Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/271



NLIKE her famous predecessor, Elizabeth, and her famous successor, Victoria, Queen Anne was a wife and mother long before she ascended the throne of England. A woman of thirty-seven, childless though the mother of seventeen children, she had lived through momentous changes in her country's history. In the course of seventeen years her uncle, Charles II., had died, her father, James II., had fled from his kingdom, her sister Mary had reigned and died, and she herself had just lost her last child, the pathetic little Duke of Gloucester, but two years before the death of her brother-in-law,