Women of History: Selected from the Writings of Standard AuthorsVarious
History
Women of History: Selected from the Writings of Standard Authors
Various
Women -- Biography
Now turn the medal, and read the reverse:--"Queen Anne had a person and
appearance very graceful; something of majesty in her look. She was
religious without affectation, and certainly meant to do everything that
was just. She had no ambition, which appeared by her being so easy in
letting King William come before her to the crown, after the king, her
father, had followed such counsels as made the nation see they could not
be safe in their liberty and lives without coming to the extremities
they did; and she thought it more for her honour to be easy in it, than
to make a dispute who should have the crown first that was taken from
her father. And it was a great trouble to her to be forced to act such a
part against him, even for security, which was truly the case; and she
thought those that showed the least ambition had the best character. Her
journey to Nottingham was purely accidental, never concerted, but
occasioned by the great fright she was in when King James returned from
Salisbury; upon which she said she would rather jump out of the window
than stay and see her father."
Those who have read the previous character drawn of Queen Anne by the
same person must think the contradictions between the two truly
monstrous, and the emanation of a bewildered brain. Some candid persons,
disposed to sentimentalise on the fierce duchess, have supposed that,
after a lapse of time, her mind had softened towards her benefactress,
and that she wrote the last character as a reparation for the first. But
such inferences vanish before the fact that the duchess herself favours
the world with her motives, in raising a statue at Blenheim to her
former royal mistress, and adorning it with the laudatory inscription,
the whole being avowedly not to do justice to Queen Anne, but to vex and
spite Queen Caroline, the consort of George II. Here are her words:
"This character of Queen Anne is so much the reverse of Queen Caroline,
that I think it will not be liked at court." In the middle of the last
century, the Duchess of Marlborough hated Queen Caroline more than she
did Queen Anne. Such is the real explanation of these discrepancies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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