The death of Charles II. in 1685, which placed her father upon the English throne, as James II., caused very little immediate change in the household of the Princess Anne. She became one of the central figures at her father’s court, but possessed no particular influence, and occupied herself with court gossip and card-playing, in the society of her favorite, Lady Churchill, when not engaged with the cares of her nursery. The Princess Anne was a good wife and devoted mother; and although all her children but one died in early infancy, it was not through neglect on her part. But Anne was poorly fitted by tastes or nature to play the brilliant part in history which fortune afterwards decreed to her lot. She was simply a good-natured, commonplace, and very weak-minded woman, led by the stronger minds of her favorites, and swayed by every political breeze around her. Her favorites, to her credit be it said, however, were women, and not men admirers. So that although her character was undeniably weak and petty, her life as a wife and mother was blameless, and her heart was kindly. And yet such were the circumstances which environed her after-years, that the name of this simple-minded queen, whose narrow understanding might have been compassed by the circumference of her thimble, and “who put on her crown as she would have put on her cap”—the name of this unaspiring, unqueenly woman, who would have been more at home as a fish-wife than as a sovereign, was pronounced with awe from one end of Europe to the other; and even the _Grand Monarque_ himself, “hitherto the insolent arbiter of the world,” the magnificent, the matchlessly imperial _Louis Quatorze_, trembled on his throne before Queen Anne and her victorious general, the Duke of Marlborough. The French general, the Duke of Vendôme, who replaced the defeated Marshal Villeroi, wrote concerning Anne’s illustrious military leader:— “Every one here is ready to take off his hat at the very mention of Marlborough’s name.” When, in after-years, the daring generalship of Marlborough had been replaced by the daring ambition of Bolingbroke, whose marvellous and impassioned eloquence caused even Mr. Pitt in later years to exclaim, when asked what treasures he would especially like to snatch from out of the shadows of the past, “I would choose one of the lost Decades of Livy and a speech of Bolingbroke’s!”—no wonder that with such generals and such orators, the name of Queen Anne was reflected to the world in shining glory.