She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland
and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, Britain’s last
Stuart monarch, and five years later united two of her
realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state,
creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. She had a history
of personal misfortune, overcoming ill health (she
suffered from crippling arthritis; by the time she
became Queen she was a virtual invalid) and living
through seventeen miscarriages, stillbirths, and
premature births in seventeen years. By the end of her
comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had
emerged as a great power; the succession of outstanding
victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke
of Marlborough, had humbled France and laid the
foundations for Britain’s future naval and colonial
supremacy. While the Queen’s military was performing
dazzling exploits on the continent, her own
attention—indeed her realm—rested on a more intimate
conflict: the female friendship on which her happiness
had for decades depended and which became for her a
source of utter torment. At the core of Anne
Somerset’s riveting new biography, published to great
acclaim in England (“Definitive”—London Evening
Standard; “Wonderfully pacy and absorbing”—Daily
Mail), is a portrait of this deeply emotional,
complex bond between two very different women: Queen
Anne—reserved, stolid, shrewd; and Sarah Churchill,
Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Queen’s great
general—beautiful, willful, outspoken, whose acerbic wit
was equally matched by her fearsome
temper. Against
a fraught background—the revolution that deposed Anne’s
father, James II, and brought her to power . . .
religious differences (she was born Protestant—her
parents’ conversion to Catholicism had grave
implications—and she grew up so suspicious of the Roman
church that she considered its doctrines “wicked and
dangerous”) . . . violently partisan politics (Whigs
versus Tories) . . . a war with France that lasted for
almost her entire reign . . . the constant threat of
foreign invasion and civil war—the much-admired
historian, author of Elizabeth I
(“Exhilarating”—The Spectator; “Ample,
stylish, eloquent”—The Washington Post Book World),
tells the extraordinary story of how Sarah goaded
and provoked the Queen beyond endurance, and, after the
withdrawal of Anne’s favor, how her replacement, Sarah’s
cousin, the feline Abigail Masham, became the ubiquitous
royal confidante and, so Sarah whispered to growing
scandal, the object of the Queen's sexual
infatuation. To write this remarkably rich and
passionate biography, Somerset, winner of the Elizabeth
Longford Prize for Historical Biography, has made use of
royal archives, parliamentary records, personal
correspondence and previously unpublished material.
Queen Anne is history on a large scale—a
revelation of a centuries-overlooked monarch.
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