Abstract
On April 23, 1702, Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs of England and Scotland, was crowned with regal solemnity in Westminster Abbey. As a queen regnant, Anne had inherited the office and estate of king, and was crowned in a manner similar to that of her kingly progenitors. There was, however, one important difference. In a clear break with previous English precedent, Anne was crowned alone, even though she had a husband, Prince George of Denmark, who did not become a king of England as did the wives of kings, who enjoy the title of queen. Prince George nonetheless enjoyed precedence over all the other peers of the realm as he watched the ceremony from inside the Abbey. Noted for his joviality, he did not appear to be in any way emasculated by the fact that he did not share his wife’s royal status as a king consort, as Philip of Spain had during his marriage to the sixteenth-century Tudor queen regnant Mary I.1
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Notes
Stuart J. Reid, John and Sarah Duke and Duchess of Marlborough: Based upon Unpublished Letters and Documents of Blenheim Palace (London: John Murray, 1915), 106. This anecdote is also cited in Agnes Strickland, The Lives of the Queens of England VIII, 157.
Anne J. Duggan (ed.), Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002);
Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); idem., Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Carole Levin and Robert O. Bucholz (eds.), Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009);
Theresa Earenfight, Queenship and Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);
Elena Woodacre (ed.), Queenship in the Mediterranean: Negotiating the Role of the Queen in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
For an excellent discussion of this in a medieval English context, see: W. Mark Ormrod, “Monarchy, martyrdom and masculinity: England in the later middle ages,” in Patricia H. Callum and Katherine J. Lewis (eds.), Holiness and Masculinity in Medieval Europe (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 174–91.
David Cannadine, “From biography to history: Writing the history of the modern British monarchy,” Historical Research, 77 (2004), 289–312.
But compare Clarissa Campbell Orr, “The feminisation of the monarchy, 1780–1910: Royal masculinity and female empowerment,” in Andrzej Olechnowicz (ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 76–107.
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© 2014 Charles Beem and Miles Taylor
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Beem, C., Taylor, M. (2014). Introduction: The Man behind the Queen. In: Beem, C., Taylor, M. (eds) The Man behind the Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448354_1
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