certain knack of sticking to what had been dictated to her to a degree often very disagreeable, and without the least sign of understanding or judgment’ (Private Correspondence, 120). But with regard to the period of her womanhood, at all events, it should never be forgotten that Anne had since her marriage undergone an amount of bodily suffering and mental anguish which, in the opinion of competent medical authority, would have weakened the intellectual vigour of most women.
The public life of Queen Anne, for the influence of whose personal character room enough was left by the incompleteness of the British constitution, reflects both her virtues and her defects. She took an active personal share in the business of state, frequently attended cabinet councils, and even on occasion originating measures herself. Thus Bolingbroke asserts that the ‘restraining orders’ to Ormond were first proposed by the queen (see Miscellaneous State Papers, ii. 482–3). She continued the custom of her ancestors in attending debates in the House of Lords. But she regarded it as her special right to appoint her ministers according to her own choice, and from any party (see her letter to Marlborough in Coxe, ii. 439). This principle was in direct conflict with the system of party government which was in her reign, though still with very incomplete success, continuing to assert itself.
The ornamental surroundings of royalty had comparatively little charm for her; and in her later years, partly no doubt in consequence of the condition of her health, she lived so much to herself that her court at times seemed ‘as it were abandoned’ (Burnet, vi. 230). She had striven to reform the system of selling places in her household, but without enduring success (Mrs. Thomson, i. 362). Her own expenditure was free and generous. On coming to the throne she strove to fulfil the engagements of her predecessors, although she did not think it necessary to renew all the pensions granted to cavaliers by her uncle and father and dropped by William III (Treasury Papers, 1702–1707, 36, 43). For herself she at least announced, in March 1703, the admirable principle that ‘the queen grants no reversions’ (ib. 123), which, however, she seems at one time to have intended to violate in the case of the daughters of the Duchess of Marlborough. We find her naturally generous to her late husband's servants, continuing their salaries during her life, ‘provided they keep no public houses’ (Luttrell, vi. 390; Wentworth Papers, 63; but see Treasury Papers, 1708–1714, 531). Her charity extended itself to the most various objects, and is apparent in many transactions of her reign.
But, as has been seen, there was one department of affairs which Queen Anne considered specially her own. Her interest in the church as shown by her endeavour to take the ecclesiastical patronage of the crown into her own hands, and more enduringly by the bounty which bears her name, has already been sufficiently illustrated. She was zealous for the efficiency of the clergy as well as for their welfare (cf. Ellis, 3rd series, iv. 331). The curious hallucination, which in 1706 at least momentarily prevailed at the Curia, that she was a convert to the church of Rome, is one of the unsolved problems of her history (see Strickland, xii. 113). In the crisis of 1688 she had written to her sister that ‘she would choose to live on alms rather than change’ her religion (Appendix, Dalrymple's Memoirs, ii. 170).
The Duchess of Marlborough inscribed on the statue erected by her to the queen at Blenheim, that she was ‘religious without affectation.’ Perhaps it cannot be added that she was religious without superstition. The revival by her of the practice of the royal touch, which William III had all but discontinued, can, however, hardly have been a matter of personal choice (see Burton, ii. 202; Treasury Papers, 1702–1707, p. 142). It is well known that among those she touched was Samuel Johnson. Anne touched as late as March and April in the year of her death (see Wentworth Papers, 359, 375). In the observance of the duties of religion Queen Anne was an example of regularity (Stoughton, v. 322), nor did she tolerate slackness in others.
Anne's affectionate disposition was in her earlier years prevented by untoward circumstances from finding its most natural outlet. Deprived of her mother, separated from her sister, estranged in some degree from her father, she had to take refuge in the friendship which was the consolation, till it became the bane, of her life. When, in after
