Hi all and welcome or welcome back to my channel, History Calling.
Today we’re looking at Queen Anne Stuart, who you may know a little about from the movie,
The Favourite (I’ll leave a link for that in the description box below if you’re interested).
Anne is best remembered by many as the Queen who was pregnant 17 times,
yet had no surviving children at the time of her death and in today’s video I’m going to talk you
through her experiences of trying and failing to produce an heir for the house of Stuart
and explain some of the theories as to why she had so much trouble in this area.
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Anne was born on 6 February 1665, the daughter of James, Duke of York (the future James II of
England) and his first wife, Anne Hyde, Duchess of York. Little Anne was the second of the couple’s
two surviving children after her older sister Mary, who was born in 1662 and who would go on
to marry their cousin William III and ultimately become Mary II. The Duchess of York died in 1671
and Mary and Anne’s father remarried to the 15 year old Italian princess, Mary of Modena,
in November 1673. Anne herself was married ten years later on 28 July 1683 at the age of 18
to Prince George of Denmark and it’s here that her tale of woe as regards her children begins.
Over the next 17 years she would fall pregnant at least 17 times that we know of, which resulted in
a minimum of 18 children (as one and possibly even two of the pregnancies were of twins).
It was an almost unbroken list of tragedies however.
Her first pregnancy ended with her miscarrying a girl on 12 May 1684. Things then seemed to be
looking up for a brief period, as she gave birth to two healthy daughters in a row, Mary on 1 June
1685 and Anne Sophia on 12 May 1686, exactly 2 years after the first miscarriage. Tragically,
both little girls died of smallpox within a week of each other in February 1687. This was also
within a fortnight of their mother miscarrying again, this time of a boy on 21 January 1687.
She fell pregnant once more very quickly however, but had another stillborn son at 7 months on 22
October that same year. Six months later, she lost another child on 16 April 1688. On 24 July
1689 she gave birth to the child who would live the longest, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester.
He was followed by two very short-lived siblings. A sister Mary, was born on 14 October 1690,
but lived only 2 hours. Incidentally, I know that Anne had already had a daughter called Mary,
but this practice of recycling children’s names was very common at all levels of society during
this period and well beyond. While I know a lot of people today might not be very comfortable with
that, it was considered quite normal, especially given the child mortality rates at the time and
the desire many felt to ensure that family names carried on from one generation into the next.
In this case, the girl was again being named after her aunt, who had also recently become
Queen and so it made even more sense to give her this name as a mark of respect.
The next child was a brother George, born on 17 April 1692 but he survived only a few minutes.
He was the last living child Anne would ever give birth to. There followed a stillborn daughter on
24 March 1693, another miscarriage on 21 January 1694, a lost daughter on 20 February 1696 and a
miscarriage, possibly of twins that same year on 20 September. There were two miscarriages in 1697,
one on 25 March, another on 2 December, the latter of which may have been of twins again. On
15 September 1698 she was delivered of a stillborn son and on 25 January 1700 Anne’s final recorded
pregnancy came to an end with another stillborn boy. Her only surviving child, Prince William,
who had a range of health problems including hydrocephalus (meaning water on the brain),
then died on 30 July that same year, possibly of smallpox or pneumonia, though no definitive cause
of death could be agreed upon. As you can see, it is an absolutely heart-breaking list of loss.
Anne obviously had no problems in falling pregnant, even hard on the heels of a miscarriage,
birth or stillbirth, but if we remove her daughters Mary and Anne Sophia and
her son William from the list, all of whom died of causes unrelated to childbirth,
we're still left with 14 pregnancies which ended in tragedy.
How unusual was this though and what might have been the reason for it?
We can get an idea of the miscarriage and mortality rate for young children by looking
at the experiences of some of Anne’s nearest female relations. Her mother,
Anne Hyde, duchess of York gave birth 8 times that we know of, before dying at the age of 34,
but only 2 of her children, Mary and Anne, survived to adulthood. The others all passed
away before the age of four from a range of issues such as smallpox, plague and convulsions.
The duchess’s sister, Francis Hyde, who married Thomas Keightley, fared even worse. Of the 7
pregnancies she recorded in her family Bible which resulted in 2 daughters and 7 sons, only one girl,
Catherine, survived. Her others, which included two sets of twin boys (suggesting twins ran in
the family), all died before their 6th birthdays and four of them passed away as small babies.
Mary of Modena had 12 recorded pregnancies, of which only 2 children survived infancy.
Six were stillborns or miscarriages, the remaining 4 died as babies or small children.
Queen Anne’s sister Mary, later Mary II, had been married to William of Orange at the age of 15,
but had no children after suffering several miscarriages as a teenager.
She died of smallpox in 1694 at the age of 32. We can see then that Anne’s experience of multiple
miscarriages and stillbirths and even the loss of her young daughters to smallpox wasn't in itself
uncommon to either the time period in which she was living, or even to her own family, but the
sheer number, 14 failed pregnancies that we know of, is out of the ordinary. So what was going on?
Well, first of all, let me issue a quick disclaimer. I’m not a medical doctor and even
if I was, we should remember that it’s impossible to properly diagnose Anne or indeed anyone else,
at a distance of over 300 years. What follows is therefore simply a series of
guesses by historians and modern doctors based on the comments made by observers at the time
about Anne’s health. Early and unsubstantiated theories held that she might have contracted
syphilis or porphyria, but her medical history doesn't support either conclusion,
nor is there any suggestion that her husband was syphilitic either.
Then there was the hypothesis that perhaps her lost pregnancies were the result of the rhesus D
phenomenon, in which the mother’s blood type is rhesus negative, the father is rhesus positive
and their first child is also rhesus positive. This then leads the mother to produce antibodies
against rhesus positive children and will lead to multiple miscarriages after the first pregnancy.
This has also been posited as an explanation for the problems Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn
suffered with Henry VIII, but has ultimately been ruled out by most historians of Queen
Anne Stuart as it doesn’t fit with her symptoms. Remember, she had a miscarriage followed by two
successful pregnancies in a row and a later, successful pregnancy with Prince William,
Duke of Gloucester, a pattern which really doesn’t fit with the rhesus D diagnosis.
A more believable, though still unprovable, theory put forward by one of Anne’s biographers,
Anne Somerset (I’ll leave her book linked below) argued that the Queen suffered
from a ‘intra-uterine growth retardation caused by an insufficiency of the placenta.
This in turn could have been the consequence of Anne being affected by Hughes syndrome, also
known as antiphospholipid syndrome, or “sticky blood”’. As Anne Somerset goes on to explain,
this essentially meant that Queen Anne’s blood was more prone to clotting and so couldn’t pass
through the tiny blood vessels of the placenta, thus the constant miscarriages and stillbirths.
This theory is further supported by the fact that Hughes syndrome can lead to
arthritis and skin breakouts on the face, both of which the Queen would go on to suffer from.
Whatever the problem was, we might also wonder if it ran on one or both sides of her family,
given the tragedies her mother, aunt, sister and step-mother suffered, however I think it’s
impossible to prove this one way or the other. Mary II seems to have had reproductive issues as
well, but they were very different to Anne’s. She was never pregnant again (that we know of) after
her teens and none of her pregnancies went to term, or close to it in the way that Anne’s did.
As for the other women in the family, despite some miscarriages and/or infant deaths soon after
birth, they, like Anne, all produced a number of children who were born alive and healthy and died
later of causes unrelated to childbirth, so there doesn’t seem to have been a problem in the genes
of either the Stuarts or the Hydes. The loss of so many of their children was ultimately bad luck
caused by the time period in which they lived and the lack of proper medical care. Indeed had more
of Anne’s children been born alive and lived even a few weeks, we would likely say the same of her.
As I mentioned earlier, after 1700 Anne would never have another recorded pregnancy,
though her husband George didn’t die until 1708. From what her doctors said and wrote,
this doesn’t seem to have been because of the menopause (she was only turning 35 in 1700) but
may have been due to her increasingly poor health and/or because she and Prince George (who was in
poor health himself with asthma and obesity) were no longer sleeping together, especially after she
became Queen in early 1702 and was busy with affairs of state. By her early thirties she too
was seriously overweight and had to be carried to her coronation, though once at the door,
she was able to walk into Westminster Abbey under her own steam. She was also increasingly suffering
from attacks of gout and arthritis which caused her enormous pain. The effect of at least 17
pregnancies may have physically damaged her too and left her unable to conceive again.
Perhaps this was a blessing though? Even if she had become pregnant again, given her track record
the chances that she would have had a healthy, living child seem incredibly low and really,
hadn’t she suffered enough? The Favourite shows her owning a group of white rabbits,
one for each of her lost children and while this isn’t historically accurate,
it is true to say that she was emotionally devastated by the loss of her children.
To sum up then, we’ll never know for certain what her medical issues were but I hope we can
all agree that no English Queen ever endured as much in the quest for an heir as Anne and
she’s deserving of our deepest sympathy for what she went through. She died in 1714, aged 49 and
was buried in Westminster Abbey with her husband and some of their children. Her death brought an
end to the Stuarts’ rule over Britain and Ireland and the throne then passed to her distant cousin,
the Elector of Hanover, who became George I. I hope you’ve found this video interesting,
if sombre. Let me know in the comments below what you think might have caused
Queen Anne’s difficulties and I’ll be back next week with a new video. Til then, keep learning.