505.  Summary.

William’s reign was a prolonged struggle for the great Protestant cause and for the maintenance of political liberty in both England and Holland.  Invalid as he was, he was yet a man of indomitable resolution as well as indomitable courage.

Though a foreigner by birth, and caring more for Holland than for any other country in the world, yet, through his Irish and Continental wars with James II and Louis XIV, he helped more than any other man of the seventeenth century, Cromwell alone excepted, to make England free.

ANNE—­1702-1714

506.  Accession and Character of Anne.

William (S504) left no children, and according to the provisions of the Bill of Rights (S497)[1] the Princess Anne, younger sister of the late Queen Mary, now came to the throne.  She was a negative character, with kindly impulses and little intelligence.  “When in good humor she was meekly stupid, and when in ill humor, sulkily stupid."[2] But if there was any person duller than her Majesty, that person was her Majesty’s husband, Prince George of Denmark.  Charles II, who knew him well, said, “I have tried Prince George sober, and I have tried him drunk, and drunk or sober, there is nothing in him.”

[1] See the Bill of Rights (third paragraph) on page xxxi of the Appendix. [2] Macaulay’s “England”; and compare Stanhope’s “Reign of Anne.”

Along with the amiable qualities which gained for the new ruler the title of “Good Queen Anne” her Majesty inherited the obstinacy, the prejudices, and the superstitions of the Stuart sovereigns.  Though a most zealous Protestant and an ardent upholder of the Church of England, she declared her faith in the Divine Right of Kings (SS419, 429), which had cost her grandfather, Charles I, his head, and she was the last English sovereign who believed that the touch of the royal hand could dispel disease.

The first theory she never openly proclaimed in any offensive way, but the harmless delusion that she could relieve the sick was a favorite notion with her; and we find in the London Gazette (March 12, 1712) an official announcement, stating that on certain days the Queen would “touch” for the cure of “king’s evil,” or scrofula.

Among the multitudes who went to test her power was a poor Lichfield bookseller.  He carried to her his little half-blind, sickly boy, who, by virtue either of her Majesty’s beneficent fingers or from some other and better reason, grew up to be known as the famous author and lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson.[2]

[2] Johnson told Boswell, his biographer, that he remembered the incident, and that “he had a confused, but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood.”—­Boswell’s “Johnson.”

507.  Whig and Tory; High Church and Low.