Ancestral Trails 2016 » Anne of DENMARK (1574-1619)

Personal data Anne of DENMARK 

• She was born on December 12, 1574 in Skanderborg, Arhus, Denmark.

  Attention: Age at marriage (November 24, 1589) below 16 years (14).

• She died on March 2, 1619, she was 44 years old.
• A child of Friedrich II of DENMARK and Sophie von MECKLENBURG-GUSTROW

Household of Anne of DENMARK

She is married to James I STEWART.

They got married on November 24, 1589 at Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, Denmark, she was 14 years old.

Child(ren):

1. Elizabeth STEWART  1596-1662 
2. Charles I STEWART  1600-???? 
3. Henry Frederick STEWART  1594-1612

Notes about Anne of DENMARK

Anne of Denmark (Danish: Anna; 12 December 1574 - 2 March 1619) was Queen consort of Scotland, England, and Ireland as the wife of King James VI and I.

The second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark, Anne married James in 1589 at age 15 and bore him three children who survived infancy, including the future Charles I. She demonstrated an independent streak and a willingness to use factional Scottish politics in her conflicts with James over the custody of Prince Henry and his treatment of her friend Beatrix Ruthven. Anne appears to have loved James at first, but the couple gradually drifted and eventually lived apart, though mutual respect and a degree of affection survived.

In England, Anne shifted her energies from factional politics to patronage of the arts and constructed her own magnificent court, hosting one of the richest cultural salons in Europe. After 1612, she suffered sustained bouts of ill health and gradually withdrew from the centre of court life. Though she was reported to have been a Protestant at the time of her death, evidence suggests that she may have converted to Catholicism sometime in her life.

Historians have traditionally dismissed Anne as a lightweight queen, frivolous and self-indulgent. However, recent reappraisals acknowledge Anne's assertive independence and, in particular, her dynamic significance as a patron of the arts during the Jacobean age.

Anne was born on 12 December 1574 at the castle of Skanderborg on the Jutland Peninsula in the Kingdom of Denmark. Her birth came as a blow to her father, King Frederick II of Denmark, who was desperately hoping for a son. But her mother, Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, was only 17; three years later she did bear Frederick a son, the future Christian IV of Denmark.

With her older sister, Elizabeth, Anne was sent to be raised at Güstrow in Germany by her maternal grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Mecklenburg. Compared with the roving Danish court, where King Frederick was notorious for gargantuan meals, heavy drinking and restless behaviour (including marital infidelity), Güstrow provided Anne with a frugal and stable life during her early childhood. Christian was also sent to be brought up at Güstrow but two years later, in 1579, the Rigsraad (Danish Privy Council) successfully requested his removal to Denmark, and Anne and Elizabeth returned with him.

Anne enjoyed a close, happy family upbringing in Denmark, thanks largely to Queen Sophie, who nursed the children through their illnesses herself. Suitors from all over Europe sought the hands of Anne and Elizabeth in marriage, including James VI of Scotland, who favoured Denmark as a kingdom reformed in religion and a profitable trading partner.

James' other serious possibility, though 8 years his senior, was Catherine, sister of the Huguenot King Henry III of Navarre (future Henry IV of France), who was favoured by Elizabeth I of England. Scottish ambassadors had at first concentrated their suit on the oldest daughter, but Frederick betrothed Elizabeth to Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, promising the Scots instead that "for the second [daughter] Anna, if the King did like her, he should have her."

The constitutional position of Sophie, Anne's mother, became difficult after Frederick's death in 1588, when she found herself in a power struggle with the Rigsraad for control of King Christian. As a matchmaker, however, Sophie proved more diligent than Frederick and, overcoming sticking points on the amount of the dowry and the status of Orkney, she sealed the agreement by July 1589. Anne herself seems to have been thrilled with the match. On 28 July 1589, the English spy Thomas Fowler reported that Anne was "so far in love with the King's Majesty as it were death to her to have it broken off and hath made good proof divers ways of her affection which his Majestie is apt in no way to requite." Fowler's insinuation, that James preferred men to women, would have been hidden from the fourteen-year-old Anne, who devotedly embroidered shirts for her fiancé while three hundred tailors worked on her wedding dress.

Whatever the truth of the rumours, James required a royal match to preserve the Stuart line. "God is my witness", he explained, "I could have abstained longer than the weal of my country could have permitted, [had not] my long delay bred in the breasts of many a great jealousy of my inability, as if I were a barren stock." On 20 August 1589, Anne was married by proxy to James at Kronborg Castle, the ceremony ending with James' representative, George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal, sitting next to Anne on the bridal bed.

Anne set sail for Scotland within 10 days, but her fleet was beset by a series of misadventures. finally being forced back to the coast of Norway, from where she travelled by land to Oslo for refuge, accompanied by the Earl Marischal and others of the Scottish and Danish embassies.

On 12 September, Lord Dingwall had landed at Leith, reporting that "he had come in company with the Queen's fleet three hundred miles, and was separated from them by a great storm: it was feared that the Queen was in danger upon the seas." Alarmed, James called for national fasting and public prayers, kept watch on the Firth of Forth for Anne's arrival, wrote several songs, one comparing the situation to the plight of Hero and Leander, and sent a search party out for Anne, carrying a letter he had written to her in French: "Only to one who knows me as well as his own reflection in a glass could I express, my dearest love, the fears which I have experienced because of the contrary winds and violent storms since you embarked ...". Informed in October that the Danes had abandoned the crossing for the winter, and in what Willson calls "the one romantic episode of his life," James sailed from Leith with a three-hundred-strong retinue to fetch his wife personally, arriving in Oslo on 19 November after travelling by land from Flekkefjord via Tønsberg. According to a Scottish account, he presented himself to Anne, "with boots and all", and, disarming her protests, gave her a kiss in the Scottish fashion.

Anne and James were formally married at the Old Bishop's Palace in Oslo on 23 November 1589, "with all the splendour possible at that time and place." So that both bride and groom could understand, Leith minister David Lindsay conducted the ceremony in French, describing Anne as "a Princess both godly and beautiful ... she giveth great contentment to his Majesty." A month of celebrations followed; and on 22 December, cutting his entourage to fifty, James visited his new relations at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, where the newlyweds were greeted by Queen Sophie, twelve-year-old King Christian IV, and Christian's four regents. The couple moved on to Copenhagen on 7 March and attended the wedding of Anne's older sister Elizabeth to Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, sailing two days later for Scotland in a patched up "Gideon". They arrived in the Water of Leith on 1 May. Five days later, Anne made her state entry into Edinburgh in a solid silver coach brought over from Denmark, James riding alongside on horseback.

Anne was crowned on 17 May 1590 in the Abbey Church at Holyrood, the first Protestant coronation in Scotland. During the seven-hour ceremony, her gown was opened by the Countess of Mar for presiding minister Robert Bruce to pour "a bonny quantity of oil" on "parts of her breast and arm", so anointing her as queen. (Kirk ministers had objected vehemently to this element of the ceremony as a pagan and Jewish ritual, but James insisted that it dated from the Old Testament.) The king handed the crown to Chancellor Maitland, who placed it on Anne's head. She then affirmed an oath to defend the true religion and worship of God and to "withstand and despise all papistical superstitions, and whatsoever ceremonies and rites contrary to the word of God".

By all accounts, James was at first entranced by his bride, but his infatuation evaporated quickly and the couple often found themselves at loggerheads, though in the early years of their marriage, James seems always to have treated Anne with patience and affection. Between 1593 and 1595, James was romantically linked with Anne Murray, later Lady Glamis, whom he addressed in verse as "my mistress and my love"; and Anne herself was also occasionally the subject of scandalous rumours. In Basilikon Doron, written 1597-1598, James described marriage as "the greatest earthly felicitie or miserie, that can come to a man".

From the first moment of the marriage, Anne was under pressure to provide James and Scotland with an heir, but the passing of 1591 and 1592 with no sign of a pregnancy provoked renewed Presbyterian libels on the theme of James' fondness for male company and whispers against Anne "for that she proves not with child". As a result, there was great public relief when on 19 February 1594 Anne gave birth to her first child, Henry Frederick.

Observers regularly noted incidents of marital discord between Anne and James. The so-called Gowrie conspiracy of 1600, in which the young Earl of Gowrie, John Ruthven, and his brother Alexander Ruthven were killed by James' attendants for a supposed assault on the King, triggered the dismissal of their sisters Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven as ladies-in-waiting to Anne, with whom they were "in chiefest credit." The Queen, who was five months pregnant, refused to get out of bed unless they were reinstated and stayed there for two days, also refusing to eat. When James tried to command her, she warned him to take care how he treated her because she was not the Earl of Gowrie. James placated her for the moment by paying a famous acrobat to entertain her, but she never gave up, and her stubborn support for the Ruthvens over the next three years was taken seriously enough by the government to be regarded as a security issue. In 1602, after discovering that Anne had smuggled Beatrix Ruthven into Holyrood, James carried out a cross-examination of the entire household; in 1603, he finally decided to grant Beatrix Ruthven a pension of £200.

A briefer confrontation occurred in 1613 when Anne shot and killed James' favourite dog during a hunting session. After his initial rage, James smoothed things over by giving her a £2,000 diamond in memory of the dog, whose name was Jewel. In 1603, James fought with Anne over the proposed composition of her English household, sending her a message that "his Majesty took her continued perversity very heinously." In turn, Anne took exception to James' drinking: in 1604 she confided to the French envoy that "the King drinks so much, and conducts himself so ill in every respect, that I expect an early and evil result."

In London, Anne adopted a cosmopolitan lifestyle, while James preferred to escape the capital, most often at his hunting lodge in Royston. Anne's chaplain, Godfrey Goodman, later summed up the royal relationship: "The King himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the Queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together." Anne moved into Greenwich Palace and then Somerset House, which she renamed Denmark House. After 1607, she and James rarely lived together, by which time she had borne seven children and suffered at least three miscarriages. After narrowly surviving the birth and death of her last baby, Sophia, in 1607, Anne's decision to have no more children may have widened the gulf between her and James.

The death of Prince Henry in 1612 at the age of eighteen, probably from typhoid, and the departure for Heidelberg of the sixteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth in April 1613, after marrying Elector Frederick V of the Palatine, further weakened the family ties binding Anne and James. Henry's death hit Anne particularly hard; the Venetian ambassador was advised not to offer condolences to her "because she cannot bear to have it mentioned; nor does she ever recall it without abundant tears and sighs". From this time forward, Anne's health deteriorated, and she withdrew from the centre of cultural and political activities, staging her last known masque in 1614 and no longer maintaining a noble court. Her influence over James visibly waned as he became openly dependent on powerful favourites.

Although James had always adopted male favourites among his courtiers, he now encouraged them to play a role in the government. Anne reacted very differently to the two powerful favourites who dominated the second half of her husband's English reign, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham. She detested Carr, but she encouraged the rise of Villiers, whom James knighted in her bedchamber; and she developed friendly relations with him, calling him her "dog". Even so, Anne found herself increasingly ignored after Buckingham's rise and became a lonely figure towards the end of her life.

By late 1617, Anne's bouts of illness had become debilitating; the letter writer John Chamberlain recorded: "The Queen continues still ill disposed and though she would fain lay all her infirmities upon the gout yet most of her physicians fear a further inconvenience of an ill habit or disposition through her whole body." In January 1619, royal physician Sir Theodore de Mayerne instructed Anne to saw wood to improve her blood flow, but the exertion served to make her worse. James visited Anne only three times during her last illness, though Prince Charles often slept in the adjoining bedroom at Hampton Court Palace and was at her bedside during her last hours, when she had lost her sight. With her until the end was her personal maid, Anna Roos, who had arrived with her from Denmark in 1590. Queen Anne died aged 44 on 2 March 1619, of a dangerous form of dropsy.

Despite his neglect of Anne, James was emotionally affected by her death. He did not visit her during her dying days or attend her funeral, being himself sick, the symptoms, according to Sir Theodore de Mayerne, including "fainting, sighing, dread, incredible sadness ...". The inquest discovered Anne to be "much wasted within, specially her liver". After a prolonged delay, she was buried in King Henry's Chapel, Westminster Abbey, on 13 May 1619. The catafalque, designed by Maximilian Colt, placed over her grave was destroyed during the civil war.

As he had done before he ever met her, James turned to verse to pay his respects:

So did my Queen from hence her court remove
And left off earth to be enthroned above.
She's changed, not dead, for sure no good prince dies,
But, as the sun, sets, only for to rise.

Anne gave birth to seven children who survived beyond childbirth, four of whom died in infancy or early childhood; she also suffered at least three miscarriages. Her second son succeeded James as King Charles I. Her daughter Elizabeth was the "Winter Queen" of Bohemia and the grandmother of King George I of Great Britain.
SOURCE: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Denmark

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Timeline Anne of DENMARK

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