This page has been validated.
Anne
473
Anne
nor the flattery, often equally robust, of her poets and prose writers, has succeeded in persuading posterity that good Queen Anne was either an attractive woman or—though she appropriated to herself Queen Elizabeth's motto (semper eadem)—a great queen. On the other hand, spared though she was by neither foe nor friend, yet even in her own libellous age it was chiefly left to foreign pens to libel a genuinely national queen. Since Queen Anne has been dead, popular sentiment has preserved her name in kindly remembrance for the sake of her homely virtues, and neither partisan nor sectarian prejudice has prevented historians from acknowledging that she took no ignoble view of the responsibilities belonging to the throne on which a parliamentary compromise had seated her—the last of our Stuart sovereigns.
[The only biography proper of Queen Anne is that of the enthusiastic but uncritical Miss Strickland, in her Lives of the Queens of England, vols. x–xii. 1848. Among the earlier historical accounts of her reign are Boyer's Annals of the reign of Queen Anne, 11 vols. 1703–13, and 1 vol. folio 1735, the edition here cited; the Histories of Oldmixon, Tindal, Ralph, Smollett, here cited in the 5 vols. edition of 1822, Cunningham, and Belsham; and Roger Coke's Detection of the Court and State of England, vol. iii. (here cited in the 4th edition, 1719). An admirably lucid narrative is Somerville's History of Great Britain during the Reign of Queen Anne, 1798, which includes an essay on the ‘Danger of the Protestant Succession during her last years.’ Charles Hamilton's Transactions during the Reign of Queen Anne from the Union to her death, 1790, is violently partisan and valueless. More recent historians of the period are Lord Stanhope, here cited from the separate History of England, comprising the reign of Queen Anne until the peace of Utrecht, 1870; Ranke, in Englische Geschichte, vol. vii., and the Oxford translation; Burton, Reign of Queen Anne, 3 vols., 1880; C. von Noorden, Europäische Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert, vols. i.–iii., 1870–1882, which reaches to the year 1710; and Wyon, History of Great Britain during the Reign of Queen Anne, 2 vols., 1876; Morris's Age of Anne (1877) is a useful little manual. The earlier period of Anne's life falls within the narratives of Macaulay, and of Onno Klopp, Der Fall des Hauses Stuart, 1875–81. For Scottish affairs see also Burton's History of Scotland, from 1689–1748, 2 vols. 1853, with the Lockhart Papers, 2 vols. 1817, and Lockhart's Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland, 1714. Many administrative details will be found scattered through the Calendars of Treasury Papers, 1702–7, and 1708–14, Rolls Series, 1879. The memoir-literature furnishing materials for Anne's biography is very large. Foremost in it stands Burnet's History of his own Time, here cited in the six-volume Clarendon Press edition of 1833; for the earlier period information is supplied in the Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, 1677–78, Camden Society, 1847; the Correspondence of Henry Earl of Clarendon, and Lawrence Earl of Rochester; with Clarendon's Diary, 1687–90 (1828), and the Hatton Correspondence, Camden Society, vol. ii. 1878; Sir John Dalrymple's Memoirs, 3 vols. 1790, with their curious appendices, only reach the early years of Queen Anne's reign. Over a longer period extend Narcissus Luttrell's invaluable Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from Sept. 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols. 1857; Evelyn's Diary, which reaches to 1706, and the Correspondence of the Duke of Shrewsbury, 1695–1704, ed. Coxe, 1821; the Wentworth Papers, ed. Cartwright, 1883, begin with the year 1705. The relations of the queen to the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough are most fully given in Coxe's Memoirs of the Duke of Marlborough, here cited in the 3 vols. 4to edition of 1819, which, though written with a strong bias, have permanent value as an historical work. They are supplemented by the Coxe MSS. in the British Museum, by the Letters and Despatches of the Duke, ed. Sir George Murray, 5 vols. 1845, and by Lediard's biography, 3 vols. 1736. The Duchess's own narrative, prepared for publication by Hooke, is the celebrated Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from her first Coming to Court to the year 1710 (1742), here cited as ‘Conduct.’ It was answered by Ralph in The Other Side of the Question, 1742, defended by Fielding in A Vindication of the Duchess Dowager of Marlborough, and further criticised in a A Review of a late Treatise, &c., and A Continuation of a Review, &c. (both 1742). Numerous other letters and papers of the duchess, bearing on her relations to the queen, will be found in the Private Correspondence of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 2 vols. 1838; the volume of Letters, published in 1875, belongs mainly to her later years. See also Mrs. Thomson's Memoirs of the Duchess and the Court of Queen Anne, 2 vols. 1839. For Anne's relations to her father and brother, and the history of Jacobite affairs before and during her reign, Clarke's Life of James II, founded on the king's manuscript memoirs, 2 vols., 1816, and the Stuart Papers in Macpherson's Original Papers, 2 vols. 1775, must be cautiously studied; the Hanover Papers, in the latter collection, illustrate Anne's relations to the Court of Hanover. As to her interest in the peace negotiations cf. the Mémoires du Marquis de Torcy, Collection Petitot, vols. lxvii. and lxviii. 1828, and the Minutes of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager, ‘done out of French,’ it is said, by De Foe, here cited in the 2nd edition, 1736. Some curious details of a less special nature are contained in the Duke of Manchester's Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne, from the Kimbolton Papers, 2 vols. 1864. But the most vivid conception of court and society under Anne is to be formed from the Journals and Letters of Swift and his correspondents, here chiefly cited from the 5th edition of his and
