Anne, Queen of Great Britain

Vulgar History Podcast

Anne, Queen of Great Britain

April 15, 2020

Ann Foster:
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History. My name is Ann Foster, and this is a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. This is Season Two and what we’ve been looking at all season long are Women Leaders in History and the Men Who Whined About Them. This was going to be the Season Two finale, we’ve been sort of going in chronological order and this is as close to modern day as we were going to get. But then I found another story that I really wanted to do so there’s going to be one more episode next week. So, this is the penultimate episode of Season Two, which is not to say the penultimate episode of this podcast forever, it’s just of Season Two. If you go through the feed, if you’re listening to this in real time, I’m recording this during the pandemic era, and I’ve been releasing some minisodes for everybody just about some interesting stories about past pandemics in world histories and some of the bonkers things that happened that people did during them. Anyway. So, what I was doing was I was researching different pandemic stuff, and then I found the story that was really cool, and when I started to sort of write the context for it, I realized like, oh, this is a full episode, this isn’t just a pandemic minisode. All of which to say this is a regular episode this week, there’ll be another regular episode next week, and in between, all kinds of pandemic specials, because I keep reading about it for some reason, how other people dealt with pandemic-type situations. Anyway, I’m pretty sure today’s episode doesn’t have any plague in it, although I think there is smallpox, smallpox is involved. People die of various things because human bodies do that. 

But anyway, so we’ve been looking at women leaders in history, most of them, many of them from England and or the United Kingdom as well. You know, we also had a sojourn into ancient Egypt and ancient Rome. But the woman who I’m going to look at this week is one of, I think, euhhh, am I right? One of only four officially recognized Queen regnants of England/the United Kingdom — pretty sure there’s only four — and it is Queen Anne of Great Britain. She suddenly became very well known after she was the subject of the film The Favourite in 2018, that won the Oscars in 2019. Her story is really, really interesting, and I’m glad that The Favourite came out and that a lot of people saw it and got a lot of people googling “Who is Queen Anne?” because that did really good things for the search and optimization on my blog. Anyway, but mostly, more than anything, I’m just glad that it’s got people looking at her and reassessing her and figuring out who she is. 

So, when I went to see The Favourite for the first time — because I’ve seen it more than once, obviously, because it’s an amazing movie — afterwards there were some people in the audience and it was two, I think it was two young men, it was at least a young man and companion. And one of them was just like, he had clearly just Googled “Who is Queen Anne?” and he was reading some stuff about, like… He was reading stuff about Anne Boleyn, basically. And I was just like, nnhh, should I correct him? Nnhh, this is awkward. And then I couldn’t stop myself. I had to say like, “Oh, no, no, no. It’s not the same as Anne Boleyn. This is a whole different time period.” So bold, bold of Yorgos Lanthimos, the filmmaker, to make a film about a woman that not a lot of people knew who she was to begin with. And clearly, a lot of people went to see the movie and still didn’t know who she was because I still get a lot of hits on my website for “Who is she?” So, we’re going to talk about it because it is an incredibly interesting story with lots of twists, turns, and the whole thing about, like, women and leadership. A lot of the themes we’ve looked at other people this season all come into play again. So, let’s do it. 

Anne with an E, I have to say, my name is Ann Foster without an E. Her name is Anne with an E. It’s a little strange for me to be talking about Anne and the third person. But here we go. Anne, not me, was born on February 6, 1665, and she was the fourth child born to then the king. So, the king at the time was King Charles II. She was born to King Charles II’s younger brother, Prince James, and his wife, Anne Hyde. So, King Charles II was very well known for having lots of mistresses and lots of children with his mistresses, but no legitimate children. This meant that Princess Anne, our main character, her father, the younger brother of the king, was heir to the throne because the whole thing was it goes from father to son, from man to man. In this case, there wasn’t even any women options, like, it was just going to go to him. So, her father was heir to the throne, meaning that her older brother, who was named James, her father was also named James— This is going to get confusing like these stories always do so I’ll try and explain who they are in context. So, heir to the throne was Anne’s father, James, and then next in line to the throne was Anne’s older brother, also called James, and then next in line to the throne was Anne’s older sister, called Mary, and then her. So, this is already looking like a pretty unlikely scenario that she’s going to end up becoming the monarch at all, right? Lots of people ahead of her who could have their own children, et cetera. Oh ho, we all know what’s going to happen. Well, you know where it’s going to wind up, but you don’t know what’s going to happen because how could you? It is a wild story. 

So, Prince James, her father, was widely rumoured to be a secret Catholic, and this was an era, 1665, when the country’s religion was Protestant. So, Charles II, the King, instructed that Anne and all of her siblings to be raised as Protestants, just in case they wound up taking over the country in the future, so that there would continue to be Protestant monarchs. So, the first six years of Anne’s life were marked by a lot of death. And I mean, just from what I’ve been reading about recently, she was born February 1665, that was just around the time that the great plague hit London/England, so there was a lot of death of people she didn’t know as well as people she did know. 

So, her brother, James, her older brother, died when Anne was 2 years old, and at around the same time, her parents had another son, a new baby brother called Charles, who died in infancy at around the same time. She also had a baby sister named Henrietta one year later, who was born and then died in infancy. By this point, and again, this is just the first six years of her life, Anne herself was already dealing with a medical condition of some sort. It’s the sort of thing even nowadays, people might not know what it is, you know, when the symptoms are just like, “We’re not sure that’s kind of not the symptom of anything so maybe it’s all in your head because you’re a girl,” sort of thing. So, she had a lot of medical issues throughout her life. The issue that she had here was that her eyes watered excessively… Okay. So, she was shipped off, age 4, to stay in France with her grandmother because they thought that maybe the fresh French air, I don’t know, maybe she would recuperate over there. But shortly after she arrived, her grandmother died, so then Anne was transferred to stay with an aunt who is also in France, and then that aunt died. And so, six-year-old Anne was shipped back to England. Very soon after she returned, two more younger siblings died in infancy, and at around the same time, her mother died. 

So, if you’re keeping track, we now just have two royal siblings left: Mary, the older sister, and Anne, the younger sister. Unless their father remarried and had another son, these two girls were second and third in line to the throne. But remember how her father was rumoured to be a secret Catholic? He came out of the Catholic closet when Anne was 8 years old, publicly converting to being a full Roman Catholic, which was, like, the biggest scandal ever because the country was Protestant. There had been numerous wars about this. And then, her father chose a new wife, because remember his wife had died, who was a Catholic princess named Mary of Modena. Mary of Modena was 14 years old, making her just six years older than her new stepdaughter, Anne. And everyone started to freak out about the sons that James and Mary of Modena would likely start having because the sons would be Catholic, and because of primogeniture, they would be ahead of Anne and Mary, and everyone’s just panicking because it seems like what if the next king is going to be Catholic? 

So, in 1677, Anne’s older sister, Mary, was married to their Protestant cousin, William III of Orange, which is in the Netherlands. So, Mary, the older sister, sailed away to live with him in the Netherlands to be queen over there. Anne was infected with smallpox at around the same time as her sister’s wedding, so she couldn’t attend, and she wasn’t able to say goodbye, which is just pretty sad. Also, having smallpox is a horrible thing. I was reading about that for some of these pandemic podcast episodes and just, like, it’s great that she didn’t die of it. Speaking of sad, her governess also caught smallpox and died. So, Anne’s bad luck of being constantly surrounded by death and her being the only one who doesn’t die continued on. 

When she was 12 years old, her uncle, King Charles II, chose a husband for her. So, she got married to her cousin, Prince George of Denmark, on July 28, 1683, which meant Anne got to move out of the family palace and start her own royal court, age 12. She also got her own ladies-in-waiting, and one of them was a childhood friend of hers, a young girl who she’d grown up with, whose name was Sarah Churchill. Remember that name because that’s going to come up lots more later. Despite her young age, Anne’s marriage to George was consummated pretty quickly, and she became pregnant really soon. Her first pregnancy ended in a stillbirth, but she became pregnant twice more in the next two years, and she had two daughters whose names were Mary — because the story doesn’t have enough people named Mary in it yet, apparently — and Anne Sophia, which is a nice name. Soon after that, her uncle, King Charles II, died, meaning that her father became King James II, a Catholic king. And this meant a whole bunch of new problems for basically everybody.

So, from basically day one, nobody was a fan of King James II, especially the way that he fired all the Protestant officials and hired new Catholic people in their place. Anne — who, remember, had been raised Protestant because her uncle, the king, had made sure that she was raised Protestant — continued to practice her own faith, as did her sister off in the Netherlands with her husband, William. James II was like, “So, it would be really cool, Anne, if you had your daughters baptized as Catholics.” Apparently, this made Anne burst into tears; she hated Catholics, she didn’t want her daughters to be Catholic. Like, she was so upset that from this point on, after he suggested that, she became estranged from her father and her stepmother, Mary of Modena, who was, again, six years older than her. But Anne didn’t have a lot of time to focus on family estrangement because her life continued to be unrelentingly tinged with death and tragedy. 

Over a period of one week in 1687, she had another miscarriage, both of her young daughters died of smallpox, and her husband, George, also fell ill, presumably smallpox also. This is a story where anytime someone gets sick from this point on, I’m just assuming smallpox. So, she and George were left grieving the death of their children and the miscarriage as he struggled to survive. But George made a full recovery, and Anne became pregnant again later that year, which ended in another stillbirth. But someone else was also not having much luck vis-à-vis pregnancies, her six years older stepmother, Mary of Modena. 

So, Mary of Modena, the stepmother, had become pregnant ten times since she married Anne’s father. Each of these ten pregnancies had ended in either miscarriage, stillbirth or the infant death of the child. This is so sad for Mary of Modena as a woman, as a person, just, to go through this and was also freaking James out because he needed to have a new Catholic heir, otherwise his Protestant daughters would become his heirs. This was an issue of like, “Oh no, women heirs,” but also, like, religion thing. So, as long as he and Mary of Modena didn’t have a surviving child, then Mary and then Anne would be the next monarchs. But then Mary of Modena suddenly became pregnant, and everybody waited to see how it was going to turn out. If it was a son and he survived, he would be the new Catholic heir to the throne, which would change everything. How lucky and convenient that would be. But Anne thought this is all just, like, a little bit too convenient, maybe. So, Anne had a theory that her stepmother wasn’t really pregnant, but was actually faking being pregnant. The plan that Anne thought her stepmother had was that on the delivery day, she’d pull a switcheroo with some random baby and claim that was the new Catholic heir to the throne. Why would they maybe do this? Well, basically because Mary of Modena and James were really desperate to have a surviving son and heir to continue on their Catholic ways, and they really didn’t want Anne or Mary to become the new queen and switch everybody back to being Protestant. 

Anne didn’t keep her theory a secret. She made sure that everybody heard this rumour because, as we will see in later examples, she lived for the drama of it all. So, a bit before her stepmother’s delivery date, Anne had another miscarriage, or she said she did, or she did and used it to her advantage. Anyway, she went off to recuperate in the spa town of Bath. So, normally, when the new queen gives birth to a new heir, the other heirs come into the room to witness the birth in case somebody dies and the other heirs have to, like, quickly take over because childbirth was so dangerous at this period. But Anne was like, “Sorry, I can’t be there to watch this probably fake birth. I’m too busy here at the spa because I just had a miscarriage. Bye.” So, it was kind of convenient. This is where the rumours come from, that she maybe was lying about the miscarriage in order to just have an excuse to not be present for the birth. So, while Anne was in Bath, her stepmother allegedly gave birth to a son or else pulled a switcheroo or one way or another, there was a new heir to the throne who was a baby named James, who was baptized Catholic. Every male person in the story seems to be called James, but this one is little baby James. 

So, Anne wrote a letter to her sister, Mary, in the Netherlands, and in the letter, she was like, “So, allegedly this baby James is her half brother, but I don’t know if he really is. There might have been a switcheroo involved. I wasn’t there at the birth because I was tragically at the spa that day. So, please feel free to spread this rumour around the Netherlands.” Her sister wrote back like “Solid theory. Also, P.S. William and I are probably going to invade and take over from our Catholic father. Don’t tell anyone.” And Anne was like, “Amazing. I’ll keep our father distracted with all this fake baby stuff, so he’ll be too busy to notice you and William invading,” and that is exactly what happened. 

So, their father, King James II, was really busy defending himself, being like, “My wife just 100 percent gave birth to a baby. I can prove it. Look, here, there were 40 other people in the room when she gave birth, and I’ll get them all to testify. And they’ll all say that they saw the baby came out of her vagina. Anne, can you please come and hear their testimony so you’ll stop spreading these rumours?” And Anne was like, “I’m sorry, I can’t travel. I’m pregnant,” which for most of her life would have been true, but at this point was not, she was totally lying. So, her father had a written record of all the 40 witnesses’ testimony. And he was like, “Anne, I can send you the minutes of this testimony so you can read it to stop spreading these rumours. And she was like, “Mmm, no thanks.” And James freaked out. And Anne just kind of kept him distracted with that. And then, revolution! So, as her sister had hinted, she and William of Orange invaded England on November 5, 1688, in order to take over as Protestant co-monarchs. And it worked, they were successful. The whole thing became known as the Glorious Revolution. 

So now, back in England, Anne had been pretending like she didn’t know this was going to happen, and in fact, the only person that she told was her best friend forever, her BFF, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Remember her from earlier? Her lady-in-waiting. So, Sarah Churchill was connected to the very powerful Churchill family, who are, side note, the ancestors of Winston Churchill. So, the powerful Churchill family supported William and Mary’s coup. But then James found out that the Churchills were against him, and he ordered that Sarah should be arrested, and Anne freaked out. She was like, “I will never betray my best friend,” and she secretly snuck out the back stairs of the palace with Sarah to escape being arrested. When James found out that his daughter had deserted him, he was like, “Wow, not even my estranged daughter supports me. I guess I’ll just go flee to France with my wife and baby James,” and that is what they did. 

So, after all this happened, the courtiers, all the people in the palace, were like, “Whoa, that was like super intense. Anne, are you okay?” And she was like, “It’s fine. What day is it? Tuesday? Oh, Tuesday. That’s the day I play cards. Let’s play cards.” And everybody was like, “Whoa! Look how chill she is amid all this drama,” and she literally played cards. But like, look at her life to this point. She was like a first-responder type person; she’s somebody who’s so constantly living through extremely stressful, dramatic things. Her tolerance for highly stressful situations was clearly much higher than that of the average person. And so, she played cards. William and Mary were Protestant co-monarchs of England, and everything was glorious for, like, five minutes. 

So, since William and Mary didn’t have any of their own children, a whole decision had to be made about who would be their heir. As co-monarchs, whichever one of them died first would be succeeded by the other one. So, sort of like if you listened to the podcast from two weeks ago, the whole Isabela Ferdinand scenario. So, it’s like William’s heir is Mary and Mary’s heir is William, but once they’re both dead, who would it go to? And so, the next heir would be Anne or her children if she had any children. At this point, she did not. But then, the year after the Glorious Revolution, Anne had another child, she had a son who was named William. He not only survived childbirth and infancy but, like, kept growing up. So, he was now the heir to William and Mary, baby William. So, William and Mary were so grateful to Sarah and the Churchill family for having supported them during the whole revolution that they gave her husband the title Earl of Marlborough, and this is how Sarah herself becomes the Duchess of Marlborough. And then again, everything’s great for five minutes and then becomes chaos again, because that is what this whole woman’s life is like. 

So, everything is amazing. Anne was like, “My sister is the queen, she’s a Protestant like me. William and Mary. I would like to have a palace I can live in and also lots of allowance money. Thank you.” And William and Mary were like, “Mmm, we’ll give you a palace, but we’re not going to give you any allowance money.” And Anne was like, “Okay, but can you give my husband George an important military role?” And Mary and William were like, “No.” And then Anne was like, “Okay, well, now we’re estranged forever. The only friend I need in my life is Sarah Churchill. Goodbye forever.” So, she just, like, when someone burned a bridge with Anne, she was just done with them. Clearly a character trait. 

The only friend she had or that she felt she needed was Sarah Churchill. So, they were really, really, really close in a way that princesses and duchesses weren’t usually and in a way that they kind of weren’t supposed to be based on, like, cultural expectations, et cetera. In the film The Favourite, they showed them as being in a sexual relationship… Maybe they were. Who knows? But they were definitely really, really close. Anne saw the two of them as equals, and as such, they called each other by the nicknames Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman to indicate how they were on the same level, like, class-based system wise. 

But then William and Mary began to suspect that Sarah’s husband was secretly meeting with supporters of the deposed King James in France, and this was treason. So, they fired the Earl of Marlborough from his various important jobs and demanded that Anne remove Sarah as one of her ladies-in-waiting. But clearly, at this point, Anne was never going to betray her best friend, so it all got super intense to the point that Mary personally fired Sarah herself, which was, like, not really done because Sarah was technically a lady-in-waiting for Anne. And then Anne just like went full on nuclear option. So, Anne stormed into the castle and ran off to live in a different castle because she couldn’t even stand to look at her sister anymore after this betrayal. And Mary, then she fired Anne’s guard of honour and officially forbid anyone from talking to her, like, none of the servants could talk to her, no one would talk to her. So, Anne was in this other palace surrounded by people who weren’t even allowed to acknowledge that she was there. So, this sisterly drama playing out in this, like, 17th-century royal setting, it’s just wild. I want to have a prequel miniseries to The Favourite about young Anne and Mary because this is just like, my god. 

Okay. So, as ever, I mean, Anne was pregnant through all of this. Just assume until her husband dies, she is constantly pregnant because she was. So, in the midst of all this drama with her and her sister, she gave birth to another son who only lived for a few minutes, sadly. William was still there, though, she still had one son. So, after this latest child’s death, Mary headed off to the other castle. So, you think like, was she going to go and make amends with her sister? Was she going to like help grieve with her over this child death? Of course not. What happened is Mary stomped into Anne’s room being like, “Stop being friends with Sarah. I hate you.” And then Anne was like, “I hate you, too.” And then, she moved to another different castle even further away, and she never saw her sister again because Mary died two years later of smallpox and these were two women who could hold a grudge. 

So, Mary is now dead, which means William becomes the solo king on his own because he was the co-monarch and kind of her heir. So, his heirs at this point were Anne’s son, baby William. And Anne was kind of the next heir, I guess, until William, baby William, had his own son. So, the king, King William, decided to try and smooth over the relationship between him and Anne because basically that’s all he had vis-à-vis heirs. So, he gave back all the possessions and titles that Mary had previously removed from her, he allowed people to talk to her again, and invited her to come back and live in the main palace. He even gave Anne all of Mary’s jewels and then restored Sarah and her husband to their former positions. So, everything was going great in one way, but health-wise, Anne was doing not so well. 

Her seventeenth, seventeenth pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at around this time, and all of her other various health problems became even worse. Doctors back then had different methodologies and diagnoses than we do now. But based on her symptoms, it seems like Anne likely had a pretty bad combination of arthritis, gout and other things, including the aftereffects of being pregnant 17 times. Increasingly frequently, she had trouble walking, so she sometimes used a chair with wheels on it because wheelchairs hadn’t been invented yet. She sometimes had people carry her around in chairs without wheels on them. So, she’s living with chronic pain, presumably psychological issues based on, like, literally her whole life so far. And then her son, William, died aged 11, I’m not sure of what, I’m going to guess smallpox, but some sort of health-based issue. His date of death was July 30th and Anne decreed that every year on July 30th, everybody in the household that lived with her were to mark that day as a day of mourning. What this meant with his death was that Anne is literally the only remaining heir to King William. 

Parliament was pretty frantic at this point about the issue of who would be heir after all these childless people, not only because they’re like, “Eugh! A woman inheriting, we don’t love that idea,” but also, like, what if the next person in line was Catholic or something? Like, if Anne inherited, it’s not their top choice, but also, she didn’t have any surviving children who would inherit after her. So, it’s like a two-pronged, two-stage inheritance crisis. So, they unfurl the family tree, crossed off everybody who was Catholic and looked to see who is left. Like, 50 names were removed from the line of succession, which meant that a very distant relation, who was a Protestant woman named Sophia, Elector of Hanover, went from 51st in line to first in line. Who is Sophia, Elector of Hanover? I’m glad you asked. She was the granddaughter of James I, who was Mary, Queen of Scots’s son. So, James I had a daughter named who was Elizabeth of Bohemia, and then Sophia was a descendant of her. So, she was the great-granddaughter of Mary, Queen of Scots and the great-great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. But what mattered most to everybody, and she’s a woman and they’re like, “As long as she’s Protestant, even being a woman is okay.” So, an act was written up saying that she was the next heir after Anne and then her Protestant descendants after her. But first things first. 

So, William died in 1702, which meant that Anne became Queen Anne. She was, at this point, 37 years old and doing poorly health-wise to the extent that she had to be carried down the aisle of Westminster Abbey in a chair as she couldn’t walk for her coronation. But to make it all dramatic, someone, probably Sarah Churchill, arranged for a low back to be put on the chair so Anne’s long train could unfurl dramatically behind her down the aisle, which sounds amazing. Among her first acts as Queen was to give a bunch of important titles to her husband, George, as well as to Sarah and to Sarah’s husband. This is basically where the movie The Favourite begins. 

So, Anne, now the Queen, was beyond devoted to her best friend, Sarah Churchill, to the point that everyone around them was like, “This is weird. Why is Sarah Churchill so important to this woman?” Anne did things like she gave Sarah her own palace and did basically everything nice for her, and Sarah was sort of mean to her sometimes. It was seemingly a sort of toxic scenario where Anne, sort of like, indulged her and then Sarah was sort of mean back to her. Again, you can see this all in The Favourite, the film. And then, into this codependent scenario, arrived a new courtier named Abigail Hill, and this is the role played by Emma Stone in the movie. Anne liked her a lot and they became secret friends because she knew that Sarah didn’t want her to be friends with anybody else. Sarah didn’t even know that they were friends until Abigail got married to a man named Baron Masham, making her now Abigail Baroness Masham, and Anne was a guest at the wedding. So, Sarah found out that Anne and Abigail were close enough that Anne got a wedding invitation, and Sarah Churchill freaked out in, like, rage, jealousy. So, there were special rooms at Kensington Palace reserved for Sarah when she came to stay there to visit her friend, the Queen. But since Sarah spent most of her time off in her own personal castle, Anne let Abigail move into Sarah’s rooms, and then Sarah freaked out when she found out about that and then everything just gets wild. 

So, Sarah showed up at court with a very raunchy poem all about how the Queen was in a sexual relationship with Abigail. Sarah didn’t write the poem; she had commissioned it from a poet. So, she had this poem that she had written, and then she went to the Queen like, “Oh my god, look, someone wrote this poem about you and Abigail. Spending time with her is ruining your reputation, so you should stop being friends with her. You should be friends with me instead.” And Anne was like, “Can’t I have two friends?” But secretly, Anne seemed to enjoy having Sarah and Abigail fighting over her. Again, the movie The Favourite goes through the stuff. A lot of this drama was a very sort of etiquette battle sort of thing. Like, one of Sarah’s jobs is picking out which jewels the Queen would wear each day and one day the Queen chose to wear different jewels from the ones Sarah had chosen and then Sarah freaked out because not wearing the jewels she’d chosen was, like, the etiquette version of being punched in the face. So, Sarah, who clearly had quite a temper that she was not afraid of demonstrating, literally yelled at the Queen in public to shut up, which is like, you’re not allowed to do that. That’s kind of treason. But nobody stopped her, and Anne didn’t punish her, so it’s all just sort of like, that’s the culture that’s going on. 

To add to all of this just, like, wild sequence of events, Anne’s husband suddenly died, again, I’m guessing smallpox. Anne was super upset about this, obviously, they’d been husband for decades, they’d been through a lot together as a couple, such as 17 pregnancies and all the child death. She’d always had a portrait of her husband, George, hanging in her room, and one day she went into her room, and it was gone. And Sarah was like, “Yeah, that was me. I took down the portrait because I thought it would make you sad, and you shouldn’t look at it.” And then Anne was like, “Put it back.” And Sarah was like, “Mmm, make me.” And Anne was like, “I’m the Queen.” And Sarah was like, “Meh, meh, meh.” And then they just sort of had this huge fight. That’s the sort of stuff that was going on. Eventually, Anne wrote a letter to Sarah’s husband, like, “Can you please tell your wife to stop being mean to me, and stop yelling at me, and stop stealing paintings of my dead husband?” And Sarah’s husband was like, “What’s going on, Sarah?” And so, Sarah went to have a face-to-face with Anne, which happened on April 6, 1710, and they had a friend breakup. These two were now officially estranged and say what you will about Queen Anne I, but when she decided to end a relationship with somebody, she just like… She did. No looking back. 

So, meanwhile, back in France, Anne’s father, the former King James, was hanging out with his wife, Mary of Modena, their son, baby James, and they had another child who they named Louisa Maria Theresa. So, by now, baby James, who is now an adult, had been brought up being told that he was actually the rightful King of England, and he believed it. He kind of was the rightful King of England because William and Mary, sort of like, took over. Anyway, James, the younger, formerly baby James, and his supporters were called the Jacobites, and they decided to sail over to Scotland and begin the work of taking the country back and making it Catholic. They had some secret allies who he thought would help, but Anne had spies of her own who intercepted James and chased him away. But then Sarah Churchill, a woman who could seriously carry a grudge, was spreading the story that Anne secretly wanted her half-brother James to become the heir instead of Sophia, Elector of Hanover. And just like how it was impossible for her father to prove that his child wasn’t secretly switcherooed, Anne found it impossible to convince anyone that this gossip wasn’t true because when people don’t like you, they can’t really be convinced that mean rumours about you aren’t true. 

Throughout all of this — this is all just, like, personal life stuff, and that’s what I tend to be most interested in and what I tend to talk about on the podcast — but bear in mind, Anne was also being the queen. So, she sat in more cabinet meetings than any previous English monarch had ever done, and also more than most of the later monarchs did. She was interested in what was going on in Parliament and did lots of important political stuff that other people have written about. I’m just here to tell you the juicy gossip bits, but I’ll put some recommended reading in the show notes for this if you want to read about the political side of her life. Even though Anne’s health concerns were becoming more and more exacerbated, like, she became basically a bedridden invalid, before she could walk, but she sometimes needed a wheelchair instead, now she couldn’t even walk anymore. She would wheel herself in her chair with wheels or have people carry her into Parliament, where she attended, like, all-nighter meetings to go over important government business. And then, on July 30, 1714, which is the 14th anniversary of the death of her son, William, the date that she always had everyone commemorate as a day of mourning, Anne had a stroke that left her unable to speak and then she passed away on April 1, 1714, aged 49. 

Queen Anne was buried in Westminster Abbey, the same place where, 12 years before, she’d been carried down the aisle in a chair with a low back so that she could have a train. She was laid to rest next to her husband, George, as well as the remains of many of her stillborn and infant children, as well as her son, William, who died aged 11. And Sophia, Elector of Hanover, who had been her heir, actually died just a few months before, which meant that Anne’s heir was Sophia’s son, who became King George I, and we’ll talk about that another time. Oh, he was the one who was the king during Mary Toft giving birth to rabbits scenario. If you want to just, like, match these Jenga pieces up in your mind. 

But the story doesn’t end here because Sarah Churchill was not willing to let go of her grudge, even though Anne was dead. So, Sarah lived for 30 more years after Anne had died and later published a memoir that basically trashed Anne as being a simpleton/idiot and spilled lots of like, “secrets” that may or may not have been true. But because everyone knew how close Sarah had been to the queen, her word was taken as truth and this affected Queen Anne’s reputation for centuries to come because conveniently, Sarah’s description of Anne as this kind of useless and overly emotional woman fell neatly into that patriarchal stereotype of women being unsuited for leadership roles, which may also be why her story was the story was accepted so readily. But the third point of The Favourite’s, sort of, love triangle, Abigail Masham left royal court after Anne’s death and lived out the rest of her life in private. So, Sarah Churchill is the only one who’s just, like, clinging onto this whole thing. 

Although Anne’s reign was relatively short — I don’t know, it was 12 years, which is shorter than some, longer than others — she was the sitting monarch during a number of hugely important political events, such as England and Scotland uniting into Europe’s then-largest free trade area. She oversaw numerous successful battles; she wasn’t on the battlefield, but a king wouldn’t have been either. Actually, Sarah Churchill’s husband, Lord Marlborough, led a lot of these battles, but she was the queen while these battles happened, especially a lot of sea battles. She was a noted patron of the arts and literature and was the namesake for the well-known Queen Anne style of architecture and furniture. The timing of her reign coincided with a time of a whole lot of colonization by English people in eastern North America. So, a bunch of places were named after her, including the American city of Annapolis, the Nova Scotian Annapolis Royal and Annapolis Valley and Fort Anne, as well as Princess Anne Street in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Queen Square in Bloomsbury, London. 

So, it’s time to go through a Scandaliciousness Scale for Queen Anne. This is an interesting one, in terms of, like, Women Leaders and the Men Who Whined About Them, her reputation suffered a lot. And a lot of that was because of how Sarah Churchill whined about it, frankly. And it’s interesting, too, because of the whole religious, Catholic versus Protestant thing, that she was a woman, which was not a lot of people’s first choice, but she was Protestant, and that was preferred to a Catholic. Same with Sophia of Hanover. But we’re going to go into the Scandaliciousness Scale here. 

The first category is Scandaliciousness, and I think Queen Anne gets a 10 for Scandaliciousness just because she was super into gossip. The whole thing where she, like, went to the spa on purpose, potentially pretending to have had a miscarriage just so she could continue to spread rumours about her half-brother maybe having been switched at birth. The whole, I mean, the Sarah Churchill screaming at her in front of other people, Sarah Churchill showing up with the, like, lesbian poems. The whole court at this time seemed to have been quite scandalous, and that was a lot of her… You know, I’m going to give her… Like, maybe not a 10, maybe an 8. An 8 for Scandaliciousness because there’s, like, a lot of juicy gossip type stuff going on, but in terms of comparing her to other people that we’ve done on the show, there’s not, like, a murder moment. You know, there’s not that one major scandal that really tips everything over. But just her life; she lived her life in a scandalicious sort of way that I respect. 

Schemieness. I’m going to give her a 9 for Schemieness, I think, because while we don’t know a lot of the schemes that she got up to, the ones that we do know about, like, again, spreading rumours about her half-brother being maybe switched at birth, and the whole thing with the fact that she knew that her sister was going to invade and she didn’t tell anybody, the way that she snuck away in the middle of the night to keep Sarah Churchill from being fired… Like, her schemieness was good. And then also, because we looked at other people this way in terms of, like, how they ruled, how they led; she oversaw a lot of successful military campaigns, which is a sort of schemieness. 

Her Significance is a tricky one because she, for a long time, was seen as quite insignificant. She was Queen for 12 years, and during those 12 years, a lot of stuff happened that was helpful to England, such as the beginnings of Great Britain happening, a lot of military victories, a lot of places were named after her. So, it’s sort of like, she was significant in a way… Like, Annapolis is a thing a lot of people have heard about, even if people don’t know who she was, to the point that when the movie The Favourite came out, everybody started googling, “Who is she?” and read my essay. I’m going to say… Euhh! 6.5. 6.5 for Significance. 

The final category is the Sexism Bonus. This is interesting to consider because, on the one hand, if she had been in a situation where women were more respected, like, she would have just been the heir, and her father maybe wouldn’t have gotten married, there wouldn’t have been the whole Jacobite rebellion and stuff. But it’s interesting in a way that her gender didn’t super get in her way. She became the heir because there was no one else to be the heir after William and Mary. Then she had, I mean, 17 pregnancies, like a lot of health problems, like a lot of, and that was all related to her biology and stuff. If she hadn’t been pregnant all those many times, maybe she wouldn’t have had the health problems… I don’t know. I mean, I can’t give her less than a 5 for Sexism, but honestly and intriguingly, I don’t think that was really one of the big challenges they got in her way. 

So, let me just add this up. We have 28.5, so where does that land her? Next week, when I do the finale for the season, I’m going to post all the scores so everybody else can see them because I always find it interesting to see. I always say, and I mean it very genuinely, like, I’m not putting these women against each other to say, like, who’s cooler than the other, who’s better than the other? But just I’m scoring on four different things, and where does everybody fall when you score them in this way? But 28.5 puts her in fifth place overall in terms of scores. She is, shockingly, 0.5 above Cleopatra, and so she’s just below Elizabeth Báthory, who has a 29. I feel like they sort of have some similarities there. I’ll post this whole list next week, I think, because it is interesting to see where everybody goes. But frankly, and maybe it’s because this season we’ve been doing women leaders, which inherently means they’re, I guess, more significant, but the top three right now, Agrippina the Younger has 31, Empress Matilda has 30, Juana I of Castile has 30, and those are all from this season. Elizabeth Báthory from Season One is at 29, and then Queen Anne is in fifth place at 28.5, with Cleopatra and Lucy Hay tied just below her at 28. 

Anyway, that is Queen Anne of Great Britain. There are a bunch of books— Okay, sorry, there’s not a bunch of books, there’s literally, like, two books. There’s a book called Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion by Anne Somerset, which gets into… I think it’s a great title, The Politics of Passion, because her emotional, like, her relationships with people are such a significant part of her. She also had a lot of, as they describe it here in the description of the book, “personal misfortune,” just the death that constantly surrounded her, just a lot of the health problems she had. So, yeah, if she had been… I don’t know. See, I’m reconsidering, if she had been a man king with similar problems, like I don’t think anyone would be like, “Oh my god, this poor man, he had 17 pregnancies.” Well, I mean, chances are he wouldn’t. But, like, people don’t look at her husband and say, like, “Oh, this poor man, he fathered 17 failed pregnancies.” So, I don’t know, she’s really judged harshly. It’s not like… Hmm, it’s like she was judged harshly in her time. She’s judged harshly in retrospect by people who say, like, “She was a woman, she was emotional. She had these relationships with people. She had all these pregnancy health problems,” in a way that men wouldn’t be judged. But to the point that it sort of supersedes her, what she actually did as a monarch, which was lots of impressive stuff, seeing England through a pretty rocky time. 

So, there’s that book Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion by Anne Somerset. There’s also a book called The Favourite: The Life of Sarah Churchill and the History Behind the Major Motion Picture. So, this is about Sarah Churchill/Anne, is another book. And I’ll put all the links to that in the show notes. I don’t know… Is this… I don’t know. I’ve never done this before, but I think I’m going to bump up her Sexism Bonus a little bit because, in her time, she didn’t face a lot of it. But like afterwards, she did. I gave her a 7 for Sexism, and I feel like I’m going to give her an 8 for Sexism, which, yes, is going to increase her score. Now, she’s at 29.5 because she I don’t know, everybody did, it’s not a contest. But the people who are up here are… She faced— I don’t know, I feel good about that, just talking it through. So now, she’s fourth place. Agrippina the Younger, 31; Empress Matilda, 30; Juana I of Castile, 30; Queen Anne I, 29.5; Elizabeth Báthory, 29. These are all women on this list who faced, they all faced sexism. Anyway, that’s kind of the theme of what we’re looking at. 

This is the Vulgar History podcast, my name is Ann Foster. I’m just going to run through the things that I always say at the end, just little reminders for you. For instance, if you want to find some books to read, I think they’re all historical nonfiction books, the ones that I recommend, the ones that I’ve been using for researching this podcast and other projects I’m working on, are all listed on my Bookshop.org page. So, if you go to Bookshop.org/Lists/Vulgar-History-Recommends, you can find a list of these books about Queen Anne as well as other books about other women we’ve been talking about and other nonfiction books that I recommend. Bookshop.org is a fantastic site; the money from there goes towards independent bookstores who need so much support right now in this pandemic era. So, I’m supporting them in this little way that I can. The link to that will be in the show notes as well. 

I’ve got my little merch store. So, if you go to TeeSpring.com/Stores/VulgarHistory, you can find T-shirts, tote bags, mugs, all different sorts of items that are all celebrating, commemorating the women who we’ve been looking at during this season. I’ve got an item for each of the different women so if there’s somebody who’s your fave, there’s somebody who you want to represent. I just put out the Juana of Castile stuff, which is just a portrait of her, and it says, like, “La Reina,” like, the queen. It’s pretty great. The thing about the merch store is that I basically want to buy everything from it for myself, but maybe you like some of the stuff as well. Again, that’s at TeeSpring, and there’ll be an item there when this episode drops for Queen Anne as well because she’s someone who is very much worth celebrating, I think. 

If you want to support me/this podcast, my Patreon is Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. The original essay that I wrote about Queen Anne, which again, because of this film and people seeing it and no one knowing who she was, it did amazing things for my website, this film, just people googling “Who is this person?” and then reading my essay about it. So, you can find that essay at AnnFosterWriter.com. The podcast is also on Instagram and Twitter. And if you have thoughts or comments or whatever, you can email that to VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. 

And yes, there’s going to be one more episode in this season of Women Leaders in History and the Men Who Whined About Them, that’ll be coming out next Wednesday. In the meantime, there’s going to be some more catch-up on the bonus episodes, the Pandemic Super Specials. And on the Patreon, I’ve been planning, and there’s more in the works. I have some Patreon-only mini episodes that are called So This Asshole, looking at various men in history. Rereading through all the stuff about Queen Anne, I feel like her father, James II would be a suitable subject for So This Asshole. Those are just on the Patreon page as well. 

Yeah. So, my name is Ann Foster, this is the Vulgar History podcast. I hope you’re all doing well. I hope that these gossipy stories of history are a fun distraction for everybody, and I’ll talk to you all next time. 

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.