Queen Anne of Great Britain
Anne was the last Stuart monarch, presided over the union of England and Scotland, and was pregnant seventeen times without leaving an heir. Born in 1665, the daughter of James II, she was raised a Protestant on Charles II's insistence while her father converted to Catholicism, and in 1688 she sided with William of Orange against him — a decision she was reproached with for the rest of her life. She succeeded William in 1702 at thirty-seven, in poor health, and reigned for twelve years. The reign's substance was the War of the Spanish Succession, fought to stop France and Spain uniting, in which Marlborough won Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet and became the most successful English general since the Middle Ages. Her friendship with Marlborough's wife Sarah had begun in childhood, ran on terms of equality unusual between a queen and a subject, and collapsed after 1707 into a quarrel that helped bring down the Whig ministry. The Act of Union of 1707 joined England and Scotland into a single kingdom with one parliament, driven by English anxiety that Scotland would choose a different successor and by Scottish bankruptcy after the Darien scheme. Her seventeen pregnancies produced five live births, and the only child to survive infancy died at eleven in 1700. The Act of Settlement therefore passed the crown to the house of Hanover on her death in 1714, skipping some fifty Catholics with better hereditary claims. She was in constant pain from gout and had grown too heavy to walk by the end, and was carried to her own coronation. The reign nonetheless produced the union, Marlborough's victories, Gibraltar, and the first genuinely two-party politics in Britain.
- Lived: 1665 CE – 1714 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: queen, ruler
