It was not just her children’s health that worried Anne over the summer of 1686, for Sarah herself was less robust than usual, suffering from a nasty cold and ‘dismal thoughts’. Having extracted a promise that she would write to her daily, Anne became greatly alarmed when twenty-four hours went by without her receiving a letter. ‘For God’s sake if anything does ail you, find some way to let me know’, she begged her urgently, ‘for ’tis very uneasy to me to be from you and not to hear something of you every day’. It soon emerged that one reason why Sarah was feeling so unwell was that she was expecting another child. After excusing Sarah from waiting on her so frequently during her pregnancy, Anne was annoyed when she accepted an invitation to visit Lady Sunderland in Northamptonshire. She condemned Lady Sunderland’s thoughtlessness in suggesting this ‘great journey … which I must needs say according to my small understanding was a very strange undertaking for one in your condition’.41 In January 1687 Sarah gave birth to a much-desired son, but within six months another pregnancy again prevented her from being in attendance as often as the Princess would have liked.
In view of Anne’s unconditional devotion to Sarah, it was unfortunate that her sister Mary had a less enthusiastic attitude towards her. The Princess was decidedly ruffled when in late 1686 Mary suggested not just that Sarah was worryingly irreligious, but that it was impossible to trust her husband, on account of his being in such high favour with the King.
Anne herself had earlier felt bothered by the perfunctory way that Sarah practised her faith. Her friend’s hostility to Catholicism could not be faulted, for she professed herself disgusted by what she termed its ‘cheats and nonsense’, but her attachment to the Anglican Church was not stronger on that account. She was apt to mock individuals such as Lady Clarendon who ‘made a great rout with prayers’, and derided the hypocrisy of those who were ostentatious in their religious observance but struck her as deficient in the Christian virtues. Sarah’s irregular attendance at divine service had so perturbed Anne that when her friend apologised for cutting a letter short in order to go to church, the Princess wrote back that while she would have welcomed a longer letter, on this occasion ‘I can’t complain, for indeed I think you do not go to that place so often as you should do’. However, while she believed herself entitled to make such comments, she reacted fiercely to Mary’s strictures on the Churchills.42
In December 1686 she wrote to her sister wanting to know who had ‘taken such pains to give you so ill a character of Lady Churchill’. She insisted ‘I don’t say this that I take it at all ill … but I think myself obliged to vindicate my friend’. Firmly, she continued ‘I believe there is nobody in the world has better notions of religion than she has’, even if Sarah did ‘not keep such a bustle with religion’ as others who paraded their piety. Lady Churchill not only had impeccable ‘moral principles’, but possessed ‘a true sense of the doctrine of our Church, and abhors all the principles of the Church of Rome’. As for her husband, he was certainly ‘a very faithful servant to the King, and … the King is very kind to him’. Yet while he would doubtless obey his master ‘in all things that are consistent with religion … rather than change that, I dare say, he will lose all his places and all he has’.43 After receiving this spirited defence Mary did not raise the subject again, but her misgivings were not entirely allayed.
Despite the troubling political situation, at the outset of 1687 the Princess of Denmark had many reasons to be optimistic. Her father still lacked a male heir, so any damage effected by him was likely to be undone in the future. The waters of Tunbridge had once again had the desired result and she was several months into another pregnancy. Naturally she would have hoped that this time she would produce a son, but in the meantime she could take delight in her two daughters. The eldest one was now a toddler, ‘somewhat unhealthy, but most dearly beloved of the Princess’. On 10 January Anne wrote to Mary in Holland ‘to thank you for the plaything you sent my girl. It is the prettiest thing I ever saw, and too good for her yet, so I keep it locked up and only let her look on it when she comes to see me. She is the most delighted with it in the world and in her language gives you abundance of thanks. It might look ridiculous in me to tell you how much court she makes to your picture without being bid, and may sound like a lie, and therefore I won’t say anything more of her, but that I will make it my endeavour always to make her a very dutiful niece’.44
Then a series of catastrophes happened in quick succession. After being ‘indisposed … two days’, on 21 January Anne lost the child she was expecting. Her pregnancy had been far enough advanced for the foetus to be identified as a male child. One report believed the Princess’s miscarriage had been precipitated by ‘a jolt in her coach’, but Anne herself attributed it to her having unwisely performed an energetic French dance with ‘a great deal of jumping in it’. Physically she made a swift recovery, but within days a still worse tragedy befell her, for her younger daughter caught smallpox. On 31 January Anne wrote to Mary ‘in so great trouble for my poor child’ that she could not focus on recent worrying political developments. ‘I must go again to my poor child presently, for I am much more uneasy to be from her’, she told Mary distractedly. Despite Anne’s best efforts, the child could not be saved, and by the time she died on 2 February her elder sister Mary had caught the disease too. For a time the little girl appeared to be withstanding the illness, but on 8 February she too succumbed. When autopsies were carried out on the tiny corpses, it was found that little Mary had already been suffering from consumption and was unlikely to have lived long in any case, but Anne Sophia had been in sound health.45
Next, George caught smallpox, and seemed destined to follow his daughters to the grave. In the end he did not die, but the grim sequence of disasters that had befallen the couple prostrated them both. On 18 February 1687 Lady Rachel Russell reported, ‘The good Princess has taken her chastisement heavily; the first relief of that sorrow proceeded from the threatening of a greater, the Prince being ill. I never heard any relation more moving than that of seeing them together. Sometimes they wept, sometimes they mourned … then sat silent, hand in hand; he sick in his bed and she the carefullest nurse to him that can be imagined’. George’s health was permanently impaired by his illness and after this he suffered from severe asthma and congested lungs. In April an observer commented ‘I like not the unwholesomeness of his looks’ and many people prophesied that before long Anne would be a widow. The French ambassador noted that in that event, the King would want to marry her to a Catholic.46
Although Anne was spared this, the pain of her losses was overwhelming, despite such terrible bereavements being relatively common in the seventeenth century. The infant and child mortality rate was appallingly high for all social classes, with an estimated one in three children dying before their fifth birthdays. The fate suffered by so many of Anne’s siblings illustrates just how precarious life was at the time. It could be argued that because Anne had not breastfed either of her children, and had been absent from them for quite long periods of their short lives, she would not have formed an exceptionally close bond with her daughters, making their deaths easier to bear. To assume this, however, would be rash, for though the anguish suffered by well-born women at the loss of their children is generally undocumented, this cannot be taken to mean that it did not exist. In France a royal contemporary of Anne’s, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans certainly felt distraught following the death of her eldest child in 1676, which left her feeling ‘as though her heart had been plucked from her body’.47
Anne’s father and stepmother did their best to console her, treating her with ‘great tenderness’. The French ambassador reported that Mary Beatrice ‘has been always with the Princess as if she was her daughter’, but in view of Anne’s dislike of the Queen, these attentions can only have been unwelcome. The Princess’s religion afforded her better comfort, for as a believer she was able to tell herself her children had departed to a better place. Excessive mourning for a loved one could be interpreted as questioning