Prince George of Denmark - Marriage

Marriage

George and Anne were married on 28 July 1683 in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, London, by Henry Compton, Bishop of London. The guests included King Charles II, Queen Catherine, and the Duke and Duchess of York. Anne was voted a parliamentary allowance of £20,000 a year, while George received £10,000 a year from his Danish estates, although payments from Denmark were often late or incomplete. King Charles gave them a set of buildings in the Palace of Whitehall known as the Cockpit (near the site of what is now Downing Street in Westminster) as their London residence.

George was not ambitious, and hoped to live a quiet life of domesticity with his wife. He wrote to a friend: "We talk here of going to tea, of going to Winchester, and everything else except sitting still all summer, which was the height of my ambition. God send me a quiet life somewhere, for I shall not be long able to bear this perpetual motion."

Within months of the marriage, Anne was pregnant but the baby, a girl, was stillborn in May. Anne recovered at the spa town of Tunbridge Wells, and over the next two years, she gave birth to two daughters in quick succession, Mary and Anne Sophia. In early 1687, within a matter of days, George and his two young daughters caught smallpox, and Anne suffered another miscarriage. George recovered, but both his daughters died. Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell, wrote that George and Anne had "taken very heavily. The first relief of that sorrow proceeded from the threatening of a greater, the Prince being so ill of a fever. I never heard any relation more moving than that of seeing them together. Sometimes they wept, sometimes they mourned in words; then sat silent, hand in hand; he sick in bed, and she the carefullest nurse to him that can be imagined." He returned to Denmark for a two-month visit in mid-1687, while Anne remained in England. Later that year, after his return, Anne gave birth to another dead child, this time a son.

In February 1685, King Charles II died, without legitimate issue, and George's father-in-law, the Roman Catholic Duke of York, became king as James II in England and Ireland and James VII in Scotland. George was appointed to the privy council and invited to attend Cabinet meetings, although he had no power to alter or affect decisions. William of Orange refused to attend James's coronation largely because George would take precedence over him. Although they were both sons-in-law of King James, George was also the son and brother of a king and so outranked William who was an elected stadtholder of a republic.

Anne's older sister Mary had moved to the Netherlands after her marriage to William of Orange. Protestant opposition to James was therefore increasingly focused on Anne and George instead of Mary, who was heiress presumptive. The social and political grouping centred on George and Anne was known as the "Cockpit Circle" after their London residence. On 5 November 1688, William invaded England in an action, known as the "Glorious Revolution", which ultimately deposed King James. George was forewarned by the Danish envoy in London, Frederick Gersdorff, that William was assembling an invasion fleet. George informed Gersdorff that James's army was disaffected, and as a result he would refuse any command under James, but only serve as an uncommissioned volunteer. Gersdorff's alternative plan to evacuate George and Anne to Denmark was rejected by George. George accompanied the king's troops to Salisbury in mid-November, but other nobles and their soldiers soon deserted James for William. At each defection, George apparently exclaimed, "Est il possible?" (Is it possible?). He abandoned James on 24 November, and sided with William. "So 'Est il possible' is gone too", James supposedly remarked. In his memoirs, James dismissed George's defection as trivial, saying the loss of one good trooper was of more consequence, but Gersdorff claimed the defection greatly perturbed the king. The defection of George and other nobles was instrumental in whittling away the king's support. In December, James fled to France, and early the following year William and Mary were declared joint monarchs, with Anne as heiress presumptive. In early April 1689, William assented to a bill naturalizing George as an English subject, and George was created Duke of Cumberland, Earl of Kendal and Baron of Okingham (Wokingham) by the new monarchs.