the Princess Anne, died. The Princess Mary and the Prince of Orange were married on the Sunday, and ‘on the Friday Lady Anne appear'd to have the small-pox.’ With this record of sickness (confirmed by a letter in the Hatton Correspondence, i. 155) begin such personal reminiscences as we possess concerning a life which will never be justly judged if its sufferings are left out of the account. The passage referred to opens the diary of Dr. Edward Lake, which extends from November 1677 to April 1678. Dr. Lake was introduced as chaplain and tutor into the service of the Princesses Mary and Anne by the Bishop of London, Dr. Henry Compton, who was said to have actively contributed to the decision that they should be educated as protestants, and who had himself been appointed their preceptor. On 23 Jan. 1676 he had confirmed them in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, of which he was dean. Lake was much troubled at being kept away from attendance on the Princess Anne by her illness, the more so ‘because her nurse was a very busy, zealous Roman catholic;’ and accordingly obtained permission from the governess and the preceptor to offer his ministrations notwithstanding. He gives a rather touching picture of the poor young princess during this passing attack of illness, which shows both that a warm affection had up to this time united her to her elder sister, and that even as a child she was full of protestant zeal, for she bade him take care to instruct her nurse's child in the protestant religion. His last entry concerning the princess is a singular statement, proving how imperfect her own training had up to this time been in the forms of the most sacred rite of the church. She afterwards became a very regular communicant.
Less than a year after her sister's tearful departure, about the beginning of October 1678, the Princess Anne accompanied her stepmother on a visit to Holland. Luttrell mentions the rumour that some priests went with them, who wished to keep out of the way of the notable ‘discoveries’ of Oates and Tongue, which had then begun to set the nation in a ferment. The duke was, in 1679, for the second time obliged to leave England with the duchess, on this occasion for the Netherlands; but, according to his own remembrance, the Princess Anne was obliged to remain behind (see Macpherson's Original Papers, i. 91, and cf. Hatton Correspondence, i. 177). It seems, however, that she and her sister Isabella were afterwards permitted to join their parents at Brussels, and to accompany them to the Hague. The duke and his family returned to London in October, and soon afterwards undertook a journey with great pomp into Scotland, where the duke had been appointed lord high commissioner. In 1681 a project of marriage between Anne and Prince George of Hanover was apparently not unfavourably received by Charles II, to whom it had been proposed through Prince Rupert by his sister Sophia, then Duchess of Calenberg (Hanover). Her son, Prince George, had, however, hardly reached England when he was recalled by his father, who had arranged a marriage for him with his cousin Sophia Dorothea. In the same year 1681 the Princess Anne twice, in March and in July, journeyed to Scotland to visit her parents; on the second occasion, as the duke believed, ‘to be a blind upon his return, and hinder any disturbance upon the people's imagining it’ (Original Papers, i. 682–3). It was a troubled year for the duke and duchess, who, in addition to political troubles, suffered the loss of their youngest daughter, Isabella (4 March); but in 1682 the skies had in some measure cleared, and in May the duke brought home his family to St. James's amidst the ringing of bells and the blazing of bonfires. Not long afterwards they paid a visit to the king at Windsor. Charles II, now once more at liberty to show his goodwill to his brother and his family, greatly resented the presumption of one of the most self-sufficient of his subjects, the Earl of Mulgrave, in ‘pretending courtship’ to the Princess Anne. He was forbidden the court, and had all his places taken from him.
In 1683 a more acceptable suitor made his appearance. Already in May, in which month the duke and duchess and their daughter paid a five days' visit to Oxford, the rumour was about town that Prince George of Denmark was coming over to England to marry the Lady Anne. On 19 July the prince arrived at Whitehall, and on the evening of the 28th the marriage was solemnised in the Chapel Royal at St. James's by the Bishop of London. At court the prince was thought ‘a handsome fine gentleman’ (Hatton Correspondence, ii. 31); and at the university Prior, taking his part in the ‘Hymenæus Cantabrigiensis,’ declared that Venus was mated with Mars. (The effusion is signed A. Prior, St. John's, but is confidently assigned to Matthew in the Aldine edition, ii. 318). Burnet, however, states that the marriage ‘did not at all please the nation, for we knew that the proposition came from France.’ Prince George's brother, King Christian V, a very able and active sovereign, had accepted French mediation in his long-standing quarrel with Sweden, and he was on bad terms with the Dutch. But English public opinion
