Page:The Queens of England.djvu/467

 Anne of Denmark, QUEEN OF JAMES THE FIRST. Anne was the second daughter of Frederick the Second, third king of Denmark, in the line which succeeded that of Christiern the Second, deposed for his extravagant excesses. She was born on the 12th of December, 1575. Her grand- father was the greedy Lutheran who absorbed the whole prop- erty of the Church into his civil list ; and who strengthened his crown by uniting to it in perpetuity his father's duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Her father became wealthier still by the tolls of Elsinore, and by enormous duties on a partic- ular and very popular beer. Her brother, younger than her- self by fifteen months, who succeeded to the Danish throne in his eleventh and was crowned in his twentieth year, became James the First's boon companion, and was the king so cele- brated in Howell's Letters for having drank thirty-five toasts at the great banquet at Rhensburgh. He was carried away in his chair at the thirty-sixth, and left the officers of his court unable to rise from the floor till late next day. Little is known of the youth of the Princess Anne but that she was borne about in arms till she was nine years old. Be- fore she was ten there was talk of her marriage at her father's court. A daughter of Denmark, in the preceding century had been wedded to a Scottish king; and questions of territory, involving the ultimate possession of the Orkney and Shet- land Islands, remained unsettled between the two countries. These now induced the proposition of a similar alliance, and the hand of this young princess was offered to the reigning king of Scotland. Four years had to pass, however, .before state objections to the marriage were removed; and when it was celebrated by proxy at Cronenburg, on the 20th of August, 1589, Anne's father was dead, and the kingdom was governed by a regency in her brother's name. From Cronenburg, at 421