow one to preserve the other. I see the general feeling of the nobility and gentry who avow to have no other end than to prevail with the King to secure their religion, which they saw so much in danger by the violent counsels of the priests, who to promote their own religion, did not care to what dangers they exposed the King. 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 calling a Parliament.
The letter never reached the Queen, but was leaked to the London Gazette.
In her Conduct Sarah Churchill denied that there had been any prearranged plan for the Princess to abscond from her father’s court, or, indeed, that there had been any conspiracy at all. ‘It was a thing sudden and unconcerted,’ she claimed, ‘nor had I any share in it, farther than obeying my mistress’s orders.’ According to Sarah, news of the Prince of Denmark’s going over to the Prince of Orange and the King’s imminent return ‘put the Princess into a great fright. She sent for me, told me her distress, and declared that rather than see her father she would jump out at window. This was her very expression.’
If Sarah was trying to imply that the news of the Prince of Denmark’s defection came as a surprise to Anne, the evidence suggests otherwise. The Denmarks had been planning their defection for about three months, in concert with the Churchills. Churchill had written to William as early as 4 August to assure him of his support. Then there is the undeniable fact of Anne’s letter of 18 November to her brother-in-law, leaving no doubt where her loyalties lay:
I shall not trouble you with many compliments, only in short assure that you have my wishes for your good success in this so just an undertaking, and I hope the Prince [of Denmark] will soon be with you to let you see his readiness to join with you … He went yesterday with the King towards Salisbury, intending 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.
It might well have been a shock to Anne that no battle had taken place and that her father was returning to London so soon. She might even have expected him to have been killed or captured. No wonder she panicked at the prospect of his imminent return and made her hasty get-away. It is significant that the backstairs she used had only recently been constructed, almost certainly with the purpose of escape in mind. It is interesting to note that just a week later, with her father on the brink of losing his throne and rioting in the streets of London, Anne could coolly write to her household treasurer, Sir Benjamin Bathurst: ‘I have nothing to say only to desire you to give order that the back stairs at the Cockpit may be painted that they may be dry against I come home.’
Met by Charles, Lord Sackville, outside the Cockpit, the party made their way through the darkness to Charing Cross, laughing hysterically after Anne lost one of her high-heeled shoes in the mud. Bishop Compton, the mastermind behind the operation, was waiting in a hackney coach to drive them to his house in the City. From there, they were taken in slow stages to Nottingham, the bishop wearing military attire and brandishing a pistol to protect his Protestant Princess. ‘Nor did she think herself safe,’ recalled Sarah, ‘till she saw that she was surrounded by the Prince of Orange’s friends.’
Pretending ‘that her father the King did persecute and use her ill for her religion, she being a Protestant and he a Papist’, Anne joined the old Protestant Association, whose original purpose had been to bring her great-great-grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, to justice. Now the association was pledged ‘to destroy all the papists in England, in case the Prince of Orange should be killed or murdered by any of them’.
The realization of Anne’s defection left James so distraught that he lost his mind. ‘God help me!’ he cried. ‘My own children have deserted me.’ His only thought now was to send the Queen and the Prince of Wales to safety and to quit the country himself. The Prince and Princess of Denmark returned to town the day after her father departed. She showed no remorse for his misfortune. William immediately went to the Cockpit to pay them his respects. Even though they had served his purpose and his use for them was almost at an end, he was careful to observe the polite formalities. Anne greeted him wearing orange ribbons like a party badge.
An eyewitness was horrified to observe: ‘King James was carried down the river in a most tempestuous evening, not without actual danger; and while her poor father was thus exposed to danger, an actual prisoner under a guard of Dutchmen, at that very moment his daughter, the Princess Anne of Denmark, with her great favourite, Lady Churchill, both covered in orange ribbons, went in one of his coaches, attended by his guards, triumphant to the playhouse.’
No sooner was their father dethroned and cast out than the protagonists began to quarrel among themselves. Probably Anne had not envisaged that William would take the crown. Her own place in the succession slipped a notch, as in the event of her sister Mary’s death William was to reign alone, followed by Anne. William refused to give Prince George the honours which Anne, as a loving wife, felt he deserved. Mary was angry that Anne failed to pay sufficient respect to her and William. Soon, the sisters were not speaking to each other at all and, after Mary demanded that she dismiss Sarah from her service as the wife of a suspected traitor, Anne ostentatiously left the court, determined to appear as the injured party. She spent the next few years, until Mary’s premature death in 1694, nursing an exaggerated sense of grievance for imagined wrongs inflicted on her by the ‘Dutch Abortion’, as she called her brother-in-law, and her proud sister.
Nothing would induce her to part from her favourite. She was even prepared to forgo some of her revenue rather than lose Sarah, and Prince George was in agreement with her. ‘Can you think either of us so wretched that for the sake of twenty thousand pound, and to be tormented from morning to night with flattering knaves and fools, we would forsake those we have such obligations to?… No, my dear Mrs Freeman, never believe your faithful Mrs Morley will ever submit. She can wait with patience for a sunshine day, and if she does not live to see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again.’
If on a visit to Bath the Lord Mayor and corporation did not show Princess Anne ‘the same respect and ceremony as has been usually paid to the royal family’ and if she found that the minister of St James’s Piccadilly, where she now worshipped since she was living privately at Berkeley House, had been forbidden to place the text of his sermon on her cushion, the normal courtesy afforded royalty, what did it matter? Anne had a highly developed sense of her own importance in the scheme of things. She could bide her time.
William could never trust John Churchill, a man who had deserted his King and commander in the field. He was right to suspect his treachery. Feeling cheated of the rewards and responsibility he felt were owed him, in spite of receiving the earldom of Marlborough, Churchill decided to take out an insurance policy with the exiled Jacobite court at St Germain-en-Laye. He might also have been seeking to allay the Jacobite threat by pretending that Anne would restore her brother’s rights when it was in her power to do so. At any rate, he persuaded her to write a letter of penitence to her father:
I have been very desirous of some safe opportunity to make you a sincere and humble offer of my duty and submission to you and to beg that you will be assured that I am both truly concerned for the misfortune of your condition and sensible, as I ought to be, of my own unhappiness. As to what you may think I have contributed to it, if wishes could recall what is past, I had long since redeemed my fault.
James rightly decided that Anne’s plea for forgiveness was not sincere. Why should she want to restore her brother, James Francis Edward, to the throne, when she herself was now the mother of a son? On 24 July 1689 her political importance soared with the birth of a son, William, Duke of Gloucester. At his birth, he was described as a ‘brave lively-like boy’, but within six weeks he suffered convulsion fits so severe that the physicians despaired of his life. It is just possible that this acute infection – perhaps meningitis, or an infection of the middle ear – interfered with the normal process of absorption of cerebral fluid, which accumulated in excessive amounts in the brain. This would account for the subsequent hydrocephalus, which would give the otherwise diminutive boy such an enlarged head that only a man’s hat would fit. With an impaired sense of balance, he would find it difficult to manage stairs or get to his feet if he were lying down.
‘My poor boy’ was the way Anne always referred to her son. He remained her only hope. Over the succeeding eleven years she had ten further pregnancies. Some, including one set of twins, ended in miscarriage, some were stillborn or died within hours of birth, and in at least two cases she gave birth to a baby who had been dead in the womb for up to a month. Even by the standards of the time, this was a poor return, begging an explanation. In the initial phase of her childbearing, two of her early children were born alive and survived for up to three years, dying of infection. In the second phase, of four foetuses that reached viability, only one survived, two died almost immediately and one succumbed several weeks before it was born. In the third phase, involving eight pregnancies, no child was born alive.
Three conditions could account for this pattern: the mother is rhesus negative; diabetes; or intra-uterine growth retardation due to placental insufficiency. In the first, if the mother is rhesus negative and the child rhesus positive, the mother responds by forming antibodies. These react on the baby’s blood, destroying the corpuscles, so that the child becomes increasingly anaemic. The antibodies do not normally develop in the first pregnancy, but in a subsequent one, perhaps the second or third pregnancy. If a rhesus negative mother develops antibodies in, say, her third pregnancy, her next one may show a foetus moderately affected, and each subsequent one progressively more so. The more severely affected the child the more likely it is to die in the womb before term and as pregnancy follows pregnancy, as in Anne’s case, these deaths may occur earlier and earlier.
What is not typical is the death in uterus of her fifth child and the later survival of William. If rhesus incompatibility caused the death of the fifth child it is unlikely that the child of the seventh pregnancy would have survived. However, there are occasional variations in the degree to which a foetus can be affected and such a sequence of events is not impossible.
More likely, in Anne’s case, than rhesus incompatibility or diabetes is insufficiency of the placenta causing intra-uterine growth retardation. The placenta is a rich vascular organ which allows the foetus to take oxygen and nutrient substances from its mother and to pass carbon dioxide and waste products back to her. If the placenta is poorly formed or if some of its blood vessels become thrombosed and unable to permit this essential exchange, growth of the foetus may be limited, and if the oxygen supply is very poor, it may die in the uterus before the end of the pregnancy, or be born very small with a serious risk of dying in the first few days or weeks of life. This is precisely the pattern of Anne’s pregnancies after the first three.
Tragically, the year of Anne’s last pregnancy, when she gave birth to a son who had been dead in the womb for a month, brought the death of her precious only son. On 24 July 1700 William, Duke of Gloucester, celebrated his eleventh birthday at Windsor Castle. There was an elaborate banquet followed by dancing, at which the child ‘overheated’ himself, before watching a spectacular firework display from the ramparts. That night he was put to bed complaining of a sore throat and chills, while his devoted mother tended him anxiously. Possibly he had scarlet fever. A week later, he was dead. Anne never recovered from the loss of her only son. Henceforth, she would always sign her letters to Sarah, ‘Your poor unfortunate faithful Morley’.
The eyes of Europe were now locked on the English succession. At Het Loo for the summer, William III was stunned by the death of the heir. Even though he had had his differences with the mother, he had been very fond of the boy. Something had to be done, and soon, to declare the order of the English succession in statute. The 1689 Bill of Rights had already declared that no Roman Catholic could succeed to the throne, ruling out the exiled Prince of Wales and the Catholic heirs of Charles I and his sister, Elizabeth of the Palatinate, Queen of Bohemia. However, the twelfth of her thirteen children, Sophie, widow of Ernst August of Brunswig-Lüneburg, Elector of Hanover, happened to be Protestant. In 1700 she was a sprightly seventy years of age and still had four sons living, of whom the eldest, George Ludwig, erstwhile suitor to Princess Anne, was undoubtedly Protestant. It was agreed that after Anne, Sophie and her heirs ‘being Protestant’ were to succeed to the English throne.
In September 1701 James II died in exile. His widow, Mary Beatrice, wrote to Anne: ‘Some days before his death, he bid me find means to let you know that he forgave you from the bottom of his heart, and prayed God to do so too, that he gave you his last blessing, and prayed God to convert your heart, and confirm you in the resolution of repairing to his son the wrongs done to himself.’
Had Anne ever promised her father that she would restore her brother’s rights? If she did, it is unlikely that she meant it. Any recognition of her brother would be to admit the lie she had perpetrated at his birth. Only by denying his right could she ensure that the monarchy would remain Protestant. No one knew better than Anne how to dissemble. All that is certain is that when William died in the early hours of 8 March 1702 and the crown at last fell within her grasp, ambition won. She was greeted in a huge wave of popularity.