The Princess of Downton Abbey

The popular Downton Abbey series of period television shows and movies has been known to feature royals throughout its run. The first film, 2019's simply titled Downton Abbey, built the main storyline around the Crawley family and their servants preparing for a visit from King George V and Queen Mary. The latest film, Downton Abbey: Grand Finale, features a much less well-known royal. In the film, she is referred to only as Princess Arthur of Connaught but in real life, she bore many titles and was positioned at the center of several royal families, not just the British one.

At her birth in 1891, Lady Alexandra Victoria Alberta Edwina Louise Duff was yet another great-grandchild of Queen Victoria. However, she already bore several distinctions. She was the first of Victoria's direct descendants who was not born as a prince or princess. Albeit, she was the first living grandchild of the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra; her older brother had been stillborn the year before. She was fifth in line to the throne after her grandfather, her uncle Albert Victor (who would die the next year), her uncle George and her mother.

Baby Alexandra's mother was the oldest daughter of Edward and Alexandra (known as Bertie and Alix in the family), Princess Louise, who would later bear the title Princess Royal. Louise had married a nobleman, Alexander Duff 6th Earl of Fife, who was 18 years older than her and a good friend of her father. Upon the marriage, Queen Victoria elevated the groom to Duke of Fife. The couple's second daughter, Lady Maud, was born two years after Alexandra. The family lived a relatively quiet life adjacent to the more public-facing members of the family. 

After 10 years of marriage, Queen Victoria paid the family a great honor. When she had first created Alexander Duke of Fife, the creation limited the title's descent only to male heirs. By 1900, it was fairly clear that the title would likely become extinct. So, Queen Victoria re-created the title again, this time allowing it to go to a female heir. Thus, seven-year-old Lady Alexandra Duff became one of those rare creatures among the British aristocracy: the heiress of a noble title in her own right.

Alexandra between her parents, Louise
and Alexander, with sister Maud, 1902
By Alexander Corbett via Wikimedia Commons

A few years later, Alexandra and Maud would be elevated even further. Their grandfather had succeeded Queen Victoria in 1901. It seemed to rankle him that any of his grandchildren did not have princely titles. In the modern British Royal Family, titles are only granted to male-line descendants of the monarch. His son and heir George's children had titles and his daughter Maud's newborn son was born a Prince of Denmark, but King Edward's daughter Louise's children were merely ladies. On November 9, 1905, at the same time that he created Louise Princess Royal, he granted her daughters the rank and style of Highness and Princess, with precedence above all others except Royal Highnesses. Thus, 14-year-old Lady Alexandra Duff became Her Highness Princess Alexandra. She and her sister are often referred to as Princess of Fife, but this is not technically correct since their status does not come from their father but from their maternal grandfather. 

The next time Princess Alexandra made headlines was in 1910. Her mother's cousin, the handsome and poetic Prince Christopher of Greece, had spent some time visiting with the wealthy Fife family. The 19-year-old princess and 22-year-old prince apparently developed a passionate affection for each other and may even have become unofficially engaged. The royal romance sparked the rumor mills at home and abroad, even prompting an announcement by The New York Times. However, perhaps under pressure from her disapproving parents, the romance ended. Christopher later shared the young couple was not very heartbroken, having been more in love with love than with each other. The papers found other alleged suitors for Alexandra, including the King of Portugal. Alas, papers of the time often published such romantic nonsense.

The Fife family were tightly knit and spent most of their time away from the court or from Bertie's Marlborough House set. They gave Louise's poor health as the reason for their limited forays into royal duties. When they traveled abroad, it was often for the benefit of her health. Choosing the dry Egyptian climate over the wet winters of England and Scotland. In late 1911, their annual escape to Egypt led to high drama. The family was aboard the SS Delhi when it shipwrecked during a terrible storm off the north African coast. The passengers were rushed into a rescue boat but that boat was overcome by the rough seas and sank. Despite wearing a life vest, Alexandra went under the waves and took in great gulps of water. She likely would have drowned had she not been pulled to safety. Her parents and sister were also dragged from the waves. Once ashore, they had to walk four miles through the storm to find refuge at a lighthouse. They then endured a 10-mile ride on donkeys to the British Legation at Tangier. At first, all seemed well with the family reporting back to Britain and to journalists that they had suffered no lasting harm. However, as they traveled along to Egypt and sailed up the Nile, it became clear that the 71-year-old Duke was not recuperating after all. He had developed pleuriscy. He died in Egypt on January 29, 1912 and Alexandra became the 2nd Duchess of Fife. As such, she was one of the largest landowners in Scotland -- the title came with 250,000 acres and 14 country houses.

Prince and Princess Arthur of
Connaught on their wedding day
from Hans van Marwijk via Wikimedia Commons

The following year, the still grieving family were delighted to welcome a new member when Alexandra married her mother's cousin Prince Arthur of Connaught, only son of Queen Victoria's third son, at Chapel Royal in St. James's Palace. With this, her title and status were raised once again. Despite the fact that she was higher in the line of succession than her husband, he was a male-line descendant. Thus, she became Her Royal Highness Princess Arthur of Connaught. She was usually referred to this way rather than with her own title as Duchess of Fife.

Arthur held a prominent position within the British Royal Family. After the death of King Edward in 1910 and accession of Alexandra's uncle King George V, Arthur and his father, who was also named Arthur, were the only adult royal princes. As his bride, Alexandra took on a much more public role than she had previously held.

The couple's only child Prince Alaistair of Connaught was born 10 months after the wedding, just 12 days after the start of World War I. The war, of course, separated the family, who had taken up residence in Mayfair. Prince Arthur served with the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium. Back home, Alexandra followed the same route as many of her female relatives on both sides of the war: she became a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington. (From the 1970s, most members of the British Royal Family have been born there.)

The war had a direct impact on the family. Cousin King George V did not agree with the expansion of royal titles that his father had implemented for the Fife girls. The war only excerbated his concerns that the public would grow tired of too many royals, especially as the family's ties to German royals were called into question. In 1917, the King officially changed the House of Saxe-Coburg to the House of Windsor and re-christened his British-dwelling cousins who had Germanic names and titles to British names and titles. The Battenbergs became the Mountbattens. The Tecks became the Cambridges. He also limited princely titles to the children and male-line grandchildren of the monarch. While he did not undo his father's creation of Alexandra and her sister as Princesses, as many other princes and princesses who could be demoted to lower titles, were demoted. This included Alexandra's son, Prince Alastair of Connaught. From then on, he was known by his mother's secondary title as Earl of Macduff.

By Alexander Corbett via Wikimedia Commons

After the war, Alexandra continued her nursing career, specializing in gynecology. She was well-respected in her field. She won a prize for a paper on preeclampsia and earned a certificate of merit. Her nursing career was interrupted from 1920 to 1923 when her husband served as Governor General of South Africa. The family was popular there, especially Alexandra, who found many ways to support nursing, hospitals and childcare there. But, she missed her hands-on work.

When they returned to Britain, Alexandra eagerly returned to her chosen career although with a degree of anonymity. She switched her specialization to the operating theater and became known as Nurse Marjorie, first at University College Hospital and later at Charing Cross Hospital. One patient's father, gave the anonymous royal a sixpence to thank her for helping his daughter. The coin became a treasured keepsake for the princess. In 1925, her uncle King George V honored her with the Royal Red Cross Badge in recognition of her service to nursing.

During the late 1920s, Alexandra's mother Louise Princess Royal became very ill. She suffered for  several years with gastric hemorrhaging and then heart disease. Her death in 1931, with daughters Alexandra and Maud, at her side was seen as a relief by many in the family. She undoubtedly benefited in those final years from Alexandra's expertise as a nurse.

Like his wife, Prince Arthur also took an interest in hospitals, serving the chairman of Middlesex Hospital's Board of Directors. He held several other leadership roles, particularly across Berkshire, where King George appointed him High Steward in 1935. The family attended the coronation of Alexandra's cousin King George VI in 1937 but they had little time left together. Arthur developed stomach cancer and passed away in 1938 at the age of 55. Alexandra was 47 and their son Alastair was 24. Four years later, when Alexandra's father-in-law died, Alastair became the 2nd Duke of Connaught.

Undaunted, Alexandra continued her nursing work. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she was offered the position of matron in a country hospital, but she preferred to be closer to the troops. She accepted a role at the Second British General Hospital, working with the servicemen who were being evacuated from Dunkirk.

Alexandra with baby Alastair
from Bain News Service in the US Library of Congress
via Wikimedia Commons

She then financed and equipped her own nursing home, the Fife Nursing Home, and personally ran it for over a decade. Although she was fully engaged in her passion for nursing and health care, Alexandra was still not exempt from more personal tragedy. Her only child Alastair had graduated Sandhurst in 1935 and entered full-time Army service, including time in Palestine and in Egypt where his maternal grandfather had died three decades earlier. During World War II, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Earl of Athlone, a royal relative serving as Governor General in Canada. On April 26, 1943, Alastair was found dead in or near his room at the Governor General's official residence of Rideau Hall. Reported at the time as death from natural causes, the truth has never been publicly clear. Early reports said he had died of hypothermia from an open window. Later reports agreed that hypothermia had killed him but only because he had fallen from his window after drinking heavily. Whatever actually happened, his mother was almost certainly devastated to lose her only child at the age of 28. Two and a half years later, her only sibling, Maud, passed away from bronchitis.

Throughout the 1940s, Alexandra increasingly suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis, which eventually left her bedbound. She closed her nursing home and focused on writing in the 1950s. She shared her work privately. One volume focused on her nursing career, while another detailed her family's horrific shipwreck. She passed away in February 1959 at the age of 67. Her titles passed to her sister Maud's only child, James Carnegie, who became the 3rd Duke of Fife. The title is currently held by his son.

Princess Arthur's depiction in Downton Abbey: Grand Finale takes place at a moment when she did have a quite prominent role in the royal family. Set in June 1930, two months before the birth of Princess Margaret, Alexandra was still in the Top Ten of the Line of Succession, which looked like this:

1. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII and then The Duke of Windsor)
2. The Duke of York (later George VI)
3. Princess Elizabeth of York (later Elizabeth II)
4. The Duke of Gloucester
5. The Prince George (later The Duke of Kent)
6. The Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood (later The Princess Royal)
7. Viscount Lascelles
8. The Honourable Gerald Lascelles
9. The Princess Royal
10. Princess Arthur of Connaught

Princess Arthur AKA Princess Alexandra AKA 2nd Duchess of Fife was 17th in line at the time of her death. She lived during six reigns, those of her great-grandmother Victoria, her grandfather Edward VII, her uncle George V, her cousins Edward VIII and George VI, and her first cousin once removed Elizabeth II. 

Through her husband, whose sister Margaret married the future King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, she is a great-aunt to the current Royal Houses of Sweden, Denmark, and Greece. Through her mother, she is cousin once and twice removed (respectively) to the King of Norway and to King Charles III.

More about Alexandra

Alexandra, the Princess Who Might Have Been Queen of Portugal on Royal Musings
Christopher of Greece to Marry Alexandra of Fife on Royal Musings
The Marriage of Prince Arthur of Connaught and the Duchess of Fife on Royal Musings
Princess Alexandra 2nd Duchess of Fife on Alchetron
Princess Alexandra, Duchess of Fife on 1066
Princess Alexandra, Duchess of Fife on Royal Watcher Blog
Princess Alexandra, Duchess of Fife: A Champion of Nursing on Royal Splendor
Relatively Royal: Meet the Fifes on Esoteric Curiosa
Wedding of Prince Arthur of Connaught and Princess Alexandra Duchess of Fife on Royal Watcher Blog

Farewell Katharine Kent: The Princess from Yorkshire

Katharine Duchess of Kent

from the Queensland State Archives via Wikimedia Commons

Six centuries had passed since a royal wedding was held at York Minster. As five future monarchs and representatives from eight royal families gathered at the church, a shy young local woman arrived on her father's arm to become the first untitled woman to become a British Royal Highness in centuries. Her very grand mother-in-law is said to have disapproved of the love match. Princess Marina, the widowed Duchess of Kent, was the granddaughter of a Greek King and great-granddaughter of a Danish King and Russian Czar. Her late husband was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the youngest surviving child of King George V. Her new daughter-in-law's grandfathers were mere baronets.

Katharine Lucy Mary Worsley was born in 1933 at her father's ancestral estate of Hovingham Hall in North Yorkshire. The only daughter of Sir William Worsley 4th Baronet and Joyce Brunner, she grew up in the countryside and did not attend school until the age of 10. In the midst of World War II, the lonely young girl was sent to Queen Margaret's School just outside of Kent. There she discovered a love of music that would come to define her life. Her musical talent led her to apply for the Royal Academy of Music but she failed to gain admission. Instead, she went to a finishing school for young ladies, living with her older brothers who were students at nearby Oxford University.

Katharine's parents helped her secure work as a nursery school teacher and she became a fixture on the local social scene, which welcomed a Prince into its midst when The Queen's younger cousin was based at Camp Catterick as part of his Army service.

Born in 1935, Prince Edward George Nicholas Paul Patrick was sixth in line to the throne at the time of his birth. He was still in the top ten when he met the blonde beauty who would become his wife. Edward's father, Prince George The Duke of Kent was the last British Prince to marry a royal when he wed Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark in 1934. After Edward, the couple welcomed two more children, Princess Alexandra and Prince Michael. Like so many families, the Kents met tragedy in World War II. Prince George was killed in an airplane crash while on active duty in 1942. Six-year-old Prince Edward became the new Duke of Kent. Ten years later, the teenager represented his branch of the family as he walked behind the funeral cortege of his uncle King George VI and a year later paid homage to his cousin Queen Elizabeth II at her coronation.

By the time Edward met Katharine, he had completed his education at the same schools his first cousin twice removed Prince Harry would later attend (Ludgrove, Eton and Sandhurst) and launched what would be a 20-year career in the British Army, eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel. His mother, who is known to have looked down upon her sisters-in-law Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and Princess Alice Duchess of Gloucester, because they were daughters of a mere earl and duke respectively, initially tried to separate the young couple. Edward was sent to Germany in hopes his ardor would cool. Meanwhile, Katharine and a friend traveled through Mexico by bus. At the end of her journey, a bouquet of flowers from Edward greeted her. Princess Marina finally accepted the inevitable and announced the couple's engagement.

Embed from Getty Images

They were married on June 8, 1961. Katharine became not just Royal Highness but also an Army wife, following her husband to postings in Hong Kong and Germany. Their first child, George Earl of St. Andrews, was born in June 1962. Daughter Lady Helen Windsor arrived in April 1964 as the third of four royal babies born that year. (The others were, in order of birth: James Ogilvy, son of Katharine's sister-in-law Princess Alexandra; Prince Edward Duke of Edinburgh, son of Queen Elizabeth II; and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, daughter of Princess Margaret.) In 1970, their son Lord Nicholas was born.

The 1970s, however, turned out to be a decade of great sorrow for the quiet Duchess of Kent. She lost her fourth pregnancy in 1975 after contracting rubella. In 1977, her son Patrick was stillborn. These tragedies combined with the deaths of both of her parents heralded a very difficult period in her life. She was hospitalized with "nervous exhaustion" and later became one of the first British royals to publicly discuss her struggles with mental health.

In public, Katharine became well-known for her role at Wimbledon, awarding the Ladies' Singles championship for decades. Her royal patronages focused largely on organizations that helped the young or the elderly. And, she was always a familiar face at royal balcony appearances and royal family celebrations. Privately, she was a well-loved member of the extended British Royal Family, participating in royal Christmas with the Queen until the family became too large to gather together in one palatial estate.

However, Katharine's mental and physical health took its toll. In addition to the depression she had suffered, she also struggled with the Epstein-Barr virus, myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome) and celiac disease. Already introspective, she turned to religion to cope and eventually made the decision to convert to Catholicism in 1994. Under the laws of succession at the time, her husband might have lost his place in the Line of Succession for being married to a Catholic. Queen Elizabeth, in a show of love and support for her cousins, decided that this rule would not apply because Katharine was not Catholic at the time of their marriage. Besides being a cherished family member, the Kents had also proven themselves as excellent "working royals", carrying on royal duties well past the age when other Britons retire. Later, her youngest son and two of her grandchildren also converted and surrendered their places in the Line of Succession, which still bars actual Catholics but not the spouses of Catholics.

By 2002, after 40 years as a royal, Katharine decided to discontinue use of "Her Royal Highness." Always modest, she has already ended the tradition of making Wimbledon competitors genuflect to the royal box. By the time she was in 70s, she had withdrawn from royal duties, appearing only on large ceremonial occasions or public family events.

Instead, she focused on her love of music. Throughout her life, she had continued to pursue her own musical interests, including singing in several choirs. In her "retirement", she became a music teacher at a primary school where only the headmistress knew who "Mrs. Kent" really was. She also opened her own small music studio teaching private lessons. In 2004, she co-founded Future Talent, a private organization that provides instruments, lessons, and other opportunities to children from low-income backgrounds.

Largely absent from public life, Katharine's last royal appearance was as a guest at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. She was one of the few guests invited to Prince Philip's covid-era funeral in 2021. The death of Queen Elizabeth in 2022 left Katharine as the oldest living member of the British Royal Family, but she did not attend the funeral nor the coronation of King Charles III that followed. She was last scene seated in a wheelchair outside of the Kent's home at Wren Cottage, Kensington Palace, as her husband received birthday greetings on October 9, 2024.

Katharine Kent, or HRH The Duchess of Kent, passed away peacefully at home at the age of 92 on September 4, 2025. Her funeral will be held at Westminster Cathedral on September 16. It will be the first Catholic funeral in the royal family in centuries. She will then join her husband's parents and other members of the extended royal family in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore, Windsor.

In addition to her 89-year-old husband, who is now the oldest living member of the British Royal Family, she is survived by her children, and 10 grandchildren. Born between 1989 and 2014, the grandchildren are Edward Baron Downpatrick (who will eventually succeed to the Kent title after his father and grandfather), Lady Marina Windsor, Lady Amelia Windsor, Cassius Taylor, Columbus Taylor, Eloise Taylor, Estella Taylor, Albert Windsor, Leopold Windsor, and Louis Windsor.

MORE ABOUT KATHARINE DUCHESS OF KENT

Duchess of Kent: Death and Funeral on Gert's Royals
Duchess of Kent Has Died on The Royal Watcher
The Duchess of Kent's Secret Double Life on Royal Central
Fresh Fashion Forever: 90 Years of the Duchess of Kent's Elegant Style on Tatler
The Jewels of the Duchess of Kent on The Royal Watcher
Katharine Duchess of Kent: A Quiet Pearl on Timeless Pearl
The Music Loving Duchess on BBC
A Piece for the Duchess of Kent's 90th Birthday on Maddy Chassar Hesketh
Wedding of Prince Edward Duke of Kent and Katharine Worsley on Unofficial Royalty

Queens of Britain Series: Queen Anne

By Michael Dahl via Wikimedia Commons

The second daughter of a second son. It had happened before when Queen Elizabeth became the last of Tudor monarchs. Now, a century after Elizabeth's death her cousin many times removed was ascending the throne as the last of the Stuart monarchs. Queen Anne's life had been less tragic and terror-filled than Elizabeth's but her rise to the throne was perhaps even more complicated.

Anne was born five years after the restoration of the monarchy. Her grandfather King Charles I had been beheaded in the midst of a civil war. Then followed a 10-year interregnum ruled by the Puritanical Cromwell's while the royal family wandered the Continent in exile. For Anne, however, those were just stories. The monarchy of her childhood was dominated by her bon vivant uncle King Charles II, who is remembered as the "Merry Monarch." However, it was still a monarchy torn by religion. Anne's father James Duke of York was Catholic. Uncle Charles was officially Protestant and, for the sake of the longevity of the crown, he insisted that Anne and her older sister Mary be raised as Protestants. Since Charles' wife Queen Catherine had no children (See my post Catherine: An Unhappy Queen), Charles knew that one of James' children would eventually ascend to the throne. He believed in order to avoid another civil war, the monarch needed to be Protestant.

Anne's father had other ideas. After her mother died when Anne was still a little girl, he married a Catholic princess and tried to have sons who would supplant his daughters in the line of succession. He was initially unsuccessful.

In the meantime, Anne was being moved from place to place, primarily because of her health. She had been sent to France to live with her grandmother, Queen Henrietta Maria. A French-born princess, Henrietta Maria opted to stay in her birth country rather than live in the country that had beheaded her husband. After the queen died, Anne was left in the care of her father's sister Henrietta Anne who had married the French king's brother. When Henrietta Anne died suddenly, young Anne returned to England to join her sister Mary in the care of the Edward and Frances Villiers. A year later, her mother died. Then, her father remarried. Then, Mary married and left to live in Holland. Anne was 12 years old and she was fairly alone except for a dear friend she had made, Sarah Jennings, who was five years her senior. 

Anne's relationship with Sarah would come to be one of the defining elements of Anne's life, her reign, and even her memory today. The two were very close throughout their youth. They wrote to each other using the sobriquets Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Morley. Anne thought this would make them more equal. It seems, however, that Sarah often had the upper hand. She married the military genius John Churchill, who defended Anne's father in the Monmouth Rebellion but later stood against him in the Glorious Revolution and won his lasting fame in the Battle of Blenheim, for which Anne would create him Duke of Marlborough.

The question of Anne's own marriage arose early as it often did for princesses. At first, it was thought that she would marry her second cousin Prince George of Hanover. As a descendant of King James I, George, like Mary's husband, William of Orange, was in the British Line of Succession. In fact, he was the next male after William. However, King Charles' preference for French alliances caused a change of plan. Mary's marriage into the Dutch naval superpower had made France uncomfortable. Charles needed an ally to counterbalance any possible future problems with the Dutch. Denmark was selected and Anne was offered to the Danish king's younger son, Prince George. The match infuriated William of Orange but ultimately delighted Anne, despite George's well-earned reputation for dullness and his complete lack of ambition.

The newlyweds fell immediately to the chief task of royal marriages: baby making. Anne would have 17 pregnancies in as many years. The first, a stillborn daughter, devastated the young couple. The birth of their daughter Mary 13 months later and Anne Sophia 11 months after that brought them great joy. Early the next year, Anne suffered a miscarriage. Shortly after that George and both of their tiny daughters were stricken with smallpox. Anne, who had survived smallpox as a child, nursed them all. George slowly recovered but the babies died within a week of each other. (See my post The Daughters of Queen Anne.) The couple was distraught at this tremendous double lost followed by another miscarriage that fall and a stillbirth the following spring. Finally, just a few days before their sixth wedding anniversary in the summer of 1689, their son William was born.

By then, the entire landscape of the British monarchy had changed, in part due to Anne's interference. Many Protestant leaders were concerned when Anne's Catholic father James acceded the throne in 1685. The fact that his heirs, Mary and Anne, were both Protestants married to Protestants kept their worries at bay. Eventually, they thought, he will die and Protestants will reign again. James, however, had made different plans. He had remarried a young Catholic princess Mary of Modena in an attempt to beget male heirs who would supersede his daughters in the Line of Succession. Mary's first 10 pregnancies resulted in stillbirths or babies who died young. When her eleventh pregnancy was announced in 1688, something seemed different. Especially to Anne. She and others started rumors that the King was planning to foist a false heir on Britain in order to maintain Catholic control. Anne even claimed that the Queen was not really pregnant. As evidence, she said her stepmother would not allow her to touch her pregnant belly as she had done in the past. By the time, Mary gave birth to a healthy son in June 1688, the conspiracy theories grew to include accusations of an infant being smuggled into the birth chamber in a warming pan. (See my post When Protestant Princesses Have Catholic Daddies.) 

By the end of the next year, Parliament had invited William of Orange to invade and James had fled the country. Parliament deemed his departure an abdication and offered a joint throne to Anne's older sister Mary and William under certain conditions. The most important of these was that Parliament would now and always hold the upper hand in governance. Another condition was that either spouse would reign to the end of life regardless of who died first and that Anne would be their heir, unless Mary had a surviving child, which she never did.

During William and Mary's reign, their relationship with Anne became strained. In the beginning, they rewarded her loyalty by making her husband Duke of Cumberland and her best friend Sarah's husband Earl of Marlborough. However, they tried to prevent her from having too much financial independence. They also began to fear that the Marlboroughs were supporting the Jacobites, supporters of King James and his return to power. Despite this, Anne grew even closer to Sarah and would not comply with Mary's order to dismiss her from her household. When Sarah was dismissed by the Lord Chamberlain, Anne left the royal palace. Courtiers were forbidden from visiting her. When she then gave birth to another dead baby, Mary went to her but berated her for her defiance. That was the last time the sisters would ever see each other. Mary died a year and a half later.

Mary's death led to reconciliation with King William, who never remarried. He accepted Anne and her son William as his heirs. After William died at age 11 in 1700, he began to worry about the future of the monarchy. The Jacobites were still strong and would spend another half century attempting to bring James II or his son or grandson to the throne. With such a threat to the Protestant throne, the Act of Settlement of 1701 was adopted. It determined that the throne would bypass all of the potential heirs who were Catholic and settled the succession on Sophia Electress of Hanover and her descendants. Sophia was a granddaughter of King James I in the female line and matriarch of a family with two more generations of Protestant male heirs. 

From the Almanac Royal Amsterdam
via Wikimedia Commons

The following year, William died and the 37-year-old Anne became Queen with Prince George as consort. Her long history of troubled health reared its head on her coronation day with an attack of gout that required her to be carried to the ceremony.

Anne showered her lifelong friend Sarah's and her husband with honors. Always tempestuous, Sarah controlled the Queen's household and served as a chief advisor. After Prince George's death, Sarah attempted to exert even more control, even removing portraits of George against Anne's wishes. Sarah's haughty ways continued to disturb others and eventually became more than even Anne could tolerate. When Anne showed favor befriend Sarah's cousin Abigail Masham, the two had a final blowout in 1711. Although frequently portrayed as a girl fight or even a spat between lovers, the row had much deeper roots in Anne and Sarah's political differences and Sarah's presumption to dictate to the Queen.

Today, Anne is one of the least well-remembered monarchs but her reign was active and full of historic events. Perhaps the most important of these was the 1707 Acts of Union that united all of the nations of the British Isles into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As the last Stuart monarch, it is perhaps fitting that she was the first to be Queen of a united Scotland and England rather than serving as Queen of each. 

She also had to face some karma from her early denials about her younger half-brother, Prince James Francis Stuart. When their father died in 1701, the King of France had pronounced James as his rightful successor. By 1708, the "Old Pretender" as he came to be called, had raised an army and attempted an invasion that was deflected by Anne's forces. Anne's government later had James exiled from France as a condition of a peace treaty between the countries.

Anne also was a patron of the arts and sciences. She supporting the work of some of the most famous men of the age, including Isaac Newton and George Frederick Handel. 

By 1713, Anne's health was rapidly declining. Some say she forced herself to stay alive long enough to prevent her cousin Electress Sophia from succeeding her. Whether true or not, Sophia died in May 1714 and Anne suffered a final stroke less about eight weeks later. She was succeeded by Sophia's oldest son, King George I, whom Anne had never allowed to visit Britain. He beheld his new kingdom for the very first time six weeks later. 

QUEENS OF BRITAIN SERIES
Boudica, Queen of the Iceni 
Empress Matilda 
Margaret Maid of Norway 
Lady Jane Grey
Queen Mary I
Queen Elizabeth I
Mary Queen of Scots 
Queen Mary II
Queen Anne
Queen Victoria - coming soon
Queen Elizabeth II - coming soon

MORE ABOUT ANNE
10 Surprising Facts About Queen Anne on Historical Medallions
The Death of Queen Anne on The National Archives
It's Not That Easy Being Queen on Tom Reeder's Blog
Mary II and Queen Anne: The Representations of Two Sisters on Team Queens
Queen Anne on The British Monarchy
Queen Anne on Historic Royal Palaces
Queen Anne on Historic UK
Queen Anne is Dead! on Untold Lives Blog
Queen Anne and the Favourite on Royal Museums Greenwich
Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill's Last Stand-Off at Kensington Palace on Historic Royal Palaces
Queen Anne's Love Life on University of Cambridge Museum & Botanic Gardens
The Stuart Dynasty - William, Mary, and Anne on A Royal Heraldry