She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, Britain’s last Stuart monarch, and five years later united two of her realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. She had a history of personal misfortune, overcoming ill health (she suffered from crippling arthritis; by the time she became Queen she was a virtual invalid) and living through seventeen miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births in seventeen years. By the end of her comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had emerged as a great power; the succession of outstanding victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, had humbled France and laid the foundations for Britain’s future naval and colonial supremacy. While the Queen’s military was performing dazzling exploits on the continent, her own attention—indeed her realm—rested on a more intimate conflict: the female friendship on which her happiness had for decades depended and which became for her a source of utter torment. At the core of Anne Somerset’s riveting new biography, published to great acclaim in England (“Definitive”—London Evening Standard; “Wonderfully pacy and absorbing”—Daily Mail), is a portrait of this deeply emotional, complex bond between two very different women: Queen Anne—reserved, stolid, shrewd; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Queen’s great general—beautiful, willful, outspoken, whose acerbic wit was equally matched by her fearsome temper. Against a fraught background—the revolution that deposed Anne’s father, James II, and brought her to power . . . religious differences (she was born Protestant—her parents’ conversion to Catholicism had grave implications—and she grew up so suspicious of the Roman church that she considered its doctrines “wicked and dangerous”) . . . violently partisan politics (Whigs versus Tories) . . . a war with France that lasted for almost her entire reign . . . the constant threat of foreign invasion and civil war—the much-admired historian, author of Elizabeth I (“Exhilarating”—The Spectator; “Ample, stylish, eloquent”—The Washington Post Book World), tells the extraordinary story of how Sarah goaded and provoked the Queen beyond endurance, and, after the withdrawal of Anne’s favor, how her replacement, Sarah’s cousin, the feline Abigail Masham, became the ubiquitous royal confidante and, so Sarah whispered to growing scandal, the object of the Queen's sexual infatuation. To write this remarkably rich and passionate biography, Somerset, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, has made use of royal archives, parliamentary records, personal correspondence and previously unpublished material. Queen Anne is history on a large scale—a revelation of a centuries-overlooked monarch.

This work examines the development of narrative historical writing in early eighteenth century England. In addition, it explores the historical dimension of Augustan political ideologies and the character of the Enlightenment in England. Contents: Part One: Tory and Whig History in the Age of Anne: Tory and Whig, Clarendon and Burnet: White Kennett and Laurence Echard; Part Two: The Rise of Whig Historical Writing in the Age of Walpole: Rapin-Thoyras and the Court-Country Historical Debate; The Whig Liberals: John Oldmixon and Daniel Neal; Thomas Salmon: The Tory Rebuttal to Rapin; Part Three: History and Ideology after the Fall of Walpole: Thomas Birch and the Historians; Thomas Carte and the Historical Mind of Jacobitism; James Ralph; William Guthrie; David Hume.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, Joseph Hone shows that arguments about Anne's right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen's legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical analysis, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, Literature and Party Politics demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.