favourite lady been brought to see reason, than she contrived to make her mistress see it likewise. The Prince of Orange was, on his side, willing to make a concession except on the main point, and thus the Declaration of Right, while settling the crown on William and Mary and vesting the government in William alone, established the succession after them of the posterity of Mary, then of Anne and her posterity, and then of William's posterity by another wife. It was noted at the time by Evelyn that the house of Hanover was left out of the succession. A clause moved by Burnet to include it was, however, still in debate between the lords and commons, when the birth of a son to the Prince and Princess of Denmark seemed to render it superfluous. As, notwithstanding, the lords still adhered to Burnet's clause, the Bill of Rights had in consequence to be dropped for the session. When it was revived and passed in 1689, the clause was absent, and, as Macaulay says, during eleven years nothing more was heard of the house of Hanover.
Princess Anne had attended the coronation of King William and Queen Mary on 11 April 1689. It was on 24 July that her hopes seemed at last to be fulfilled by the birth at Hampton Court of a son; and three days afterwards the prince was by the trusty Bishop of London christened William; the king and the Earl of Dorset were his godfathers, and the former was pleased to declare him Duke of Gloucester (Luttrell, i. 564; Clarendon's Diary, ii. 283). Though in August fears were entertained for the child's safety, it survived its early perils, and in October and November the parents took part in the gaieties of the day, the prince visiting Newmarket and appearing at the lord mayor's show, and the princess entertaining the queen and the ladies of the court at a ball at Whitehall. There had hitherto been no reason for anything but goodwill between the royal pair on the throne and the Prince and Princess of Denmark. The king had begun by a series of courtesies towards Prince George, assenting in April to a bill naturalising him in England and creating him Duke of Cumberland. By his own desire and at his own expense the prince took part in the king's expedition to Ireland in June 1690, but the king coolly ignored his presence during the campaign and even refused him a seat in the royal coach (Conduct, 38). When, at the end of April 1691, the king was on the point of embarking for the war in Flanders, the prince in vain asked his permission to serve at sea as a volunteer and without any command (Luttrell, ii. 219, 225; Conduct, 38–40).
But it was not only or chiefly resentment of the treatment shown to the prince which caused the estrangement between Anne and her royal relatives. In the first instance, immediately after the accession of William and Mary, there arose a difficulty connected with the princess's apartments at Whitehall (Conduct, 27–8; cf. The Other Side, 31). Much about the same time she in vain endeavoured to obtain from the queen the house at Richmond where she had lived as a child (Conduct, 28). According to the favourite of the Princess Anne, the two sisters were not fitted for living together in comfort, inasmuch as ‘Queen Mary grew weary of everybody who would not talk a great deal, and the princess was so silent that she rarely spoke more than was necessary to answer a question’ (ib. 25). Yet as girls they had been good friends, and Queen Mary afterwards protested that she had treated the princess and her infant with the tenderness of a mother (Burnet, iv. 162). Money began the quarrel. At the beginning of the new reign Anne enjoyed an annuity of 30,000l. charged upon the civil list, besides another of 20,000l. secured to her by her marriage settlement (Boyer, 5; Conduct, 32; Macaulay inverts these figures). Some days after the birth of the Duke of Gloucester it had been proposed by a zealous friend of the princess in the commons to raise her grant on the civil list to 70,000l.; but though her actual income was clearly inadequate, the motion had been ‘baffled.’ Five months afterwards, on 18 Dec. 1689, it was renewed. The queen, on becoming aware of what was intended, is said (by the Duchess of Marlborough) to have asked her sister the meaning of these proceedings, and, when told by the princess that her friends had a mind to make her a settlement, to have imperiously exclaimed: ‘Pray, what friends have you but the king and me?’ Much nettled, the princess now let things take their course. The motion gave rise to a two days' debate, which was so disagreeable to the king that he sent the Earl of Shrewsbury to offer through the Countess of Marlborough that if the princess would stop the proceedings in the house her civil list annuity should be raised to 50,000l. The answer returned by Anne, the language of which Macaulay may be right in attributing to ‘her friend Sarah,’ was ‘that she could not think herself in the wrong to desire a security for what was to support her, and that the business was now gone so far that she thought it reasonable to see what her friends could do for her.’ The princess obtained an annuity of 50,000l., with the parliamentary security desired. Some soreness,
