Queen Anne’s reign

Queen Anne’s reign is depicted as a twelve-year political and cultural spectacle: England appears powerful abroad and imitative of France at court, while coercive laws and procedures expose the limits of its vaunted liberty. The novel’s historical commentary makes the period’s central contradiction hard to miss: public admiration for a popular queen coexists with the subject’s vulnerability to state power.

Accession and Public Image

Anne was born in 1664, two years before the Great Fire of London. The narrator treats the astrologers’ prediction that she would become queen as a wry prelude, then links her accession to the Revolution of 1688. Her reign began as Louis XIV’s power was declining; the two rulers are cast as contrasting celestial figures, the French king as the setting sun and Anne as a pale moon rising in 1702.

England is described as receptive to female rulers. In the historical shorthand the narrator assigns to its historians, Elizabeth represents grandeur and Anne good nature. That favorable image is not allowed to settle into simple praise: the account calls both queens’ reigns heavy rather than delicate, and sets Anne’s public mildness against the brutality of her rule. Her temperament is likewise presented as contradictory: mild at bottom, but transformed by anger.

Government and the Limits of Liberty

The reign’s reputation for relative mildness is set against restrictive rules on public assembly. A meeting required permission from two justices of the peace; even twelve people gathering to eat oysters and drink porter could be treated as committing a felony. The account also emphasizes the violent pressing of sailors into the fleet, presenting it as evidence that the Englishman remained a subject rather than a citizen. It compares this practice with the forced recruitment of soldiers in France, where able-bodied men could be seized and confined in recruiting houses; Paris had thirty such houses in 1695.

The laws directed against Ireland are condemned as atrocious. More broadly, the novel measures English liberty against the machinery used to contain speech and dissent: orators could be confined in the Tower of London and writers put in the pillory. These practices complicate the image of a country proud of its freedoms, showing how readily royal authority and punishment could narrow them.

Court, Culture, and Military Display

Anne’s court is described as a miniature imitation of the grandeur of Louis XIV’s Versailles. It possessed monuments, artists, victories, commanders, writers, and royal patronage, but its magnificence is treated as an illusion produced by staging and resemblance rather than equal stature. Christopher Wren is likened to Mansart, Somers to Lamoignon, Dryden to Racine, Pope to Boileau, Godolphin to Colbert, Pembroke to Louvois, and Marlborough to Turenne. The parallel court is solemn and pompous, and its literary culture both imitates France and begins to turn toward irony, with Swift exposing the religious hypocrisy that Molière had attacked in a Catholic setting.

The account places this cultural performance beside a record of expansion and war. England had recently annexed Scotland and was sending squadrons overseas; it was also moving from the victory at Hochstadt toward Ramillies. The narrative surveys English gains and ambitions, including pressure on France concerning Dunkirk, the taking of Gibraltar, and the campaign at Barcelona. Such achievements help explain why Anne could receive admiration for reigning at a moment of national triumph, even as the commentary questions what that triumph concealed.

Anne’s public image was also shaped through coinage. She paid particular attention to the copper farthings, the low-value coins used by ordinary people, and sought a prominent image on them. During her reign six farthings were struck: the backs of the first three carried a throne, the fourth a triumphal chariot, and the sixth a goddess holding a sword and an olive branch. The sequence joins authority, victory, and peace in a small object intended for popular circulation.

Law and the Novel’s Historical Present

The surrounding narrative places the period within a longer history of legal coercion. Arrest without explanation is described as common practice despite the Habeas Corpus Act, and silent arrests are associated with claims of state necessity. The account traces the practice through older German and Norman customs, while emphasizing its function: to seize a person without warning and leave questions unresolved. Its presence in the novel’s legal world makes the formal promise of liberty look insecure beside the discretionary power of officials.

Local and royal jurisdictions also overlap. The Tower of London is described as a legally distinct jurisdiction under its own constable, while sheriffs and their officers carried out arrests and imprisonment for trial. The novel’s account of torture chambers in English prisons, including Southwark Jail, extends this picture from arrest to punishment. In the case that exposes Gwynplaine’s birth, the court’s confrontation with Hardquanonne turns a concealed history into a legal matter: the parchment identifies Gwynplaine as the legitimate heir whose titles and estates had been taken from him after King James II ordered his sale and disfigurement. Against that earlier royal abuse, the reign’s legal proceedings show both the machinery of authority and the possibility that testimony and procedure can restore a suppressed identity.