Britain’s First Queen Had A Nightmare Reign

Britain’s First Queen Had A Nightmare Reign

Queen Anne had an absolutely horrific time when it came to motherhood; she was pregnant seventeen times in seventeen years, but only one of her children survived past the age of two. Now, centuries later, researchers believe they know why. No one in England heralded the birth of a future queen when Anne was born. She was the fourth child and second daughter of the king’s brother, James, the Duke of York, and was fourth in line for the crown. But the Game of Thrones is fickle, and soon enough, Anne would see each of her rivals fall by the wayside one after another. Though her parents eventually went on to have eight children, only two of them, Anne and her older sister Mary, would survive to adulthood. When she was just six, her mother, Anne Hyde, died of cancer, and Anne and her sister lived away from their father in Richmond while he dealt with matters of state. Anne felt utterly alone and isolated, but while living in Richmond, she found a new source of support: Sarah Jennings. Sarah was five years older than Anne, keenly intelligent, and wildly ambitious. They became fast friends and formed a relationship that would define both of them for the rest of their lives. Not long after Anne met Sarah, her father shocked all of England.

First, he converted to Catholicism; then, he remarried to the even more Catholic Mary of Modena, who was fifteen, just six years older than Anne. James and Mary of Modena had ten children over the subsequent ten years, and every single one of them was either stillborn or didn’t survive infancy—a pain that Anne would come to know only too well. In the midst of all these pregnancies, James married Anne’s sister off to her cousin, the Dutch William of Orange. It was a political match that seemed to make a lot of sense at the time, but James would come to regret it; in signing the marriage document, he had essentially sealed his own grim fate. In 1683, at eighteen years old, Anne married the dashing George of Denmark. By all accounts, they cared about each other and stayed devoted for their entire relationship, but there wasn’t much spark. Anne’s relationships with the women in her life made up for that. The newly married Anne and George took up their residence in the Cockpit, a series of buildings in the Palace of Whitehall. The new digs meant Anne needed a whole new staff. This is when her relationship with Sarah Jennings, now Sarah Churchill, really started to pay off—at least for Sarah. Churchill was a woman of modest nobility, but now she found herself one of Anne’s ladies of the bedchamber. By attaching herself to Anne, Sarah Churchill was moving up in the world, and now that she’d gotten a taste for the finer things, nothing could stop that wild ambition. Within months, Anne was pregnant with her first child, but would go on to have a miscarriage. She and George didn’t give up, and she’d go on to give birth to two daughters over the following two years. Her uncle, Charles II, died suddenly in 1685, leaving Anne’s father as the new King James.

Anglicans were already unimpressed with James being a Catholic, but then he started giving important jobs to his Catholic cronies. Anne didn’t share her father’s Catholic proclivities, and it was a source of constant tension between them. Their already fragile relationship finally broke forever when James tried to force Anne to baptize her second daughter as a Catholic. 1687 was a bad year for Anne, to put it mildly. First, she suffered another miscarriage; days after that, her husband caught smallpox, which he passed along to their two infant daughters. George eventually recovered, but the girls were too young and weak to stave off the infection. Mere days after her second miscarriage, Anne lost both of their daughters. Their lavish palace became a grim place in the following months; the pair of them mourned together, sometimes sobbing uncontrollably, sometimes sitting in painful silence next to George’s sickbed. Anne would suffer yet another stillbirth before the year was out. 1687 had one more disappointment for Anne: her stepmother, Mary of Modena, became pregnant herself. A son would mean that Anne would probably never see the throne. In June of 1688, Queen Mary of Modena gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart. It was nothing short of a disaster for Anne and her sister Mary. First, it meant they were no longer in line to inherit the throne. Even worse, it meant the heir to the throne was a Catholic, potentially putting every Anglican in England at risk. Five months after King James’s son was born, William and Mary invaded England in what became known as the Glorious Revolution.

The Anglican people of England already hated their Catholic king, and they welcomed William and Mary with open arms. King James suffered one of the worst humiliations of any English monarch; his own daughter and stepson kicked him off his own throne. Suddenly, William and Mary were king and queen, and Anne was right back in the line of succession. All this time, Sarah Churchill had been at Anne’s side, offering her advice on nearly every matter. Churchill saw the way the winds were blowing and told Anne to side with William and Mary over her father—not that she needed much convincing. When James found out that Anne, her husband, and the Churchills had betrayed him, he tried to have them all thrown under house arrest. Anne and Sarah narrowly avoided capture, rushing down a back staircase of Anne’s palace under the cover of night. Reportedly, when James learned of Anne’s escape, he cried out, “God help me, even my children have forsaken me.” Not only was she back in the line of succession, but in 1689 Anne gave birth to a son. She figured that with her father gone and her sister and brother-in-law in charge, things were about to change. She quickly asked them if she could have Richmond Palace and a massive allowance from Parliament. Imagine her surprise when they refused. Things started getting tense between Anne and Mary. Anne also wanted her husband to get a position in the military, but William and Mary blocked him out completely. Finally, Anne realized what was happening; she may have been next in line for the throne, but the current king and queen were doing everything in their power to stop her from gaining any influence. Anne and Sarah Churchill were nearly inseparable. A few people may have raised their eyebrows at this relationship between a royal and one of her ladies of the bedchamber, but no one realized what went down behind closed doors. They created pet names for each other: Anne was Mrs. Morley, and Sarah was Mrs. Freeman.

The implication was clear: when no one else was around, the two of them were equals, or at least that’s what Anne thought. Churchill actually thought Anne was an idiot; she devoted her life to the royal, but thought her to be a dreadful conversationalist and found being with her extremely boring. As soon as King James was out, Sarah Churchill’s attachment to Anne started to pay off. William and Mary made her husband the Duke of Marlborough and offered him several important political offices. Churchill was now a duchess, but just a couple of years later, William and Mary began to realize the amount of influence Sarah Churchill had over Anne, and the queen demanded that Anne dismiss Sarah. When she refused, Mary had Sarah Churchill forcibly removed from the royal household. Mary had had enough: she dismissed Anne’s honor guard, forbade any courtiers from visiting her, and told all government officials to ignore everything she said. By this point, the two sisters hated each other almost as much as they hated their father. But soon, a cruel act by Mary would destroy their relationship forever. Soon after she left the palace, Anne gave birth to another son, who died minutes after being born. As Anne mourned, her sister came to visit, but if Anne thought the queen was there to offer her condolences, she was wrong. Mary didn’t show up at Anne’s door to mourn a lost nephew; she took the opportunity instead to scold her over her friendship with Sarah.

For Anne, laying there weeping for a lost son, hearing her sister scream at her about her best friend was the breaking point. After Mary left that day, the two sisters never saw each other again. In seventeenth-century England, it didn’t matter who you were; smallpox could come for anyone. Soon after her final argument with Anne, Queen Mary caught the disease, and after a brief and violent battle, she died in 1694. Anne was now the heir apparent, but she knew that her father was biding his time in France, just waiting for an opportunity to come and take back his throne. Anne found herself in a shaky political position, but she had even bigger problems to worry about. She’d never been exactly healthy, but her gout was getting worse and worse. By this point, it got so bad that she could barely walk and had servants push her around in a wheelchair. As Anne’s health worsened, her appearance suffered as well. She was in near-constant pain, and she stopped caring about her clothes. Her dresses were often dirty and tattered, her feet were almost always bound up in gruesome bandages, and her face grew ruddy and spotted. As her so-called best friend Sarah Churchill put it, she grew exceedingly gross and corpulent. So far, Anne had had an utterly horrific time when it came to motherhood, but the worst pain was yet to come. In July 1700, mere months after her twelfth stillbirth, her only surviving son was ripped away from her at just eleven years old.

She’d spent nearly twenty years trying to have children, and now she’d lost her final one. Historians wrote that the boy’s passing left Anne and her husband overwhelmed with grief. A year later, Anne’s father, the ex-King James, also died. Soon after his demise, Anne’s hated stepmother, Mary of Modena, sent Anne a letter. In it, she pleaded with Anne to restore her father’s line and make her son the king upon William’s death. As if in, in 1702 King William died, and Anne was finally queen. The English people rejoiced; they liked William more than the Catholic James, but William was still a Dutchman. With Anne, they finally had a proper English Anglican monarch. Anne’s coronation wasn’t exactly the most inspiring sight. Crippled with agonizing gout, she couldn’t make the walk to Westminster Abbey and had to have servants carry her to the church in a sedan chair. Under Anne’s reign, England and Scotland joined as a single country, Great Britain, with a single Parliament. After literally centuries of conflict and war between the two countries, Anne became the first ever queen of Great Britain. Queen Anne’s coronation must have felt like a vindication for Sarah Churchill; she’d hitched her wagon to this unlikely royal a lifetime ago, and now it was finally time to earn dividends. By this point, Churchill had become used to having Anne listen to everything she said. Abigail Hill was Sarah Churchill’s cousin, though from a lowborn side of the family. While Churchill enjoyed the comforts of nobility, the Hill family fell on hard times, and Abigail had been forced to take up work as a servant.

Sarah Churchill helped pull Abigail out of the gutter, but not necessarily out of the goodness of her heart. Most likely, Churchill thought it a terrible embarrassment to have a close relative demeaning herself as a servant. Either way, Churchill took Abigail into her own household and essentially sealed her own fate. Thanks to her connection to Sarah, Abigail managed to get a job in Queen Anne’s palace in 1704. Anne quickly came to know her young maid Abigail, and found her to be everything Sarah Churchill wasn’t. Sarah was intense, domineering, and ambitious; meanwhile, Abigail was kind, gentle, and sympathetic. Pretty much everyone in Anne’s life had mistreated her since day one, so Abigail’s compassion was a welcome change. The two started becoming very close, and Churchill didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, had become a pretty important person; that meant she was busy, so she spent almost no time at the royal palaces anymore. Because of that, it took her years to learn that Anne and Abigail had become extremely close. She finally discovered Anne’s secret in 1707, a full three years after Abigail arrived, but even still, when she arrived and saw what Anne had done, it left her utterly stunned. Not only had Anne married Abigail to a gentleman from her household, she’d actually given her a massive dowry from the privy purse. However, Sarah was the keeper of the privy purse. She took Anne’s gift as a personal betrayal. One day, Sarah Churchill returned to Anne’s palace to learn that Abigail had actually moved into her rooms. Anne had made it clear Abigail was taking Sarah’s place. As revenge, Sarah commissioned a writer to craft an utterly scandalous poem that implied Anne and Abigail were in a lesbian relationship.

The poem caused a swirl of rumors and gossip, but Sarah didn’t stop there. She wrote Anne a letter containing excerpts from the poem along with the line, “Such things are in my power that if known might lose a crown.” Anne had long since given up on having children, but that doesn’t mean there were no more tragedies left for her. In 1708, her beloved husband died, leaving her completely alone. She needed support now more than ever, but Sarah Churchill was never the supportive type. Churchill’s cruel behavior after Prince George’s passing was the final nail in the coffin. From the moment of Prince George’s last breath, Sarah started bossing Anne around. She immediately took George’s portrait down from Anne’s bedchamber, then demanded the queen move to a different palace. Anne just wanted to mourn, and Churchill started bossing her around worse than ever. But when the topic of Abigail came up, that’s when things got really heated. Sarah derided the queen for spending time with Abigail, calling her stupid. The bullying got so bad that Anne actually wrote to Sarah’s husband telling him to make his wife “leave off teasing and tormenting me and behave herself with the decency she ought both to her friend and queen.” Anne finally snapped and decided she wasn’t going to put up with her one-time friend’s torment anymore. She made Sarah officially resign from her offices, and as a final parting shot, she made Abigail the keeper of the privy purse. Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, had finally overplayed her hand; she’d spent her entire life using her friendship with Anne to gain power, but that had come to an end. Don’t feel too bad for her, though; by the time she died at the age of eighty-four, she was one of the richest women in Europe. Anne kept on heaping rewards on her beloved Abigail.

Though Abigail had risen far, she was still lowborn and severely limited in any actual power she could possess. That all changed when Anne created twelve new peers in the House of Lords, an unprecedented move. One of those titles was given to Abigail’s husband, making Abigail an official noble. The same day she made Abigail a baroness, she also officially dismissed the Duke of Marlborough, Sarah’s husband, as the commander of the army. Anne had been terribly unhealthy for pretty much her entire life, but soon after her falling out with Sarah Churchill, things really took a turn for the worse. By March 1714, she appeared to be on death’s door. After months in a sickbed, Anne suffered a stroke on July 30th, and this time there was no recovery. She died on August 1st, and her doctor, John Arbuthnot, could not help but see her end as a mercy. She’d lived in agony for years, and Arbuthnot eventually wrote, “I believe sleep was never more welcome to a weary traveler than death was to her.” Queen Anne undoubtedly suffered from a physical condition that went undetected in her time. On top of her constant pain, she had an unbelievably horrific time when it came to childbirth. But now, centuries later, scientists believe they know why based on her experiences. Autoimmune diseases like lupus or Hughes syndrome seem the most likely; these would not only explain Anne’s many traumatic pregnancies, but also the other painful symptoms she experienced throughout her entire life. Anne had spent her final years almost completely sedentary, and she’d grown severely obese by the end. Reportedly, her coffin was so massive that it took fourteen men to carry it, but that wasn’t nearly the worst indignity that Anne suffered in death. Sarah Churchill saw to that. In her memoirs, she basically called Anne a complete idiot of a queen who never would have gotten anywhere without her. But Sarah Churchill looked down on pretty much everyone, not just Anne. The truth is, Anne’s legacy is kind of amazing: a woman, the second daughter of the king’s brother, who managed to outlive everyone ahead of her to become queen at a time of amazing prosperity. She took a more active role in Parliament than any monarch before her, and her reign saw unbelievable progress in the arts, economy, science, and politics, made even more remarkable by the sheer amount of tragedy she suffered. Turns out Queen Anne was something of a boss.