Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. You're listening to our podcast

that explores the history and stories of our six palaces. These talks are a collection of some of our

best live events. I really hope you enjoy listening.

Despite ill health and tragedy, Queen Anne was a surprisingly successful monarch.

This series from our archive explores different perceptions of her reign.

In this talk, historian Dr. Anne Summers takes us through the life of Queen Anne and

encourages us to rethink her reign.

It's wonderful to be here, but it has to be admitted that Queen Anne doesn't fit altogether easily

into a lecture series on the theme of the wild, the beautiful and the damned,

because she was none of those things.

Prudish, plain and pious, a rather more appropriate adjective to describe her.

And she didn't have a great deal in common with the sort of languorous

beauties and royal mistresses whose portraits feature in the wonderful exhibition currently on

show at Hampton Court. As a young woman she actually was rather glamorous but by the time

she came to the throne numerous pregnancies had ruined her figure,

and a debilitating medical condition, almost certainly lupus, had given her a blotchy complexion

and left her dreadfully infirm and often in great pain. When touring the palace, you may have taken in the painted ceiling of the Queen's

drawing room, where Queen Anne is depicted being crowned by Neptune to symbolise the triumph

of British sea power, but I'm afraid the representation of her there is an idealised image

that bore little resemblance to the overweight and somewhat frumpy reality.

Wild is also not a word that springs to mind when thinking of Queen Anne.

Unlike the famously loose restoration court, Queen Anne's court was pretty staid,

...