The reign of Queen Anne (1702-14): some highlights

Queen Anne and her husband,
Prince George of Denmark
by Charles Boit
Royal Collection, Public Domain

There are many books on this important reign. The best recent coverage of Anne's personal life, which also deals very well with the politics of the period, is found in Anne Somerset's Queen Anne. The Politics of Passion (HarperPress 2012).

Anne: birth and education

Anne was born in 1665, the second surviving daughter of James, Duke of York and Anne Hyde. With the exception of a period of two years when she was in France, she was educated with her sister at Richmond Palace by Lady Frances Villiers. No-one believed she would ever be queen and there was no official programme of study.  Both girls learned French and domestic accomplishments such as needlework. When she became queen, Anne spoke better French than her ministers and could converse easily with foreign ambassadors. In other respects her education was neglected. But under her tutor, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, she learned strong Protestant and Anglican principles that remained with her throughout her life.

Marriage

On 28 July 1683 Anne married Prince George of Denmark, the brother of King Christian V.  As Denmark was at that time an ally of France, Louis XIV approved, seeing it as a counter-balance to the Orange marriage. George was shy, stolid and inert, but Anne loved him, but the one great cloud in their marriage was Anne’s unhappy history of miscarriages and early infant deaths. There has been much speculation about this tragic story, the latest explanation being a diagnosis of Hughes syndrome.

Enter Sarah

Anne now had the power to appoint her own household and she showed her independence by making Sarah, Lady Churchill (née Jenyns), her Second  Lady of the Bedchamber. Sarah’s husband, John, created Baron Churchill in 1682, was the Duke of York’s protégé.

The reign of William III

Anne played a major role in the Glorious Revolution: first by convincing her sister that her stepmother’s pregnancy was fraudulent, and then by deserting her father in November 1688 when she escaped with Sarah and Bishop Compton to Nottingham.


In February 1689 she very reluctantly waived her right to the succession until after William’s death. On 24 July 1689 she gave birth to a son, William, at Hampton Court Palace. He was soon given the title of Duke of Gloucester. Supporters of the Revolution hailed this as a providential event, but he was not a healthy child and seems to have suffered from hydrocephalus. 

Relations between Anne and her sister and brother-in-law cooled. Anne hated William, resenting the fact that he had usurped her place in the succession; in her letters to Sarah she described him as ‘Caliban’ and ‘the Dutch abortion’. She believed they were treating her husband with disdain by refusing him a significant military role. They quarrelled over money. Parliament granted Anne £50,000 per annum, a sum both William and Mary thought far too generous. 

Alienated from her sister, she turned increasingly to Sarah, now Countess of Marlborough, and in 1691 they agreed to address each other in their letters as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman. Sarah later wrote:

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.  

Anne’s court became a rival to the official court. She engaged in secret correspondence with her father and refused Mary’s demands that she dismiss Sarah after William dismissed her husband in January 1692.  

Scotland and Ireland

Scotland

As after the death of Cromwell in 1658, Scottish politicians found themselves reacting to events in England. In December 1688 James’s ministers fled Edinburgh in the wake of anti-Catholic rioting, leaving the control of the city to radical Presbyterians.

In January 1689 William summoned a Convention of Estates to meet in Edinburgh on 14 March. Scottish Jacobites refused to attend and on 4 April members voted, with only five against, that James had attempted ‘the subversion of the Protestant religion, and the violation of the laws and liberties of the kingdom.’ The Claim of Right, the Scottish equivalent of the Bill of Rights, was accepted on 11 April. ‘

It was also a Presbyterian revolution. On 22 July William reluctantly agreed to an act abolishing bishops. He was also forced to accept a lesser degree of toleration than in England. A witch-hunt was initiated against clergy who sympathized with episcopacy. 664 ministers were dismissed in the following decades and many Episcopalians, who still held to divine right monarchy, looked to the restoration of the Stuarts to secure their rights.

John Graham of Claverhouse,
Viscount Dundee
Public domain

Whereas the Presbyterians of the Lowlands were overwhelmingly Williamite, Jacobitism remained strong in the Highlands. When the Convention offered the Crown to William, John Graham of Claverhouse, now created Viscount Dundee by James, rode north to rally the Jacobite clans. On 27 July 1689 several thousand Highlanders led by Viscount Dundee defeated William’s forces under General Mackay at Killiekrankie. But this was a Pyrrhic victory as Dundee was killed and the Jacobites were finally trounced at Crondale on 1 May 1690. But the rebellion showed the strength of Scottish Jacobitism and further pushed William into the arms of the Presbyterians.

The Revolution Settlement

The Bill of Rights
Public domain

The Bill of Rights

Immediately before the formal offer of the Crown on 13 February 1689, the Commons had presented William and Mary with the Declaration of Rights. Though at that stage William ignored it, later that year it was translated into a statute, the Bill of Rights.

The lawyers who drafted the Declaration chose ambiguous language which would affirm the political principles to which they could all adhere. Many of the provisions of the Bill of Rights were retrospective, such as declaring the suspending and dispensing powers illegal. The Bill reiterated old rights rather then invented new ones and was certainly not an overt attempt to establish a contractual monarchy. There was plenty of scope for varied interpretation.

One provision in particular did not stand the test of time: the provision 

that the raising or keeping of a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with the consent of Parliament, is against the law.

But what was this to mean in practice? After the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) which ended the Nine Years' War, the question of whether to continue a standing army in peace-time was hotly debated in Parliament. William personally appealed to the Commons to be allowed to keep the Dutch foot-guards. In 1699 the Disbanding Act fixed the number of troops to be kept in establishment and a peacetime standing army was legalised.

Most importantly, the Glorious Revolution established a Protestant succession to the crown. The Test Act now applied to the monarch. In contrast to the European principle of cuius regio eius religio, from this time onwards monarchs and their spouses had to follow the religion of the people. The principle was reinforced in the Act of Settlement (1701) and the Act of Union (1707).

The Glorious Revolution

William of Orange, by Willem Wissing
Public domain

Invasion

William’s fleet sailed on 20 October 1688 but was forced back by a terrible storm in which several ships and five hundred horses were lost. When the wind turned north-easterly on 1 November his fleet set sail a second time. Driven by 'the Protestant wind' the fleet sailed up the Channel and landed at Torbay on 5 November. (The same wind trapped the English fleet in the Thames estuary.) At first his experience seemed to replicate Monmouth’s - he was welcomed by the common people, but the gentry stayed at home. But four days later he entered Exeter and the tide began to turn in his favour. The army defections began on 16 October. On 21 November he began a slow march towards London, which was in the grip of anti-Catholic rioting. By this time Lord Delamere had secured Cheshire for him. On 21 and 22 November the earls of Devonshire and Danby seized Nottingham and York respectively.

Defections

This did not mean that William’s victory was inevitable. Many powerful Tories, including James's brother-in-law the Hydes, and most bishops were not prepared to abandon an anointed king, even if they disagreed with his religion. But at Salisbury on 23 November James lost his nerve. He could only sleep with the aid of drugs and he was bothered by a series of violent nosebleeds. Instead of marching out to meet William, he retreated to London. At this point John Churchill and James's nephew, the duke of Grafton, defected, followed the next night by his son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark. James was especially angry at Churchill’s defection – he had made him lieutenant-general and peer of the realm and felt, quite reasonably perhaps, that he was owed some loyalty.

The Glorious Revolution: why William invaded

Louis XIV in 1685
Public domain

The European background

When he invaded England in November 1688, William was taking an extraordinary gamble. The reasons for it lie in the European situation, and in particular his worries about the expansionist politics of Louis XIV as the French state expanded territorially. In what were known as réunions, border towns were incorporated into France and forced to accept Catholicism. In 1680-1, the French attacked Orange in southern France, where William's family had its hereditary estates. In August 1681 they occupied the town and pulled down its walls, and let the dragonnades loose. This was a final insult to William as a sovereign Prince. For a while, though, he was helpless, as the Dutch States General would not allow him to increase the number of armed forces. 

In September 1681 the Protestant city of Strasbourg was taken from the Empire, giving the French control of much of the lower Rhine. The barrier town of Luxembourg was then besieged (it fell in June 1684). 

The capitulation of Strasbourg, 1681

William’s answer was to build up an anti-French alliance. It was not easy as the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I was distracted by the Turkish invasion; in 1683 the Ottomans were at the gates of Vienna. However in the following years, as Louis seemed to be over-reaching himself, France’s enemies began to unite against her.

The Revocation of Edict of Nantes led to much ill-feeling in the United Provinces (the Netherlands), where Dutch citizens resident in France found themselves forbidden to leave French territory. In addition France put up trade barriers against the Netherlands, much to the fury of Amsterdam.  This enabled William to gain the backing of the States-General (the Dutch parliament) for war against France and to build up the Dutch navy,which had been run down after the war with England.

James II (2)

James II, school of Peter Lely
Public domain

Catholicising policies

Though the king had initially failed in his attempt to achieve toleration of Catholics through Parliament, he did what he could to improve their plight. In September 1685 he decided to re-establish diplomatic relations with Rome and he picked as his ambassador the devoutly Catholic Earl of Castlemaine. In November the papal envoy arrived (though James showed himself surprisingly independent of papal control).

Ministers and bishops were horrified when he allowed the establishment of seminaries in London and patronised Catholic presses. He even sent a priest to Holland in an unsuccessful attempt to ensure Mary’s conversion.

Unable to achieve toleration of Catholics through Parliament,  James fell back on the dispensing power - the right to dispense individuals from the operations of acts of Parliament. The Catholic convert, Obadiah Walker, the Master of University College, Oxford, was given a royal dispensation to withdraw from Anglican worship and hear mass in his lodgings

In June 1686 this power was tested in Godden v. Hales before the judges of the common law courts. Shortly before the trial, James canvassed the judges and dismissed six of them. Eleven of the twelve judges then upheld the monarch’s dispensing power.

However, though James seemed to have the law on his side, by 1688 less than a quarter of the JPs and deputy lieutenants were Catholics. Disappointed, James poured money and effort into a missionary campaign and arranged for personal interviews with leading politicians in order to bring about their conversions. But his efforts were probably doomed to fail as the stories of the cruelties of the French dragonnades had intensified English anti-Catholicism.

James II (1)

James II and VII, by Peter Lely
Public domain

James's aims

In the Whig histories of the nineteenth century James II was vilified as a potential absolutist who wanted to rule without Parliament and to force Catholicism on the nation. However, most historians now believe that his aim was not to force Catholicism on the nation nor to rule without Parliament. He was especially sensitive to the charge that he was a client of Louis XIV and was eager to assert England’s independence. His aim was to establish the rights of Catholics to worship without persecution and to take full part in the political life of the country: but to do this he would have to persuade Parliament to repeal the penal laws, the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678. He believed that once this was done Catholicism would triumph without any compulsion from the state.

However, this belief shows his political naivety. He completely misunderstood the nature of English anti-Catholicism, failed to empathize with the profound anti-popery of the majority of his subjects, and was unable to realize that his actions were likely to be misinterpreted. In his attempts to alleviate the rigours of religious discrimination, he had to fall back on the royal prerogative at a time when the association of ‘popery’ and ‘arbitrary power’ was taken for granted. His naturally authoritarian temperament did not help.

James: Duke of York

James was fifty-two at the time of his accession. His childhood had been uncertain and frightening. The Civil War started when he was nine; at thirteen he was handed over to the parliamentary forces and imprisoned in London, and two years later he escaped in disguise. The happiest years of his life were those in which he was a professional soldier, serving with the French and then the Spaniards. After the Restoration he became Lord High Admiral. In spite of his devout Catholicism (probably post 1669) he had as many mistresses as his brother. 

By 1685 he was the last surviving child of Charles I. He did not expect to live long and, as his second wife, Mary of Modena, had so far not presented him with a surviving child, he was resigned to the fact that he would be succeeded by his Protestant daughter, Mary, Princess of Orange. His actions were therefore those of an old man in a hurry. 

Mary of Modena, by William Wissing
The as-yet childless queen
Public domain

In his policy he could expect no help from his ministers who were staunch Anglicans. Perhaps his most trusted protégé was John Churchill, whose sister, Arabella, had been his mistress. He was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber, and in May he was made Baron Churchill. His wife, Sarah, was lady of the bedchamber to James's daughter, Princess Anne .

James’s accession was greeted quietly. In a statement to the privy council which he later repeated to Parliament, he declared that he would make it his duty 'to preserve this government both in church and state as it is by law established'. But from the start there were signs of a new royal style: more formality in official behaviour, more bluntness and directness in royal statements. He insisted on attending Mass in full state.