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agree very well with me, but as for my being with child, I don’t believe it, though not having had anything since my month was out it is not altogether impossible’.¹⁰ Only in the autumn did she accept she was pregnant, and she remained confused about the date of conception.

      While at Tunbridge, the Princess relied on Sarah to keep her informed about her daughter’s health, having begged Sarah to ‘let me know the least thing that ails her’. After receiving a worrying report the Princess wrote, ‘I am sorry my girl has any soreness in her eyes for fear she should take after me in that’. The child was so sickly that it was decided that medical intervention was necessary. In fact, this much increased the danger, for only the strongest children were capable of surviving the ministrations of seventeenth-century doctors. Anne agreed that the infant should be given an incision, or ‘issue’, through which evil humours could be drawn out, but was assailed by doubts after authorising the procedure. She wrote anxiously to Sarah that she was now in ‘a mind to put it off till I am at London myself, though if I thought the deferring of it could be of any ill consequence I would send presently to Mrs Berkeley to let it be done and therefore I desire you would let [me] know your opinion about it’. Fortunately by the time Anne returned to London in early September, the child was better. The Princess informed Sarah that she found little Mary ‘God be thanked, very well, and I think mightily grown since I saw her’, though displaying little of that ‘wit and awareness’ that Anne had been told to look for in her. She added, ‘She has at this time a scabby face which they tell me will do her a great deal of good. I beg a thousand pardons for giving you so particular a nasty account of her but … I could not hinder myself from doing it’.¹¹

      Anne’s main worry at this time was financial, for despite having an income from England of £20,000 a year (with more coming from Denmark), she and her husband found themselves overstretched as both had large households. Anne had two ladies of the bedchamber, five dressers, four maids of honour, and a woman to look after them, a sempstress, starcher and laundress, two chaplains, four pages of the backstairs, two gentlemen ushers, two gentlemen waiters, plus a fully staffed stables with her own Master of the Horse. George had an even larger establishment and stables and coachmen of his own. In addition they had to pay kitchen staff. The documented wage bill came to more than £8,645 and this was almost certainly an underestimate. On top of these expenses were costs for food and clothing. According to Sarah, the Countess of Rochester spent additional enormous sums on Anne’s wardrobe. Although the Princess grumbled that she believed her clothes to ‘be much the worse for her looking after’, at the end of 1685 the Countess’s ‘accounts came to eight thousand pounds’.¹²

      On top of this came Anne’s gambling costs, which were by no means inconsiderable. Cutting back on this was difficult, for if Anne had absented herself from the tables, there would have been complaints. Stakes were high: in the summer of 1686 the Princess told Sarah ‘Yesterday I won three hundred pound, but have lost almost half of it again this morning’. Sarah clearly made regular gains from her card games with her mistress, but years later she criticised the Princess for being dilatory about settling her debts. In addition she carped that when Anne did pay, ‘she would throw down more than was necessary’.¹³

      By late 1685 Anne’s overspending had left her £10,000 in debt, ‘which was very uneasy to her’. According to a later account, she asked her uncle Lord Rochester to approach her father for more funds on her behalf, but he ‘excused himself … telling her she knew the King’s temper in relation to money matters, and such a proposal might do him hurt and her no good’. Thereafter Anne held a lasting grudge against him, complaining that neither he nor his brother Clarendon had ‘behaved … well to me … which one may think a little extraordinary’.¹⁴

      James did, in fact, do his best to ease his daughter’s financial difficulties. In November 1685 he ordered that £16,000 of ‘royal bounty’ should be given to her to discharge her debts. Three months later he granted Anne and George an additional £10,000 a year. By that time the extravagant Lady Clarendon had left her service and had been succeeded by Lady Sarah Churchill as First Lady of the Bedchamber. Sarah claimed that by acting a ‘faithful and frugal part’ she reduced the Princess’s annual wardrobe expenses to £1,600. Even so, Anne remained short of money.¹⁵

      Gilbert Burnet was shocked that Anne received ‘but thirty thousand pounds a year, which is so exhausted by a great establishment that she is really extreme poor for one of her rank’. Roger Morrice also thought that James treated Anne shabbily and was even under the illusion that she had had ‘no addition … to her pension since this King came to the throne’. Having heard in May 1687 that Prince George was so ‘greatly in debt’ that he could hardly pay for his visit to Denmark that summer, and that Anne had been ‘forced to put off many of her servants and two coaches and six horses and other appurtenances suitable to her quality’, Morrice noted indignantly, ‘the father starves Princess Anne and Prince George her husband’. Yet this was unfair, for shortly after this Anne and George were granted an additional £16,000 ‘as the King’s free gift and royal bounty’.¹⁶

      Parliament had been adjourned while James dealt with Monmouth’s invasion, but when it reassembled on 9 November 1685, difficulties soon arose. The King had enlarged the army to help him suppress the rebellion, and when doing so had given commissions to several Catholics, despite the fact that this contravened the Test Act of 1673. In an arrogant speech he informed Parliament he had no intention of dismissing these officers now that peace had been restored. On 16 November the Commons presented an address respectfully reminding James that such commissions were illegal. ‘With great warmth’ James responded that ‘he did not expect such an address from the House of Commons’.¹⁷

      When the King’s speech was debated in the House of Lords on 19 November, there were ‘high speeches’ from many peers, with Anne’s former preceptor Bishop Compton expressing himself particularly fiercely. The King prorogued Parliament the following day. Soon afterwards he began depriving men who expressed opposition of their employment. By December 1685, sixteen army officers who had supported the Commons’ address had been cashiered, and James also dismissed two Members of Parliament who held administrative posts. He indicated that ‘all persons that should hereafter offend’ could expect the same treatment. Bishop Compton was dismissed from the Privy Council and his court office of Dean of the Chapel Royal. It was believed he had been disgraced not just for too ‘freely speaking in the House of Lords’, but also ‘for his being industrious to preserve the Princess Anne in the Protestant religion, whom there were some endeavours to gain to the Church of Rome’.¹⁸

      Those alarmed by James’s behaviour consoled themselves that he would be succeeded by the Protestant Mary of Orange. However, some people feared that if Anne converted to Catholicism, her father would reward her by disinheriting Mary and making his younger daughter his successor. The French ambassador Barrillon certainly saw this as the best way for James to proceed, though he acknowledged in March 1685 that some would regard the proposal as ‘chimerical and impracticable’. Another French diplomat named Bonrepos, who arrived in England at the end of the year, did his best to advance the scheme. In the spring of 1686 he asked the Danish envoy in England if Prince George would be interested in his wife succeeding to the throne in preference to Mary, which would be feasible if George changed faith. To Bonrepos’s delight, the Dane replied that he had already discussed the matter with George, who was ready to receive instruction. Bonrepos’s excitement mounted when he understood that Anne too wished to be instructed. To encourage her he presented her with some theological works, which she received politely. Bonrepos concluded that although Anne appeared ‘timid and speaks little’, she was ‘intelligent and highly ambitious’, and well aware of her own interests.¹⁹

      It turned out that Bonrepos had been over optimistic. The King sounded a note of caution after receiving a message from the Pope urging him to do everything possible to bring about Anne’s conversion. He indicated that it would not be easy to achieve, for she had been ‘brought up by people who inspired in her a great aversion for the Catholic Church, and she has a very stubborn nature’. Nevertheless, being mindful of how her mother had been won over to Catholicism, James did not repress all hope of Anne undergoing a similar miraculous transformation. He gave his daughter

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