Volume 2, Slice 2 Part 3 (1/2)
As the queen's reign drew to its close, rumours were rife on the great subject of the succession to the throne. Various Jacobite appointments excited suspicion. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke were in communication with the Pretender's party, and on the 27th of July Oxford, who had gradually lost influence and quarrelled with Bolingbroke, resigned, leaving the supreme power in the hands of the latter. Anne herself had a natural feeling for her brother, and had shown great solicitude concerning his treatment when a price had been set on his head at the time of the Scottish expedition in 1708. On the 3rd of March 1714 James wrote to Anne, Oxford and Bolingbroke, urging the necessity of taking steps to secure his succession, and promising, on the condition of his recognition, to make no further attempts against the queen's government; and in April a report was circulated in Holland that Anne had secretly determined to a.s.sociate James with her in the government. The wish expressed by the Whigs, that a member of the electoral family should be invited to England, had already aroused the queen's indignation in 1708; and now, in 1714, a writ of summons for the electoral prince as duke of Cambridge having been obtained, Anne forbade the Hanoverian envoy, Baron Schutz, her presence, and declared all who supported the project her enemies; while to a memorial on the same subject from the electress Sophia and her grandson in May, Anne replied in an angry letter, which is said to have caused the death of the electress on the 5th of June, requesting them not to trouble the peace of her realm or diminish her authority.
These demonstrations, however, were the outcome not of any returning partiality for her own family, but of her intense dislike, in which she resembled Queen Elizabeth, of any ”successor,” ”it being a thing I cannot bear to have any successor here though but for a week”; and in spite of some appearances to the contrary, it is certain that religion and political wisdom kept Anne firm to the Protestant succession.[12]
She had maintained a friendly correspondence with the court of Hanover since 1705, and in 1706 had bestowed the Garter on the electoral prince and created him duke of Cambridge; while the Regency Act provided for the declaration of the legal heir to the crown by the council immediately on the queen's death, and a further enactment naturalized the electress and her issue. In 1708, on the occasion of the Scottish expedition, notwithstanding her solicitude for his safety, she had styled James in her speech closing the session of parliament as ”a popish pretender bred up in the principles of the most arbitrary government.” The d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough stated in 1713 that all the time she had known ”that thing” (as she now called the queen), ”she had never heard her speak a favourable word of him.”[13] No answer appears to have been sent to James's letter in 1714; on the contrary, a proclamation was issued (June 23) for his apprehension in case of his arrival in England.
On the 27th of April Anne gave a solemn a.s.surance of her fidelity to the Hanoverian succession to Sir William Dawes, archbishop of York; in June she sent Lord Clarendon to Hanover to satisfy the elector.
The sudden illness and death of the queen now frustrated any schemes which Bolingbroke, or others might have been contemplating. On the 27th, the day of Oxford's resignation, the discussions concerning his successor detained the council sitting in the queen's presence till two o'clock in the morning, and on retiring Anne was instantly seized with fatal illness. Her adherence to William in 1688 had been a princ.i.p.al cause of the success of the Revolution, and now the final act of her life was to secure the Revolution settlement and the Protestant succession. During a last moment of returning consciousness, and by the advice of the whole council, who had been joined on their own initiative by the Whig dukes Argyll and Somerset, she placed the lord treasurer's staff in the hands of the Whig duke of Shrewsbury, and measures were immediately taken for a.s.suring the succession of the elector. Her death took place on the 1st of August, and the security felt by the public, and perhaps the sense of perils escaped by the termination of the queen's life, were shown by a considerable rise in the national stocks.
She was buried on the south side of Henry VII.'s chapel in Westminster Abbey, in the same tomb as her husband and children. The elector of Hanover, George Louis, son of the electress Sophia (daughter of Elizabeth, daughter of James I.), peacefully succeeded to the throne as George I. (q.v.).
According to her physician Arbuthnot, Anne's life was shortened by the ”scene of contention among her servants. I believe sleep was never more welcome to a weary traveller than death was to her.” By character and temperament unfitted to stand alone, her life had been unhappy and tragical from its isolation. Separated in early years from her parents and sister, her one great friends.h.i.+p had proved only baneful and ensnaring. Marriage had only brought a mournful series of infant funerals. Constant ill-health and suffering had darkened her career. The claims of family attachment, of religion, of duty, of patriotism and of interest, had dragged her in opposite directions, and her whole life had been a prey to jealousies and factions which closed around her at her accession to the throne, and surged to their height when she lay on her deathbed. The modern theory of the relations between the sovereign and the parties, by which the former identifies himself with the faction for the time in power while maintaining his detachment from all, had not then been invented; and Anne, like her Hanoverian successors, maintained the struggle, though without success, to rule independently finding support in Harley. During the first year of her reign she made known that she was ”resolved not to follow the example of her predecessor in making use of a few of her subjects to oppress the rest. She will be queen of all her subjects, and would have all the parties and distinctions of former reigns ended and buried in hers.”[14] Her motive for getting rid of the Whigs was not any real dislike of their administration, but the wish to escape from the domination of the party,[15] and on the advent to power of the Tories she carefully left some Whigs in their employments, with the aim of breaking up the party system and acting upon what was called ”a moderate scheme.” She attended debates in the Lords and endeavoured to influence votes. Her struggles to free herself from the influence of factions only involved her deeper; she was always under the domination of some person or some party, and she could not rise above them and show herself the leader of the nation like Elizabeth.
Anne was a women of small ability, of dull mind, and of that kind of obstinacy which accompanies weakness of character. According to the d.u.c.h.ess she had ”a certain knack of sticking to what had been dictated to her to a degree often very disagreeable, and without the least sign of understanding or judgment.”[16] ”I desire you would not have so ill an opinion of me,” Anne writes to Oxford, ”as to think when I have determined anything in my mind I will alter it.”[17] Burnet considered that ”she laid down the splendour of a court too much,” which was ”as it were abandoned.” She dined alone after her husband's death, but it was reported by no means abstemiously, the royal family being characterized in the lines:--
”King William thinks all.
Queen Mary talks all, Prince George drinks all, And Princess Anne eats all.”[18]
She took no interest in the art, the drama or the literature of her day.
But she possessed the homely virtues; she was deeply religious, attached to the Church of England and concerned for the efficiency of the ministry. One of the first acts of her reign was a proclamation against vice, and Lord Chesterfield regretted the strict morality of her court.
Instances abound of her kindness and consideration for others. Her moderation towards the Jacobites in Scotland, after the Pretender's expedition in 1708, was much praised by Saint Simon. She showed great forbearance and generosity towards the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough in the face of unexampled provocation, and her character was unduly disparaged by the latter, who with her violent and coa.r.s.e nature could not understand the queen's self-restraint in sorrow, and describes her as ”very hard” and as ”not apt to cry.” According to her small ability she served the state well, and was zealous and conscientious in the fulfilment of public duties, in which may be included touching for the king's evil, which she revived. Marlborough testifies to her energy in finding money for the war. She surrendered 10,000 pounds a year for public purposes, and in 1706 she presented 30,000 pounds to the officers and soldiers who had lost their horses. Her contemporaries almost unanimously record her excellence and womanly virtues; and by Dean Swift, no mild critic, she is invariably spoken of with respect, and named in his will as of ”ever glorious, immortal and truly pious memory, the real nursing-mother of her kingdoms.” She deserves her appellation of ”Good Queen Anne,” and notwithstanding her failings must be included among the chief authors and upholders of the great Revolution settlement. Her person was described by Spanheim, the Prussian amba.s.sador, as handsome though inclining to stoutness, with black hair, blue eyes and good features, and of grave aspect.
Anne's husband, Prince George (1653-1708), was the second son of Frederick III., king of Denmark. Before marrying Anne he had been a candidate for the throne of Poland. He was created earl of Kendal and duke of c.u.mberland in 1689. Some censure, which was directed against the prince in his capacity as lord high admiral, was terminated by his death. In religion George remained a Lutheran, and in general his qualities tended to make him a good husband rather than a soldier or a statesman.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--_Dict. of Nat. Biography_ (Dr A.W. Ward); A.
Strickland, _Lives of the Queens of England_ (1852), somewhat uncritical; an excellent account written by Spanheim for the king of Prussia, printed in the _Eng. Hist. Rev._ ii. 757; histories of Stanhope, Lecky, Ranke, Macaulay, Boyes, Burnet, Wyon, and Somerville; F.E. Morris, _The Age of Anne_ (London, 1877); _Correspondence and Diary of Lord Clarendon_ (1828); _Hatton Correspondence_ (Camden Soc., 1878); Evelyn's _Diary_; Sir J. Dalrymple's _Memoirs_ (1790); N.
Luttrell's _Brief Hist. Relation_ (1857); _Wentworth Papers_ (1883); W. c.o.xe, _Mem. of the Duke of Marlborough_ (1847); Conduct of the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough (1742); Ralph, _The other Side of the Question_ (1742); _Private Correspondence of Sarah d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough_ (1838); A. T, Thomson, _Mem. of the d.u.c.h.ess and the Court of Queen Anne_ (1839); J.S. Clarke's _Life of James II._ (1816); J.
Macpherson's _Original Papers_ (1775); Swift's _Some Considerations upon the Consequences from the Death of the Queen, An Inquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen's last Ministry, Hist. of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne_, and _Journals and Letters; The Lockhart Papers_ (1817), i.; F. Salomon, _Geschichte des letzten Ministeriums Konigin Annas_ (1894); _Marchmont Papers_, iii. (1831); W. Sichel _Life of Bolingbroke_ (1901-1902); _Mem. of Thomas Earl of Ailesbury_ (Roxburghe Club, 1890); _Eng. Hist. Rev._ i. 470, 756, viii. 740; _Royal Hut. Soc. Trans._ N.S. xiv. 69; _Col. of State Papers; Treasury; Hist. MSS. Comm. Series, MSS. of Duke of Portland_, including _the Harley Papers, Duke of Buccleugh at Montagu House, Lord Kenyan, Marq. of Bath at Longleat; Various Collections_, ii. 146, _Duke Of Rutland at Belvoir, 7th Rep. app._, and _H.M. the King_ (_Stuart Papers_, i.); _Stowe MSS._ in Brit. Museum; Sir J.
Mackintosh's Transcripts, _Add. MSS._ in Brit. Museum, 34, 487-526; _Edinburgh Rev._, October 1835, p. 1; _Notes and Queries_, vii. ser.
iii. 178, viii. ser. i. 72, xii. 368, ix, ser. iv. 282, xi, 254; C.
Hodgson, _An Account of the Augmentation of Small Livings by the Bounty of Queen Anne_ (1845); _Observations of the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty_ (1867); _Somers Tracts_, xii. xiii. (1814-1815); H.
Paul, _Queen Anne_ (London, 1907). (P. C. Y.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See also _Hist. MSS. Comm., MSS. of Duke of Rutland at Belvoir_, ii. 109.
[2] Dalrymple's _Memoirs_, ii. 175.
[3] Dalrymple's _Memoirs_, ii. 249.
[4] Lord Ailesbury's _Memoirs_, 293.