Queen Anne is Britain’s forgotten queen regnant, her reign and influence dwarfed by the influence and gains of her predecessor, Elizabeth I, and her successor, Queen Victoria. But it was her queenship that was most closely used as a model when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, not necessarily as a template to follow, but certainly in terms of precedents laid out for how a female monarch could rule. Unlike the Virgin Queen or the morbid tenure of Mary I, Anne was the first queen regnant to rule with a husband who was not given equal footing to his wife. She also marked the end of the Stuart line, her 18 pregnancies failing to provide a single child that lived until adulthood.

She followed closely on the heels of her sister, Mary II, who ruled jointly with her husband, the Dutch William III, after the deposition of their father, James II, in the Glorious Revolution. Her rule, and the succession that followed her of the German George I, solidified Britain as a Protestant nation, one that still held a deep suspicion of Catholics, particularly in the ranks of its government. Indeed, for the entirety of her reign, her stepmother and half-siblings lived in exile in France, still claiming that by bloodline Britain was theirs. And in that they were technically correct, but Britain’s aversion to papacy had deep-seated roots stemming back to the Tudors and suspicion of foreign involvement, from Rome to France to Spain, and it was through Queen Anne and her sister before her that Britain declared its religion unchangeable.

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