WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER.
From our childhood up we have all heard of "Good Queen Anne." When we were small tots in the nursery we sang little rhymes about
Queen Anne, Queen Anne, she sat in the sun.
I send you three letters, you don't read one.
Then as we grew older we succumbed more or less to the rage for the eighteenth century which has laid hold on so large a section of English and Americans during the last few years. And we began to use Queen Anne's name in season and out of season—to talk glibly of Queen Anne architecture, Queen Anne furniture, and Queen Anne plate. The subject is doubtless an interesting one. And I for one am grateful to Queen Anne—or rather to the architects of her reign. Those stately red brick houses of her time, though they are far less graceful than Elizabethan mansions, and less romantic than the French chateaux of the same period with their high roofs, and charming tourelles with extinguisher tops, are among the most comfortable, homelike, lovable dwelling-places we can find in England.
The plate too of Queen Anne's reign is justly esteemed as the handsomest and richest that can be found. As I write a bit of veritable Queen Anne plate stands beside me on the table—a graceful little candlestick five inches high, of plain, solid silver. No need to look at its Hall-mark, or puzzle over its history; for the only ornament on its foot is an open-work pattern formed of roughly cut letters, "Queen Anne. 1702"; and on the rim above is engraved "His Highness Prince George. S.LS. Anno Dom. 1702."
The candlestick was a present from Queen Anne on her coronation, to a certain old ancestress of ours, who had been one of the ladies in attendance on the Queen's young son, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester—the only one of her numerous children who lived beyond his babyhood.
This little boy, the last of our children of Westminster Abbey, was born on July 24, 1689. It was a memorable year in the history of England, for it had seen the great and bloodless revolution by which James the Second had been driven from Great Britain, and William the Third put on the throne. The misgovernment of James had become unbearable; and William, Prince of Orange, who had married the king's eldest daughter Mary, was invited "by a small party of ardent Whigs to assist in preserving the civil and religious liberties of the nation." William and Mary accepted the Declaration of Right, and were crowned as joint sovereigns on April 11, 1689. They had no children. So when Princess Anne, the Queen's sister, and wife of Prince George of Denmark, gave birth to her little boy in the following July, he was welcomed as the future King of England.
King William and the King of Denmark were the baby's godfathers. The marchioness of Halifax was his godmother. Queen Mary adopted him as her heir; and the king conferred upon him the title of Duke of Gloucester: but he was not created Duke "because his mother considered that title dreadfully unlucky."
But at first it seemed highly improbable that the poor child would live long. He was delicate from his birth—very small—and for two months his death was constantly expected. The doctors advised an incessant change of nurses; and the wretched baby, as was to be expected, grew weaker and weaker. At last, however, a fine-looking young Quakeress, a Mrs. Pack, with a month-old baby in her arms, came up from Kingston to tell the Princess Anne of a remedy which had done her children good. The Prince of Denmark besought her to become wet-nurse to the suffering little prince; and from that moment the unfortunate child began to thrive.
