Erik Visits a (Non)-American Grave, Part 2,122

This is the grave of Queen Anne, as well as Prince George of Denmark.

Born in 1665 at St. James Palace in London, Anne was the daughter of the future King James II. This fact alone would make things complicated at her birth. When she was born, King Charles II was on the throne. He knew his brother was a Catholic. He knew what that might mean for the Crown. He wanted to forestall another revolution. So he intervened with his little brother to ensure that Anne was raised as an Anglican. No one really thought at this time that she would become queen. But since Charles did not have children within marriage and James did not have boys, it was at least possible. And of course it happened, but that’s a way off here. .

So Anne was raised as a good Anglican. In 1677, she married Prince George of Denmark, a cousin who was a Protestant. Well, Charles II died in 1685. James took over. But he was a Catholic and that led to the Glorious Revolution that kicked his Catholic ass out of the country. Parliament asked James’ oldest daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange to be joint monarchs, keeping it all in the royal line but ensuring Protestant supremacy, not to mention Parliamentary supremacy. That was fine, but they didn’t have children either. Increasingly, Mary and Anne did not get along either, since Anne liked to spend a lot of money and that annoyed her older sister. But when Mary II died in 1694 and William III died in 1702, Anne improbably had risen to queen. By this time, Anne and George’s only son, Prince William, had died at the age of 11. So the English knew they would have to figure out this monarchy thing with people who had children who lived, which eventually became the Hanovers after the passage of the Act of Settlement in 1701, which explicitly banned Catholics from the throne.

Well anyway, Anne was an acceptable queen because she truly was an Anglican and not a Catholic. She was a conservative woman, close to the church, like just about every royal, and as such was pretty openly on the side of the Tories. The two parties were really just developing and one reason she really prefered the Tories was that they were more committed to an established church. Of course they were less than a half-century after Cromwell when she took over, so such questions were highly relevant. The English never again came even close to supporting a lunatic like Cromwell, but what role should religious dissenters play in government? For Anne, the answer was none. The Occasional Conformity Bill is what came out of this, first proposed by the Tories in 1702 but not passed until 1711. By locking out non-conformists, it was a naked play by the Tories to ensure the Whigs could never win, since most non-active Anglicans were Whigs. Anne made Prince George vote for it, even though as a Lutheran, he himself would have been disqualified. As per a lot of laws that are intended to ensure the other party doesn’t win, it really didn’t work that well and when the Whigs returned to control of government in 1719, they repealed it.

It goes without saying that the most important thing that happened in Anne’s reign was the Act of Union that brought Scotland and England together and created the United Kingdom. Anne had pushed for this from her first speech to Parliament. The Scots did not come by this decision easily and pushed back pretty hard for several years, but when Parliament passed a 1705 law that threatened Scots with a declaration that they were aliens in England, the region, increasingly reliant on the south economically, acquiesced.

Anne’s reliance on the Tories ran onto the shoals of international policy. The most conservative Tories mostly did not support British intervention into the War of the Spanish Succession, while most Whigs very much did support it. Because of this, the government was forced to rely on Whig support on many issues. This infuriated Anne, who really did hate the Whigs. It bothered her so much that she started engaging in purges of people in her circle of influence who spoke in favor of admitting Tories into the ruling coalition for Britain’s larger interests. She was also very much into the insider politics of her court and she hated a lot of her family and they hated her and there just were a lot of silly issues through her own reign.

Worse for Anne’s hatred of the Whigs, the pretender to the throne, James, the surviving son of James II, tried to invade England in 1708. It was a pathetic failure. He never landed. But general fears by the public of what a Catholic king would mean and how many Tories would be OK with that led to the Whigs sweeping into government later that year, much to Anne’s revulsion. But the War of the Spanish Succession proved very expensive and the people turned away from supporting it, which brought the Tories back pretty quickly. In addition, when the Treaty of Utrecht was ratified by Louis XIV of France, it gave his approval to the Hanoverian succession in the UK, which stabilized the government and entire nation.

Anne did not have good health. Endless attempts at pregnancy did not help. She got pregnant at least 17 times. No child survived. William had made it the farthest, the only one to get out of infancy. She also really lived it up as queen. She got very very large and this hurt her health a lot. Gout, all the things of the British elite classes that are almost a stereotype of unhealthy living. In fact, she was already so unhealthy when she took over that she had to be carried to her coronation because her gout was too bad to walk. She couldn’t really walk at all after the beginning of 1713. She had a stroke in June 1714 and died, at the age of 49. Prince George had died in 1708.

There was nearly a Queen Sophia. She died two months before Anne and George I became the next monarch up.

Queen Anne is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

If you would like this series to visit American royals, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. King Kamehameha III and King David Kalakaua are both buried in Honolulu. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.