Review by Choice Review
Winner of the 2013 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, Somerset is without a doubt one of the best biographers of English royalty writing today. As with her Elizabeth I (1991), this page-turner about Queen Anne is both compelling and absorbing. The fast-paced, engagingly written narrative tells a fascinating story full of rich detail that makes palpable the various political complexities of England's first imperial age. From the awkwardness of her birth from parents who almost did not marry, to the partisan battles that expedited her death, Anne's life was full of personal intrigues that came to have public consequences and weighed on her heavily. Somerset relies on the usual published and manuscript sources, but blends them together in telling fashion. Centering on the queen's tempestuous friendships with her longtime favorite, Sarah Churchill, and then Abigail Masham, the author nicely conveys the backdrop of war, party politics, and the struggles to maintain the Protestant succession that dominated the age and were at the forefront of all of Anne's relationships and policies. Since this is a biography for scholar and lay reader alike, whatever broader historiographical awareness it may lack can certainly be forgiven, especially considering its wonderful capacity to bring this often-forgotten royal to life. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. B. Lowe Florida Atlantic University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
jane RIDLEY'S book is timely in a double sense. When the British edition was released shortly after the 2012 Diamond Jubilee summer, America was still perplexed by the high point of that comically un-summery event as an armada-size flotilla of "tugboats and garbage barges" (Jon Stewart's sardonic description) passed in hours' long chugging convoy down the Thames, rain pelting remorselessly. Saluting on the dank royal barge were the freezing 86-year-old monarch and her nearly 91-year-old consort. The riverbanks were crowded with a million sodden subjects, roaring jubilantly. What, had Americans wondered, was that all about? Ridley's book will go some way toward explaining. The American publication of "The Heir Apparent" has coincided, happily for the publisher, with a mild spasm of American interest in the English monarchy with the birth of yet another heir. And the wizened features of a man not quite as old as Britain's reigning monarch recently appeared on the front page of Time magazine: a coronation of sorts. Just days short of the traditional retirement age of 65, Prince Charles declared himself ready. But the omens, despite those decades of loyal waiting, are not propitious. His mother's mother, the beloved Queen Mum, lived to see 101. When Edward VII's mother, Victoria, finally died, at age 81, he reportedly said, "It has come too late" (the occupational hazard of the heir apparent). The current Prince of Wales, having survived the Diana crisis, is popular with his people. So too, when he finally ascended to the throne, was Edward VII - an odd circumstance because, as Ridley's book demonstrates, he was immoral, selfish, philistine and rather stupid. In order to understand the paradox, one must acknowledge that the monarch has two selves: the spiritual and the personal. One is immortal, the other mortal. The English (less so the Scottish) revere their monarch not because he or she is lovable (they don't have a wonderful record in the amiability stakes) but because it affirms that "there'll always be an England." Ridley's superb book is the fruit of a decade's immersion in the royal archives, a privilege rarely granted. And her work was all the trickier because, at least in the past, royal archivists have often seen their role as not merely preserving documents but burying material deleterious to the interests of the throne. As Walter Bagehot, the authority on the (unwritten) British constitution, once put it, "daylight" must never be let in on the "magic." To penetrate the protective murk, Ridley has applied detective as well as scholarly skills. Nor is she overawed. With jaunty lèse-majesté she refers to her subject throughout as Bertie. In his lifetime, only his family and presumably his mistresses were allowed that right. Then again, there were quite a lot of mistresses. Bertie's romantic targets fell into several groups. There were the wives of his friends ("Greater love hath no man," goes the waggish quip, "than that he lay down his wife for his king") and the wives of members of the upper classes. The last, and one of the more durable, was Mrs. Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife and former mistress of the current heir apparent. Bertie's other targets were world famous courtesans with names like La Barucci and Skittles. Actresses (including Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt) were also favored, as were the blue-blooded "professional beauties" thronging court events. In Bertie's younger days, common prostitutes were called upon. How seigneurially did he assert his rights? One can only fantasize. But what we do know would satisfy any divorce court. the house of Hanover feared two things : madness and republicanism. The terrible example of mad King George III haunted the family line. When Bertie was a child, the country's leading phrenologist was consulted and found the future monarch's skull "feeble and abnormal." His mother, throughout her life, believed he had a "small empty brain." In any case, he seemed resistant to education. The book Ridley records him most enjoying is a popular novel about adultery, "East Lynne," discussed with his entourage while cruising down the Nile, in between taking pot shots at crocodiles. Bertie often went to the opera, but just as often left before the end. He made few significant contributions to the royal collection of artworks. He loved "shooting" - especially when his prey was driven toward him in sacrificial droves. In later life, he devoted himself to baccarat and his stable (much more successfully, with three Derby winners). Bertie's father, Prince Albert, did his best to make the heir apparent worthy of his future role with brutally severe tutoring and, when necessary, the even more brutal whip. "I had no boyhood," Bertie later recalled. When he reached manhood, he was free to kick up his heels and celebrated with a military barracks whore called Nellie. Reported by ever-watchful spies to his parents, Bertie's behavior caused Albert "the deepest pain I have yet felt in this life." Victoria firmly believed the news precipitated her beloved husband's decline and death. She could, she said, never thereafter look at her son "without a shudder." After his "fall," Bertie was rushed into marriage with a Danish princess, Alexandra. "She is my brood mare," he later confided, falling back on the inevitable horsy image. "The others are my hacks." "Alix" endured six pregnancies by the age of 26. But Ridley dismisses the possibility that Bertie infected her with syphilis, which some whispered was the cause of her lifelong invalidism. Bertie gorged as eagerly as he philandered. After a multicourse dinner, Ridley records, "he was said to retire with a cold chicken by his bed, which, so the story went, was always bare in the morning. His nickname was Tum Tum." One luckless friend who dared address him that way was instantly banished. Over time, Bertie's 29¼-inch waist ballooned to 48 inches. He smoked 20 cigarettes and a dozen Havanas a day. Emphysema and heart failure killed him, at age 68. His main enthusiasm was for uniforms (he liked to strut in a Field Marshal's outfit) and "dress." His lasting sartorial monuments are the undone bottom button on the gentleman's waistcoat (the 48-inch "tum," not style, was the reason); the cuff, or turn-up, on trouser legs; and the "dinner jacket." Bertie's devotion to his public appearance - particularly when crowds or camera lenses were present - was punctilious. A quick Internet search will make the point. As Prince of Wales, Bertie was not party to Foreign Office dispatches, on the orders of his mother. At this stage, his judgment in international affairs was felt to be "worryingly naïve." And yet, Ridley argues, he became shrewder with age and may claim some credit for helping to forge the Entente Cordiale with France. What were his main achievements? As Ridley plausibly observes, Edward VII astutely perceived the necessity of making royalty a spectacle, realizing that the monarchy, if it was to survive, must put on a show for the people. In the future, the royals would be players not in the political but in the theatrical sense. As that drenched celebration on June 3, 2012, demonstrates, his perception was probably correct. When Edward VIPs mother, Victoria, died, he reportedly said, 'It has come too late.' john Sutherland's most recent book,"A Little History of Literature," has just been published. By Brooke Allen QUEEN ANNE The Politics of Passion By Anne Somerset Illustrated. 621 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35. Britain's queen anne (who reigned from 1702 to 1714) has not been treated kindly by historians. Consensus has it that "Brandy Nan" was obese and of limited intelligence, with a predilection for the bottle. More dangerously, she is supposed to have put herself under the thumb of domineering women favorites with political agendas: first the Whig partisan Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and subsequently the duchess's upstart cousin Abigail Masham, a Tory sympathizer. (It is suggested from the surviving correspondence that Anne might have had lesbian leanings, though whether these were ever acted upon is unknown.) She is seldom given any credit for the great events of her reign, which included the 1707 Act of Union and the glorious victories over the armies of Louis XIV. Anne Somerset, who has written about Elizabeth I and William IV, among other royals, has now produced a spirited and extremely convincing defense of the hapless Anne. So many of our unflattering ideas about Anne, she points out, have come from the vindictive pen of the Duchess of Marlborough. The fact that the duchess was clever, witty and bitchy meant that her jibes have been remembered and repeated through the generations. What many have failed to take into account is that the beautiful duchess was not only a termagant but was unreliable and demonstrably unbalanced. (Somerset wisely doesn't go in for posthumous psychoanalyzing, but the duchess's behavior could be consistent with both clinical mania and paranoia.) Her fall from Anne's favor was no one's fault but her own - she had behaved again and again, as Somerset demonstrates, with staggering insolence - nevertheless, her rage knew no bounds when Anne took up with the more pliant Abigail Masham. Yet the veracity of the duchess's memoirs and correspondence has seldom been questioned, while the Marlboroughs' image has been expertly burnished for posterity, thanks mainly to their famous descendant Winston Churchill's multivolume biography of the duke. Anne had the misfortune to live in interesting times. She was born five years after the restoration of her uncle, Charles II; her father, James II, was the heir-apparent and continued to be so, for the libidinous Charles, father of numerous out-of-wedlock offspring, was unable to sire a legitimate child. James, alas, was a Roman Catholic, and at his succession to the throne a country exhausted by a century of religious turbulence, inducing a revolution and civil war, was unwilling to accept a monarch not of the established religion. James played his cards exceedingly badly, and when he was ousted after only three years, Anne deserted his cause in favor of her elder sister, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, who became England's first constitutional monarchs. As William and Mary continued childless, it became probable that Anne would ascend the throne. She was unpromising monarchical material. For one thing, she wasn't particularly well educated - even the partisan Somerset doesn't claim otherwise - and her schooling was "astonishingly inadequate," considering the possibility she might become queen: She was taught only the most basic arithmetic and very little of the history of her own realm. "There can be no doubt that had Anne been a boy she would have been taught very differently," Somerset writes, while adding rather astutely that "whether such a training, with its heavy emphasis on classical languages, would have made Anne a better ruler remains conjectural." Anne was also plagued by ill health. At the time this was attributed to "gout," a catchall term of the 18th century, but the illness that tormented her might have been lupus, a disease that was crippling before the advent of modern medications. Yet Anne had a surprising confidence in her ability to govern, one that seems not to have been entirely misplaced. Her love for her country and her wish to do well by it are evident in all that she did and wrote. Her firmness in the Anglican faith and her distaste for all religious dissent might not seem particularly laudable to modern readers, who prize toleration, but in the context of the era it was all-important. England wanted a Protestant monarch, and it wanted religious harmony, insofar as that was possible; Anne provided these. The presence of her Catholic half brother, just across the Channel in France, was a perpetual threat that Anne's army and navy managed to contain. Far from having no will of her own, as the Duchess of Marlborough claimed, Anne demonstrated a firm one at many moments of crisis, and for someone who clearly disliked confrontation she proved again and again that she could face it when necessary. Like Queen Victoria a century and a half later, Anne cultivated a maternal image, presenting herself as the mother of her people. Tragically, her career as an actual mother was cut short: None of her children survived to adulthood. Pregnant at least 17 times, she suffered numerous miscarriages and stillbirths. Two little daughters were taken from her by smallpox. Her precocious but sickly son and heir, the Duke of Gloucester, succumbed to a fever at the age of 11. As the number of pregnancies suggests, Anne enjoyed a happy relationship with her husband, Prince George of Denmark. Mocked as a nonentity by highfliers like the Marlboroughs, George didn't cut a glamorous figure at court or on the battlefield, but he was a kind and thoughtful man, supportive of his wife and content, so it seemed, with his second-place position. Anne's marriage was solid, even if she was romantically attracted to other women. When Sarah Churchill, in a crude attempt at blackmail, threatened to make Anne's early, effusive letters public, Anne was dismayed, begging the duchess to return her "strange scrawls." If all this makes Somerset's biography sound like a racy read in the style of Ophelia Field's 2003 biography of the Duchess of Marlborough, nothing could be further from the truth. "Queen Anne" is essentially a political biography: British party politics were born in Queen Anne's lifetime, during the attempt to exclude her Catholic father from the succession, and during her own reign the Whig-Tory rivalry reached a level of malice and vituperation that has perhaps never again been matched. Many pages are devoted to the machinations of players like Robert Harley (later Lord Oxford), Henry St. John (later Lord Bolingbroke) and Sidney Godolphin. The rivalries and back-stabbing between the various factions make as unedifying a spectacle as anything to be seen on today's Senate floor, and may wear down a majority of casual readers. Despite the book's subtitle, it contains more politics than passion. The unlikely queen achieved numerous successes in her life, but none, perhaps, was more surprising than her leaving of it. As her health declined rapidly, some court insiders speculated that she had made secret deals with the Jacobites, providing for her half brother to return and claim his lost kingdom. Most observers feared that chaos or revolution would ensue upon her death. Nothing of the kind occurred: The Protestant succession, planned since 1688, went smoothly into gear, and Prince George of Hanover unhurriedly made his way to England to become King George I. Bolingbroke was amazed: "Sure there never was yet so quiet a transition from one government to another." Despite further Jacobite invasions during the Georgian period, the British succession would never again be in real question. "Free at last of all her pain, care and sorrow," Somerset concludes, "this most conscientious of rulers had discharged her final duty." Anne is supposed to have put herself under the thumb of women with political agendas. BROOKE ALLEN teaches literature at Bennington College. She is editing the collected letters of Terry Southern.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 1, 2013]
Review by Library Journal Review
An eager book-buying public consumes many books on the charismatic Queen Elizabeth I, last of the Tudors, but who cares about "Good Queen Anne" (1665-1714), the last of the Stuarts? Some may recall Anne's patronage of Sarah and John Churchill (first Duke and Duchess of Marlborough) and their fall from grace. Fewer may know of Anne's struggles to produce an heir. Through Anne's 17 pregnancies, leading to few live births, Somerset (The Affair of the Poisons) presents a fascinating glimpse into 18th-century medicine (for strong stomachs only). The one child to survive past infancy was the hydrocephalic Duke of Gloucester, by far the most appealing character in this long biography. His death at age 11 ended Anne's hope of continuing the Stuart dynasty. On her own death, the throne passed to distant cousins, the Hanoverian Georges. Somerset offers a persuasive portrait of Anne as a ruling monarch (rather than a tool of her ministers and her serving women), lacking the intellectual gifts and extroversion of Elizabeth I, but determined to steer the ship of state herself. The evil Sarah Churchill's powers ultimately paled next to those of her plodding but deeply serious queen. VERDICT British royal history buffs will want to read this thorough biography of a long underestimated monarch.-Stewart Desmond, New York (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Somerset (The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV, 2004) delivers an exhaustive and easily readable history of a queen trying to emulate Elizabeth I with none of the Tudor forcefulness and too much of the Stuart feebleness. The much-maligned Queen Anne (16651714) was never expected to reign. Her father, James II, was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and succeeded by his daughter, the childless Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. Anne's 17 pregnancies before her accession produced only one child, who survived only to age 11. Her devotion to her friend and First Lady of the Bedchamber, Sarah Churchill, was a most unfortunate liaison. Sarah treated Anne as an uninformed fool, unable to form opinions of her own. However, Anne blossomed when she became queen, a situation that Sarah never accepted. Sarah's husband, the Duke of Marlborough, and Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin, were Anne's primary ministers; many thought they completely controlled her. Anne's correspondence shows just how malicious and even criminal Sarah was. Her dictatorial domination is evident in her demands, harangues and diatribes. Even Marlborough phrased his letters to the queen based on instructions from his wife and Godolphin. They viciously abused Anne's rejection of their politics while encouraging the future George I to invade England after they fell from favor. Today's reader will easily recognize the rancorous party politics, obstructionism and inability to enact laws that existed in that period. Anne's natural reserve and her instinct for discretion has led historians to believe that she was weak and dominated by women of stronger character. Somerset's impressive scholarship debunks that belief and shows Anne as a masterful, even authoritative, queen who survived the influence of her "friends."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
