bestowed on the crown; but in February 1704 they were appropriated by Queen Anne to the assistance of the poorer clergy, and thus form what has since been known- as " Queen Anne s bounty." The amount to be paid was originally regulated by a- valuation by the bishop of Norwich in 1254, later by one instituted in 1292, which in turn was superseded by the Liber Regis of 1 5 3 5 . In France, in spite of royal edicts, like those of Charles VI., Charles VII, Louis XL, and Henry II., and even denunciations of the Sorbonne, the custom held its ground till the famous decree of the 4th of August during the Revolution of 1789. In Germany it was decided by the concordat of Constance, in 1418, that bishoprics and abbacies should pay the servitia, according to the valuation of the .Roman chancery in two half-yearly instalments. Those benefices only were to pay the annalia which were rated above 24 gold florins ; and as none were so rated, the annalia fell into disuse. The Basle Council (1431-1443) wished to abolish the servitia, but the concordat of Vienna (1448) confirmed the Constance decision. The Congress of Ems (1786) also declared against them; but they continued to be paid till 1803, when, to indemnify the powers that had sustained territorial loss through the recent wars, a very great amount of ecclesiastical property was secularised. In some parts of Germany, the payment of annates is still made under particular concordats. In Scotland annat or <mn is half a year s stipend allowed by the Act 1C 72, c. 13, to the executors of a minister of the Church of Scot land above what was due to him at the time of his death. This is neither assignable by the clergyman during his
life, nor can it be seized by his creditors.ANNE, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, was born on the 6th of February 1664. She was the second daughter of James Duke of York, afterwards James II. She was only seven years old when her mother, Anne Hyde, died, having previously professed adherence to the Church of Rome, a step which was immediately imitated by her husband. The duke, however, had to allow his daughters, the princesses Mary and Anne, to be brought up as Protestants ; and Anne always continued to be attached, zealously and even bigotedly, to the Church of England. In her twentieth year she was married to Prince George, the brother of the King of Denmark. In the establishment then formed for her, a place was given, on her own earnest desire, to her early playfellow Lady Churchill, afterwards Duchess of Marlboro ugh; and this ambitious and imperious woman, acquiring rapidly an irresistible authority over the feeble mind of the princess, thenceforth ruled her absolutely for more than twenty years. Not long afterwards, when the Duke of York had become king, he made repeated attempts to convert the princess Anne to his own creed ; he engaged that, if she would become a Roman Catholic, she should be placed in the line of succession to the throne before her elder sister Maiy. Prince George appears to have received those overtures favourably ; but he, an indolent and goodnatured man, who cared for nothing but good eating and field-sports, never had any influence over his wife. She remained firm in her Protestantism, lived in retirement during the whole of her father s reign, and did not allow her opinions or feelings any further vent than that which they found in her private correspondence with the Princess of Orange. When, in 1688, James s queen gave birth to a son, the sisters took a lively interest in the suspicions and inquiries that arose ; and Anne was easily led to believe that the child was supposititious ; though later in her life she must have been convinced that he was really her brother. Before the landing of the Prince of Orange Prince George was pledged to join him ; and his wife and Lady Churchill abandoned King James on the first opportunity.
From the Revolution till the death of William III., Anne s way of life was as quiet and obscure as it had been during the reign of her father. She did, indeed, on the prompting of her favourite, acquiesce in the act of the convention-parliament, which, postponing her place in the succession, gave the throne to William in case he should survive Mary. But the sisters soon quarrelled, and never were reconciled. The misunderstanding began in trifling- questions of etiquette, quite fitted to the calibre of both of the royal minds; but considerations of real import ance soon compelled the king himself to interfere. The Churchills, traitorous to their new sovereign, as they had been to the old, were known to be intriguing for the restora tion of James ; and they induced Anne to write secretly to her father, and declare repentance for her desertion of him. Even when William dismissed Marlborough from all his places, the princess obstinately persisted in retaining his wife in her household. After Queen Mary s death the king and his sister-in-law went through the forms of a reconciliation ; but there was no confidence on either side ; and indeed the secret correspondence with Saint Germains was still carried on. The state of the succession to the crown threatened new difficulties. Anne had seventeen children, but most of them were still-born ; and the Duke of Gloucester, the only one who survived infancy, died in 1700 at the age of eleven. The Jacobites, however, were unable to prevent the passing of the Act of Settlement, which placed the Electress of Hanover after Anne in the succession to the crown.
On the 8th of March 1702, Anne became queen of England by the death of William, being then thirty-eight years of age. Into her short reign there were crowded events possessing vast importance, both for the British Empire and for the whole of Europe ; and her name is customarily associated with one of the most characteristic epochs in the history of English literature. Marlborough and Peterborough commanded her armies ; her councils were directed in succession by Godolphin and Somers, by Harley and St John ; Berkeley and Newton speculated and experimented ; and the " wits of Queen Anne s time" were mustered, in poetry and in prose, under such chiefs as Prior and Pope, Swift, Addison, and Steele, Arbuthnot and Defoe. But no sovereign could have exerted less of real and personal influence than Queen Anne did, either on the national polity or on the national enlightenment. A blessed thing it was that she should have been thus powerless. For, beyond her own epicurean comforts, and the petty ceremonial of her court, there were just three ideas which her narrow and uninstructed intellect admitted : each of these ideas was full of danger to the peace and happiness of the state; and each of them was cherished by her with the hereditary stubbornness of a Stuart. She was as eager as any one of her race to enlarge the prerogatives of the crown : her father s devotion to the Church of Rome was not stronger than was her desire to increase the power of the Church of England ; and she never ceased to wish earnestly that her exiled brother should be her successor on the throne. In no stage of Anne s reign was even the last of these designs impracticable : there were always able statesmen inclined to lead the way; and more than once the tide of public opinion set towards absolutism, both political and ecclesiastical. The queen, however, was not only dull and ignorant, but also indolent, fond of flattery, and accustomed from her youth to let herself be guided by stronger and more active minds than her own. Whatever her wishes might be, her actions were ruled by her female favourites. Fortunately the earlier of her two directresses, a woman of extraordinary force of character, was both willing and able to keep in check the
queen's private inclinations : not less fortunate was it that