When the English Parliament assembled, James’s absence did not appear to have made them more tractable. The King indicated that he was willing ‘to pare the nails’ of a Popish successor by giving Parliament the right to approve appointments to the Privy Council and to name judges if the monarch was a Catholic. However he insisted he would never allow them ‘to impeach the right of succession’ or interfere with ‘the descent of the crown in the true line’.96 These concessions were rejected and an Exclusion Bill was introduced which passed its second reading in the Commons on 21 May. Six days later the King once again dissolved Parliament.
Charles believed that as yet it would be unwise to permit his brother to return to England, but in August he agreed to James’s request that his daughters Anne and Isabella could visit, ‘to help me bear my banishment with somewhat more patience’. Every precaution was taken to ensure that the two girls were not seduced into Popery while abroad. They were forbidden to visit Catholic churches and monasteries, and two Anglican chaplains who travelled with them read daily prayers in a chapel set aside for their use. Even the most limited contact with the outward manifestations of Catholicism filled Anne with distaste, and she professed herself shocked by glimpsing ‘images … in every shop and corner of the street. The more I see of those fooleries, and the more I hear of that religion, the more I dislike it’.97
Anne and Isabella set out for Brussels on 20 August, but their father was not there to greet them. Two days after their departure Charles II had fallen seriously ill, and James had rushed back to England to be at his brother’s bedside. Anne and her younger sister remained in Brussels with the Duchess, and the letters Anne sent to Frances Apsley and her mother show that she was worried about her father’s difficulties. When Lady Apsley suggested that all the family would soon be permitted to return, she wrote ‘I wish it were so indeed’ but dismissed it as unlikely because now that the King was better, James was being sent back to Brussels. However, she refused to be discouraged, ‘for I have a good heart, thank God, or else it would have been down long ago’. She admitted too, that she was quite enjoying some aspects of life abroad. She was pleased with her accommodation in the Hotel des Hornes, which was ‘better than I expected, and so is all this place’. Brussels was ‘a great and fine town’ and ‘all the people here are very civil, and except you be otherways to them, they will be so to you … Though the streets are not so clean as they are in Holland, yet they are not so dirty as ours … They only have odd kinds of smells’. She had also been impressed when taken to ‘see a ball at the court incognito, which I liked very well’. The fireworks, dancing, and celebrations in honour of the King of Spain’s marriage to her cousin Marie Louise d’Orléans – with whom Anne had shared a nursery in France – ‘far surpassed my expectations’, and the ‘lemonade, cinnamon water and chocolate sweetmeats, all very good’, also met with her approval.98
James was back in Brussels by the end of September. Since Anne and Isabella were scheduled to return to England after paying a brief visit to William and Mary, he decided to accompany them to The Hague, for ‘I would be glad to be with them as long as I could’. While he and the Duchess were there, a message arrived from Charles agreeing that James could now base himself in Scotland. On 8 October 1679 the Duke and Duchess of York left Holland with Anne and Isabella, fortunately unaware that they would never see William and Mary again. Having dropped off their two daughters in London, they travelled overland to Scotland, arriving in Edinburgh on 24 November. Three months later, they were permitted to return to England, but when Parliament met again in the autumn of 1680, the King decided that James must leave the country once more. On 20 October the Duke and Duchess were forced to set out for Scotland, this time by sea.
Parliament opened on 21 October and at once the Commons drafted a new Exclusion Bill, providing for James to be barred from the throne and perpetually banished. The implications were serious for Mary and Anne: as James put it, if the measure became law it ‘would not only affect himself, but his children too’ since those who had voted for it ‘would never think themselves secure under the government of those whose father they have excluded’. Some of the Whigs, possibly including their leader the Earl of Shaftesbury, would have liked Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to become king after his father. Whereas the first Exclusion Bill had expressly stated that on Charles’s death the crown should devolve upon the ‘next lawful heir’ who was Protestant – meaning Mary – the bill now introduced left the matter vague. After being modified in committee it once again specified that after James had been bypassed, the line of succession would carry on unaltered, but from Mary and Anne’s point of view the earlier ambiguity on this point was an ominous development.99 As it was, the bill did not become law, for after passing the House of Commons without a division, it was thrown out by the Lords. In January the King dissolved Parliament and announced that a new one would meet in Oxford in the spring.
While the Duke of York was in Scotland, a suitor appeared on the scene for the Lady Anne. This was Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, who like Anne was a great grandchild of King James I. He was the son of the Duke of Hanover and his wife Sophia, the youngest daughter of Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia. By the spring of 1680 he was already being ‘much talked of for a husband for Lady Anne’, and in many ways he seemed an ideal choice, as he was ‘a Protestant, very young, gallant and handsome and indifferent rich’. One English diplomat described it as the ‘more fit match for her of any prince I know in Christendom’.100
Sophia’s brother, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, lived in England, and in January 1680 he had set things in motion by writing to tell his sister that he had been approached about a marriage between George and Anne. ‘All the realm would like it, so think about it’, he urged her. Sophia and her husband were slightly sceptical that the ‘fine things’ her brother promised of the marriage would actually materialise, but they were ready to give it serious consideration. Later that year Prince George went on a European tour, and arrived in England on 6 December. The King was very welcoming, providing him with apartments at Whitehall. The next day Prince George was introduced to Anne, and ‘saluted her by kissing her with the consent of the King’. Since the Prince did not leave the country until 11 March 1681, he almost certainly saw Anne on other occasions, but with James absent and the monarchy in crisis there could be no question of concluding anything. Even after George Ludwig’s departure, however, the idea of a union was by no means abandoned, and an Italian diplomat stationed in England believed that Anne had fallen in love with the Prince.101
On 21 March 1681 Parliament met at Oxford. To avoid a complete rupture, the King offered a series of ‘expedients’ designed to safeguard the kingdom if his brother inherited the crown. James would become King in name, but would be declared unfit to rule. A regency would be set up to govern the country, with William and Mary installed as joint protectors of the realm. Despite bearing the title of King, James would be banished from his own dominions during his lifetime. Even these far-reaching proposals failed to satisfy the Commons. Instead they introduced another Bill of Exclusion, and disquietingly it once again failed to name a successor.102 Charles was not prepared to accept this, and without warning dissolved Parliament a week after it had opened. The failure to reach a settlement, thought by some to presage disaster, marked the start of a royal recovery.
Bolstered by skilful financial management and payments from Louis XIV, with whom he had negotiated a secret agreement, Charles was able to survive without summoning another Parliament. By late May a royal adviser reported that ‘his majesty’s position has improved considerably since the dissolution’,103 but the King did not yet feel sufficiently confident to bring his brother back to England. Instead he agreed that Anne could join her father. In March, her little sister Isabella had died, leaving both her parents desolate. Being reunited with Anne would, it was hoped, afford some consolation.
Anne