Initially it had seemed that Anne’s attack of smallpox would be relatively mild. On 12 November, however, the disease grew much worse. She became covered with spots, and Lake found ‘her highness somewhat giddy and very much disordered’. Alarmed for her own safety, she begged Lake not to leave her. She remained ‘very ill’ for some days.87 As more and more people at court were stricken with smallpox, William grew desperate to take his wife home to Holland. Utterly distraught at her impending departure, Mary was also still bothered by fears for her sister’s physical and spiritual well-being. She was unable to say goodbye herself, but charged the Duchess of Monmouth to take care of Anne and to accompany her often to chapel, and she left behind her two letters to be given to Anne when she was better. Mary bade farewell to the rest of her family at Gravesend. An onlooker reported ‘there was a very sad parting between the Princess and her father, but especially the Duchess and her, who wept both with that excess of sorrow’ that everyone present was moved.88 However, within a fortnight of arriving in the Netherlands Mary had recovered from her homesickness and fallen deeply in love with her dour and uncommunicative husband.
During Anne’s illness, her father showed a touching solicitude for her. He ‘visited her every day … and commanded that her sister’s departure should be concealed from her; wherefore there was a feigned message sent every morning from the Princess to her Highness to know how she did’. Only on 4 December was she told that Mary had long since left the country, ‘which she appeared to bear very patiently’. In due course Anne made a full recovery, although there were fears her complexion would be permanently pitted. On 3 December she was allowed to visit her stepmother, who was still resting in her bedchamber after her confinement. Nine days later her little brother, who had been ‘sprightly and like to live’ at birth, died. It is often stated that Anne had unwittingly infected him with smallpox when she saw him for the first time, but this is questionable. It is not even certain that the child would have been present when she went to see Mary Beatrice; all the contemporary reports of his death blame negligence on the part of his nurses. Whatever the cause of his demise, the loss of the little male heir left the Duke and Duchess of York emotionally shattered. ‘The Duke was never known to grieve so much at the death of any of his other children’, while his wife was ‘inconsolable’.89
With the death of Lady Frances, Anne needed a new governess. Lady Henrietta Hyde, wife of Anne’s uncle Laurence Hyde, was chosen. Known as a ‘great adversary of the Catholics’, she was well qualified to protect Anne against Popish influences but her appointment was not popular with other members of the household. On learning who was to replace Lady Frances, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake commented glumly, ‘Seldom comes a better’. In one respect, however, Anne’s life now improved, for she took over the lodgings at St James’s Palace which Mary had vacated.90
On Easter Sunday 1678, Anne took communion for the first time. Much to the annoyance of her father, she had been confirmed some time before with her sister. Knowing that the Duke of York still felt aggrieved about this, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake was mortified when she drained the contents of the chalice on receiving the sacrament. In great embarrassment he recorded in his diary, ‘Her Highness was not (through negligence) instructed how much of the wine to drink, but drank of it twice or thrice, whereat I was much concerned, lest the Duke should have notice of it’.91
In the autumn of 1678 Anne had a chance to see her sister again. Having already lost a baby in April 1678, Mary was believed to be pregnant once more, but was ill and feeling low. In hopes that a sisterly visit would cheer her up, James gave permission for his wife and younger daughter to travel to Holland while he and the King were at Newmarket. The Duchess of York reported delightedly that she understood that Mary was ‘very anxious to see me and her sister; we have as great a wish to see her’.92
On 1 October they set out accompanied by a ‘little company’ of high ranking ladies and courtiers, including the Duchesses of Monmouth, Richmond, and Buckingham, and Anne’s new governess Lady Henrietta Hyde. When informing William that they were on their way, the Duke of York had stressed that they did not want a tremendous fuss to be made of them, as the ‘incognito ladies … desire to be very incognito’. Despite this Prince William of Orange, who was not by nature the most open-handed of men, made a great effort to be hospitable. A member of the his staff was surprised when William spent ‘a pretty penny’ making Noordeinde Palace comfortable for his guests. By 17 October the party was back in England, and in his letter thanking William for his ‘kind usage’ of his womenfolk James reported that the Duchess was ‘so satisfied with her journey and with you as I never saw anybody’. For Anne too, the outing had been a success. She was much impressed by the immaculate cleanliness of the streets in Dutch towns, and observers commented on the affectionate reception she received from her sister. The visit also afforded her the first real opportunity of becoming acquainted with her brother-in-law. In later years there was a strong mutual antipathy between them, and William is supposed to have ‘often said, if he had married her, he should have been the miserablest man upon earth’. However, since he was noted to be in the gayest possible humour throughout her stay in Holland, one can perhaps conclude that he did not take against her instantly.93
Anne and Mary Beatrice returned from this pleasant excursion to find England in the grip of wild panic. A charlatan named Titus Oates had alleged that he had uncovered a Jesuit plot to kill the King and overturn the government. When the magistrate who had recorded Oates’s depositions was found murdered on 17 October, this prompted an outbreak of anti-Catholic hysteria. On 1 November the Earl of Shaftesbury declared in Parliament that a ‘damnable plot’ had been uncovered, and in the ensuing frenzy Catholic peers were disabled from sitting in the House of Lords. The Duke of York was at least exempted from the bill’s provisions, but he was aware that he was ‘far from being secure by having gained that point’.94 In December Catholic priests supposedly guilty of conspiracy were tried and executed, as was James’s former secretary, Edward Coleman, who was discovered to have been in treasonable correspondence with Louis XIV’s confessor.
Fear of Popery now reached such a peak that a sizeable section of the political nation was no longer prepared to tolerate the prospect of a Catholic king. In January 1679 Charles II dissolved Parliament, but a new one was summoned for the spring, and it was clear that when it met, the King would face calls to disinherit his brother. The country became so polarised that political parties emerged, with allegiances divided between those who favoured excluding James from the throne, and those who wished to preserve intact the hereditary succession. The two groupings soon acquired names, originally intended as insults. Those hostile to the Duke of York were known as ‘Whigs’, short for ‘Whiggamore’, a term formerly applied to extremist Presbyterian rebels in Scotland. Their more traditionalist opponents were dubbed ‘Tories’, after the lawless Catholic bandits who rampaged in Ireland. The labels would outlast the Exclusion Crisis, and bitter divisions along these lines would become so entrenched a feature of political life that when Anne came to the throne the two parties became her declared ‘bugbears’.
Because the situation in England was so fraught, the King decided that his brother must be sent out of the country prior to the meeting of the new Parliament in March 1679. Permission