When the Queen Mother arrived in England in early November she encouraged courtiers to come forward with further stories to discredit Anne. Now James professed himself disgusted with the young woman’s ‘whoredom’, and having assured his mother that he ‘had now such evidence of her unworthiness that he should no more think of her’, he gave it out that it was untrue that he had already taken Anne as his wife.8
Despite James’s public denial of the marriage, the King knew otherwise. The Venetian ambassador reported ‘he seems to have taken the lady’s side, telling his brother that having lacked caution at first he could not draw back … at this stage’. Charles had no doubt that the stories sullying Anne’s reputation could be dismissed as ‘a wicked conspiracy set on foot by villains’, and he signified his support for his Lord Chancellor by creating him Baron Hyde on 3 November. Charles informed the Queen Mother that both ‘seemliness and conscience’ required him to uphold a marriage he had no doubt was valid, while to Hyde he declared, ‘the thing was remediless’. James was bluntly instructed to ‘drink as he brewed and lie with her whom he had made his wife’.9
Shaken by his brother’s attitude, James’s resolve to disavow Anne faltered. It did not take much to persuade him that the stories about her had all been slanders for, as a French diplomat shrewdly observed, ‘this young prince is still in love with this girl’. By December, he was stealing out of court to spend nights with Anne at her father’s house. When Anne’s mother began referring to her as ‘Madam the Duchess of York’, it was clear that matters were on the verge of being settled, and the French ambassador noted that people were now resigned to the inevitable.10
On 20 December James officially acknowledged Anne as his wife, and people came to court to kiss her hand. Four days later the Princess Royal was killed by an attack of smallpox, and died expressing remorse for the harsh things she had said of Anne. Even the Queen Mother relented. Before returning to France, she received Anne and James together on 1 January 1661 ‘with the same grace as if she had liked it [the marriage] from the beginning’. That afternoon the baby prince was christened Charles, and the King and Queen Mother stood as godparents.11
Although Anne had now been absorbed into the royal family, inevitably memories lingered of the unpleasantness that had attended her entrance into it. As late as 1679 James’s cousin Sophia of Hanover made a sneering reference to Anne Hyde’s lack of chastity, and she also mocked her low birth. Years later, when a marriage was mooted between the Duke and Duchess of York’s daughter Anne and Sophia’s eldest son Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, Sophia was not very keen on the idea because ‘the Princess Anne on her mother’s side [was] born of a very mediocre family’. James’s Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, was also mindful of such matters. At one point he even flattered himself that the English would prefer him as their sovereign before either of James’s daughters by Anne Hyde, despite the fact the two girls were nearer in blood to the throne than he was. While William was soon disabused of this idea, he was not alone in thinking that Anne Hyde’s progeny were unfit to succeed to the crown. In 1669 the Venetian ambassador to England reported that the Lord Chancellor’s grandchildren were ‘universally denounced as unworthy of the office and of such honour’.12 These objections had no basis in law, but Anne Hyde’s daughters would always face prejudice because they were not pure-bred royalty.
The Duke and Duchess of York had a suite of lodgings in the King’s principal London palace, Whitehall, and they were also allocated St James’s Palace for summer use. With great forbearance the Duchess resisted taking revenge on those courtiers who had defamed her, astonishing everybody by accepting that they had acted ‘out of pure devotion’ to James. Yet while her graciousness in this instance could not be faulted, some people felt that she sought to compensate for her humble origins by taking ‘state on her rather too much’. ‘Her haughtiness … raised her many enemies’ and an Italian diplomat reported complaints of her ‘scorn … ingratitude and her arrogance’.13
The King, however, was not among her critics. He enjoyed her company, for the Duchess was a lively conversationalist, an asset her daughter Anne did not inherit. Samuel Pepys was much impressed by the clever answers the Duchess gave when playing a parlour game, and she was certainly a good deal more amusing than her husband, whose sense of humour was non-existent. She had a forceful personality, but the Duke did not seem to mind her assertiveness: contemporaries were surprised that he appeared ‘more in awe of the Duchess than considering the inequality of their rank could have been imagined’.14
Unfortunately, there were limits to the Duchess’s power over him, for James was constantly unfaithful, despite her being ‘very troublesome to him by her jealousy’. It was said that ‘having laid his conscience to rest by the declaration of his marriage he thought that this generous effort entitled him to give his inconstancy a little scope’. He was renowned for being ‘the most reckless ogler of his day’ and was ‘perpetually in one amour or other without being very nice in his choice’. He had affairs with, among others, Lady Carnegie, Goditha Price, Lady Denham, and Arabella Churchill. In 1662, the Duke’s affair with Lady Carnegie led to a disagreeable rumour that her husband had deliberately infected himself with venereal disease, and thereby ensured his wife passed it on to her lover. The Duchess of York was supposed to have contracted the illness in her turn, and this was blamed for so many of her children proving ‘sickly and infirm’. Even the pains that afflicted her daughter Anne as an adult were sometimes attributed to her having inherited ‘the dregs of a tainted original’.15 In fact, as James had healthy children by his mistress Arabella Churchill, it seems unlikely that he was syphilitic, and that this caused his daughters’ ailments.
The pleasures of the table helped console the Duchess for her husband’s infidelities. One observer recalled that she ‘had a heartier appetite than any other woman in the kingdom … It was an edifying spectacle to watch her Highness eat’. Whereas with every year the Duke of York grew progressively thinner, ‘his poor consort … waxed so fat that it was a marvel to see’. By 1668 an Italian diplomat reported that she was almost unrecognisable because ‘superfluous fat … has so altered the proportions of a very fine figure and a most lovely face’.16 The Duchess’s daughters would both inherit her tendency to plumpness, with Anne in her later years being clinically obese.
The Duke and Duchess of York’s eldest son, whom the King had created Duke of Cambridge, only lived a few months. When he died in May 1661 the Venetian ambassador reported he was ‘lamented by his parents and all the court’, but Pepys commented heartlessly that his death ‘will please everybody; and I hear that the Duke and his lady themselves are not much troubled at it’. The reason for this was that owing to the controversial circumstances of his birth, the child’s legitimacy would always be open to question. It was true that in February 1661, Hyde, the child’s grandfather, had taken the precaution of establishing a formal record both of his daughter’s betrothal to James while in Holland (which, if properly attested, was as binding in law as a church wedding) and their subsequent marriage at Worcester House.17 Nevertheless, problems might still have arisen in future.
Though convenient in some ways, the death of the little Duke of Cambridge did mean that the succession to the crown was not secured beyond the current generation. There was therefore relief when the Duchess of York became pregnant again. However, after she gave birth on 30 April 1662 to a daughter, christened Mary, Pepys reported ‘I find nobody pleased’. Women were not formally barred from inheriting the throne by Salic law, as in France, but it was agreed that a male monarch was infinitely preferable, and even the memory of the glorious reign of Elizabeth I, who had become Queen a century earlier, could not eradicate the idea that women were not really fitted to rule kingdoms. It was not until July 1663, when the Duchess of York produced a boy ‘to the great joy of the court’, that the outlook appeared better.18 The child was named James after his father and in 1664 the King conferred on him the same title as his ill-fated brother.
When Anne was born in February