Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Duchess of Marlborough maintained that Anne was insufficiently vigilant to detect that her Treasurer of the Household, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, had tried to defraud her. Still less was Anne capable of understanding the complex financial arrangements that underpinned government during her reign. 48
    The main emphasis in her education was on acquiring feminine accomplishments. Mrs Henrietta Bannister taught her music, for which Anne’s ‘ear was very exquisite’. Anne also received guitar lessons from Henry Delauney, who was paid £50 a year. Strumming on the guitar was currently a fashionable accomplishment for ladies, and Anne’s father ‘played passably’ on the instrument. 49
    Dancing lessons were another important part of the curriculum. The Duchess of Marlborough would grudgingly concede that in her youth Anne had ‘a person and appearance not at all ungraceful’, and until she became physically incapable of doing the steps, Anne derived intense pleasure from dancing. In 1686, when the dissenter Roger Morrice noted in his journal that Anne had recently performed at a court ball, he added disapprovingly ‘as she does constantly’. Within a few years her burgeoning weight and attacks of lameness made dancing difficult. Nevertheless in 1691 she was reported to have taken to the floor during her birthday celebrations, and even in 1696 she managed to dance at a party for her brother-in-law. That was almost certainly the last time she was able to do so, and long before she became Queen dancing had ceased to be an option. 50
    Anne’s dancing master was a Frenchman called Mr Gory. He instructed her in the latest Continental dances, but she did not despise native traditions, patriotically maintaining that some English country dances were ‘much finer’ than those imported from France. Years later, she would engage Mr Gory, by then old and rich, to teach dancing to her son, William, Duke of Gloucester. Unfortunately the little boy was badly coordinated, and so hated his lessons that he called Mr Gory ‘“Old Dog” for straining his joints a little’. 51

    Anne and Mary were taught drawing by the dwarf artist Richard Gibson, with Mary outshining Anne in this and in needlework. Outdoor activities appealed more to Anne and by her teens she was a keen horse-woman, enjoying riding and hunting. She was also introduced to more frivolous recreations at an early age. Roger Morrice noted that Mary’s tastes had been shaped by what he termed ‘the prejudices of her education, which induced her to spend her time as other courtiers did in cards, dice, dances, plays and masques’. Anne liked all these pastimes as much as her sister. Card games such as basset played for high stakes were very much a feature of court life, and by the time Anne was fifteen she was a regular player at the tables. 52
    Anne’s father would later advise that ‘young persons … should not … read romances, more especially the woman kind; ’tis but loss of time and is apt to put foolish and ridiculous thoughts into their head’. It is not clear whether he managed to stop his daughters reading novels, but they certainly derived literary pleasure from plays. In 1679 fourteen-year-old Anne reported that she was planning to watch a rehearsal of an amateur production of George Etherege’s cynical and immoral comedy The Man of Mode , and it is obvious that she already knew the piece well. She was displeased by the casting of one female role, writing scathingly ‘Mrs Watts is to be Lady Townley, which part I believe won’t much become her’. Some years before that, her imagination had been captured by another drama, Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates , which exerted a fascination on her for a long time. The play was a perennial ‘favourite of the tender hearted ladies’, and was a tale of sibling rivalry, tragic love, and court intrigue. Anne’s favourite character was the hero, Ziphares. This princely youth refuses to forsake his true love Semandra,