Stuarts

ANNE 207
although she had great natural dignity: "the proudest woman in the world'
Pepys terms her) ; nor does Queen Anne seem to have had a spark of the
natural fascination which most of the Stuarts exerted over those with
whom they were brought in contact. No two women could be more unlike
than Mary of Scotland and the mild Oueen who found a fittino- husband
in the stolid, phlegmatic George of Denmark, with his homely virtues.
To Anne was given neither the melancholy dignity of Charles I. nor the
bonhomie of his son, the second Charles. Sarah Jennings terms her "a
little card-playing automaton."
It is but just, however, to admit, in the words of the writer already quoted,
that " Anne was one of the sovereigns who may, without too great a strain
of hyperbole, be allowed to have been beloved in her day. She did nothing
to repel the popular devotion : she was the best of wives, the most sadly
disappointed of childless mothers. She made pecuniary sacrifices to the
weal of her kingdom such as no king or queen of England had made before.
And she was a Stuart, Protestant and safe, combining all the rights of the
family with those of orthodoxy and constitutionalism, without even so much
offence as lay in a foreign accent. There was, indeed, nothing foreign about
her, a circumstance in her favour which she shared with the other °reat
English Queens-regnant who had preceded her. All these points made her
popular, even, it might be permissible to say, "beloved." The placid-faced,
middle-aged lady whose features are so familiar to us on the canvases of
Kneller, and the enamels of Zincke, had, when a child, plump, rosy-faced,
fresh beauty of her own, with the prettiest hands, and a very sweet,
melodious voice, so that, according to Lord Dartmouth, it was a pleasure
to hear her. Here is a picture of her as drawn by the authoress of "The
Queens of England."
" Anne had the round face and full form of her mother and the Lord
Chancellor Clarendon. In her youth she was a pretty, rosy Hebe. Her
hair a dark chestnut brown, her complexion sanguine and ruddy ; her face
round and comely; her features strong and regular ... her bones were
very small, her hands and arms most beautiful. She had a good ear for
music." Her simple, narrow-minded nature is reflected in her face, as
shown in the picture of her with her son by Michael Dahl, belonging to
Earl Spencer and given in this book. It is not difficult to draw a picture
of her in the stiff brocade and quaint costume of the period of her youth,
with high-heeled shoes and "head-dresses mounting up to the skies,"— so