Queen Anne

Why she matters for the novel

Anne is the dying monarch whose imminent death creates the political crisis of the 1713 chapters. Everyone in the novel — from Harvard dons in Boston to courtiers at Versailles — is positioning for what comes after her. She never appears as a character, but her shadow falls over everything.

Who she was

Anne (1665-1714) was the last Stuart monarch and the first queen of Great Britain (after the 1707 Act of Union merged England and Scotland). She was the second daughter of James II from his first, Protestant wife.

She was not the weak, passive figure she’s sometimes portrayed as. She presided over Britain during the War of the Spanish Succession, supported the Duke of Marlborough’s military campaigns (the greatest British victories since Agincourt), and navigated ferocious party politics between Whigs and Tories. She was also genuinely devout — unlike many of her Stuart relatives, her Protestantism was sincere.

The tragedy of succession

Anne married Prince George of Denmark in 1683. They had seventeen pregnancies. Five children were born alive. Four died before age two. The fifth — William, Duke of Gloucester — survived to age eleven, long enough for the country to invest its hopes in him, then died in 1700. Anne was devastated.

Her inability to produce a surviving heir is the reason for the Act of Settlement (1701), the Hanoverian succession, and ultimately the political crisis that drives the plot of Quicksilver. If just one of her children had lived, the entire political landscape of the novel would be different.

Her health

By 1713, Anne suffered from gout so severe she was sometimes carried in a sedan chair or hauled up stairs on a pulley. She was overweight and in chronic pain. The Harvard dons “behaving as if Queen Anne were already dead and buried” aren’t being disrespectful — they’re being realistic. She died on August 1, 1714, less than a year after the novel’s opening scene.

The succession

Anne’s death triggered exactly the crisis everyone had been anticipating. George of Hanover became George I under the terms of the Act of Settlement. Jacobite supporters of the Stuart Pretender launched a rebellion in 1715 but failed. The Hanoverian dynasty would rule Britain for the next century and a half.