Book review: Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

POOR old Queen Anne. I’m not being patronising; it’s how she thought of herself. Her chosen pseudonym in signing letters to her best friend, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was “your unfortunate Mrs Morley”. Certainly she seemed pitiful in obese, arthritic old age: “ill-dressed, blotted in her countenance and surrounded with plasters”.

Anne endured 17 pregnancies but saw none of her children survive, had a poor education, and doesn’t seem to have been particularly clever, warm or likeable.

Anne Somerset does her best to redeem her subject. She points out that in Anne’s short reign (1702-1714) Britain itself was created with the Act of Union, then set on its path to future greatness with the Duke of Marlborough’s success in continental wars.

Anne wrote to Sarah in the early days of their friendship that “I had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you”. Latterly estranged from Sarah, Somerset has nothing exciting to say on Anne’s lesbian tendencies, concluding that her relationship with Sarah was never physical. But Anne’s husband, George of Denmark, is one of the book’s surprises. Usually written off as a nonentity, said to love only “news, his bottle, and the Queen”, George seems here worthily beloved by Anne. Contemporaries said he “never appeared vigorous or active, but was singularly useful in keeping the Queen steady”. After 25 years of marriage, Anne was seen “kissing him the very moment the breath went out of his body”. Somerset proposes rhesus blood incompatibility as an explanation for the couple’s tragic reproductive failures.

There’s an impressive quantity of meticulous research on display, but Queen Anne does read like rather an old-school, even Victorian, biography, with page after page compiled from the highlights of the protagonists’ letters. In this sense it is definitive, and it’s the best account of Anne yet written. What’s missing is a sense of the physicality of Anne’s world: the energy of Stuart London, the voices of her subjects beyond a small, aristocratic circle, and the context of her age’s changing ideas about behaviour, religion and science.

• Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

Harper Press, 426pp £25