Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Read Online Free PDF

Louis, he would instead emulate him by undermining his subjects’ rightful liberties. It was thought that as a Catholic he would be automatically predisposed to rule arbitrarily, for, as the Earl of Shaftesbury put it, ‘Popery and slavery like two sisters’ went ‘hand in hand’. 42
    It took some years before disquiet about James’s religion became so marked that his opponents sought to prevent him becoming King. Since Anne was only eight when her father resigned as Lord High Admiral, it is unlikely that she was aware from the first of the implications of his being a Catholic convert. In time, however, it would define her relations with him.
     

    After being constantly ‘subject to a variety of diseases beyond the endurance of the strongest constitution’ Anne’s brother Edgar had died in June 1671. The loss of what the Venetian ambassador called the ‘sole sprig’ 43 of the royal family meant that Anne became a figure of greater significance. She was now third in line to the throne, and since the Queen showed no sign of providing an heir, Anne would not be moved lower down the order of succession unless her father remarried and had a son.
    Anne’s education should thus, logically, have been a subject of national concern, and yet it was astonishingly inadequate. She and Mary were entrusted to the care of Lady Frances Villiers and spent much of their time in the crumbling Tudor palace at Richmond the royal governess shared with her husband, the Keeper of Richmond Park. Anne developed a marked ‘fondness for the house … where she … lived as a child’ and, believing ‘the air of that place good for children’, wanted her own son to be brought up there. 44
    Royal daughters were no longer accorded the sort of education that had been deemed appropriate when Queen Elizabeth I had been in the schoolroom. Anne’s great grandfather James I of England had believed that it was undesirable to introduce women to the classics. Such views were still so prevalent that even the cultivated diarist and virtuoso, John Evelyn, would pronounce in 1676 that ‘learning does commonly but corrupt most women’, as in their case the study of ancient texts was ‘apt to turn to impertinence and vanity’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was slightly younger than Anne, observed, ‘There is hardly a creature in the world more despicable or more liable to universal ridicule than a learned woman’. Anne herself appears to have been suspicious of women with intellectual pretensions. The Duchess of Marlborough wrote that one reason Anne did not like her aunt Lady Clarendon was that she ‘looked like a madwoman and talked like a scholar, which the Princess thought agreed very well together’. 45
    There was little likelihood that Anne’s father or uncle would try to counter convention by turning her and her sister into paragons of learning. Their own education had been disrupted by the Civil War, and neither James nor Charles was academically minded. The ideas of a former schoolmistress called Bashua Makin, who in 1673 published a pamphlet dedicated to the Lady Mary, would have seemed outlandish to both men. She wanted gentlewomen to be instructed in a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, ancient languages and rhetoric, whereas currently on emerging from the classroom they could only ‘polish their hands and feet … curl their locks … [and] dress and trim their bodies’. 46

    The princesses’ parents both spoke French fluently and in that language, at least, the two girls received excellent instruction from a Frenchman, Peter de Laine. As a result when she was Queen, Anne would have no difficulty communicating with French diplomats in their own tongue. 47
    Anne was taught enough basic arithmetic to be able to inspect her household accounts on marriage. She was careful about checking these and once picked up a discrepancy after noticing in 1698 that ‘the expenses of oil and vinegar were very extravagant’. Even so,