DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

ae) court the dethroned James the Second, and continued to acknowledge him as king of England, refusing to recognise the elect sovereign of its people, when he insulted their liberties and their rights, then they rose as one man. Forming an alliance with the Dutch and the Germans, they gave the foreign intruder a lesson such as he never thought of experiencing, and checked, for one century at least, the meddling propensities of his descendants and countrymen. Queen Anne was born in 1664, and was conse- quently, at the time of her accession in 17 02, in her thirty-ninth year. Early in life she married Prince George of Denmark, a man of dull understanding and coarse habits, who merely lived for the pleasures of the table. Despite his long residence in this country, he never mastered its language. ‘I have tried him drunk, and I have tried him sober,’ Queen Anne’s uncle, Charles the Second, said of him, ‘and there is nothing in him.’ The only claim he has to our notice rests on the devotion with which he inspired the Queen. In the course of their union, she bore him seventeen children. They all died in their infancy, with the exception of the little Duke of Gloucester, who lived to the age of eleven. In her younger days Queen Anne was a strik- ing and a handsome woman. Of her various likenesses, the statue in St. Paul’s Churchyard is