Parliament met soon after; and the queen's speech, announcing peace, after eleven years of warfare, was anxiously awaited. But she was too ill with gout, which had affected different parts of her body, to be able to appear in the house of lords until the ninth of April, and then her voice was painfully weak from her long suffering. Her majesty offered Louis IV. the Order of the Garter in honor of the signing of the peace; but the most interesting event to us of the present day connected with it is that the great composer, Handel, wrote his magnificent Jubilate to celebrate it.
As time went on the queen's health grew no better, and she was such an enormous eater that frequent attacks of gout were the result,—particularly as she had grown so corpulent from her other disease, dropsy, that she could take no exercise, and had to be lowered and raised from one floor to another in the palace by means of a chair worked with pulleys and ropes. She was in constant dread lest her brother should land in England, or George of Hanover present himself at court to claim his place as her successor. She, therefore, wrote two letters, one to Princess Sophia, Dowager Electress of Brunswick, the other to George Augustus, Duke of Cambridge, setting forth the danger of such a proceeding, and appealing to their honor. As we know, her fears were groundless in that direction; for the house of Hanover made no attempt to approach the shores of England, though there has been some dispute among historians as to their real intentions in this matter.
A.D. 1714. Queen Anne paid the ballad writer, Tom D'Urfey, a fee of fifty pounds for a verse he repeated one day while she was at dessert, that happened to tickle her fancy. As it refers to the Hanover succession, it is worth repeating:—
"The crown's far too weighty
For shoulders of eighty;
She could not sustain such a trophy.
Her hand, too, already
Has grown so unsteady
She can't hold a sceptre;
So Providence kept her