Anne of Denmark Totally Explained

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Anne of Denmark (12 December 1574 – 2 March 1619) was queen consort of James VI of Scots, I of England and Ireland. The second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark, Anne married James in 1589 at the age of fourteen and bore him three children who survived infancy, including the future Charles I. She demonstrated an independent streak and a willingness to use factional Scottish politics in her conflicts with James over the custody of Prince Henry and his treatment of her friend Beatrix Ruthven. Anne appears to have loved James at first, but the couple gradually drifted and eventually lived apart, though mutual respect and a degree of affection survived.
In England, Anne shifted her energies from factional politics to patronage of the arts and constructed a magnificent court of her own, hosting one of the richest cultural salons in Europe. After 1612, she suffered sustained bouts of ill health and gradually withdrew from the centre of court life. Though she was reported to have died a Protestant, evidence suggests that she may have converted to Catholicism at some stage in her life.
Historians have traditionally dismissed Anne as a lightweight queen, frivolous and self-indulgent. However, recent reappraisals acknowledge Anne's assertive independence and, in particular, her dynamic significance as a patron of the arts during the famous Jacobean age.

Early life

Anne was born on 12 December 1574 at the castle of Skanderborg, on the Jutland Peninsula in the Kingdom of Denmark. Her birth came as a blow to her father, King Frederick II of Denmark, who was desperately hoping for a son. Anne's mother, Sophie of Mecklenburg, however, was only seventeen, and three years later did bear Frederick a son, the future Christian IV of Denmark. Anne was sent with her older sister Elizabeth to be raised at Güstrow, in Germany, by her maternal grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Mecklenburg. Compared with the roving Danish court, where King Frederick was notorious for gargantuan meals, heavy drinking, and restless behaviour which included unfaithfulness to the Queen, Güstrow provided Anne with a frugal and stable life during her early childhood. Christian was also sent to be brought up at Güstrow; but two years later, in 1579, the Rigsraad, or Danish Privy Council, successfully requested his removal to Denmark, and Anne and Elizabeth returned with him.
Anne enjoyed a close and happy family upbringing in Denmark, thanks largely to Queen Sophie, who tended the children herself during their illnesses. Suitors from all over Europe sought the hands of Anne and her older sister in marriage, including James VI of Scotland, who favoured Denmark as a kingdom reformed in religion and a profitable trading partner. Scottish ambassadors had at first concentrated their suit on the oldest daughter, but Frederick betrothed Elizabeth to Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, promising the Scots instead that "for the second [daughter] Anna, if the King did like her, he should have her".

Betrothal and proxy marriage

Sophie's constitutional position became difficult after Frederick's death in 1588, when she found herself in a power struggle with the Rigsraad for control of King Christian. As a matchmaker, however, Sophie proved more diligent than Frederick and, overcoming sticking points on the amount of the dowry and the status of Orkney, she sealed the agreement by July 1589. Anne herself seems to have been thrilled with the match. On 28 July 1589, the English spy Thomas Fowler reported that Anne was "so far in love with the King's Majesty as it were death to her to have it broken off and hath made good proof divers ways of her affection which his Majestie is apt in no way to requite". Fowler's insinuation, that James preferred men to women, would have been hidden from the fourteen-year-old Princess, who devotedly embroidered shirts for her fiancé while three hundred tailors worked on her wedding dress.
Whatever the truth of the rumours, James required a royal match to preserve the Stuart line. "God is my witness," he explained, "I could have abstained longer than the weal of my country could have permitted, [hadnot] my long delay bred in the breasts of many a great jealousy of my inability, as if I were a barren stock". On 20 August 1589, Anne was married by proxy to James at Kronborg Castle, the ceremony ending with James's representative, George Keith, the Earl Marischal, sitting next to Anne on the bridal bed.

Marriage

About ten days later, Anne set sail for Scotland, but her fleet was beset by a series of misadventures, finally being forced back to the coast of Norway, from where she travelled by land to Oslo for refuge, accompanied by the Earl Marischal and others of the Scottish and Danish embassies.
On 12 September, Lord Dingwall had landed at Leith, reporting that "he had come in company with the Queen's fleet three hundred miles, and was separated from them by a great storm: it was feared that the Queen was in danger upon the seas". Alarmed, James called for national fasting and public prayers, kept watch on the Firth of Forth for Anne’s arrival, wrote several songs, one comparing the situation to the plight of Hero and Leander, and sent a search party out for Anne carrying a letter he'd written to her in French: "Only to one who knows me as well as his own reflection in a glass could I express, my dearest love, the fears which I've experienced because of the contrary winds and violent storms since you embarked...". Informed in October that the Danes had abandoned the crossing for the winter, and in what Willson calls "the one romantic episode of his life", James sailed from Leith with a three-hundred-strong retinue to fetch his queen personally, arriving in Oslo on 19 November after travelling by land from Flekkefjord via Tønsberg. According to a Scottish account, he presented himself to Anne, "with boots and all", and, disarming her protests, gave her a kiss in the Scottish fashion.
Anne and James were formally married at the Old Bishop's Palace in Oslo on 23 November 1589, "with all the splendour possible at that time and place". So that both bride and groom could understand, Leith minister David Lindsay conducted the ceremony in French, describing Anne as "a Princess both godly and beautiful...she giveth great contentment to his Majesty". A month of celebrations followed; and on 22 December, cutting his entourage to fifty, James visited his new relations at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, where the newlyweds were greeted by Dowager Queen Sophie, twelve-year-old King Christian IV, and Christian's four Regents. The couple moved on to Copenhagen on 7 March and attended the wedding of Anne's older sister Elisabeth to Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, sailing two days later for Scotland in a patched up "Gideon". They arrived in the Water of Leith on 1 May. Five days later, Anne made her state entry into Edinburgh in a solid silver coach brought over from Denmark, James riding alongside on horseback.

Coronation

Anne was crowned on 17 May 1590 in the Abbey Church at Holyrood, the first Protestant coronation in Scotland. During the seven-hour ceremony, her gown was opened by the Countess of Mar for presiding minister Robert Bruce to pour "a bonny quantity of oil" on "parts of her breast and arm", so anointing her as queen. (Kirk ministers had objected vehemently to this element of the ceremony as a pagan and Jewish ritual, but James had insisted that it dated from the Old Testament.) The king handed the crown to Chancellor Maitland, who placed it on Anne's head. She then affirmed an oath to defend the true religion and worship of God and to "withstand and despise all papistical superstitions, and whatsoever ceremonies and rites contrary to the word of God."

Relationship with James

By all accounts, James was at first entranced by his bride, but his infatuation evaporated quickly and the couple often found themselves at loggerheads, though in the early years of their marriage, James seems always to have treated Anne with patience and affection. Between 1593 and 1595, James was romantically linked with Anne Murray, later Lady Glamis, whom he addressed in verse as "my mistress and my love"; and Anne herself was also occasionally the subject of scandalous rumours. In Basilikon Doron, written 1597–1598, James described marriage as "the greatest earthly felicitie or miserie, that can come to a man".
From the first moment of the marriage, Anne was under pressure to provide James and Scotland with an heir, but the passing of 1591 and 1592 with no sign of a pregnancy provoked renewed libels on the theme of James’s fondness for male company, and whispers against Anne "for that she proves not with child". As a result, there was great public relief when on 19 February 1594 Anne gave birth to her first child, Henry Frederick.

Custody of Prince Henry

It was quickly brought home to Anne that she was to have no say in the care of her son. James appointed as head of the nursery his former nurse Helen Little, who installed Henry in James's own old oak cradle. Most distressingly for Anne, James insisted on placing Prince Henry in the custody of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, at Stirling Castle, in keeping with Scottish Royal tradition.
   In late 1594, Anne began a furious campaign for custody of Henry, recruiting a faction of supporters to her cause, including the chancellor, John Maitland of Thirlestane. Nervous of the lengths to which Anne might go, James formally charged Mar in writing never to surrender Henry to anyone except on orders from his own mouth, "because in the surety of my son consists my surety", nor to yield Henry to the Queen even in the event of his own death. Anne demanded the matter be referred to the Council, but James wouldn't hear of it. After public scenes in which James reduced her to rage and tears over the issue, Anne became so bitterly upset that in July 1595 she suffered a miscarriage. Thereafter, she outwardly abandoned her campaign, but it was thought permanent damage had been done to the marriage. In August 1595, John Colville wrote: "There is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation betwixt the King and the Queen, each intending by slight to overcome the other."
   Anne saw a belated opportunity to gain custody of Henry in 1603 when James left for London, taking the Earl of Mar with him, to assume the English throne following the death of Queen Elizabeth. Pregnant at the time, Anne descended on Stirling with a force of "well-supported" nobles, intent on removing the nine-year-old Henry, whom she'd hardly seen for five years; but Mar's mother and brother would allow her to bring no more than two attendants with her into the castle. The obduracy of Henry's keepers sent Anne into such a fury that she suffered another miscarriage: according to David Calderwood, she "went to bed in anger and parted with child the tenth of May".
   When the Earl of Mar returned with James’s instructions that Anne join him in the Kingdom of England, she informed James by letter that she refused to do so unless allowed custody of Henry. This "forceful maternal action", as historian Pauline Croft describes it, obliged James to climb down at last, though he reproved Anne for " womanly apprehensions" and described her behaviour in a letter to Mar as "wilfulness". After a brief convalescence from the miscarriage, Anne duly travelled south with Prince Henry, their progress causing a sensation in England. Lady Anne Clifford recorded that she and her mother killed three horses in their haste to see the Queen, and that when James met Anne near Windsor, "there was such an infinite number of lords and ladies and so great a Court as I think I'll never see the like again".

Marital frictions

Observers regularly noted incidents of marital discord between Anne and James. The so-called Gowrie plot of 1600, in which the young Earl of Gowrie, John Ruthven, and his brother Alexander Ruthven were killed by James's attendants for a supposed assault on the King, triggered the dismissal of their sisters Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven as ladies-in-waiting to Anne, with whom they were "in chiefest credit". The Queen, who was five months pregnant, refused to get out of bed unless they were reinstated and stayed there for two days, also refusing to eat. When James tried to command her, she warned him to take care how he treated her because she wasn't the Earl of Gowrie. James placated her for the moment by paying a famous acrobat to entertain her, but she never gave up, and her relentless support for the Ruthvens over the next three years was taken seriously enough by the government to be regarded as a security issue. In 1602, after discovering that Anne had smuggled Beatrix Ruthven into Holyrood, James carried out a cross-examination of the entire household; in 1603, he finally caved in to Anne's campaign and granted Beatrix Ruthven a pension of £200.
A briefer confrontation occurred in 1613 when Anne shot James's favourite dog dead during a hunting session; after his initial rage, James smoothed things over with the gift of a £2000 diamond in memory of the dog, whose name was Jewel. In 1603, James fought with Anne over the proposed composition of her English household, sending her a message that "his Majesty took her continued perversity very heinously". In turn, Anne took exception to James's drinking: in 1604 she confided to the French envoy, "the King drinks so much, and conducts himself so ill in every respect, that I expect an early and evil result".

Separate life

In London, Anne adopted a cosmopolitan lifestyle, while James preferred to escape the capital, most often at his hunting lodge in Royston. Anne's chaplain, Godfrey Goodman, later summed up the royal relationship: "The King himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the Queen to make him ; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together". Anne moved into Greenwich Palace and then Somerset House, which she renamed Denmark House. After 1607, she and James rarely lived together, by which time she'd borne seven children and suffered at least three miscarriages. After narrowly surviving the birth and death of her last baby, Sophia, in 1607, Anne’s decision to have no more children may have widened the gulf between her and James.
The death of Prince Henry in 1612 at the age of eighteen, probably from typhoid, and the departure for Heidelberg of the sixteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth in April 1613, after marrying Elector Frederick V of the Palatine, further weakened the family ties binding Anne and James. Henry's death hit Anne particularly hard; the Venetian ambassador was advised not to offer condolences to her "because she can't bear to have it mentioned; nor does she ever recall it without abundant tears and sighs". From this time forward, Anne’s health deteriorated, and she withdrew from the centre of cultural and political activities, staging her last known masque in 1614 and no longer maintaining a noble court. Her influence over James visibly waned as he became openly dependent on powerful favourites. and she developed friendly relations with him, calling him her "dog". Even so, Anne found herself increasingly ignored after Buckingham's rise and became a lonely figure towards the end of her life.

Religion

A further source of difference between Anne and James was the issue of religion; for example, she abstained from the Anglican communion at her coronation. Anne had been brought up a Lutheran, but she may have discreetly converted to Catholicism at some point, a politically embarrassing scenario which alarmed ministers of the Scottish Kirk and caused suspicion in Anglican England.
   Queen Elizabeth had certainly been worried about the possibility and sent messages to Anne warning her not to listen to papist counsellors and requesting the names of anyone who had tried to convert her; Anne had replied that there was no need to name names because any such efforts had failed. Anne drew criticism from the Kirk for keeping Henrietta Gordon, wife of the exiled Catholic George Gordon, Marquess of Huntly, as a confidante; after Huntly's return in 1596, the St Andrews minister David Black called Anne an atheist and remarked in a sermon that "the Queen of Scotland was a woman for whom, for fashion's sake, the clergy might pray but from whom no good could be hoped".
   When former intelligencer Sir Anthony Standen was discovered bringing Anne a rosary from Pope Clement VIII in 1603, James imprisoned him in the Tower for ten months. Anne protested her annoyance at the gift, but eventually secured Standen's release.
   Like James, Anne later supported a Catholic match for both their sons, and her correspondence with the potential bride, the Spanish Infanta, Maria Anna, included a request that two friars be sent to Jerusalem to pray for her and the King. The papacy itself was never quite sure where Anne stood; in 1612, Pope Paul V advised a nuncio: "Not considering the inconstancy of that Queen and the many changes she'd made in religious matters and that even if it might be true that she might be a Catholic, one shouldn't take on oneself any judgement".

Court and politics

In Scotland, Anne sometimes exploited Court factionalism for her own ends, in particular by supporting the enemies of the Earl of Mar. As a result, James didn't trust her with secrets of state. Henry Howard, active in the highly secret diplomacy concerning the English succession, subtly reminded James that though Anne possessed every virtue, Eve was corrupted by the serpent. In practice, Anne was little interested in high politics unless they touched on the fate of her children or friends.
In England, Anne largely turned from political to social and artistic activities. Though she participated fully in the life of James’s Court and maintained a Court of her own, often attracting those not welcomed by James, she rarely took political sides against her husband. Whatever her private difficulties with James, she proved a diplomatic asset to him in England, conducting herself with discretion and graciousness in public. Anne played a crucial role, for example, in conveying to ambassadors and foreign visitors the prestige of the Stuart dynasty and its Danish connections.
The Venetian envoy, Nicolo Molin, wrote this description of Anne in 1606:
King Charles I. Her daughter Elizabeth was the grandmother of King George I of England.

Henry, Prince of Wales (19 February 1594–6 November 1612). Died, probably of typhoid fever, aged 18.
Elizabeth Stuart (19 August 1596 – 13 February 1662). Married 1613, Frederick V, Elector Palatine. Died aged 65.
Margaret Stuart (24 December 1598 Dalkeith Palace – March 1600 Linlithgow Palace). Died aged two. Buried at Holyrood Abbey.
Charles I of England (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649). Married 1625, Henrietta Maria. Executed aged 48.
Robert Stuart, Duke of Kintyre (18 January 1602 – 27 May 1602). Died aged four months.
Mary Stuart (8 April 1605 Greenwich Palace – 16 December 1607 Stanwell, Surrey). Died aged two.
Sophia Stuart. (22 June 1606 - 23 June 1606). Born and died at Greenwich Palace.

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