Anna of Denmark (1574-1619)

Wife and queen consort of King James VI of Scotland (James I of England)

Anna of Denmark was born 12 December 1574, the second of seven children of Frederick II, king of Denmark-Norway, and his queen consort, Sophia. She is particularly known as a patron of the arts, especially the court masque and her involvement in court politics. Married to the Scottish monarch, James VI, by proxy in May 1589, her new spouse collected her for her coronation on 17 May 1590. The couple had seven children themselves, only three of whom—Henry, prince of Wales, the future Charles I, and Elizabeth, the “Winter Queen” of Bohemia—saw their sixth birthday.

Customarily regarded as “frivolous,” Anna’s reputation has received new scholarly luster, thanks, in large part, to the development of a better appreciation of her behavior prior to her arrival in London. Students of Jacobean England have long known of her role as a patron of arts, especially of her fondness for masquing, but have tended to regard her employment of dramatists and her own appearances in their theatrical creations as squibs fired by a largely impotent political personality who supposedly lacked the seriousness and intellectual ability to make any substantial contribution to the character of reality during the reign of her husband, the archetypical patriarch.

Anna certainly played the litterateur, but she also, as befit the well-educated daughter of a capable mother, continually involved herself in “high politics” in both Scotland and England. Shortly after she arrived in her home, she befriended Henrietta, countess of Huntly and daughter of her new husband’s favorite and cousin, Esme Stewart, and aligned herself with Huntly’s brother, Lodovick Stewart, duke of Lennox, and John Erskine, earl of Mar, against their enemy, James’s chancellor, Sir John Maitland, to the extent that Maitland had to petition for her favor after a two-year battle. She then allied herself with the chancellor against Mar.

Anna’s safe delivery of a son in 1594 cemented this realignment as she opposed the Stewart tradition, continued for Prince Henry

Anna of Denmark, wife and queen consort of King James V! of Scotland. Engraving by G. Barrie and Son. (Library of Congress)

By her husband, of handing over their heirs to the governance of the Erskine family. For the next ten years, she tussled with James over the Erskines’ control of her child—for all of the king’s notorious fondness for young men, their passionate marriage involved alternate periods of loggerheads and reconciliation as Anna bore children routinely. Although implicated in the Gowrie plot in 1600—two of her closest attendants were sisters of the treacherous earl— the queen finally won the war when she collected Henry from Stirling Castle on her way to join her husband in England following his accession to that throne in 1603 as James I.

Like James, Anna found that the relative wealth of the English realm permitted flights of previously unimaginable fancy, which she indulged, especially and notoriously, in the production of court masques. The larger English stage also, though, offered new opportunities for political maneuvering; indeed, her involvement in English politics predated her physical arrival in the kingdom when a group of noblewomen, including Lucy, countess of Bedford, Penelope, Lady Rich, and Mary, countess of Pembroke, made their way north to meet the new queen at Newcastle. These ladies comprised part of a substantial faction, a relict of the failed rebellion of the earl of Essex in 1601, opposed to Spain and its English supporters. Although the nature of her own religion remains uncertain, Anna found an affinity with this group, and she associated herself with them for the rest of her life.

Prior to Robert Cecil’s death in 1612, the maneuvers of the anti-Spanish faction remained small in scale, and the death of the prince ofWales in November of the same year was a severe personal, as well as political, blow. But afterward, their activities became more noisome, especially after the death of Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, in 1614. Most famously, Anna and fTiends—George Abbott, archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, earl of Pembroke—maneuvered a new favorite, George Villiers, into the king’s affections at the expense of the pro-Howard Robert Carr.

The queen and her associates, though, had interests in policy as well as politics. Her councilors, including Sir Edwin Sandys, and their circle played vital roles in the Virginia Company; a number of significant works espousing British “improvement” were dedicated to Anna, including Captain John Smith’s procolonization The Generali Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles. The queen took charge of the English government while James returned to Scotland during 1617.

Despite Prince Henry’s death, as the mother of the “spare” Prince Charles, Anna might have continued to exercise considerable significance in British affairs. Unhappily, even as Villiers began his political ascent, she developed pleurisy and became seriously ill by the end of 1617. She died 2 March 1619.

Louis H. Roper

See also Literary Culture and Women; Power, Politics, and Women; Sidney, Mary Herbert;Theater and Women Actors, Playwrights, and Patrons.

Bibliography

Alsop, J. D. “William Welwood, Anne of Denmark and the Sovereignty of the Sea" Scottish Historical Review 59 (1980): 155—159.

Barroll, Leeds. Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Lewalski, Barbara K.“Enacting Opposition: Queen Anne and the Subversion of Masquing." In Writing Women in Jacobean England, 15—43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Roper, Louis H.“Unmasquing the Connections between Jacobean Politics and Policy: The Circle of Anna of Denmark and the Beginning of the English Empire, 1614—18" In High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England. Edited by Debra Barrett-Graves, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Carole Levin, 45—59. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.