Original subtitles

Royal history is at the heart of our national identity.

We think of it as the definitive truth about our past.

Kings and queens, dates and facts,

all consigned to a past that's unchanging and fixed.

But it's not like that at all.

History is a chorus of voices.

Each of them shouting out its own version of the story.

And very often, it's the loudest voices that get heard most clearly.

In this series, I'm lifting the lid

on three of royal history's great nation-building stories.

Henry VIII's Reformation.

It's often seen as a bawdy royal soap opera,

but was it really England's first Brexit?

The Spanish Armada -

Elizabeth I's triumphant foundation of an empire,

or a ripping yarn that's riddled with fibs?

And in this programme, Queen Anne and the forging of Great Britain.

She's gone down in history as a feeble monarch.

Fat, sickly and pushed around by her politicians

and, above all, her ladies-in-waiting, her favourites.

But did Anne really lack political skill?

Queen Anne herself was a very astute politician.

And was she truly a weak military leader?

People see something they hadn't seen in a century - a French army,

the scourge of Europe, breaks and runs.

All of Anne's achievements and victories

seem to have been forgotten.

So who started this character assassination?

And why has Anne's memory been blackened for centuries?

BELL TOLLS

Queen Anne's path to the throne begins in 1688.

The upheavals of the Reformation were far from over.

France and Spain was still fighting to restore Catholicism to England.

And they had a royal ally.

Anne's father, King James II, had converted to the faith.

The country's Protestants rose up

and Anne had to make a hard choice.

Anne was brought up a Protestant,

so now she was in a terrible position.

She had to either abandon her religion, or abandon her father.

In this dilemma, though, she was supported by

her childhood best friend, almost her soulmate, Sarah Churchill.

History remembers Queen Anne as a weak and dithering monarch,

but her bold decision to join the revolt

reveals this to be a fib right from the start.

There's a sentry guarding the door, Anne is trapped in her rooms,

but Sarah finds an unguarded back staircase.

And at the bottom of it, she's got a Hackney carriage waiting.

They escape.

Sarah Churchill would be by Anne's side all the way to the throne.

When James heard what had happened, he burst into tears.

"God help me," he said.

"My own children have forsaken me."

One observer said that he felt the loss of his daughter

as badly as the loss of his army.

James now lost heart and he fled into exile in France.

Anne's older sister, Mary, now took the throne,

with her Protestant husband, the Dutch William of Orange.

By joining the revolt, Anne had also positioned herself

to inherit the Stuart crown.

Sarah and Anne had made a sensational escape.

This was such a bold move!

And they were now more than friends, they were partners in crime.

Queen Anne came to the throne 14 years later, in 1702.

The rule of her sister and her Dutch brother-in-law

had been unpopular in England,

and Anne was committed to the nation's revival.

As a young woman, Anne had predicted that England will flourish again.

And now she aimed to make good on that.

But the new queen's reign was already being undermined

by the prejudices of her politicians and subjects.

Many were against her simply because she was a woman.

Despite 17 pregnancies,

she and her husband George had also failed to produce a Protestant heir.

And many believed she was too sick to defend Protestant England

against the might of Catholic France and Spain.

Anne's various illnesses seemed impossible to cure.

Her symptoms included a blotchy red face,

sore legs, horribly swollen feet.

Her doctors said all this was gout.

And if the illnesses sound bad, the treatments sound almost worse.

There was blood-letting,

placing of hot irons on her skin, and blistering.

Add in arthritis and the poor woman

really was a prisoner in her own body.

Back then, they said it was all caused by gluttony

and excessive drinking.

But this is another fib.

The illnesses were real.

Modern doctors have diagnosed the debilitating

autoimmune disease, lupus.

Anne's enemies saw it as a sign of moral weakness.

Sir John Clerk, a Scottish MP, once met Queen Anne,

and he said it was like meeting

"the most despicable mortal in the world".

He said that she had a "blotched countenance",

and she was "surrounded by some plasters and some dirty-like rags".

Now, I, personally, find it impressive that Queen Anne

was able to be queen despite her physical condition.

And I suspect that

our generally-negative view of her reign today

has been shaped by that, and other juicy quotations

about the imperfections of her body.

Many historians struggle to believe

that Anne could be both chronically ill and an effective queen.

And that doubt existed in Stuart times, as well.

At this period, the monarch is not just a figurehead.

So if the monarch is chronically unwell,

that really puts the...the...the nation,

um...politics, Parliament,

the state, in peril.

Um...with Anne, I think this is accentuated because she is a woman.

If there's one long-term purpose of a queen,

it's to create the next generation, the next monarch.

So Anne's health, and in particular, her fertility,

is the subject of intense scrutiny throughout her reign.

And, of course, it's an area where she experiences

great tragedy and sadness, and ultimately, she fails.

What did people make of the fact that they had a woman on the throne?

Well, I think it's undeniable that female power

is a problem in this society.

Female rule is a... it's a kind of aberration.

The fact that she's a woman is very often used against her.

On the other hand, right from the start,

she uses it to her advantage in really canny ways, I think.

So in her coronation, she chooses a passage, a biblical passage,

which refers to queens nursing the nation.

So she... Right from the start, she's using this idea

of a mother's authority, really.

And she sets herself up as mother of the nation.

One of Anne's first tasks as queen

was to address a speech to Parliament.

Once again, expectations were low.

In the early 18th century, Parliament was a brutal place.

There were two factions, who despised each other.

FAINT RAISED VOICES

The Whigs were the party of business. The metropolitan elite.

They wanted to restore England's glory

by going to war with Catholic France.

And they believed Parliament should curtail the power of the monarch.

The Tories were landed gentry, country squires.

They resisted going to war with France

because it would lead to an increase in land tax.

They were committed monarchists.

Tory values could be summed up as God, Queen and country.

Anne dreaded entering this bear pit.

To make matters worse, one of her ministers said

that she was too "unwieldy and lame"

even to appear before Parliament.

It looked like it was going to be a disaster.

But Anne had a secret weapon.

Sarah Churchill had ensured that her friend was immaculately dressed,

perfectly prepared and stunningly regal.

Sarah had also arranged for Anne to be carried into Parliament.

She learned her speech off by heart.

People noticed that she gave it without book, no notes.

And she said, "There is nothing you could expect or desire me to do

"that I wouldn't do

"for the happiness and prosperity of England."

But it was another line of the speech which became a sort of a meme

and got relayed around the country.

She said, "I know my own heart to be entirely English."

And this was a dig at her predecessor,

the unpopular Dutch King, William III.

It went down a storm.

Anne had done brilliantly.

Many of the doubts about her reign were beginning to melt away.

"Her Majesty charmed both houses on Wednesday,"

reported one observer.

"Never any woman spoke more audibly, or with better grace."

The Earl of Sunderland gushed,

"If she acts as she speaks,

"she will be safe, happy and adored."

FAINT CHEERING

Queen Anne herself was a very astute politician,

and she was a very shrewd manipulator

of political actors to her own ends.

But Anne's cleverly-planned debut would soon be forgotten,

due to the machinations of her political enemies.

In the early 18th century,

the position of Prime Minister hadn't yet been established.

The monarch selected MPs for the top jobs, and approved policy.

Anne was often caught in the crossfire between what she called,

"the merciless men".

But the standard story of her reign

diverts our attention away from Parliament

and on to intrigues at court.

History, and Hollywood, have often painted Queen Anne

as a woman under the thumb of other women - her favourites.

They controlled access to the queen for political purposes.

Now, like all myths, there's a grain of truth at the heart of this,

but really, it's very much of an exaggeration.

Sarah Churchill was a Whig, and Tory politicians were suspicious

of her political influence on the queen.

It's true that she was influential.

She was Mistress of the Robes, Keeper of the Privy Purse

and Groom of the Stool,

symbolised by her golden key of office.

Sarah controlled Anne's clothes,

her social calendar and her money.

But stories depicting the queen as Sarah's puppet

were often motivated by jealousy of Sarah's power and privileges.

Lady Sarah Churchill

had one of the most important apartments at Hampton Court.

And this was her little closet, dressing room area?

A closet or dressing room.

How does it compare to other rooms the courtiers had in the palace?

It is as richly decorated as the monarch's apartment.

So it's a very, very cushy little room she's got here.

It is the best place in the palace if you're a courtier.

Because it is so close to the most private spaces of the monarch.

Mm. Queen Anne would have slept right next door.

Oh, yes! Very cosy arrangement.

Well, if you're the queen,

you don't want to be sleeping in the grand chambers upstairs.

They're cold and not very comfortable.

A room like this is much more homely, much more cosy.

You have to imagine it once had a bed in.

A bed in it? Yes!

That was a big part of her life, being surrounded by women

in these funny little downstairs rooms.

Yes. But because those women are there,

they can also talk politics with the queen.

There's no escape, is there, if you're the queen?

Monarchs can't have normal relationships

because everybody wants something from them.

At Hampton Court, any politician hoping to influence the queen

in the early years of her reign needed access to her private study.

The queen was both extremely ill and extremely shy.

She kept away from high society.

She kept herself to herself, mainly in the company of her ladies.

So, if you were an ambitious politician,

how would you get access to her reclusive majesty?

Well, there are two routes.

Here's the official way.

Firstly, you'd come up this epically-grand staircase,

with its magnificent murals.

Right down at the other end there is Queen Anne's study.

It seems an awfully long way away.

And between us and it, there were all these different rooms,

each with its own door and its own lock and its own guard.

These rooms form a hierarchy.

And the more important you are,

the deeper you're allowed to penetrate into the palace.

But ultimately, it was the queen's favourite who'd decide

whether you were allowed into the royal presence or not.

But this isn't the only way in to see the queen.

These are the back stairs.

It's a working part of the palace.

This is where servants would bring things up to the queen's study.

The only people who are supposed to use these stairs

are the servants themselves, and, of course, the queen's favourite.

Clever politicians knew that

the secret backstairs route, via Sarah Churchill,

could get you enormous influence over the queen.

And, as a result, the power-hungry Sarah

became even more powerful still.

One of the queen's first appointments

was Sarah Churchill's husband, Lord Marlborough.

He was keen to go to war with France to crush the Catholic threat.

He would lead the queen's army.

For many historians,

this looks like a blatant favour to Sarah and the Whigs.

The history books have Anne down as feeble.

A puppet, with strings pulled by her politicians.

But if you actually look at her political career,

it was much more nuanced than that.

Anne was clever enough to take advice,

but she put both Tories and Whigs into her Cabinet,

and she was no pushover.

Anne once said of herself,

"If any of the Whigs think I am to be hexed or frightened

"into compliance because I'm a woman,

"they are mightily mistaken in me."

Despite all her problems, Anne was holding her own.

But her tragic lack of children was still a problem.

England's stability as a Protestant nation was at stake.

Scouring the family tree for a Protestant heir

meant skipping over no fewer than 50 eligible Catholics.

The next contender was a German called Sophia of Hanover.

And Anne would do

everything in her power

to fix this Protestant succession.

But the Catholic threat was growing.

A royal crisis in Spain was taking England to the brink of war.

Charles II of Spain was also childless.

On his death, Spain and its colonies

would pass to the grandson of the King of France.

This would create a Catholic mega-empire

intent on restoring a Catholic king to the English throne.

The war of the Spanish succession was brewing.

This was one of the greatest tests for Queen Anne

and her Protestant allies in Europe.

This war determined the future of Europe

and, in many ways, the future of world civilisation.

There's no question that the consequences are world consequences

if Louis XIV controls the wealth of the Spanish Empire.

Essentially, that's a global empire for him.

Why does Louis threaten Queen Anne quite so much?

Well, he would remove her from the throne.

The fear was that they would impose Catholicism on the nation.

So actually, asking the nation to change its religion yet again.

Imagine the bloodshed.

Queen Anne's military legacy tends to be forgotten.

But in 1704, she overruled the Tories

and backed the hawkish Duke of Marlborough.

Anne's shrewd choice of military commander

was about to pay dividends.

Marlborough definitely wants to take the war to Louis XIV,

but he's got these allies, he has the Dutch allies,

and, quite frankly, they're frightened of

the reputation of Louis XIV.

France's armies had dominated the continent for over half a century.

Louis XIV was unbeatable, unstoppable.

There was a real sense, "We can't really beat him.

"Why are we even trying?"

In 1704, the French actually give Marlborough his opportunity.

Basically, a French army, in conjunction with a Bavarian army,

is driving towards Vienna.

So Louis is marching on Vienna.

What's Marlborough going to do about that?

So he works out a plan with Prince Eugene of Savoy,

the allied commander in the south,

that what they're going to do is Savoy is going to march north,

Marlborough is going to march south, and they will meet

and cut the French forces off before they reach Vienna.

Now, to do this, it's a major logistical undertaking.

Marlborough actually has to set up shoes and boots along the route

because he is going to march his troops so far and so fast

that they are going to wear out their footwear.

The two armies meet on the way to Vienna.

What happens at the battle

is that Marlborough proves himself a tactical genius.

He makes a feint early in the morning

towards the village of Blindheim,

he draws the French forces off from the river.

He saves his cavalry till the afternoon.

When he sends in the 81 squadrons of cavalry,

they smash through the French lines.

And people see something they hadn't seen in a century - a French army,

the scourge of Europe, breaks and runs for the river.

At the end of the day, Marlborough is exhausted.

He's on horseback.

He writes a note to his wife, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough.

"Quickly, get me a piece of paper."

He writes on the back of a tavern bill,

"Please tell the queen her army has won a glorious victory."

And that message is, in fact,

the announcement of England's arrival on the world's stage.

You're making me feel quite proud to be English.

THEY CHUCKLE Well...

Queen Anne's army had won the most crushing victory

against the French since Agincourt.

On hearing the news, Anne said it gave her more joy

than she had ever received in her life.

Not bad at all, for a queen who'd go down in history as a disaster.

Queen Anne's army had shattered French morale.

It had stopped Austria from being invaded.

It had won one of the most decisive victories in European history.

England was now in the ascendant.

And here was the Duke of Marlborough's reward

from his queen - the Palace of Blindheim,

or, in plain English, Blenheim.

Historians have presented this as purely Marlborough's victory.

The usual story rarely acknowledges

that it was the queen who appointed him.

Elizabeth I gets remembered for beating the Spanish Armada,

Mrs Thatcher gets remembered for winning the Falklands War.

Why doesn't Queen Anne get remembered?

Queen Anne was fully the equal of any of her Tudor predecessors,

but she lacked the star quality of Queen Elizabeth

and other people who sat on the British throne.

She was quiet, she was shy,

she was significantly overweight.

And I think people then, and people today,

still draw conclusions about that, which amount to mere prejudice.

You never hear, "fat and competent, fat and politically astute",

and yet, that's exactly what Anne was.

She knew who she was and was exactly the queen that England,

and then, later, Great Britain, needed during her reign.

The war with France continued.

And it was getting closer to home.

Louis XIV was eyeing up a French alliance with Scotland.

Together, they could perhaps crush England.

But the queen had a solution.

And it would also help secure the Protestant succession.

England and Scotland shared one monarch,

but had two separate parliaments.

Anne was urging Scotland to join a united parliament in London

in return for economic rewards.

This would shut the door on a French alliance with Scotland

and secure the Protestant Hanoverian succession.

Great Britain was about to be born.

The story of how the union came about

usually goes something like this:

England said to Scotland, "How about it? Shall we get together?"

The Scottish nobles thought about it, debated it

and eventually decided, yes!

The only people who thought that this was a bad idea

were a small rabble of dissenters.

Most people in England and Scotland thought that it was great.

What a triumph!

But this version of the story

is one of the biggest fibs in British history.

Scotland's archives reveal the truth about the people's response

to the idea of a union with England.

What do you think that people generally, in Scotland,

felt about the union when it was proposed?

If you had an opinion, I think contemporaries would have said

most Scots were against it.

We've got here a copy of a petition from the Scottish National Archives,

which is saying, "We don't want the union".

So this is a petition from the inhabitants

and the trades and merchants of the borough of Ayr.

It's signed by over 1,000 people, which is very large for this time.

So it's signed by officers of the trade guilds, senior merchants,

and then, as it goes down, you get more ordinary people.

We can see the initials of people who are not actually literate enough

to sign their full signature.

And were there lots of these petitions?

And what about the pro-union petitions? Where are they are?

There's only one petition that we can call pro-union,

and it's from the borough council of Ayr.

And they say, "We're OK with this union in principle,

"but could you please amend some of the articles of the treaty?"

How many petitions were there against the union?

There were about 80, about 80 petitions.

And they're signed by approximately 20,000 people.

Which, for the time, is...is a lot.

And there was ONE pro-union petition?

Yes. At this time, there was a very strong sense of national identity.

People saw Scotland as an ancient kingdom.

It had been around, according to history of the time,

for 2,000 years.

And it was seen as really dishonourable to give that up.

The real story at the union involved the bribery of Scottish politicians

with the promise of titles and riches.

The Duke of Hamilton was a Scottish anti-unionist hero.

But late one September night in 1705,

he abruptly changed his tune.

The Scottish Parliament was debating how to choose commissioners

to negotiate for Scotland over the suggested union.

BELL TOLLS

The Duke of Hamilton suddenly did a very surprising thing.

He announced that

he thought that the queen ought to pick her own commissioners.

This was inexplicable to the rest of the opposition.

They were confused, they were dismayed.

They walked out of the chamber.

And this allowed the motion to slip through by just eight votes.

Hamilton had been bribed.

He would later become the first British Ambassador to France.

His U-turn allowed Anne to select Scotland's own negotiators.

Anne was getting exactly what she wanted.

Not exactly the action of a politically-naive pushover.

This corridor behind 10 Downing Street

once led to Henry VIII's cockfighting pit.

And it was here that

the queen's ruthless battle for the union was won.

The two teams of commissioners were kept apart from each other

in separate, locked rooms, and written messages were exchanged.

So 300 years ago, this corridor was where it was all at,

with the messengers going up and down.

Scotland's future was at stake here,

and yet the Scottish negotiating team had been muted.

The deal was struck in just three days.

The two parliaments would be united in London

as Her Majesty's Parliament of Great Britain.

Scotland would be free to trade with England's colonies.

And the Protestant Hanoverians would succeed Queen Anne

to both the Scottish and English thrones.

Now, Anne's deal went back to be approved by the Scottish Parliament.

And once again, Anne's ministers manipulated the outcome.

�20,000 worth of English gold, about five million today,

was used to persuade Scots MPs to vote for union.

Here, in the hall of the Scottish Parliament,

MPs voted their independence away.

Scotland's national poet, Rabbie Burns,

was appalled by the corruption and lies.

So the last line we heard there was,

"We're bought and sold for English gold -

"Such a parcel of rogues in a nation."

Why is Robert Burns so cross with the Scottish people?

So he's reflecting the notion that the union was made

with a degree of corruption.

It is a marriage of convenience.

It is created because there is no successor to Anne.

And that problem needs to be solved.

If Anne had had a surviving child,

it probably would not have happened at that point in time.

So amazingly, the union really came down to the womb of one woman.

Mm-hm. Yep.

Queen Anne's lack of a successor is what drives the union.

It's an incredible thought.

By May 1707, Anne had secured a Protestant succession,

foiled the French alliance with Scotland,

and created Great Britain into the bargain.

She was now eager to bring the bloody and expensive war

with France to an end.

But she was distracted by a growing conflict at home.

Sarah's cousin, Abigail Masham, had joined the queen's staff,

and Sarah was dismayed to see Abigail

quickly winning the queen's affection.

The queen now had a new favourite.

It was Abigail who tended to her day and night.

Sarah was out.

But just how close

was the relationship between Anne and Abigail?

Well, that's a secret that remains shrouded in darkness.

Abigail Masham was the cousin of the Tory leader, Robert Harley.

And she gave him special access to the queen.

Anne now used Harley as an ally against the Whigs,

who wanted to fight on against the French.

And Harley was the finest political schemer of his age.

His nickname is the Backstairs Dragon.

He's called the Backstairs Dragon

because he's always thought to have some Machiavellian plan.

He's always playing both sides against the middle.

And so, this is a man who always has three or four plots going at once.

The queen worked with Harley on secret plans

to make a peace treaty with France.

Sarah and the Whigs were utterly furious.

Speculation about Abigail's relationship with the queen

has diverted attention from Anne's shrewd political tactics ever since.

A popular song began spreading a rumour, originating from Sarah,

which would destroy the queen's reputation.

Ballads had already been very popular,

right from Shakespeare's day,

and they were the way that people enjoyed themselves, singing.

It was very much part of oral culture in ale houses

and inns and taverns, to sing popular songs.

In this period, it becomes a way of expressing political satire.

And so, you could have a ballad about a king and a pauper

without naming the king, or naming the individuals involved.

And you could satirise what was going on in politics

without ending up in the Tower of London.

So they have to have a thinly-disguised satire

on what's going on in high places.

"When as Qu... A..."

That's Queen Anne...

Well, we can recognise immediately it's Queen Anne,

and so would people at the time.

"When as Queen Anne of great renown

"Great Britain's sceptre sway'd

"Besides the church, she dearly lov'd

"A dirty chamber-maid.

"O! Abi... That was her name."

That's Abigail Masham, isn't it? This is about Abigail.

"She starch'd and stitch'd full well

"But how she pierc'd this royal heart, no mortal man can tell."

"She pierced this royal heart."

That is romance, then.

It's...it's cross-class romance.

Whoever's written this ballad is causing mischief

and really kind of putting Abigail down.

She's being positioned as an ignorant, low-born woman

who's illiterate,

"but had the conduct and the care of some dark deeds at night."

"Dark deeds at night."

Well, that's got to be girl-on-girl action.

It's a trivial thing, on one level,

but it's been really influential, hasn't it,

in shaping our view of Queen Anne?

It's like a pop song that's also spreading gossip and rumour

and political intrigue.

Well, even if there's no smoking gun proving it was Sarah,

you sort of think, who else could it have been? It must have been her!

It must have been her.

And I think, definitely, Sarah is...is playing with fire here.

She's engaging in open propaganda wars. Hm.

Great Britain was now alive with rumours

that Abigail and Anne were lovers.

Do you think that dark deeds

actually happened in the night in this room?

We will never know for sure.

If we could make these walls talk, we might know.

But there's no reason, just because of who Anne was,

the position she had in society and the time she lived in,

that she might not have felt same-sex love and desire.

What kind of evidence would you expect, anyway?

It's not really going to exist, is it?

Very often, evidence doesn't survive because it was taboo.

Who would write this down, and why would you write it down?

If you're whispering intimate secrets to somebody,

you don't need to write them a letter.

Sarah knew Anne better than anybody else.

Sarah would have known

that there could have been a grain of truth in her rumours.

But the unintended consequence of that

is that people assumed that not only Abigail

was having an intimate relationship with the queen,

but that Sarah had, as well.

Sarah's relationship with Anne was, by now, spiralling downwards.

At St Paul's Cathedral in 1708,

Queen Anne and Sarah were attending a service of thanks

for another Marlborough victory over the French.

Sarah had laid out spectacular jewels for Anne to wear.

And on the way to St Paul's, she noticed Anne hadn't put them on.

To Sarah, the message was clear.

The queen didn't value Sarah's husband's victory enough

to be bothered to wear the jewels to the ceremony to celebrate it.

And Sarah also thought that

she could detect the influence of Abigail here.

And if Abigail was in, then Sarah was out.

In the coach, they argued.

And it all grew to a head as they arrived here, at the cathedral,

where Sarah's feelings boiled over as they were going up the steps.

Crowds were all around them as the argument continued.

There were lots of people here, at the entrance to the cathedral,

and as the queen came in, they all heard Sarah saying to her,

"Be quiet."

Everybody heard Sarah telling the queen to shut up!

This was terrible!

This was still an age when queens were considered to be semi-divine,

and here was Anne being humiliated in public by her own servant.

This time, Sarah had gone too far.

The queen who's been remembered as a feeble puppet

was, in fact, now ready to dismiss her lifelong friend.

Sarah resorted to blackmail.

To back up the rumours about Anne's sexuality,

she said she'd publish intimate letters

the queen had sent her over the years.

So, what is the truth about Anne's sexuality?

These letters are often taken as so-called evidence

that Queen Anne was our lesbian queen.

What's your take on the letters as support for that, or not?

Well, I mean, you know, the letters obviously don't contain anything

that explicit about some carnal relationships,

so I think the only thing we do know,

for which there is evidence in the letters,

is the emotional intensity of their relationship,

especially on Anne's part.

Sarah said that Anne's letters were

sometimes full of "flames of extravagant passion".

What sort of thing was she referring to?

She was referring to letters like this one.

"I have been in expectation of you a long time,

"but can stay no longer without desiring to know

"what you intend to do with me.

"For it is most certain I can't go to bed without seeing you.

"Could you see my heart,

"you would find I have not one thought but what I ought of that

"dear woman whom my soul loves."

"The dear woman whom my soul loves." Mm-hm.

Such a special feeling to read such an intimate letter. Yeah.

I truly feel that if you are a royal woman, as well,

you would be married off at a young age to an arranged marriage

that was all about producing the kids, really.

So, you would naturally seek emotional fulfilment, wouldn't you?

Yeah. I mean, Anne did, I think,

um...she did really like/love her husband.

There's certainly no correspondence like this between her and George.

I mean, the suggestion that there is something unnatural

about Anne's feelings for other women

really originates from Sarah herself.

So here we have Sarah writing to Anne

about Anne having "no inclination for any but of one's own sex".

So the evidence for Anne being what we might call gay is shaky.

But after Sarah's threat of blackmail,

Queen Anne dismissed Sarah from her court.

When she moved out, Sarah asked if she could store her belongings

at St James's Palace.

Anne agreed, but the rent would be 10 shillings a week.

Sarah was spitting with rage,

so she took with her all sorts of things that she shouldn't have done.

Like the mantelpieces and the door knobs.

If it moved, Sarah swiped it.

So Anne retaliated.

She stopped the building works here, at Blenheim.

She said, "I'm not going to build a house for the duke

"if his duchess is taking my house to pieces."

What had been a beautiful friendship had become a furious feud.

And the queen hadn't finished yet.

This would become battle royal.

In January 1711, Sarah was forced to return that golden key of office.

She and her husband were also advised to leave England

to avoid further trouble.

Harley's Tories had won the election

with the promise of signing a peace treaty with France and Spain.

But the Whigs still wanted to fight on to victory,

and they outnumbered the Tories in the House of Lords.

The queen was desperate to win,

so she and Harley resorted to a strategy

that was described as a "mighty stretch of her powers".

She knew that she didn't have enough Tory lords to win the vote,

so before you could even say "dodgy",

she just created a dozen new ones.

This was shocking to Parliament. One observer said

it was "as stunning as if she'd burnt Magna Carta".

The queen had won again.

And this peace treaty would transform Britain.

History rarely even remembers Anne's Treaty of Utrecht,

but it changed the world.

It marked the end of French dominance in Europe,

and it landed some massive trade deals for Britain.

One of the most lucrative was with Spain.

It was called the Assiento.

It gave Britain a 30-year monopoly

in a trade that would turn us into the world's greatest economic power.

A trade in slaves.

How do you feel about narratives that still exist

that present Queen Anne's reign as

the epic beginnings of this fantastic thing, the British Empire?

Well, there's some truth in that,

in the sense that all the conditions are being created for this takeoff,

when Britain was able to dominate world politics.

And all of that is facilitated by the human trafficking

of African men, women and children in their...

Not just tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, but millions.

How essential was the slave trade to Britain's 18th-century economy?

Well, you can't think of Britain's economy in the 18th century

without what's called the "slave trade".

You're stimulating shipbuilding because you need the ships.

Rope-building, sail-making, um...

everything connected with weapons,

alcohol, metal industries. Um...

So if we look at all the kind of major cities of this period,

something like a city like Manchester

develops based on this trade.

The Bank of England, the...the British Museum, the...

Everything. All the stately homes in the country.

All the wealth of this period is connected with colonial trade.

Queen Anne's deal is shocking today,

but the Assiento and the Treaty of Utrecht

launched an empire of which the Tudors could only dream.

Elizabeth I was Anne's much-admired heroine.

And she'd held a thanksgiving at St Paul's

after seeing off the Spanish Armada.

Now Anne was going to go one better.

There was planned, also at St Paul's,

a procession of 4,000 children.

They were going to sing hymns to God,

thanking Him for Her Majesty, and for the gift of peace.

For the music of the thanksgiving,

Anne included a sneaky bit of support

for the Hanoverian succession.

The English composer, Purcell, was out...

..and the German composer, Handel, was in.

Handel's previous patron had been the Hanoverian court.

But once again, Anne's body was to let her down.

This was supposed to be her moment of glory,

but she was too ill to attend.

The queen would also miss the unveiling of this statue.

Anne had shown courage by using military force at crucial moments,

but she'd also shown wisdom

by making peace when she had the chance.

Sounds like exactly what you'd hope for

in a natural-born leader, doesn't it?

Like her heroine, Elizabeth I, Anne had been victorious,

and she'd helped create the Europe that we know today.

After a lifetime beset by illness,

on 1st August, 1714, at the age of 49,

Queen Anne died.

Today, she's been all but forgotten.

But in just 12 years, England had been transformed

into a new world power.

The mighty Great Britain.

And despite her fertility problems,

Anne had also fixed the smooth succession

of a new Protestant dynasty.

On 18th September, 1714,

a man called Georg Ludwig landed here, at Greenwich.

He'd just arrived from Hanover, in Germany.

Now, his English wasn't that great

and certainly, today, he would have struggled

with the citizenship test,

but pretty soon, he would be crowned King George I.

But Sarah Churchill had used her time in exile

spreading her fibs to blacken Anne's reputation in Europe.

Despite all her victories, the queen's legacy was undermined.

The statue's supposed to celebrate Anne's military success,

but pretty soon after it got put up, it was graffitied.

A disrespectful rhyme appeared, calling her, "Brandy Nan".

"Brandy Nan," it went, "left in the lurch,

"face to the gin shop, back to the church."

She didn't even have the respect of Georgian street urchins.

Sarah's final act of revenge for the Whigs

came nearly 30 years after Anne's death.

She scandalised Britain

with a treacherous account of her time in the queen's service.

What kind of a Queen Anne emerges from Sarah's kiss-and-tell memoir?

Sarah portrays Anne as just sort of blindly,

stubbornly, um...unreasonable.

And dominated by a Tory view of the world.

So here, for example, it says that, "the queen had, from her infancy,

"imbibed the most unconquerable prejudices against the Whigs."

Anne was raised as a Tory and just couldn't see past those blinkers.

Sarah's making Anne sound inflexible,

and therefore, a bit dim, really.

Can't see both sides of the argument.

Anne mainly comes out of this book as seeming just very boring

and insipid, and quite weak.

So that image of Anne as not being as intelligent,

or as, um...in control of the course of events,

really is reinforced by the way she's depicted in this memoir.

So on one level, it's sophisticated propaganda,

on another, is just a big fib, isn't it?

It oversimplifies.

It does oversimplify, but I think Sarah,

she wasn't consciously fibbing,

I think she oversimplified her view of Anne.

Sarah, really, just treats Anne as quite an infantile character.

This little book, it's just a little book,

but it has torpedoed Anne's reputation in history.

Sarah wasn't the last Churchill to rewrite Anne's story.

In 1874, another Churchill, Winston,

was born at Blenheim Palace.

As he grew up, he was fascinated by his ancestor,

the Duke of Marlborough. He dubbed him, "John Duke".

The great 19th-century historian, Thomas Macaulay,

had cast a shadow over his memory.

"The splendid qualities of John Churchill

"were mingled with alloy of the most sordid kind," he'd said.

But Winston Churchill wasn't going to take

that slur on his family name.

As a backbench MP in the 1930s,

he began writing a biography of his famous ancestor.

By the time he'd finished his book,

Winston Churchill had fought and re-fought

the Duke of Marlborough's world war over and over again in his mind.

He was using history to prepare himself for his own world war.

"The longer you can look back," he said,

"the farther you can look forward."

One of Winston's own biographers

said that, "the great showman aimed to blast Macaulay out of the water."

In Winston Churchill's colourful prose,

the Duke of Marlborough, John Duke,

gets a dramatic rehabilitation. How about this?

"Behind Queen Anne, ever faithful in her service,

"lay the pervading genius of Marlborough,

"with his enchanted sword."

In trumpeting Marlborough as this great hero,

he relegated Queen Anne to a bit-part player.

Sidelined, infantilised and misrepresented.

Winston Churchill wrote that, "Marlborough was not only the chief,

"but the sole guide of the Queen,

"and the decisions to which she obtained her assent

"shaped the future. Anne relied on Marlborough."

Churchill was patronising to Queen Anne

in order to rescue the reputation of his beloved John Duke.

But it's Sarah Churchill's fibs that have most distorted her memory.

Sarah Churchill's version of the story

has had 250 years now to stew and to spread.

And her juicy titbits about "dark deeds done at night"

are so powerful that they've pushed all the other stories

that could have been told about Queen Anne out of our minds.

You sent for Abigail to try and make me jealous, I think! Perhaps.

QUEEN ANNE GASPS

And now, the film, The Favourite,

is spreading the fibs to a whole new generation.

It goes even further than Sarah Churchill's version of events.

You look like a badger.

Oh!

Well, what do you think you look like?

A badger.

Do you really think you can meet the Russian delegation

looking like that?

No. I will manage it.

Go back to your rooms.

Queen Anne in The Favourite is a tragic figure.

She's overweight, she's insanely greedy. Mm!

She's easily manipulated by other people.

She has two lesbian lovers

and she's obsessed with her pet rabbits.

Now, you could argue about whether all these things

are really true or not, except for the last.

She definitely did not have bunnies.

Along with so much else, the rabbits in the film are total inventions.

So, what do historians make of The Favourite?

I think visually, it's sumptuous, and I think it's...

Anything that gets people interested in history is worthwhile.

I found the favourite to be delightfully entertaining

and wicked good fun, and utter rubbish as history.

Queen Anne's memory has been blackened for centuries

by her embittered lady-in-waiting.

Now Hollywood appears to have sealed her fate

as a queen destined to be remembered as a disaster.

But it was the Georgians

who colluded in putting the lid on Anne's legacy.

Anne had defeated the French,

she'd restored peace to Europe

and she'd gracefully handed over the succession to the Hanoverians.

To see how they thanked her for that,

we need to visit the most magnificent building in Greenwich,

the Painted Hall.

It was designed to be a hospital dining room,

but it's also Britain's answer to the Sistine Chapel.

It took the artist, James Thornhill, two decades to paint,

and his posture would never recover.

Ah!

There's William and Mary -

Anne's brother-in-law and her sister.

They're absolutely plumb centre. They dominate the whole room.

And here, on the end wall, we have George's family,

the Hanoverian clan.

The whole darn lot of them. There's loads of them.

With their rather modest motto, that says,

"Here we have a new race of men from heaven."

And where in all of this is Queen Anne?

Well, you could be forgiven for missing her.

She's tucked away on the ceiling here,

next to her slightly-useless husband.

She's not at all the focus of attention.

And that pretty much sums up the Georgians' attitude to Queen Anne.

In fact, that end wall was originally supposed to be

a celebration of Anne's victories.

This would have cemented the image of her

as a successful military leader.

But along came George and put his own family there instead.

It's like he painted out her legacy.

Being forgotten is perhaps the greatest indignity of all.

Queen Anne's story shows just how dangerous

royal history's fibs can be.

So we should set aside the poisonous tone of Sarah Churchill's memoirs

to reveal the real Queen Anne.

She WAS significant.

She gave the world Great Britain, for better or for worse.

She saved the nation from the French.

We need to rescue Anne from the mythology

and restore her to her rightful place in royal history.