Kinlight · The British Royal Line

Queen Anne

1665 – 1714 · Generation XXVIII · Queen of Great Britain (r. 1702–1714) · House of Stuart

Portrait of Queen Anne

Anne was born at St James’s Palace in London on 6 February 1665, the second daughter of James, Duke of York, and his first wife, Anne Hyde. Her uncle Charles II had no legitimate children, so her father was heir to the throne, and his Catholicism, public from 1673, made the religion of his daughters a matter of state. On Charles’s orders Anne and her elder sister Mary were brought up as Anglicans in a household of their own at Richmond. Her mother died in 1671, and at about that time Anne met Sarah Jennings, who became her closest friend and later married John Churchill.

In July 1683 she married Prince George of Denmark, a Lutheran and the younger brother of King Christian V. The match was arranged for diplomatic reasons but became a devoted marriage. It also began a long ordeal. Anne was pregnant at least seventeen times (the Royal Family’s website and Westminster Abbey both say eighteen), and most of those pregnancies ended in miscarriage or stillbirth. Her little daughters Mary and Anne Sophia died of smallpox within days of each other early in 1687. Only one child lived beyond infancy, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, born in 1689, and he died in July 1700 just after his eleventh birthday. His death left Anne the last person in the Protestant line of succession, and Parliament answered with the Act of Settlement of 1701, which directed the crown after Anne to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and her Protestant descendants.

Anne stayed firmly Anglican when her father, king from 1685, began placing Catholics in office. In the revolution of 1688 she took the side of her brother-in-law William of Orange, slipping out of Whitehall by a back staircase with Sarah Churchill. William and Mary took the throne with Anne next in line, but the sisters soon fell out over her parliamentary allowance, over William’s refusal to give Prince George an active command, and above all over the Churchills. John Churchill, by then Earl of Marlborough, was dismissed in 1692 on suspicion of Jacobite dealings. Anne would not give up Sarah, and after that April the sisters never saw each other again. After Mary’s death from smallpox in 1694 Anne and William reached a public reconciliation.

Anne became queen when William died on 8 March 1702 and was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 23 April, carried into the church in a chair because gout had left her unable to walk. Within weeks England was at war with France and Bourbon Spain in the War of the Spanish Succession, and Marlborough, now captain-general and soon a duke, won a series of victories on the Continent, among them Blenheim in 1704. Her reign is remembered above all for the union of England and Scotland. After years of friction between two parliaments with rival laws on the succession, the Acts of Union created a single Kingdom of Great Britain with one parliament from 1 May 1707. Anne had urged union from her first speech as queen, and she became the first sovereign of the new kingdom. In 1708 she refused assent to a Scottish militia bill, the last time a British monarch has vetoed legislation.

Her reign saw the rivalry of Tories and Whigs harden into party politics. As a devout Anglican Anne leaned toward the Tories, yet the war made her ministers rely on Whig votes, and the Duchess of Marlborough pressed her without let-up to appoint Whigs. The old friendship collapsed into bitter quarrels, while Anne took quieter counsel from Robert Harley and from Abigail Hill, a woman of her bedchamber. The death of Prince George in October 1708 devastated her. In 1710 she dismissed the Whig ministers and put Harley at the head of a government that sought peace, and to carry the Treaty of Utrecht through the House of Lords she created twelve new peers at once, a step without precedent.

She dismissed Harley in the final days of July 1714, was struck speechless by a stroke on 30 July, and died at Kensington Palace on 1 August 1714, aged 49. She was buried beside her husband and children in the Stuart vault beneath Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. Sophia of Hanover had died two months before her, so the crown passed to Sophia’s son, who became George I, and Anne was the last Stuart monarch. Sarah Churchill’s memoirs portrayed her as ignorant and easily led, and that picture shaped her reputation for generations. Historians since Edward Gregg’s biography of 1980 have given her far more credit for stubborn judgement, pointing out that she attended more cabinet meetings than any monarch before or since and presided over the age of Vanbrugh, Defoe, Pope and Swift.

Place in the family

  • Queen Anne was a 5× great-niece of King Henry VIII.
  • Queen Anne was the younger of 2 children of King James II and Anne Hyde recorded in this archive.

Images

One of 17 people of House of Stuart (from 1371) in this archive. Scotland’s royal house for three centuries before James VI inherited England and wore both crowns.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → King Charles I → King James II → Queen Anne.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

Siblings

Partners

Life

  • 1665 — Born
  • 1683 — Married George of Denmark
  • 1702 — Anne succeeds her brother-in-law, William III.
  • 1708 — Anne vetoes a parliamentary bill to reorganize the Scottish militia, the last time a bill is vetoed by the sovereign.
  • 1714 — Died
  • 1714 — Queen Anne dies at Kensington Palace.

Sources

  1. Anne, Queen of Great Britain · Wikipedia
  2. Anne (r.1702–1714) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. Queen Anne · Westminster Abbey

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