Sunday, November 10, 2013

Daily Beast: The forgotten reign of England's lesbian queen

Michael Dahl portrait, 1705
From Wiki: Anne was plagued by ill
health throughout her life. From her
30s onwards, she grew increasingly
lame and corpulent. Despite seventeen
pregnancies by her husband, Prince
George of Denmark
, she died without
any surviving children and was the
last monarch of the House of Stuart.
Most people, when prompted with the words "Queen Anne" would finish the phrase with either "chair" or "table." If her majesty was indeed gay, she certainly must have had a sense of duty: any British lesbian knocked up seventeen times must have thought of England a lot.

From Michael Korda's Daily Beast book review:
It is sometimes the fate of England to do what seems daring and difficult in politics long before the United States (which, did not of course yet exist in Queen Anne’s day) gets around to doing it. We have yet to elect a Jewish president on this side of the Atlantic, while Benjamin Disraeli was a hugely successful prime minister in the latter part of the 19th Century, and we only just tested whether a lesbian can be elected mayor of New York City, while England may very likely have had one on the throne in the 17th Century.

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