"I am her majesty's subject": Prince George of Denmark and the transformation of the English male consort.

Beem, Charles

Une des figures historiques anglaises les plus enigmatiques a la fin du regne des Stuart est le prince George du Danemark (1653-1708), l'epoux de la reine Anne (1702-1714). A la difference de Philippe d'Espagne, l'epoux de Marie I (1553-1558) qui prit sa place a ses cotes en tant que consort et a Guillaume d'Orange, plus tard Guillaume III, l'epoux de Marie II (1689-1694) qui regna en propre, George du Danemark n'atteignit jamais le statut de roi. Sa relegation a une position de subalterne a son epouse fut une contradiction flagrante a la theorie sociale de l'epoque. Pourtant, on ne trouve nulle part une explication de ce phenomene dans la documentation d'etudes historiques concernant la Revolution de 1688/1689 et l'adoption de l'Acte d'etablissement de 1702.

One of the most enigmatic personalities of the late Stuart era in England was Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne (1702-1714). During the reigns of James II (1685-1688), his father-in-law, and William III (1689-1702), his brother-in-law, George participated in military campaigns, attended the Privy Council, and was a regular presence in the House Lords, but left no discernible historical impression of himself in these capacities. Instead, George played the role of political proxy for his wife, who was prohibited from formal participation in the male dominant public spaces of government and war because of her sex, despite her place in the Stuart succession. Once Anne became queen, with full access to male gendered political power, George failed to share his wife's social or political status as a king consort, as his wife had shared his status as princess of Denmark before her accession, and as the wives of kings shared their husband's royal status as queen consorts. Anne was a queen without a king, even though she had a spouse, who played the public but informal role of a loyal and obedient subject.

Finding a suitable and acceptable public role for a regnant queen's husband, in fact, was a rather prickly socio-political byproduct of early modern English constitutional and political development. (1) Quite unlike Philip of Spain, the husband of Mary I (1553-1558), who enjoyed the status of king consort, and William of Orange, later William III, who reigned in his own right as the husband of Mary II (1689-1694), George of Denmark failed to become a king of England. While his acquiescence to a status subordinate to his wife cut against the grain of contemporary notions of masculinity, it constituted an intriguing corollary to the evolution of the autonomous sovereignty of English regnant queenship.

Amid the historical attention paid to the Revolution of 1688/89 and the Act of Settlement of 1701, an explanation for the constitutional demise of the male consort has never emerged. (2) The interpretation offered here suggests that George's widely heralded insignificance had an impact on these historical processes. (3) The unconventional negotiations of power governing Anne and George's marriage became part of the permanent fabric of the Revolution settlement, as the constitution was modified to discard the male consort entirely. George himself made no protest against his inferior status. Nevertheless, Anne attempted to mitigate George's social and political emasculation by a number of strategies intended to bolster her reputation as a good wife and his as an important man of affairs.

The interpretation of George and Anne's marriage offered here continues the historical rehabilitation of Anne's political character that has challenged the assertions of Whig historiography for much of the twentieth century. (4) Anne's revamped historical persona as a more independent and active historical agent comes into even sharper focus when it is examined in the context of her marriage. However, locating substantive historical commentary on George's life and career is problematic; few individuals, including his wife, bothered to go on record to provide any in-depth analysis of his performances as privy councilor, military leader, or member of the House of Lords. Documentary and narrative sources mentioning George of Denmark present the odd spectacle of a seemingly ubiquitous presence in late Stuart political society who left little imprint of his personality upon his contemporaries.

I. The History of Female Rule in England

George's failure to become king was a unique outcome concerning the gendered problems surrounding marriage to a regnant queen. While the unmarried Elizabeth I remains the archetype English female ruler, in practice all other regnant queens married, as kings did, for the primary purpose of perpetuating a hereditary succession. (5) Even though regnant queens carried the burden of dynastic reproduction, they also possessed and executed the office of king. This they performed within the structures of a patriarchal political society, which accorded them status as honorary males for the purposes of exercising male gendered political power. (6) The wide-ranging responsibilities of regnant queens such as Mary I (1553-1558) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603) understandably caused gendered confusion; while they wielded kingly power, their subjects still expected them to do so as women, behaving within the limits of socially prescribed forms of acceptable female behavior. (7)

Because they inherited the royal office and performed the office of king, the term female king is perhaps more descriptive of the actual political role regnant queens performed. The gendered power of the English language, however, has long barred the way to understanding female rule in the context of kingship. (8) To Queen Anne's contemporaries, as to us today, the terms king and queen were gender specific kings were men, and queens were women, each usually performing complementary but distinct social and political functions determined by their gender. That is, they played respective roles contemporary culture prescribed for men and women.

Anne's immediate predecessors, the joint monarchs William III (1689-1702) and Mary II (1689-1694), provided a compelling example of regal role-playing that allowed kingship and queenship to mirror the patriarchal construction of marriage as expounded by a number of seventeenth-century commentators, who catapulted medieval patriarchal ideologies into the early modern era. (9) The most famous of these, Robert Filmer, in Patriarcha, drew the analogy between the state and the family, vesting kings/husbands, as "natural" heads, with the highest authority in the family/commonwealth, while consigning wives, as femme coverts, to a subordinate status. (10) At the same time, political theorist John Locke, great opponent of Filmer's views, laboured to incorporate patriarchal ideology into his theories of the contractual nature of kingship, which helped form the basis for the constitutional theory of parliamentary sovereignty: the right of the estates to alter the succession when political and/or religious conditions deemed it neccessary. (11) Both of these competing ideologies found expression within the ambiguous nature of the Revolution's succession settlement, as Whig contemporaries comprehended William as a de facto parliamentary king, while moderate Tories viewed William as a de jure monarch, based upon William's matrimonial relationship to the hereditary rights of his wife Mary. (12) Regardless of these varying constitutional interpretations, William and Mary's public roles as king/husband and queen/wife represented to contemporaries a conventional allocation of conjugal authority within the context of marriage.

Amid the debates concerning the Revolution's settlement of the crown, patriarchal social and political theory continued to stress the pervasive notion that women lacked the necessary attributes of intellect, reason, physical courage, and leadership ability, which still-persuasive biblical injunctions and commentaries in Roman law continued to justify. (13) According to this logic, if a woman inherited a position of authority, her husband would perform that role for her, as William was widely seen to have done for Mary.

Not surprisingly, England's first female rulers, the sixteenth-century Tudor queens Mary I and Elizabeth I, assumed power as single women. Although Parliament had successively bastardized both of Henry VIII's daughters in accordance with his wishes, both sisters were reinstated by Henry in the line of succession in 1543, following their younger brother Edward. The Third Act of Succession placed conditions upon their succession rights, which betrayed a decided lack of consensus concerning the political status of their husbands should they succeed to the throne. (14) In any event, neither Mary nor Elizabeth married during the minority reign of their half-brother Edward VI (1547-1553). (15) Upon Edward's untimely death, Mary I ascended the throne in July 1553 after defeating the plot to set her aside and crown her cousin, Lady Jane Grey, in her place.

Because she assumed the throne in her own right as a single woman, contemporaries recognized that Mary's possession of the crown had freed her from all common-law restraints placed upon women, which fully empowered her to execute the office of king. (16) Medieval political theory accommodated this recognition with little difficulty, as embodied in the emergent concept of the king's two bodies, which recognized an eternal, corporate, and, by the sixteenth century, genderless "body politic," which combined with the flesh-and-blood "body natural" of the monarch. (17) Ideally, the monarch's body natural was that of a competent adult male, but Tudor political society recognized Mary's unmarried womanhood as a legitimate manifestation of a king's body natural, as it previously had for her underage brother Edward VI. (18)

When Mary subsequently decided to marry her cousin, Prince Philip of Spain, political theory was not clear on whether Mary would continue to possess the "body politic" of kingship following her marriage, or whether this would pass to Philip. (19) While Mary browbeat her government into accepting her choice of an ultimately unpopular and disastrous foreign husband, recent scholarship has suggested she was reluctant to part with the full royal prerogative she had possessed since her accession. (20) The solution to this dilemma was a statutory pronouncement on the political nature of female rule, designed to protect the regal office from encroachments based on English common law and wider European marriage principles, or the ius gentium (the law of nations), which might have provided a legitimate basis for Philip to usurp the prerogatives of the English crown.

This statute, the Act Concerning Regal Power (1554), provided a constitutional definition of Mary's queenship firmly within the meaning of English kingship, while the marriage treaty itself, also enacted as statute, reserved sovereignty to Mary alone, who continued to enjoy the exercise of kingship in the recognized public role of queen. (21) In contrast, the marriage treaty consigned Philip to the private, domestic arena of the bedchamber to make his influence felt as king, as he endured a form of kingship that outwardly conformed to male dominant political theory but was in actuality a ceremonial form of male consortship mirroring the relationship between kings and queens consort.

Nevertheless, the negotiators on both sides had recognized the importance of preserving Philip's social status as a husband within the marriage, which is why he enjoyed the status of king, while the English, fearful for Mary's ability to retain her prerogatives within the bonds of marriage, did their best to politically castrate Philip's kingship, a situation he was never able to come to terms with. (22) The end result of this unconventional marriage was the statutory recognition of Mary's queenship as a form of female kingship, which allowed her to continue to exercise male gendered political power after her marriage, at the expense of a politically and socially unstable and ill-defined male consort.

Mary and Philip's marriage treaty served as the blueprint for the protracted set of negotiations for marriage between Mary's successor, Elizabeth I, and the French princes Henri, Duke of Anjou, and Francis, Duke of Alencon, over the course of the 1570s. (23) During her own long reign, Elizabeth I ultimately resisted marriage, making the unresolved question of female sovereignty within the bounds of marriage a moot subject. (24) But Elizabeth traded one problem for another, as she endured decades of pressure from councillors and parliaments alike concerning the succession. While Elizabeth decisively demonstrated a woman's ability to possess the estate and perform the office of king, she did so as a single woman, much to the extreme discomfort of her contemporaries, who desired that the Queen should marry and bear heirs.

II. The Revolution Settlement

The sixteenth-century precedents regarding female rule in England, however, remained in abeyance until Anne's reign. In fact, they seemingly disappeared during the Revolution of 1688/89, the next occasion in English history when a woman was a hereditary claimant to the crown. This time, however, the woman was married.

Lacking legitimate heirs of his own, Charles II (1660-85) contracted marriages for the daughters of his brother and heir, James, Duke of York, who stood second and third in line to the English and Scottish thrones. Despite his own crypto-Catholic leanings and the more blatant ones of his brother, Charles II found it politically expedient to find Protestant princes for his nieces to marry. In 1677, Charles married his elder niece Mary to her cousin William of Orange, himself a scion of the house of Stuart. (25) William, as a Dutch Stadtholder, was a powerful Continental prince, both capable and ambitious, whose supreme mission in life was to defeat the imperial pretensions of the Catholic leviathan, Louis XIV of France. (26) Following his marriage, William considered himself possessed of a vested interest in the English succession, which he made explicit in his declaration of 1688, stating, "And since our dearest and most entirely beloved consort the Princess, and likewise ourselves, have so great an interest in this matter and such a right, as all the world knows, to the succession of the crown." (27)

Five years after Mary's match, Charles II arranged the marriage of his younger niece Anne to another Continental Protestant prince, George of Denmark. (28) While elder sister Mary had gone to reside in Holland with William and perform the role of a dutiful and supportive political spouse, George of Denmark, far removed from the Danish succession, came to live in England to play exactly the same role for Anne. It took some time for contemporaries to realize this; the Marquess of Ormonde remarked that, "it is thought the Prince will make haste to be possessed of so good a fortune." (29) William of Orange also initially feared that George might use his position as Anne's husband to build himself an independent power base and challenge William's own dynastic interests in England. (30) It soon became evident, however, that George of Denmark was not in a hurry to do anything.

With the death of Charles II in 1685 and the accession of James II, a known Catholic, the Princess of Orange became heiress presumptive. While Mary privately considered that her husband would share her throne with her, there was a decided lack of political discussion, much less consensus, concerning William's matrimonial relationship to his wife's political inheritance. (31) Mary's position as a married female heiress was unprecedented since Norman times. Her marriage contract did not include any clauses concerning her husband's relationship to her political inheritance, nor did Parliament presume to address the matter in Charles II's final years or during James II's brief reign (1685-1688). (32)

William of Orange's attitude toward his wife's succession rights was made perfectly clear by the unexpected birth of a male heir, in the summer of 1688, to James II and his second wife, Mary of Modena. In England, Anne pursued a concerted campaign to discredit the legitimacy of the birth, a debut on the political stage that revealed her singular dynastic interests. (33) By December 1688, when James vacated his throne and fled to France, his daughters Mary and Anne had already abandoned his cause. William, in fact, was exercising de facto regal power at that moment in time, having been invited over from Holland to help mend the constitution his father-in-law's Catholic and autocratic tendencies had threatened. Similar to the 1660 antecedents of the Stuart restoration, a parliament-like assemblage called the Convention was convened to decide on a number of constitutional propositions, including the occupancy of the crown. (34)

Among the primary facets of the Convention's political debates were the succession rights of the Princesses of Orange and Denmark. (35) Since the Convention decided to disinherit James II's infant son, the next hereditary heir was his elder daughter Mary. The Convention, fully realizing that their actions lay completely outside the bounds of the constitution, were eager to tie their settlement to previous constitutional practice, which to some meant recognizing Mary as the legitimate hereditary claimant. Mary, however, though a capable and educated woman, would not hear of assuming the crown in her own right without her husband sharing it with her, and she played the part of a loyal and submissive wife. (36) In a letter to the Earl of Danby, Mary considered that her social responsibilities as wife outweighed her political position as next heir: as Danby described it, "She was the Prince's wife, and would never be other than what she should be in conjunction with him, and that she would take it extremely unkindly, if any, under a pretence of care for her, would set up a divided interest between her and the Prince." (37)

Privately, William had already informed the leading members of the Convention Parliament that unless he was made king he would return to Holland. On 13 February 1689, the Convention formally invited William and Mary to reign as joint monarchs, with the regal power reserved for William alone. (38) Mary, though a reigning monarch, was nothing more than a glorified consort, exercising a queenly historical agency in accordance with patriarchal social theory and her own personal inclinations. Like previous queen consorts such as Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr, Mary served as regent during William's absences on the Continent. But when they were together in England, William and Mary embodied conventionally patriarchal expectations of the relations of power between king and queen, as she recorded in her journal: "And my opinion having ever been that women should not meddle in government." (39) An extremely popular queen, Mary created a public image of wifely devotion and deference that allowed her to soften William's much more abrasive and aloof manner of kingship. (40)

While Mary successfully projected queenly serenity, her place in political theory was another matter. On the surface, the settlement of the crown appeared to be a vindication of a symbiotic relationship between marriage rights and inherited political power, as The Declaration of Right ignored the Act Concerning Regal Power and the precedent of Mary I's marriage treaty. In fact, because the Declaration was noticeably vague concerning its hereditary logic, it was capable of wide-ranging interpretation. In 1689, in fact, William's assumption of the crown was analogous to both common-law principles as well as the ius gentium. Gilbert Burnet, whom William later made Bishop of Salisbury, wrote a particularly patriarchal reading of William's rights: "If the next [heir] is a femme covert, then by the law of nations, which creates a communication of all the rights of the wife to the husband, this is likewise communicated, so that here we may have still a lawful and rightful king." (41)

Other contemporaries could incorporate theories of hereditary and contract kingship all within one justification. One contemporary pamphlet, while acknowledging Parliament's undoubted right to reorder the succession, also argued along patriarchal lines that, although Mary was the hereditary heir, since William and Mary could not share sovereignty, William was the "natural" choice to wield the regal power. (42) Inevitably, contemporary understandings of the constitutional nature of William and Mary's accession also divided along party lines. While Whigs could celebrate the contractual nature of William and Mary's elevation to the crown, a number of Tortes found it much easier to stomach an image of William as the recipient of a "crown matrimonial," wielding regal power in right of his wife, the rightful hereditary heir, according to common-law principles. (43) When it came to defining the status of William and Mary's successor, however, the sixteenth-century precedents re-emerged.

III. "I Am Her Majesty's Subject"

The Prince and Princess of Denmark were personally present in London during the major events of the Revolution of 1688/89, although George of Denmark was not a member of the Convention. (44) Using John Churchill as her intermediary, Anne reluctantly accepted her place in the succession as William and Mary's heir, as enunciated in the Declaration of Right, later enacted as statute as the Bill of Rights. The Revolution was an ideal historical moment for George of Denmark to take advantage of his social position as Anne's husband to advance his political career and press for a political definition of his matrimonial rights, as the door to the construction of new political theory was temporarily open for debate.

George of Denmark, however, did not have an independent political career, nor did he appear to want one. In recognizing Anne as William and Mary's heir, The Declaration of Right considered Anne politically to be a single woman. While forceful and ambitious historical agents such as Philip of Spain and William of Orange had required statutory definition of the social relationship to their wife's political inheritance, George of Denmark was politically invisible during the debates that constructed the Revolution settlement. Neither Anne nor George petitioned the Convention Parliament for recognition of George's future political status, as Anne gave her approval to a settlement that consigned her husband to political oblivion. George's acquiescence to his political emasculation was completely in keeping with his character and essential to the power dynamics of his marriage.

The most famous quip about George of Denmark came from the lips of the congenial and fun-loving Charles II, who remarked "I have tried Prince George sober, and I have tried him drunk; and, drunk or sober, there is nothing in him." (45) From the moment of his arrival in England, George of Denmark showed no sign of any inclination to use his social position as a springboard for a political career. Indeed, soon after his marriage, George lamented "We talk here of going to tea, of going to Winchester, and everything else except sitting still all summer, which was the height of my ambition. God send me a quiet life somewhere." (46)

George suffered from a number of problems. Contemporaries tend to agree that George was shy. William Blathwyth, who had been dispatched to Denmark to fetch the prince to England in 1683, wrote to the Earl of Conway that "he appeared not only a man of courage, but a quiet man, which is a good thing in a young man." (47) Diarist John Evelyn concurred: "a young man of few words, spake French ill, seemed somewhat heavy, but reported valiant." (48)

George's shyness was compounded by his linguistic limitations. He never overcame his thick Danish accent, causing contemporaries to discount his intelligence. (49) While he came to England with a reputation for military valour, having saved his brother, the Danish king, during a cavalry charge against the Dutch in 1677, George never again displayed any capacity for leadership, a serious drawback for any individual wishing for a career in either politics or the military. (50) George was also chronically asthmatic, a condition that only seemed to worsen over the course of his twenty-five years of residence in England. Reputed to be a voracious eater, George also developed a popular reputation as a heavy drinker. One contemporary, John Macky, who claimed to have been a spy for William III, Anne, and George I, summed up the conventional image of George of Denmark: "he is very fat, loves news, the bottle, and the Queen." (51) Another contemporary, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, who knew him well, commented that "The Prince used to employ himself agreeably all day either in standing upon a stairhead or looking out a window, making malicious remarks upon the passerby," concluding that "Anne grew uneasy at the figure his highness cut in that princely amusement." (52)

While George may have desired to amuse himself away from the hustle and bustle of politics, his status as the husband of a royal heiress, mindful of the potential of her own position, made this impossible. (53) While possession of the crown itself washed away all former social and political disabilities, such as being a woman, Anne, despite her place in the succession, was still subject to the dictates of a political society that only allowed men to participate formally. (54) As a female heiress presumptive, Anne had to formulate a political following outside the formal structures of politics and government. Her position as William and Mary's heir was completely in keeping with contemporary social convention, as Burnet explained: "She [Anne] was not made acquainted with public affairs; she was not encouraged to recommend any to posts of trust or advantage; nor had the ministry orders to inform her how matters went, nor to oblige those around her; only pains had been taken to please the Earl of Marlborough." (55)

So George participated for Anne as her political proxy, while Anne created her own popular reputation according to contemporary gender expectations for women, as an obedient and dutiful wife, the picture of Filmerian domestic harmony within the private sphere of the home. (56) This state of affairs often served Anne's political purposes nicely; even before William's invasion, Anne occasionally found it convenient to retreat to the role of a conventional woman uninformed about politics. When her uncle, the Earl of Clarendon, tried to ply her for information on William's 1688 invasion, Anne dryly remarked that "I know nothing except what the prince tells me he heard the King say." (57) Anne's chief confidante in wifely politicking, shrouded by the public image of domestic bliss, was Sarah Churchill, perhaps the most politically-minded woman of the late Stuart and Augustan eras. In turn, Sarah's husband John, later Earl, then, Duke of Marlborough, served as Anne's chief political lieutenant in Parliament. The Marlboroughs and the Denmarks were an inseparable foursome socially, known as the "cockpit circle" for the suite of apartments Anne and George occupied in Whitehall Palace. But of the two men, only Marlborough used his social connections to Anne as a springboard for a political and military career.

In reality, Anne was the dominant partner in the marriage. George's complete subjugation to his wife's political interests was undoubtedly the secret to their long and reputedly happy marriage. (58) While social convention viewed the husband as the natural "head" of the family, contemporaries recognized that women occasionally held de facto control over their husbands. (59) According to a tract written later in the eighteenth century, "The secrets of matrimony, like those of freemasonry, are to be kept as such for this very good reason, because it is a shame to discover them." (60) According to the different categories of husbands described in this work, George fell into the category of "whissler," "a person entirely devoted to the service of his wife, and nothing but affairs of the greatest moment can force him from her presence." (61) Quite unlike the noted philanderers Charles II, James II, and William III, George of Denmark remained sexually faithful to Anne throughout their marriage. (62) George's reputation as a faithful husband, in addition to his congeniality and reputation for military valor, may well explain why his masculinity never came under serious attack by his contemporaries. (63) In addition, George's ability to play the role of political proxy for his wife allowed him to enjoy a public reputation as an important man of affairs, regardless of his lack of talent and inclination.

From the moment of his arrival in England in 1683, George was required to perform on the public stage of politics and government. Soon after his marriage he toured military installations with Charles II and Samuel Pepys, and was installed as a garter knight, an honour meant to reflect upon his wife's status as an heiress presumptive. (64) During the reign of his father-in-law, James II, George was given a military regiment and was called to the Privy Council. (65) George did not distinguish himself in either capacity. James II in fact despised George. While the English public at large considered George to be an important man of affairs, those that knew him personally were well aware of his political and military incompetence. Anne's uncle, Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, provided an incisive glimpse of James II's regard for his son-in-law from November 1688, as his crumbling army made its way to Salisbury. The king was attended by his son-in-law Prince George and the Duke of Ormond. Both were among the conspirators, and would have accompanied Churchill, had he not, in consequence of what had passed at the council of war, thought it expedient to take his departure suddenly. The impenetrable stupidity of Prince George served his turn on this occasion better than cunning would have done. It was his habit, when any news was told him, to exclaim in French, "est Il possible?" This catchword now was of great use to him. "Est Il possible?" he cried, when he was made to understand that Churchill and Grafton were missing. (66)

That evening, George and Ormonde joined Churchill to defect to William of Orange. Upon hearing this, James exclaimed, "What! Est il possible gone too? After all, a good trooper would have been a greater loss." (67)

William III also despised George of Denmark. Initially, William and Mary rewarded George and Anne with George's appointment as Privy Councillor, his creations as Duke of Cumberland and Earl of Kendal, and his statutory naturalization. (68) However, William refused to bestow any form of military patronage on George, which his status as Anne's husband should have afforded him. One contemporary noted that George was incensed that William had not appointed him Lord Admiral of England. (69) Soon after his accession, William dissolved George's infantry regiment, allegedly for its Catholic composition. (70)

Nevertheless, William allowed George to accompany him on his Irish campaign of 1690/91. While in preparation for this event, Clarendon described another episode illustrating George's appalling lack of discipline and Anne's efforts to compensate for it. Prior to his departure, Clarendon's son asked Prince George to be excused from accompanying him, since his own regiment had been disbanded. While George tried to persuade him to go anyway, he was apparently unsuccessful, as Clarendon further related: Rochester [Clarendon's brother] later went to Anne, who was already apprised of all this by the Prince. Anne said, the Prince must be waited on! Could not go on with just an equerry and groom to the Bedchamber--Rochester replied, heard Prince gave leave for Lord Falkland to stay behind for business reasons; Anne said Prince is so good natured, gave his servants leave to do anything, but Anne was angry, and hoped George would recall Lord Falkland to service. (71)

Both Clarendon's son and Lord Falkland were dismissed from their household posts for their refusals to accompany the prince, undoubtedly on Anne's orders. (72)

During the Irish campaign, George served without command at his own expense. (73) Little is known concerning what military role George actually performed during this campaign, except that William III treated George with noted disdain following the Battle of the Boyne, refusing to allow him to ride in the royal coach. (74) For the rest of his reign, William barred George from active participation in any military campaign and inflicted a number of public humiliations upon his hapless brother-in-law. In an account written by Sarah Churchill, in 1691 George asked the king leave to serve in the fleet without command. William reportedly embraced George but said nothing. As George took the silence for consent and began packing his bags, "The king, as it afterwards appeared, had left orders with the Queen, that she should neither suffer the Prince to go, nor yet forbid him to go, if she could contrive matters, as to make his staying home his own choice." (75)

Queen Mary then tried to enlist Sarah Churchill's aid to accomplish this task, but Sarah refused to do so unless the Queen acknowledged the request came from her. Finally, in a repeat of George's Irish humiliation, Queen Mary sent the Earl of Nottingham to positively forbid the Prince "not to hazard himself on board the fleet." (76)

Regardless of George's military competency, William's real target was Anne. Both William and Mary suspected she was using her husband's presence in military campaigns as a means to build up her own political following, and they used George as a public whipping boy for Anne's transgressions. (77) While Anne and George had lent their support to William and Mary, Anne only reluctantly accepted William's intrusion between herself and her sister in the hereditary line of succession. As first in line to the throne, Anne became the focus of disaffection with William III as the honeymoon of the Revolution abated and the English people came to realize their king was a foreigner intent on dragging England into Holland's chronic Continental conflicts. Relations between Anne and William and Mary had already soured by the end of 1689, when Anne's "friends" managed to secure for her an unprecedented 50,000 [pounds sterling] annual grant from Parliament, a clear political defeat for William, who wanted to keep her on a tight financial leash. (78)

One of George's more under-appreciated performances was that of intercessor within the Stuart royal family during the feud that erupted between Anne and William and Mary in 1691, when William dismissed Marlborough from his government. Mary peremptorily demanded that Anne dismiss Sarah Churchill from her household, which Anne refused to do, creating a rift between the Stuart sisters that remained unresolved at the time of Mary's death in 1694. During this time, the only individual who remained on speaking terms with all parties was George of Denmark, who endured the slights of William and Mary to keep the lines of communication open, an impressive achievement. (79) While William's contemptuous treatment of George angered Anne, George continued to negotiate the troubled waters separating the king and queen and his wife, employing his natural deference and affability to minimize the bad feelings. (80) In 1692, at the height of animosity between the Cockpit Circle and the crown, George inquired whether he could pay his respects to William prior to his departure for the Continent. (81) Although William had deprived George and Anne of their customary guard and William's own guard took no notice of the prince when he arrived at Kensington, the meeting must have been a success; following the interview the drums rolled as the guards stood at attention when George took his departure. (82) Soon after William embarked, George was recalled to the Privy Council, and on one occasion accompanying Queen Mary back to her apartments to dine with her after attending a Great Council. (83) In December 1690, when relations between Anne and William and Mary were particularly tense, George was called to the council of nine, the regency council Queen Mary headed during William's absences on the Continent. (84)

It seems reasonable to suppose George earned these distinctions, given the animosity between the court and the cockpit, on account of his efforts to coexist peacefully with William and Mary despite his continued loyalty to the Marlboroughs. Years later, Sarah Churchill recalled George's steadfastedness, which in turn bolstered Anne's: "His Royal Highness continued steady in his opinion to the last notwithstanding that almost all the servants in the family, and especially those whom I brought into it, were frequently pressing him to have me removed." (85) Unfortunately, all of George's efforts to heal the breach between Anne and Mary had failed by the time of Mary's death in December 1694. During his bereavement, William once again slighted George by, according to Agnes Strickland, excluding him "from the precedence of the royal funeral which his rank and affinity as a near kinsmen of Mary II demanded" (86)

Following Mary's death, William and Anne achieved a pro forma reconciliation, which remained intact until William's death in March 1702. William also appeared to soften in his attitude towards George, who enjoyed a public reputation as an important man of affairs for the remainder of the reign, despite the fact he made no impact on them whatsoever. (87) According to the spy John Macky, "During all King William's reign, he never entered into the administration, yet came always to Parliament regularly, and often to court; diverted himself with hunting, and never openly declared himself of any party." (88) Other sources indicate that George regularly attended William's Privy Council, suggesting George's high public profile was known within the court to lack substance. (89) George made public appearances, however, appearing with William at court levees and accompanying him in his carriage on his return from the peace of Ryswick in 1697. (90) Luttrell's political diary mentions numerous public appearances with his wife and William, often with George's young son, the Duke of Gloucester, the only one of Anne's seventeen children to survive infancy. William was fond of Gloucester, which may have softened his attitude towards George in the final years of his reign. On one occasion in 1698, William, George, and the Duke of Gloucester inspected the royal guards, to the delight of the young prince. (91) Indeed, George's congeniality undoubtedly assisted William in his attempts to interact with his English subjects, an activity the King found distasteful. While William delegated the innocuous task of holding of drawing rooms to Anne, he regularly took George with him to the Newmarket horse races, events George undoubtedly enjoyed purely for their leisure value, which contributed to his benign yet popular public image. (92)

The duke of Gloucester's tragic death at age ten in 1700, six months after Anne's seventeenth and last pregnancy ended in a still birth, deprived George of the one mark of distinction he had earned, as the progenitor of an English Protestant succession. (93) Increased tears of Jacobitism, resulting from Gloucester's death, plagued both William III and Anne and were addressed by statute in the Act of Settlement (1701), which entailed the succession to the Protestant House of Hanover, descendants of James I. The Act was a defining moment in the history of the British monarchy, as Parliament demonstrated its ability, after three hundred years of trying, to order the royal succession. Thus, when William III died on 10 March 1702, Anne possessed a clear parliamentary title that had no connection to the common-law rights of husbands or the theory of the divine rights of kings. While moderate Tortes could view Anne as a more or less true hereditary successor, Whigs could comprehend the new queen, as they did William and Mary, as an unambiguously parliamentary monarch. (94)

George's unrecognized common-law marriage rights indicated the changing nature of the royal office. The 1554 Act concerning Regal Power clearly identified kingship still as an estate and an office, while Parliament and the negotiators for Mary I's marriage sought to circumvent any common-law or wider European claims of a prospective husband to a regnant queen's royal estate. But by 1702 kingship was identified much more as a political office than a heritable estate. (95) The growth of bureaucratic government, and the sheer cost of financing Continental and naval warfare laid to rest the anachronistic medieval ideal of a monarch able to pay for the normal costs of administration out of the royal estate. (96) While a royal estate existed until the middle of the eighteenth century, William III's reign inaugurated the evolution of the civil list, a procession of parliamentary grants to the monarch acknowledging the wide discrepancy between royal income and the cost of government. Thus Anne, upon her accession, brought to her marriage a salaried position rather than a landed inheritance. Given these developments, George of Denmark's position as a regnant queen's husband possessed no constitutional significance whatsoever, nor was there any contemporary mention of a gendered social correlation between George's status and the wives of male kings, all of whom became queen consorts upon their husband's accessions or following their marriage to a reigning king.

Thus, upon her accession, it was universally recognized that Anne had succeeded alone, as John Sharpe, Archbishop of York, made clear in his coronation sermon: "Her reign alone will let us see, that it is not without great reason, that in my text Queens are joyn'd as equal sharers with kings." (97) The Archbishop's recognition of Anne's autonomous kingly sovereignty was a complete reversal of the perceptions regarding Mary II's accession, which recognized both her coverture and her womanly deficiencies as a major justification for William's assumption of regal power. In contrast, Anne's accession represented the reconciliation of sixteenth-century precedents regarding female rule, which recognized Mary I and Elizabeth I as honorary males, and the political realities of the Revolution settlement. (98)

While Anne's body politic was single, her body natural had a husband. It is noteworthy that Anne's accession did not produce the kind of polemical debate concerning female rule that accompanied Mary I's accession, nor the justifications for Mary II's subordinate political relationship to William III. In fact, contemporary opinion recalled arguments originally set forth in John Aylmer's 1559 work, A Harborowe for Trewe Subjects, citing the Hebrew judge Deborah, "tho'a married woman and subject to a husband, reign'd over the Lord's people notwithstanding." (99) The image of Deborah, in fact, was a much more perfect fit for Anne than the unmarried Elizabeth I. While Anne was her husband's subordinate in the domestic sphere of her home and marriage, in the public sphere of royal government she was the chief magistrate who knew no peer. In turn, George of Denmark, emulating Deborah's husband, offered no challenge to his wife's superior magisterial authority, stepping forward as the first peer to offer his homage, while in theory remaining the lord and master of his home. The persuasiveness of these perceptions, however, depended on George of Denmark's acquiescence.

This, in fact, turned out to be George's finest public performance. Contemporary commentary confirms that Anne and George were successful at creating such perceptions, as it recognized the distinct social and political spheres that Anne inhabited as monarch: [He was] an extremely kind husband, evidencing his excessive love, and yet behaving himself as a submissive subject, in paying all due respect to her majesty. His royal spouse, tho' exalted to the throne, consequently supreme over all her subjects, yet demeand'd herself with kindness and obedience towards him; the addition of three crowns not impairing her familiar affection, or a whit altering her conjugal submission to her lord's desires. (100)

George's desires, however, rarely deviated from those of his wife, as this anecdote from Anne's coronation illustrated: She [Queen Anne] arrived in her sedan chair at St. James's Palace in the evening, greatly exhausted. Prince George of Denmark, who was in high spirits, was in no mood for retiring. At length the Lord Chamberlain ventured to draw attention to Her Majesty's weariness, and hinted that it might be as well if he proposed retirement. "I propose!" exclaimed the Prince. "I cannot; I am her Majesty's subject, and have sworn homage to her today. I shall do naught but what she commands me." The Queen was equal to the occasion, and replied, with a smile, "Then, as that is the case, and I am very tired, I do command you, George, to come to bed. (101)

As a good wife, however, Anne laboured to convince her contemporaries that she regretted the fact that her husband did not share her royal status. There is some murky evidence that, on the surface, suggests that Anne allegedly considered a plan to make George a king consort. It was conceivable for Anne to attempt to use her prerogative powers to accomplish this goal as she would a peer. Instead, it appeared she chose to have her first Parliament consider the proposition.

However, the project never evolved past the discussion stage. (102) Parliamentary records do not reveal any debates on the subject, nor did such a bill ever materialize. Sources describing Marlborough's role indicate that Anne was persuaded it was unconstitutional for Parliament to make George a king consort. (103) In his 1743 biography of Marlborough, Thomas Lediard recorded that news of a possible scheme to make George king was circulating in the "Protestant Courts of Germany, esp. Hanover, that Anne had design of proposing to Parliament the royal dignity [for her husband]." (104) One noted authority on the life of the Duke of Marlborough insisted that "it fell to Marlborough to persuade her that this could not be done," arguing that Anne's desire to present an English contrast to William would be stymied by such an effort. (105) There is also scanty evidence of an alleged Tory plot to make George king in order to subvert the terms of the Act of Settlement. (106)

What eventually did emerge from Parliament was a bill granting George an astounding 100,000 [pounds sterling] annually should he outlive the queen, while also exempting him from those clauses of the Act of Settlement that prohibited foreigners to hold public office, something that caused a commotion in the House of Commons. Bishop Burnet, no political friend to the Queen, provided a description for this chain of events that withheld as much as it revealed. Great opposition was made ... to the passing of this clause, but the Queen pressed it with great earnestness she had yet shewn in anything whatsoever: she thought it became her, as a good wife, to have the act passed, in which she might be the more earnest, because it was not thought advisable to move for an act that should take Prince George into the consortship of the royal dignity. (107)

Unfortunately, Burnet did not state where this advice came from, or what its substance was.

However, as Burnet suggests, it was entirely within Parliament's competence to pass an act creating George a king consort. A pamphlet circulating during Anne's first Parliament made a strong case for Parliament to do just this, stating that "If we consider that his royal highness is the happy consort of our most gracious queen, for he may have a great share in her majesty's council's, and in the present ministry, we ought in prudence to pay the greatest respects which are within our power to a person so nearly concerned in the kingdom's happiness." (108) While the pamphlet acknowledged George's public reputation as an important man of affairs, it stressed that George's kingship would not encroach upon Anne's full possession of the royal prerogative. While the author called for George's creation as king consort "in conjunction with her majesty our present Queen; yet the administration of the regal power may be solely in her majesty." (109) To prove the point, the joint reigns of Philip and Mary, and more recently, William and Mary, were cited as applicable precedents. Philip particularly was the more salient example; while he did not possess formal political power, from the time of his marriage all statutes, proclamations, writs, and all other government documents were issued jointly in the name Philip and Mary. Philip's name always came first, undoubtedly to conform to the patriarchal social custom of a husband having precedence over his wife. The pamphlet's social logic was a conventional reflection of marital gender roles, but one that was ultimately in conflict with Anne's possession of kingly power.

Ultimately, the reason George did not become a king consort was that Anne chose not to pursue the project. Apprently, all such discussions took place behind closed doors, leaving only sketchy and fragmentary secondhand evidence for the historian to assess. As a king, George would hardly have been a political threat to Anne. However, Marlborough may have convinced Anne that elevating George would violate both the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, since neither statute made any provision for her husband. Harley's correspondence suggests that George's position as a crowned king could have been exploited by non-juring Tories and Jacobites eager to derail the Hanoverian succession. Anne also may have felt that her possession of kingly power was incompatible with her husband enjoying the status of king. But Anne, among her copious literary remains, left no explanation for her decision, which remains, ultimately, elusive. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to suppose that if Anne had really desired to make George a king consort, she would have pursued it as vigorously as she did the passage of the annuity act.

While George remained his wife's subject, the annuity act clearly demonstrated the high regard she felt for her husband and the respect for him that she expected from her subjects: "In consideration of the natural love and affection which your Majesty bears towards the said prince and of the eminent virtues wherewith that excellent prince is endued as also with regard to the great and signal services under your majesties authority he hath performed and doth continue to perform." (110) The entire episode is completely in keeping with Anne's own proprietary view of her political role, but it also represents a public relations scheme to bolster her popular reputation as a good monarch and a good wife. While male kings did so by emulating such male gendered qualities as martial skills and leadership ability, female kings had to emulate womanly qualities. As a married woman, Anne wished to be known as a good wife. At the same time, Anne softened the blow to George's masculinity by heralding his importance and his worth. Indeed, Anne proved to be a most generous wife. Upon her accession, Anne ensured that George enjoyed recognition as the first peer of the realm, weighted down with honours and offices that made him preeminent in the military as Lord High Admiral and Generalissimo of all English forces on land, as the War of the Spanish Succession against France was about to commence. (111)

If military distinction, rather than a crown, was George's only aspiration, his health robbed him of the fruits of his moment of glory. From William III's last years into his wife's reign, George was plagued not only by asthma but gout and other maladies requiring persistent bleeding and blistering. (112) In August 1702 Anne and George journeyed to Bath in hopes that the waters would soothe the prince's chronic asthma. In November, as Anne's first Parliament met, George was severely ill once again, as one contemporary informed his wife: "Prince George has been given over this week past of his asthma; he could not be kept awake with blisters nor cupping, so that everyone expected death each minute. He is this day much better and may last for some while, though I think not long." (113) Anne joined both houses of Parliament on 12 November 1702 to hear a sermon and prayer for George's recovery. (114) While George ultimately survived on this occasion as he had so many times in the past, he remained chronically ill for the rest of his life.

Despite his declining health, Anne also attempted to have George named supreme commander of allied forces in Europe. Achieving this unenviable task fell to Marlborough. While Anne threatened to hold back the declaration of war against France, all of Marlborough's exertions on George's behalf could not sway the Dutch, "not only because they placed no confidence in the military talents of the Prince, but because they feared he would resist the control of the field deputies, whom they sent to the army." (115) George was reportedly incensed with Marlborough for his failure; Marlborough wrote to Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin in August 1702, inquiring whether "Prince George be capable of thinking soo ill of mee." (116) Anne also attempted to obtain William's office of Stadholder for George in the Netherlands, a request to which a bewildered States-General made no reply.

Given George's lack of leadership ability and his rapidly declining health, it is unlikely that Anne really expected him to formulate war strategy. It is much more plausible to assume that the creations were symbolic, designed to make up for the slights and humiliations George had endured from James II and William III. (117) But just as importantly, the creations can also be seen as an attempt to bolster George's masculine reputation within the context of his marriage to a regnant queen. While those close to him knew the extent of his political limitations, George enjoyed a benign yet popular reputation as an important man that complemented Anne's own popularity with her subjects at large. As English Continental commander, Marlborough on paper answered to George of Denmark. His correspondence contains numerous references to keeping George informed of military affairs, while paying him all due honour as his superior officer. (118)

In reality, George was nothing more than an official conduit of military policy. Much like a modern constitutional monarch, George went through the motions of generating official memoranda without any discernible influence on the substance of such policies. (119) Nevertheless, this activity had a purpose. What was perhaps most important to Anne was that her subjects perceived that George had a crucial role to play and possessed the illusion of power. This, in turn, bolstered his public reputation as a suitable husband for a ruling queen, rather than the substance, which was beyond his competency. George remained Anne's political proxy in the House of Lords, voting reluctantly for the Occasional Conformity Bill of 1703, which he, as a Lutheran, understandably opposed. (120)

Left to his own devices, however, George had no stomach for the harsh realities of politics, which on one occasion meant defying the wishes of his wife. In his autobiography, George's secretary, Dr. George Clark, serving as an MP in 1705, recalled how Prince George dismissed him on account of his failure to vote for Anne's choice for speaker of the house in the Commons, and the distress he felt after the deed was done: "But then Prince George changed his mind, sent his footmen to see if Mr. Nicholas, his treasurer, had already done the deed, having changed his mind." Even though the deed had been done, Clark further remarked that "I had several intimations that my waiting upon him would not be unacceptable." (121) While George's loyalty was admirable, he remained pliable and softhearted towards his servants to the end of his life.

George's tenure as Lord High Admiral also gave final confirmation of his utter lack of political and administrative discipline and competency. While George was the official conduit for all manner of business related to naval affairs, Marlborough's brother, George Churchill, a man long in the prince's service, wielded the principal power in the council. Bishop Burnet observed that George "Was unhappily prevailed upon to take upon him the post of High Admiral, of which he understood little: but he was fatally led by those who had credit with him, who had not all of them his good qualities." To this Burnet added: "In the conduct of our affairs, as great errors were committed, so great misfortunes had followed on them, all these were imputed to the Prince's easiness, and to his favorite's mismanagement and bad designs." (122) George's chronic inability to instill discipline and provide leadership, which Clarendon had noticed back in 1690, was fully evident during George's tenure as Lord High Admiral. While George's personal failings were forgivable within the private circle of his family, in the glare of public opinion they became a means to attack the Queen politically.

Thus in the final year of his life George served as the victim for his wife's political policies one last time. In January 1708, when Anne sought to create new Tory bishops, the Whigs threatened to "show up the admiralty in such a way that the Prince should be obliged to give up his post of high admiral." (123) Despite the storm, George remained devoted to his stall, notably George Churchill, as he always had to both Anne and the Marlboroughs. (124) Later that year, when Anne reached a critical phase of her relationship with both Sarah Churchill and the diumvirs Marlborough and Sidney Godolphin, George allegedly influenced the outcome of a highly-charged political power struggle for control of the ministry, which resulted in Robert Harley's resignations as secretary for the north. (125)

By this time, after Anne and George had been married for twenty-five years, the distinction between personal and political assistance probably no longer existed. In a letter from June 1708, Sidney Godolphin wrote to Marlborough describing a particularly unpleasant interview with the queen: In short, the obstinancy was unaccountable, and the battell might have lasted till [evening], if after the clock had struck 3 [Prince George] had not thought fitt to come in and look as he thought it were dinner time. (126)

George may very well have been hungry, consistent with his popular reputation for gluttony, but it is entirely possible that George offered a practiced and polished piece of theater to rescue Anne from her impasse with Godolphin, acting as an unofficial chief of staff in the personal and political comfort of his spouse. One month later, Godolphin again wrote to Marlborough, suggesting he consult the Danish envoy Count Plessen in order to channel information through George to Anne, in the hopes of salvaging their deteriorating relationship with the Queen. (127) In both cases, Godolphin supplied a rare glimpse of the extent of George's influence with his wife.

George's final months, then, were his political swan song, as his health worsened in autumn 1708. On 24 October George died with his wife at his bedside, where she had been for several days. A number of contemporaries believed that Anne never fully recovered from the loss of her husband. Following her tragic attempts to bear children and the break with her longtime advisors and companions the Marlboroughs and Godolphin, Anne lost the one individual able to provide her with any sense of emotional well-being within her domestic circle. (128)

One of Queen Anne's earliest biographers, writing twenty years after her death, recalled the national mood that accompanied the announcement of the Prince's death: "His royal highness's great humanity and justice, with his other extraordinary virtues, had so endeared him to the whole nation, that all orders of men discovered an unspeakable grief for the loss of so excellent a prince." (129) George had played his unique role well. As Anne was a popular queen, so was her consort. On those occasions when the English people saw their queen in public, George of Denmark was by her side, congenial and deferential. Inevitably, the English people became accustomed to the sight of a male consort to a female king. George's public persona was benign, if not comical, yet the men of power surrounding his wife offered him the constant deference that was his due as the husband of a ruling queen, at least to his face. Even before Anne became queen, George consented to play a variety of public roles and accept public honors that would have been hers had she been a man. But once Anne became queen, George simply stood aside and made no protest as his wife was recognized as an autonomous female king.

Two years after his death, William Cockburn succinctly summed up George's signal accomplishment: "He was not ambitious to grasp of power, altho' he had the opportunity of asking what he pleas'd, being sure of all requests, yet his demands were ever attended with modesty and moderation." (130) George of Denmark's consignment to the informal status of male consort is indicative of the changing nature of English female kingship. Mary I came to the throne in 1553 as an unmarried female heiress, whose right was upheld by both statute and common-law rights of inheritance. When Mary contemplated marriage, however, her husband's possible common law rights to her royal prerogative were one of several gendered uncertainties concerning female rule that arose during her reign. But the reign of Anne, following the long reign of Elizabeth I, and the more recent 1688/89 Revolution and Act of Settlement, saw the public role of female king clearly defined as an office, rather than a heritable estate. Under these circumstances, George's common law rights to his wife's throne were uncertain, and needed to be invoked, something he and Anne never made any attempt to do. While it was entirely possible for Parliament to have created George of Denmark a king consort, contemporaries left no clear explanation for why this did not occur. However, given the power dynamics of George and Anne's marriage, it is reasonable to suppose that they both agreed not to pursue this goal, and to allow Anne to enjoy a complete and unambiguous autonomy as monarch.

George of Denmark himself was apparently happy with such an outcome. While a man of ability and daring might have attempted to use his status as a queen's husband as a springboard for political power, George stood aside as the evolution of female rule discarded the male counterpart completely. While George of Denmark may still have dreamed of military glory when his wife became queen, by the time the opportunity arrived, he was old and sick. Thus his personal inclinations and energies were perfectly suited for the informal role of consort. In this one public role he excelled. In a poem included in a short history of George's life published soon after his death, a curious mixture of fact and fiction concludes with a ringing endorsement of his most successful role: And thus we've lost the pillar of our state, both good and virtuous, wise as well as great. The best of men, who led the best of lives. The best of husbands, to the best of wives. The best of queens ne're loved a better man. Then show me such another, if you can. (131)

University of North Carolina at Pembroke

(1) See Charles Beem, "The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History" (PhD diss. University of Arizona, 2002).

(2) Post Whig assessments of the Glorious Revolution tail to include the demise of the male consort as one of the consequences of the Revolution settlement. See: Robert J. Frankle, "The Formulation of the Declaration of Rights," Historical Journal, 5 (1974), pp. 265-279; J.R. Jones The Revolution of 1688 in England (New York, 1972); Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy, and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester, 1977); Lois G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights 1689 (Baltimore, 1981); Lois Schwoerer, The Revolution of 1688-1689: Changing Perspectives, (ed.) (New York, 1992); and Evelyn Cruickshank, The Glorious Revolution (New York, 2000). Recent scholarship has stressed the importance of the Anglo-Dutch relationship, and make no mention of George of Denmark. See Dale Hoak, Mordechai Feingold (eds.) The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives On the Revolution of 1688-89. (Stanford, 1996). See also, Jonathan Israel, "The Dutch Role in the Glorious Revolution," The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact in Jonathan Israel (ed.) (Cambridge, 1991).

(3) See Richard Lodge, who observed "Prince George was a nonentity in English Affairs," The Political History of England, 1660-1702 (London, 1910), p. 232.

(4) This process started with George Macaulay Trevelyan's three-volume The Reign of Queen Anne (London, 1930-34). Trevelyan's analysis constitutes the final phase of Whig historiography, as he recognized Anne as an active historical agent: "She did not leave affairs to her favorites or even wholly to her Ministers. In order to do what she thought right in Church and State, she slaved at many details of government" (p. 2). While a number of popular or literary treatments of Anne's reign appeared over the later twentieth century, Edward Gregg's definitive biography, Queen Anne (London, 1980). demonstrated the complexity of Anne's attempts to rule amid the partisan turbulence of the early eighteenth century. More recently, in his work on court ritual, R.O. Bucholz has demonstrated an additional context to Anne's contributions to the maintenance of monarchical political power--see "Nothing But Ceremony: Queen Anne and the Limitations of Court Ritual," Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), 288-323; The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, 1993); and "Queen Anne: Victim of Her Virtues?" in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain, 1660-1837 (Manchester and New York, 2002), pp. 94-129. For a brief assessment of the historiographical transformation of Anne's political role, see Richard Wilkinson, "Queen Anne" History Review 31 (1998), pp. 39-45.

(5) England's first three married regnant queens, Mary I (1553-1558), Mary II (1689-1694), and Anne (1702-1714) all failed to produce heirs. Both Victoria (1837-1901) and Elizabeth II (1952-) more than made up for the first three.

(6) Constance Jordan first suggested the conceptual term "honorary male": see "Women's Rule in Sixteenth Century Thought" Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), pp. 436-43.

(7) See the "Introduction" in Carol Levinard Jeanie Watson (ed.s), Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Detroit, 1987), pp. 1-15.

(8) The etymology of the word cyning, king in Anglo-Saxon, denoted a cunning, wise, and potent leader, while cwen, Anglo-Saxon for queen, simply described the wile of a king. See Arthur Taylor, The Glory of Regality: An Historical Treatise of the Anointing and Crowning of the Kings and Queens of England (London, 1829), p. 3.

(9) For a further discussion of Mary II's politicized role as a paragon of domestic (and political) virtue, see Lois Schwoerer, "Images of Queen Mary 11, 1689-1695," Renaissance Quarterly 42, (1989), and Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714, (Manchester, 1999), pp. 110-16. For analyses of seventeenth-century patriarchal theory, see James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1979), and Elizabeth J. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1987).

(10) Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (London, 1680).

(11) John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (an Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government), and J. W. Gough (ed.), A Letter Concerning Toleration (New York, 1956). For recent analyses of contract theory, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford, 1988), pp. 34, 93-95, and Lois Schwoerer, "Locke, Lockean Ideas, and the Glorious Revolution" Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), pp. 531-48.

(12) For a recent analysis of the Glorious Revolution's succession dilemma, see Howard Nenner, The Right to Be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1603-1702 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1995), pp. 147-249. Nenner summed up the constitutional ambiguity of William and Mary's accession, writing, "the members [of the Convention] chose to elect William and Mary to the throne, although only a few would admit explicitly to what they had done." (p. 156). See also Tony Claydon, "William III's Declaration of Reason and the Glorious Revolution," Historical Journal 39 (1996), pp. 87-108, for a recent analysis of Whig perceptions of William as an elected monarch. For contemporary tracts that explicitly labeled William and Mary's elevation as an election, see "Political Remarks on the Life and Reign of William III" (circa 1702), William Oldys and Thomas Park (eds.) in Harleian Miscellany (6 vols.) (London, 1806-10), III, pp. 350-60, which staled that "It is true, his lady was next in blood, supposing the pretended Prince of Wales illegitimate. But he [William] never insisted upon that title, so much as upon the election of the people by their representatives, convened in the most solemn manner." (p. 360). See also "Reasons For Crowning the Prince and Princess Jointly, and For Placing the Executive Power in the Prince Alone" (London, 1689), Harleian Miscellany, VI, which stated, "for he [James II] has forfeited the troth of the regal inheritance of the regal power, both in himself and his heirs lineal and collateral, so that the same is devolved back to the people, who have also the legislative authority, and consequently may of right give and dispose thereof." (p. 606).

(13) See Diana Coole, Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism (New York, 1993), also Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven, 1995). In his introduction, Fletcher identified a system of structural patriarchy at work in early modern England. which denied women access to the public sphere of politics. Reflecting Judith Bennett's deconstruction of the term, Fletcher defined patriarchy as an "unstable historical construct," constantly under pressure amid dynamic social and political change, arguing that "the essence of gender scheme is overlap," allowing men and women to negotiate and transgress the boundaries between socially constructed gender roles. Within Fletcher's model, Mary II and Anne present a striking contrast in their attitude towards their positions as royal heiresses.

(14) "The Third Act of Succession," Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, Anno 35, Henrici VIII, c.1. For an analysis of the Act's marriage qualifications, see Mortimer Levine Tudor Dynastic Problems (New York, 1973), pp. 74-75, and Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536-1547 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 24, 193-94.

(15) In August 1537, Henry VIII's Privy Council recommended that the King's daughters be married, but apparently nothing came of the proposal. See State Papers of Henry VIII, vol. 1 (London, 1830), pp. 545-46. In 1542, negotiations for a marriage between Mary and a son of Francis I of France fell through because Henry VIII would not allow her to be declared legitimate, while in 1545-46, after Mary had been restored to the succession, other proposals with Hapsburg princes and the protestant nephew of the Elector Palatine came to nothing. For an analysis of these negotiations, see J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley, 1968) pp. 434, 460, 469.

(16) For a discussion of the social and legal status of medieval and early modern Englishwomen, see Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England, 450-1500 (London, 1995) and Pearl Hogrete, Tudor Women (London, 1995).

(17) See Ernst Kantorwicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology (Princeton, 1957), and Marie Axton The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977).

(18) From 1216 to 1553, England experienced the reigns of six boy kings. In the 1370s, Edward III was still considered to possess the royal prerogative despite senility, while in 1453 Henry VI fell into a catatonic state, necessitating the appointment of a Lord Protector to exercise the king's authority. Regardless of the physical state of a king, he was always recognized as possessing full kingly sovereignty.

(19) In January 1554 Imperial Ambassador Simon Renard reported he head heard that two English lawyers say "that by English law, if his highness marries the Queen, she loses her title to the crown and his highness becomes king." Royall Tyler (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Spanish vol. 12, ed. (London, 1949), pp. 15-16. For an analysis of the relationship between common law and the succession, see William Huse Dunham, Jr., "Regal Power and the Rule of Law: a Tudor Paradox," Journal of British Studies, 3 (1964), 24-56.

(20) See Elizabeth Russell, "Mary Tudor and Mr. Jorkins" Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research 152 (1990), pp. 263-76, and Judith Richards, "Mary Tudor as a 'Sole Quene?': Gendering Tudor Monarchy," The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 895-924.

(21) See Statutes of the Realm, I Marie, sess. 3 caps I and II. Scholars have widely debated the motivations for this Act. See David Loades, in Clair Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.), "Philip II and the Government of England," Law and Government Under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988), p. 177, and J.D. Alsop "The Act for the Queen's Regal Power" Parliamentary History 13 (1994) pp. 261-76.

(22) Philip never came to terms with the limitations imposed by the marriage treaty. Writing in October 1555, a year and some months after the marriage, Venetian ambassador Frederico Badoer wrote to the Doge and Senate, "I have been told on good authority that the King of England has written to the Queen his consort, that he is most anxious to gratify her wish for his return, but that he cannot adapt himself to it, having to reside there in a form unbecoming to his dignity, which requires him to take part in the affairs of the realm." Rowdon Brown led.), Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, vol. 1, pt. 1 (London, 1877), p. 212.

(23) Mary and Philip's marriage treaty served as the blueprint for a number of Elizabeth's projected marriage treaties. See "Calendar of the manuscripts of the Most. Hon. Marquis of Salisbury," Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, vol. 9 pt. 2, pp. 243, 288-93, 543-44.

(24) Mary I was the target of a number of a religiously motivated attacks against female rule. The most famous of these works, John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558), drew upon scripture and classical authority to demonstrate why female rule violated the divinely ordained subjugation of women to men. One year later, following Elizabeth I's accession, John Aylmer published a rebuttal, An Harborowe For Faithful and Trewe Subjects (London, 1559). While Knox saw scripture as law. Aylmer saw it as history, which provided examples of exceptions to the general rule of male authority. Aylmer in particular discussed the problem of a married female ruler, using the biblical judge Deborah as a salient example of a woman supreme in the public arena of government, but the obedient and dutiful spouse to her husband at home. For a discussion of these works, see Constance Jordan, "Women's Rule in Sixteenth Century," pp. 436-43, and Patricia Ann Lee, "A Bodye Politique to Govern: Aylmer, Knox, and the Debate on Queenship," Historian, 52 (Feb. 1990), pp. 242-62.

(25) William's mother was Mary Stuart, the daughter of Charles I of England, which placed him in the line of succession, after his wife and her sister Anne.

(26) The standard work remains Stephen Baxter, William III and the Defense of European Liberty (Westport, Connecticut, 1966).

(27) William III, The Declaration of His Highness William Henry, By the Grace of God, Prince of Orange, & c. Of the Reasons inducing him to appear in Arms in the Kingdom of England, for preserving of the Protestant Religion, and for restoring the Laws and liberties of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1988).

(28) See F.H. Blackburne Daniell (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles II: January-June 1683 (London, 1933), pp. 276, 296.

(29) Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, K.P., New Series, 7 (London, 1912), p. 22.

(30) During the negotiations for George and Anne's marriage, the French ambassador Barillon wrote to Louis XIV, reporting that the Danish attempted to have William of Orange removed from the English succession. See Baxter, William III, p. 187. However, neither marriage contract made any explicit mention of either Prince in the order of succession. For William and Mary's marriage contract, see British Library, Sloane add. Mss. 38329, f. 23. For George and Anne's, see PRO sp 108/547.

(31) Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1833, originally published 1724-34), V, p. 139. In 1686. Mary discussed with Burner her concerns over a lack of positive law concerning William's matrimonial rights to her crown.

(32) See Nenner, Right To Be King, p. 179.

(33) See: Lois G. Schwoerer, "Women and the Glorious Revolution" Albion, 18 (1986), pp. 195-218.; W.A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford, 1988); Eveline Cruickschanks (ed.), By Force Or Default? The Revolution of 1688-89 (Edinburgh, 1989); Robert P. Maccubin, Martha Hamilton-Phillips, et al. (eds.), The Age of William III and Mary II: Power, Politics, and Patronage, 1689-1702 (Williamsburg, Virginia, 1989); George Hilton Jones, Convergent Forces: Immediate Causes of the Revolution of 1688 in England (Ames, Iowa, 1990); and Robert Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688: The Andrew Browning Lectures 1988 (Oxford, 1991).

(34) See William Huse Dunham Jr. and Charles T. Wood "The Right To Rule in England: Depositions and the King's Authority," American Historical Review 81 (1976), pp. 738-61. In their discussion of medieval depositions, Dunham and Wood noted the increasing role of parliament as a legitimizing force in medieval English depositions.

(35) See The Parliamentary History of England, vol. V, A.D. 1688-1702 (London, 1809), pp. 45-63, for various debates within the Convention concerning Mary and Anne's rights to the succession.

(36) In her political journal, Mary of Orange clearly stated her total identification with a conventional woman's role, which prescribed a secondary and domestic role within her politicized marriage. See Mary II (ed. R. Doebner), Memoirs of Mary, Queen of England (London, 1886), passim.

(37) Parliamentary History, V, p. 63.

(38) "And that the sole and lull exercise of regal power be only in and executed by the said Prince of Orange in the names of the said Prince and Princess during their joynt lives...." Statutes of the Realm, 6 (London: 1819), William and Mary, sess. 2 cap. 2, 143.

(39) Mary II, Memoirs, p. 23.

(40) See Weil, Political Passions, pp. 105-19.

(41) Gilbert Burnet, An Inquiry into the Present State of Affairs: and in particular, whether We Owe Allegiance to the King in These Circumstances? And whether we are bound to Treat with Him, and Call him back again, or not? (London, 1689), p. 10.

(42) "Reasons for Crowning the Prince and Princess of Orange King and queen Jointly, and for Placing the Executive Power in the Prince Alone," Harleian Miscellany, VI, pp. 606-607.

(43) For contemporary explanations of William and Mary's elevation as "elected monarchs" see above n. 12.

(44) See J.H. Plumb, "The Elections to the Convention Parliament of 1689," Cambridge Historical Journal, 3 (1937), pp. 235-54, also Nicholas Luttrell, A Brief Relation of State Affairs From Sept. 1678 to April 1714, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1857), I, p. 491. In his political diary, Luttrell recorded that William of Orange visited the Prince and Princess of Denmark at Whitehall palace, 19 Dec. 1688.

(45) Burnet, History, III, p. 49.

(46) Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, vol. 9, part 2 (London, 1884), p. 458.

(47) F.H. Blackburne Daniell (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series-Charles II, January-June 1683 (London, 1933), p. 244.

(48) John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, introduction and notes by Austin Dobson (London, 1906), p. 107.

(49) Burner, History, V, p. 391. Burnet observed that George, "knew much more than he could well express, for he spake acquired languages ill and ungracefully."

(50) William Cockburn, An Essay Upon the Propitous and Glorious Reign of Our Glorious Sovereign Anne (London, 1710). In this essay, published two years after George's death in 1708 Cockburn recalled George's bravery in the service of his brother, king of Denmark, p. 13. George's bravery is also discussed in Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, I (London, 1933), p. 188.

(51) John Macky, Memoirs of the Secret Services of John Macky, esq., During the Reigns of King William, Queen Anne, and George I (London, 1733).

(52) Stuart J. Reid, John and Sarah Duke and Duchess of Marlborough: Based on Unpublished Letters and Documents of Blenheim Palace (London, 1915), p. 141.

(53) In an often quoted letter from Anne to Sarah Churchill in 1692, Anne clearly looked forward to her own "sunshine day," when she would inherit the throne. In this letter, as in many others between the two, Anne referred to Sarah as "Mrs. Freeman," and herself as "Mrs. Morley" so they could correspond as social equals. See The Letters and Diplomatic Instructions of Queen Anne, ed. Beatrice Curtis Brown (New York, 1935), 60-61.

(54) This recognition, implicit upon Mary I's accession in 1553, was made explicit upon Elizabeth I's in 1558. See William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England. ed. with intro. By Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Chicago, no date), p. 18.

(55) Bumet, History, V, 7.

(56) See Bucholz, "Queen Anne: Victim of Her Virtues?" p. 96.

(57) Samuel Weller Singer (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and his Brother Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, 2 vols. (London, 1828), II, p. 89.

(58) The History of the Life and Reign of her late majesty Queen Anne (London, 1730). In this history published twenty-six after Anne's death, her marriage still enjoyed a popular reputation as a happy one, p. 276.

(59) See Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England (London, 1999) p. 2.

(60) Anonymous, The Present State of Matrimony (London, 1749) p. 3.

(61) Ibid.

(62) In a letter to the Earl of Albemarle, 1 Mar. 1697/98, Matthew Prior commented on George's conjugal fidelity; "the (French) dauphin he dismissed much like prince George, except that the one only makes love to the princess, and the other every girl at the opera without distinction." Reports of the Royal Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Earl of Bath, vol. 3, Prior Papers (London, 1908) p. 195. See also M.R. Hopkinson, Anne of England (New York, 1934), pp. 89-91.

(63) While available primary sources do not reveal any contemporary slurs upon George of Denmark's masculinity, recent scholarship on early modern British notions of masculinity have noted the transformation from "honour" to "civility" as a means to assess appropriate male gendered social behavior. See Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660-1800 (London, 2001) and Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (eds.), English Masculinities 1660-1800 (London, 1999). However civil George's social behavior may have been, the finding of these works, which do not discuss George of Denmark, would suggest that, as the subordinate partner in his marriage, he would have been a likely candidate for attacks upon his masculinity. It is my speculation that George's earlier reputation for military valour, as well as his naturally congenial temperament, may have shielded him from such attacks.

(64) Luttrell, State Affairs, I, pp. 287, 312. A newsletter of 12 Aug. 1684 reported that George accompanied Lord Dartmouth and Samuel Pepys to Sheerness and Chatham to check the status of ships and stores. See Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, VII, p. 264.

(65) On 2 July 1685, James II gave his "Regement of foote" to George of Denmark. See Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report of the Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury K. G., K. T., vol. 2, pt. 1, (London, 1903), p. 82. For an analysis of the military aspects of James II's reign, see J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (Totowa New Jersey, 1972), pp. 142-43. On 9 Feb. 1685, George was called to James II's Privy Council. See Luttrell, State Affairs, I, p. 328.

(66) From the Earl of Clarendon's diary, 26 Nov. 1688, cited in Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England From the Reign of James II, 3 vol., II, p. 81.

(67) Ibid.

(68) Luttrell, State Affairs, I, p. 502, 519.

(69) See Abel Boyer, The History of Queen Anne (London, 1735), p. 6.

(70) Western, p. 143.

(71) Clarendon Correspondence, pp. 314-15.

(72) Luttrell noted that both men were fired from their posts: State Affairs, II, p. 51.

(73) One contemporary account only mentioned George's participation in William's Irish campaign in the context of a "person of quality accompanying the king." See Samuel Mulleneaux, A Journal of the Three Months Royal Campaign of His Majesty in Ireland, Together with a True and Perfect Diary of the siege of Limerick (London, 1690), p. 7. A recent study of the Irish campaign offered no details of George's participation. See Richard Doherty, The Williamite War in Ireland, 1688-1691 (London, 1998).

(74) See Churchill, Marlborough. His Life and Times, I, p. 389. In an explanatory footnote, Churchill quoted his ancestor, Sarah Churchill, from the archives at Blenheim Palace: "The King [William III] never took more notice of him [Prince George[ than if he had been a page of the buck-stairs, nor he [George] was never once named in any gazette, tho I am apt to think the bullet that so kindly kissed the King's shoulder was as near to his royal highness."

(75) Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, (London, 1742). p. 39.

(76) Sarah Churchill's attitude towards William and Mary was hardly unbiased, but Luttrell's diary provides a less vivid corroboration of this episode: State Affairs, II, pp. 219-25.

(77) Mary II recorded in her journal her belief that her sister Anne was behind George's decision to go to sea. See Mary II, Memoirs. p. 38.

(78) Anne's quest for the subsidy was the occasion for a rather dramatic confrontation between her and her sister Mary. When Anne replied sheepishly that it was her friends in the Commons that had initiated the request, Mary replied, "Tray, what friends have you but the King and me?" Churchill, Conduct, p. 29.

(79) Lutterel, II, p. 391.

(80) See Churchill, Conduct, p. 114. According to Churchill, following the death of his brother, the King of Denmark, George inquired whether William would see him in his mourning, but "the King would not see him, unless he came in colours; and the Prince was persuaded to comply, though he did it with great uneasiness."

(81) Churchill, Conduct, p. 103.

(82) Luttrell, State Affairs, II, p. 365.

(83) Ibid., p. 391.

(84) Journal of the House of Commons, II, pp. 566-67, Luttrell, State affairs, II, pp. 2, 133, 150.

(85) Churchill, Conduct, p. 86.

(86) See Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 15 vols. (Philadelphia, 1854-59), XV, pp. 15, 20. Luttrell recorded that following Mary's death, "[the] Prince of Denmark was yesterday no console the King, but his majestie being asleep did not see him.": State Affairs, III, p.419.

(87) Luttrell, State Affairs, III, p. 423. Luttrell reported that the "Prince of Denmark was with his majestic some time in private," 6 Jan. 1695. (88) Macky, B2.

(89) See Reports of the Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury, pp. 269, 280, 289. This collection includes Privy Council minutes from 1695/96, which record George was present, but not an active participant.

(90) William Lowndes recalled in a letter to Sir William Trumbull, 19 Nov. 1697, an invitation to join King William, Prince George, and other dignitaries at court. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire, vol. 1, part 2 (London, 1924), p. 770. In a letter to Roger Kenyon, Richard Edge reported that Prince George accompanied King William back to London following his landing from Holland, 16 Nov. 1697, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Fourteenth Report, Appendix, part iv, The Manuscripts of Lord Kenyon (London, 1894), p. 422.

(91) Henri and Barbara van der Zee, William and Mary (London, 1973), p. 455.

(92) Luttrell's diary has numerous references to George's excursions to Newmarket, State Affairs, 1, p. 590, and IV, p. 365. See also John Ashton, Social Life in Queen Anne's Reign (London, 1919), p. 329 and van der Zee, pp. 285, 444.

(93) H.E. Emson, "For Want of an Heir: The Obstetrical History of Queen Anne" British Medical Journal, 304 (1992), pp. 66-67.

(94) For a recent analysis of competing notions of Anne's title, sec Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed (New York, 1996), pp. 313-35.

(95) For an analysis of the shift of the shift in perception from "estate" to "office," see J.R. Jones, "The Revolution in Context," in J.R. Jones (ed.), Liberty Secured." Britain Before and After 1688 (Stanford, 1992), pp. 11-52.

(96) The most well known medieval exposition on the financial responsibilities of kingship was that of the fifteenth century John Fortescue, who argued that a well endowed monarchy was the basis for strong government. See Lord Thomas (Fortescue) Clermont (ed.), The Life and Works of Sir John Fortescue (Lord Chief Justice under Henry VI) (London, 1869).

(97) John Sharpe, A Sermon Preach'd at the Coronation of Queen Anne (London, 1702), p. 16.

(98) For a contemporary example of Anne's perception as an autonomous and sovereign monarch, see Joseph Gander, The Glory of her Sacred Majesty Queen Anne in the Royal Navy and her Absolute sovereignty as Empress of the Sea: Asserted and Vindicated (London, 1703).

(99) Sir Thomas Craig (trans. James Gatherer), The Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England in Two Books, (London, 1703), p. 83. Craig originally wrote the work in Latin prior to James I's 1603 English accession, to bolster James's legitimacy through female descent. Gatherer's 1703 translation was a timely bolster to Anne's position as a married monarch.

(100) Cockburn, Glorious Sovereign Anne, pp. 12-13.

(101) Reid, Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, p. 106. This anecdote can also be traced to Malcolm's Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London, p. 54, cited in Strickland, Queens of England, XV, pp. 161-62.

(102) Thomas Lediard, The Life of John, Duke of Marlborough, 3 vols. (London, 1743), I, p. 137. Lediard remarked that, of a plan to elevate George to the royal dignity. "nothing of that nature, as I have already observed, being proposed, or so much hinted at, either in the Queen's speech or otherwise, by any member of either House."

(103) See William Coxe, Memois of John, Duke of Marlborough (London, 1818), p. 155.

(104) Lediard, Duke of Marlborough, I, p. 136.

(105) Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, pp. 2, 36.

(106) An alleged Tory plot to make George a king was mentioned in a letter to Robert Harley, Speaker of the House of Commons, September 1702, cited in Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967), p. 90. and Lediard, Duke of Marlborough, I, p. 136.

(107) Burnet, Bishop Burnet's History, V, p. 55.

(108) A Letter to a Member of Parliament in Reference to his Royal Highness Prince George of Denmark, British Library, misc. 85/1865 c. 19 (100).

(109) Ibid.

(110) Statutes of the Realm (London, 1831), VIII, p. 1: Anne, sess. 2, cap.2, "An Act for Enabling Her Majesty to Settle a Revenue for Supporting the Dignity of His Royal Highness Prince George."

(111) Robert Pentland McNaffy (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Anne, vol. 1, 1702-1703 (London, 1916), pp. 85, 466.

(112) George was often reported to be ill. Luttrell, State Affairs, III, pp. 488, 501; V, p. 201. Henry L. Snyder (ed.), Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence (Oxford, 1975), pp. 737, 1124, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Report, Appendix, part 3, The Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, vol. 3 (London, 1889), p. 283.

(113) Letter from Robert Molesworth to his wife, 5 Nov. 1702. "The Manuscripts of the Hon. Frederick Lindley Wood, M.L.S. Clemonts, esq., and S. Philip Unwin, esq.," Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports on the Manuscripts in Various Collections, vol. 7, p. 226.

(114) Sir Jonathan Trelawny, A Sermon Preach'd Before the Queen and Both Houses of Parliament at the Cathedral Church of St. Pauls, 12 Nov. 1702 (London, 1702).

(115) Coxe, Memoirs ... Duke of Marlborough, p. 113.

(116) The Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, p. 103.

(117) In 1708, N. Tate, poet laureate to Queen Anne, composed a largely fictitious poem lauding Prince George's contributions to British naval victories in his official capacity as Lord High Admiral. See N. Tare, A Congratulatory Poem to his Royal Highness Prince George of Denmark Upon the Glorious Successes at Sea (London, 1708).

(118) Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, pp. 208, 296.

(119) Much evidence attests that George went to the office regularly, see: Luttrell, State Affairs, V, pp. 179, 183; British Library, Sloane add 5440, ff. 125, 128, add 5443, ff. 215, 221, 223; Huntington Library hm 774, ff. 3, 18-19, 23-24, 40-41; Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1702-1704 (London, 1910), pp. 124, 228, 504, 511, 512, 535; 1704-1706, pp. 8, 109, 112, 119-30, 133, 135, 142, 150, 160, 375, 1706-1708, pp. 100, 108, 115, 195, 203, 207, 225, 361, 369, 418, 419, 525; 1708-1710. p. 33, 34, 64-70, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213, 216.

(120) A.S. Turberville, The House of Lords in the XVIII Century (Westport Connecticut, 1970), p. 53.

(121) "Autobiography of Dr. George Clark" Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports of Manuscripts of F.W. Leybourne-Popham, Esq. (London, 1899) p. 282.

(122) Burnet, History, 5, 392.

(123) Letter from Lord Raby to Baron Leibnitz, Jan. 17, 1708 (179), State Papers and Correspondence Illustrative of the Social and Political State of Europe, From the Revolution to the Accession of the House of Hanover, John Kenble, ed. (London, 1857), p. 464.

(124) Marlborough wrote to his Duchess that "The prince would not hear of George Churchill's resignation." Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, p. 1035.

(125) See Jonathan Swift, "Memoirs Relating To that Change Which happened in the Queen's Ministry in the Year 1710," in Herbert Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis (eds.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift: Political Tracts, 1713-1719, 8vols. (Oxford, 1953), VIII, pp. 112-13. According to Swift, "The Prince, thus intimidated by [George] Churchill, reported to the Queen, that Marlborough would quit if Godolphin was turned out, so Harley was turned out."

(126) Marlborough Godolphin Correspondence, p. 999.

(127) Ibid., p. 1045. George Macaulay Trevelyan, the last historian to consider George of Denmark's political worth, "Prince George the Dane was too stupid or too shrewd to govern her (Anne's) political action." England Under Queen Anne-Blenheim, p. 177.

(128) See Philip Roberts (ed.), The Diary of Sir David Hamilton (Oxford, 1975), p. 4. Hamilton, Anne's physician, remarked, "I shall pass by the trouble which the Prince's death caused her, because of the happiness of her marry'd state, and her inward concern of mind, which follow'd his death are so well known."

(129) Boyer, Queen Anne, p. 357.

(130) Cockburn, Glorious Sovereign Anne, p. 13.

(131) Sir Charles Cotteril, The Whole Life and Glorious Actions of Prince George of Denmark (London, 1708), p. 8.