Queen Anne

Queen Anne is presented as an ordinary woman made sovereign by chance, a ruler whose personal contradictions and clumsy interventions turn the court into a source of both political consequence and satire. Her reign is associated less with deliberate policy than with whim, jealousy, and a network of quiet observation; yet her authority reaches from the appointment of a Lord High Admiral to the management of what the court knows about Duchess Josiana and Lord David Dirry-Moir.

Identity and Character

Anne’s portrait is built from incompatible qualities. She is described as merry, kindly, and august to a degree, but as reaching neither virtue nor vice; stubborn yet weak, violent in anger yet often sunk in taciturn grumbling. Her laughter can be as ponderous as her anger, and her thoughts seem to escape indirectly rather than as clear explanations. The narration makes her a mixture of the good woman and the mischievous devil, with something of the Sphinx lodged in what it calls a goose. These contradictions make her less a consistent political mind than a figure of unpredictable, sometimes absurd authority.

Her body and habits receive the same unsparing attention. Anne is stout, short-sighted, and awkwardly formed, though the narrator singles out her white, fine skin and well-developed neck. She displays much of her skin and introduces the fashion of large pearls clasped around the throat. Her short forehead, sensual lips, fleshy cheeks, and large eyes are catalogued alongside her bodily clumsiness. The account connects her appearance to her self-regard: Anne is ugly, not by choice, and derives part of her religion from that ugliness. She drinks, has fits of rage, and is called both a clumsy coquette and a chaste one, another of the portrait’s deliberately unresolved pairings.

Rule and Courtly Authority

Anne’s politics are as erratic as her temperament. A Tory, she governs through the Whigs, while allowing events to fall as they may and displaying little aptitude for directing affairs of state. The narrator depicts her policy as cracked and her authority as capable of producing great catastrophes from small causes. When a whim of command takes her, she treats it as merely giving the fire a stir with a poker. Her pronouncements can reduce royal power to petty rules of precedence: she insists that no peer may keep his hat on before the king except Baron Kingsale, an Irish peer.

Her interventions are not always merely ceremonial. Anne makes her Danish husband, George of Denmark, Lord High Admiral of England and all the royal plantations, reasoning that it would be unjust for him not to hold the office because her father had held it. The example captures the book’s image of her government: a dynastic and personal association is treated as sufficient grounds for a major appointment. At the same time, the novel connects her limited sight to courtly advancement. William Cowper’s short-sightedness finds favour with Anne, whose own sight is defective, and the narrator links that resemblance to her appointment of him as Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Royal Conscience.

Josiana and the Web of Surveillance

Anne bears a grudge against Duchess Josiana for several overlapping reasons. She considers Josiana beautiful, and also considers Lord David handsome; Josiana’s engagement to him therefore gives the queen two grounds for jealousy. Their sisterhood adds another source of resentment. Anne dislikes women being pretty, treating beauty as contrary to good morals, and the narrator presents Josiana’s beauty and philosophical character as vexations to a queen who is herself ugly. Anne may have liked Josiana if she had not been her sister, but the kinship makes their resemblance politically and personally uncomfortable.

Their births sharpen that discomfort. Anne is the legitimate daughter of Anne Hyde, a gentlewoman whom King James II married when he was Duke of York. She regards the inferior rank of her mother as leaving her only half royal. Josiana, by contrast, was born illegitimately; in the narrator’s account, her birth draws attention to the irregularity that Anne believes shadows her own. The sisters thus occupy different but adjacent positions of dynastic vulnerability, and each can serve as a reminder of the other’s compromised standing. Anne nevertheless smiles on Josiana, even while her account of their relationship stresses resentment beneath the surface.

The court’s observation of Josiana is not confined to Anne. Josiana has Lord David watched by Barkilphedro, and Lord David in turn has Josiana observed by the same trusted agent. Anne also secretly keeps herself informed of both of their conduct through Barkilphedro, whom she fully trusts. The shared informant makes surveillance a hidden point of contact among the sisters, Lord David, and the queen: private rivalry and royal oversight run through the same channel. In a separate exchange, Anne falls silent and then exclaims, “Those bastards!” Barkilphedro notices that she has used the plural, a small verbal detail that makes her reaction itself an object of scrutiny.

Gwynplaine and the Royal Stage

Anne’s role in Gwynplaine’s entry into the House of Lords is indirect but consequential to the courtly setting. William Cowper has not sought details about the new Lord Fermain Clancharlie’s disfigurement, considering such knowledge beneath his dignity. To the few words Anne lets fall on the subject, he replies that a peer’s face is in his peerage. After reading and certifying the affidavits, however, Cowper recognizes that Gwynplaine’s appearance may cause a sensation. He arranges the investiture for the evening and brings it forward so that Gwynplaine enters before the House assembles, seeking to prevent a disturbance. The procedural measures belong to Cowper, but Anne’s brief remarks form part of the royal context in which the deformity is discussed and managed.

The novel sets this carefully controlled admission against the rapid spread of Gwynplaine’s story. By morning, the account of a peer found on the stage and a mountebank become a lord has circulated through Windsor’s royal households, from princes to lackeys, and onward into London. By eight o’clock, Gwynplaine is the talk of the town. Later, the throne is illuminated by wax-filled candelabra, yet remains empty; the narration remarks that the queen’s own presence could scarcely have added to its majesty. Anne is therefore represented both as a living sovereign whose court acts on information and as a royal presence that the ceremony can evoke through an empty, splendid seat.

Narrative Role

Anne’s characterization turns the machinery of monarchy into a study in incongruity. Her authority is real: she appoints, observes, and belongs to the chain of power around Gwynplaine’s recognition. But the narration repeatedly measures that authority against its personal origins—short-sighted affinity, family grievance, sexual jealousy, and whims of precedence. Her portrait does not make her simply virtuous or simply vicious; instead, it makes sovereign power feel exposed to the same pettiness and inconsistency as private life. The contrast between her grumbling, imperfect person and the illuminated, empty throne condenses that irony: the institution appears grand, while the individual charged with embodying it remains stubborn, fallible, and difficult to read.