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| Self Portrait, 1740 |
Princess Anne, the Princess Royal was the eldest daughter of
George II. She was born into what we would call an extremely dysfunctional
family in May 1709. (For more information about her grandmother and the House
of Hanover read my blog on 15
th November.) Anne was a remarkable
woman in many ways; she is criticised and praised by contemporary chroniclers
for her arrogance and her accomplishments both of which she had in equal
measure.
Anne was born at Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover, five years
before her paternal grandfather, Elector George Louis, succeeded to the British
throne as George I. Her parents’ relationship with King George I was a troubled
one. Her mother, Caroline of Ansbach, had been brought up in the Prussian Court
where she had been treated as a surrogate daughter and had been well educated. It is difficult to know to what extent her experience of
life at the boorish and brutal Hanoverian Court influenced her opposition to
George I in England. Did Caroline suspect her father-in-law of having her
mother-in-law’s lover killed? Did she support her husband’s desire to set his
mother free from her imprisonment at Ahlden? Whatever the case Anne’s parents left
Hanover in 1714 and did not return.
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| Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover |
Political differences between father and son led to factions
in the court in Hanover from the late 1710s and these disagreements were
carried over the British court coming to head following the birth of George and
Caroline’s second son, Prince George William in 1717. At the baby’s
christening, Anne’s father publicly insulted the Duke of Newcastle. This so
infuriated George I he banished his son and daughter-in-law from St James’s
Palace and kept their children, including Anne under his guardianship at
Leicester House. The family rift was healed, in part at least, in 1720 when
Anne’s brothers were returned to care of her parents but the girls remained the
wards of the King.
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Anne’s sisters, Princess Caroline (1713-1757) left,
Princess Amelia (1711-1786), right. |
That year Anne’s body was ravaged by smallpox. The disease
killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans a year during the closing years of the
18th century. This near death experience and her parent’s experience of the
disease at the beginning of their marriage caused her to support her mother’s
efforts to test the practice of variolation (an early type of immunisation
against smallpox), which had been witnessed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and
Charles Maitland in Constantinople. At the direction of her mother, Caroline,
six prisoners condemned to death were offered the chance to undergo variolation
instead of execution: they all survived, as did six orphan children given the
same treatment as a further test, (there were no medical ethics committees
then). Convinced of variolation’s safety, the Queen had her two younger
daughters, Amelia and Caroline, inoculated and with this royal patronage the
practice spread amongst the upper classes.
On 22 June 1727, George I died while in Germany, making
Anne’s father king. The following year, her elder brother, Frederick, who had
been educated in Germany, was brought to England to join the court. Father and
son had not seen one other in 14 years and when they did the fireworks began. Their relationship was even more tempestuous than the one between George I and
George II especially after 1733 when Frederick purchased Carlton House and set
up what George II considered to be a rival court.
As a daughter of the future British King Anne’s marriage was
always going to be a dynastic one. As a princess requiring a protestant
marriage her options were limited. The government hit on the idea of a marriage
with the rather lowly William, Prince of Orange-Nassau to sure up their
anti-French alliance. George II was not enamoured with the proposal and Anne was
concerned herself for William had a well-known physical deformity. She
dispatched Lord Hervey, a close confident, to report on its extent. Hervey
reported that although William was no Adonis and his body was as bad as
possible; William suffered from a pronounced curvature of spine, probably the
result of sclerosis like the English King Richard III; he had a pleasing face.
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Willem Karel Hendrik
Friso van Oranje-Nassau, 1751 |
Despite his deformity and the inferior territory Anne
decided she would take him. She was already 25 years old and did not want to
end up an old maid surrounded by her warring relatives. When they married in 1734,
her mother and sisters wept through the ceremony and Lord Hervey described the
marriage as more sacrifice than celebration.
As an outsider and British, Anne was not popular in the
Netherlands. Her life must have been a lonely one as she did not get along with
her mother-in-law and her husband was frequently on campaign, his power base dependent on his ability to protect the states of the Dutch Republic from its
enemies. In these lonely years Anne concentrated her efforts on literature and
playing the harpsichord; she was an accomplished, artist, musician, and
lifelong friend of her music teacher Handel.
Producing the required heir was problematic too. In 1736,
she gave birth to a stillborn daughter and another in 1739. Her first live
birth came in 1743 with the arrival of Princess Carolina of Orange-Nassau who
was followed by another daughter, Princess Anna two years later. Her only son
arrived in 1748 when she was 39 years old.
When her husband died three years later in 1751 at the age
of 40, Anne was appointed regent for her 3-year-old son, Prince William V. She
was given all prerogatives normally given a hereditary Stadtholder of the
Netherlands, with the exception of the military duties of the office, which were entrusted to Duke Louis Ernest of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
To say that she took to the role like a duck to water would
not be an exaggeration. Finally free to exercise some power, in true Hanoverian
style, Anne used her wit and her determination to secure her personal power
base and with it the dominance of her family and the Orange dynasty.
She was hard-working but remained unpopular. Commercial
rivalry between the Dutch and the British East India Companies was part of the
cause. Another reason was the constitution of the United Provinces. But what
made her most unpopular was that she seized the opportunity to centralise power
in the office of the hereditary Stadtholder over the traditional rights of the
Dutch states particularly the State of Haarlem and in her foreign policy, she favoured
the British-German alliance over alliance with the French.
Ultimately, as a
woman she was reliant on the men around her and it is fair to say that her
husband and her son were fighting a losing battle against the tide of history
at the end of the 18th century and Anne with all her skills could
not realise the ambitions of the House of Orange on her own. She ruled the
Netherlands for eight years dying of dropsy in 1759 when her son was 12. She
was replaced as regent by her mother-in-law, Marie Louise of Hesse-Kassel and
when she died in 1765, Anne's daughter,
Carolina, was made regent until William V turned 18 in 1766.
Anne was a remarkable woman. With her beauty shredded by
smallpox she took on the world and won. (I am sure she took the opportunity to show herself in her best light in her self-portrait above.) She accepted and made a success of her
marriage which on the face of it held little prospect for personal happiness.
She was an intelligent if haughty woman who endured years of loneliness, the pain of 2 stillborn children and widowhood. She exercised the role of Staadholder (chief executive
of the Dutch Republic) as effectively as any man and laid the foundations of the Dutch royal family. Her
grandson, William I became the first king of the Netherlands in 1815.
Sources:
George II: King and Elector By Andrew C. Thompson, 2011,
Yale University Press
Photo credits:
