8.5 The Reign of Queen Anne, 1702 - 1714
With the death of King William III in 1702, the English crown passed to his closest heir, 37-year-old Princess Anne, daughter of King James II. In her youth, Anne had been shy and very much dependent upon friends. Ever since childhood, her closest friend had been Sarah Jennings, who would later marry the Whig general John Churchill. Sarah Churchill would exert a great influence on Anne's life and thought. Anne was very much a tragic figure. Her mother died when she was six, and she was put in the care of an Anglican bishop. In 1683 she married Prince George of Denmark with whom she was very happy and loved deeply. During the Glorious Revolution, George sided with the parliamentary opposition to Anne's father, and Anne followed her husband. They tried desperately to have children, but all seventeen of Anne's pregnancies ended tragically. Her only surviving child died in 1700 at age ten. His passing led to the 1701 Act of Settlement, confirming England's Protestant succession in the Stuarts' Hanoverian cousins. Anne understood but resented what happened to her father. She never liked William III and was angered when her sister, Queen Mary II, ordered Anne to end her association with Sarah Churchill.
For most of Queen Anne's reign England was at war with France. The War of the Spanish Succession had begun in 1702 (as a result of Louis XIV's policy to secure the crown of Spain for his grandson and its consequent threat to the European balance of power) and involved most of the Western European states in a major international war. English armies, ably led by John Churchill, now the Duke of Marlborough, were actively involved in the conflict which continued for some twelve years.
In 1707 Anne approved the Act of Union that combined the kingdoms of England and Scotland into the political union known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain. No longer would the two kingdoms be independent and share the same monarch. The Scots would be represented in both houses of Parliament. The Presbyterian Church would remain a legal church, and the Scottish legal system would continue to operate without interference from London. Various commercial agreements were reached to accommodate Scottish business interests and protect them from English competition. While there were those in both countries who initially opposed the union, their opposition never threatened the union and soon disappeared as the British economy continued to grow.
In 1710 parliamentary elections returned a Tory majority to the House of Commons. The Tories favored ending Britain's involvement in the war and advocated negotiating a separate peace with France. Tory critics argued that the war had gone on too long and was exhausting Britain's resources. The Whigs, holding a majority in the House of Lords, urged continuation of the war. With the Parliament so divided, any future peace agreement could not receive parliamentary approval as it would be rejected by the Whig Lords.
Anne shrewdly realized the value of a Tory-dominated Parliament. Herself wanting peace, she recognized that the wishes of a Commons elected by the political nation should not be thwarted by the political leanings of a few hereditary nobles. To remedy the impasse and secure a Tory majority in the House of Lords, Anne, in 1712, created twelve new titles of nobility and awarded them to Tories. These new appointments gave the Tories the majority they needed in the Lords. With Parliament secure, Anne authorized British diplomats to enter the negotiations that had begun with France at Utrecht. Britain and France and their allies made peace the following year (Treaty of Utrecht, 1713).
Anne's policy created an important constitutional precedent for the future. When the Lords blocked the Commons on an issue of fundamental importance, the monarch could create enough new Lords of the appropriate view to make a majority in that house. The utilization of this precedent was threatened again over controversial bills in 1832 and 1911; but in the end the Lords reluctantly voted to accept the new laws. In both cases the Lords did not want their status lessened by the crown's creation of new nobles for reasons of political expediency.
An earlier action by the queen also marked a constitutional development: the seeming end of the royal power to veto a law passed by Parliament. The legislation in question was a 1708 bill that called for the creation of a Scottish militia for Scotland’s defense. The Act of Union was less than year old and Anne’s advisors rightfully suspected that not all Scottish sympathies were yet in its favor, especially as Britain was then at war with France. Historically, France and Scotland had shared interests often hostile to England. Scotland, Anne reasoned, did not need a separate army and she vetoed the bill. Because no monarch since has vetoed a Parliamentary bill, royal approval of legislation is considered a constitutional given. (The power of the crown to veto legislation has, however, never been formally abolished.)
The reign of Queen Anne also saw the further consolidation of political power by the landed gentry. In 1710 the Tory-dominated Parliament passed the Landed Property Qualifications Act. This law stated the requirements for election to both shire (county) and borough (town) seats in the House of Commons and by so doing preserved the domination of the wealthy landowner over British political life. The law required a candidate for a shire seat to own land worth at least £600. A candidate for a borough seat had to own land worth at least £300. Thus, only the very wealthiest of the landowners qualified for election to the House of Commons, limiting further the social-economic scope of the British lawmakers. The Landed Property Qualifications Act would remain law in Britain until 1832 and consequently kept Britain a plutocratic oligarchy until new social forces mandated a change.
The rise of the Tories marked the downfall of Sarah Churchill and her influence over the Queen. As Sarah had urged Anne to commit herself fully in support of the war (such a policy would certainly further the Churchill fortune), Anne found herself pursuing a policy that was not to her liking. By nature Anne was a woman of peace, and she shared the Tory desire to end the war. In 1710 Anne, showing surprising independence of will, dismissed Sarah from her service. Later in 1711 the Tory Parliament secured the dismissal of Sarah's husband, the Duke of Marlborough, from his command. The fall of the Churchills cleared a major obstacle to peace.
In 1713 the Peace of Utrecht ended the war. Parliament ratified the treaty which awarded Britain sovereignty over Gibraltar, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the Hudson's Bay territory, and gave Britain a monopoly of the slave trade to Spanish America. Through the treaty France agreed to accept the legitimacy of the Hanoverian line of succession in Britain and withdrew its recognition of Catholic Prince James Edward Stuart as the legal heir to the British throne.
In her later years Anne agonized over the question of succession. The Act of Settlement required that the crown pass to her German cousin, Sophia of Hanover (or her heirs). Anne believed that if her half-brother, James Edward Stuart, could be persuaded to renounce his Catholicism, he should be her successor. Her Tory ministers, always in favor of legitimate monarchy, supported the Queen and began negotiations with the Stuart prince. Although James resolutely refused to change his religion, the Tory chief minister, Viscount Bolingbroke, continued to work for the repeal of the Act of Settlement.
The renewed issue of succession provoked a nationwide controversy and led to a shakeup in Anne's government. Desperate to keep their party in power, several of Anne's ministers urged her to dismiss Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke had been most adamantly outspoken in favor of keeping the crown in the Stuart line. Bolingbroke survived the crisis, but the Queen did not. While the controversy raged within the close circles of the Tory leadership, Anne died. As the Act of Settlement was still law, the government was legally compelled to notify Sophia's son (Sophia having died two months earlier) Prince George, the Elector of Hanover, that he was the King of Great Britain. Anne was the last Stuart to rule England. The Protestant succession remained in place. The Hanoverian monarchy was about to begin.
The Last Stuarts
What about James Edward, the Stuart claimant to the throne? In exile in France, he continued to seek means to regain the English throne. His hopes lay with the fact that the British did not care for their new German king.
George I, being a German and primarily concerned with the well-being of his beloved Hanover (of which he continued to be the head of state), was most unpopular in Britain. The Whigs saw him as a means to regain influence in government and actively courted his favor. Having seen the Tories try to undermine his succession, George was suspicious of the Tories and was unwilling to work with them.
In 1715 a small group of Scottish nationalists, resentful of the loss of Scotland's independence eight years earlier, rebelled against George and proclaimed the Stuart prince their rightful king. James Edward traveled to Scotland to lead the rebellion which he hoped to carry to England. In England, James' cause was supported by a few sympathetic and mostly Tory "Jacobites," but there was no widespread expression of popular support for the Stuart heir. The Scottish rebellion was easily crushed by armies again under the command of Marlborough, who had been made minister of war by King George. With the defeat of the Jacobites in Scotland, James again sought asylum in France. James, now known as the "Old Pretender," would spend the rest of his life in exile. He died in 1766, having lived to see his son attempt to seize the British throne in 1745.
In 1745 a Scottish rebellion against the rule of King George II revived the Stuart cause. Taking advantage of Britain's involvement in a major Continental war, Charles Edward Stuart, the "Young Pretender," landed in Scotland. Having French financial support, "Bonnie Prince Charlie" raised an army and briefly succeeded in defeating those British forces sent against him. Inspired by his victories in Scotland, Charles led an invasion of England. His army got to within eighty miles of London before it was cut to pieces by a combined British and Hanoverian army. Pursued back to Scotland, Charles escaped his enemies by disguising himself and eventually took ship back to France. This brief but explosive Stuart attempt to regain the British throne inspired a romantic image of the heroic young prince rallying his supporters in the face of overwhelming odds that has become legend in Scottish folklore. "Bonnie Prince Charlie" has ever since been the theme of both song and story. The British crown, however, remained safely secure on the Hanoverian head.
Bonnie Prince Charlie died despondent and alcoholic in exile in 1788. The Stuart line ended when Charles' younger brother Henry died in 1807. Henry went into the Catholic priesthood and later became a Cardinal of the Church. Henry, his brother Charles, and his father (James Edward Stuart, "Baby Jamie") are all buried in St. Peter’s, Rome.
The history of the British monarchy in the 18th century is continued in Chapter 10, section 5.
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The image of Queen Anne is from the Grand Ladies Website gogmsite.net/.
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Sources for Queen Anne
Blitzer, Charles. Age of Kings. New York: Time-Life Books, 1967.
Churchill, Winston S. Marlborough: His Life and Times. New York: Scribners, 1968.
Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Louis XIV. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution. New York: Norton, 1961.
Knapton, Ernest. Europe 1450 – 1815. New York: Scribners, 1958.
Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe. New York: Norton, 1996.
Palmer, Robert R et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.
Trevelyan, George Macauley. England Under the Stuarts. London: Putnam, 1916.
Tucker, Albert. A History of English Civilization. New York: Harper, 1972.
Willcox, William. The Age of Aristocracy. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1971.