which helped to surround the event with suspicions was the absence of the Princess of Denmark, who was staying at Bath, and who pleaded the state of her health as a reason for not attending the extraordinary privy council held in October to place the genuineness of the young prince beyond all possible doubt. Whether her journey to Bath in June had been undertaken from any motive hostile to her stepmother, it is not easy to decide. There was certainly no love lost between them, even if Boyer's story, that there had been a quarrel between the royal ladies, ending, as some said, by the queen throwing a glove in the princess's face, be rejected as scandal. The king afterwards declared that he had desired her to defer her visit, and that he had only consented to it in the hope that she might still be back in time (Clarke's Life of James II, ii. 160). On the other hand Burnet asserts (iii. 249–50) that the king pressed her going to Bath against the opinion of most of her physicians and of all her other friends, and in a letter to her sister the princess herself expresses her deep concern at having been away at the time of the birth, ‘for I shall never now be satisfied whether the child be true or false. It may be our brother, but God only knows’ (Dalrymple, ii. 175). Her father afterwards entertained no doubt that the two princesses both expected to succeed to the crown in turn, and that the journey to Bath had been contrived on purpose (Clarke, ii. 159), and elsewhere he states that it was the scepticism of the Princess Anne which induced the queen to consent to the extraordinary council (ib. ii. 197). This scepticism did not wholly give way even after the council had been held (Clarendon's Diary, ii. 196–9), and it abundantly manifests itself in the extracts made by Birch from her correspondence with her sister, which include the string of questions, fit only for a jury of matrons, propounded by the Princess of Orange on the subject of the birth, and answered seriatim by the Princess of Denmark (Dalrymple, ii. 167 seqq.) If we may credit her father, her doubts were completely resolved a year afterwards by a witness of experience (see Original Papers, i. 157), and it is clear that in her later years she regarded the Pretender as her brother.
Very soon the storm burst over the head of King James II, and, his elder daughter's side having been chosen for her, it became necessary for the younger also to decide upon a course of action. From a letter of the princess, dated 13 March 1688, it appears that, after assenting to Anne's paying a visit to her sister in the spring of that year the king had withdrawn his permission, and this is confirmed by Barillon. The letters between the sisters, given in extracts by Dalrymple, certainly convey the impression that there was a thorough understanding between them. Among the assurances of support which reached the Prince of Orange in the latter part of the summer was a letter from Churchill, of which the salient point was that he ‘put his honour absolutely into the hands of the prince.’ On 23 Sept. Clarendon had a conversation with the Princess Anne, in which she spoke with great dissatisfaction of the Sunderlands, and appeared to her uncle to have something on her mind (Diary, ii. 189). On 1 Nov. William's declaration was circulated in London, and on the 5th he landed at Torbay. Four days afterwards Clarendon asked his niece to say something to the king ‘whereby he might see her concern for him;’ but she declined to put herself forward (ib. ii. 201). And when the news came to town that Clarendon's son, Lord Cornbury, ‘who had been early taught to consider his relationship to the Princess Anne as the groundwork of his fortunes and had been exhorted to pay her assiduous court,’ had joined the Prince of Orange with some soldiery, the princess seemed unable to understand Clarendon's emotion, and expressed her belief that ‘many of the army would do the same’ (Macaulay, from Clarendon). A prophetic, if not a well-informed, spirit spoke in her words. The news of Cornbury's desertion had reached London on 15 Nov. On the 24th the Duke of Grafton and Churchill, accompanied by Colonel Berkeley, escaped from the king's quarters at Salisbury to the Prince of Orange's at Exeter. Churchill, it was afterwards asserted, had in fear for his own security anticipated the outbreak of a plot, of which he was the centre, to seize the person of the king. Next evening Prince George of Denmark, after supping with the king at Andover, whither the royal army had retreated, rode away in the company of the Duke of Ormond and the Earl of Drumlanrig to the Prince of Orange, whom they found at Sherburne on the 30th. And when the king reached London on the 26th he found that his daughter, accompanied by her favourite, had fled from him like their husbands. In the words of a letter written on the following day, ‘yesterday morning, when the Princess of Denmark's women went to take her out of her bed, they found she had withdrawn herself, and hath not yet been heard of. Nobody went in her company that we hear of besides Lady Churchill and Mrs. Berkeley’ (Ellis, Original Letters 2nd series, iv. 164–5; cf. Clarendon's
