… is from page 43 of Charles King’s 2024 book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah:
Queen Anne had experienced nearly every moment of her adult life as torture. At her coronation in Westminster Abbey, in 1702, persistent joint pain and stiffness, perhaps the symptoms of lupus, required that she be borne aloft in a chair, her regal train trailing behind the bearers. She carried few of her pregnancies – at least seventeen in all – to term. The children who survived never made it to adulthood. A son, William, the great hope as heir and future king, died of a throat infection at the age of eleven. Her husband and consort, Prince George of Denmark, fell to lung disease and dropsy.
DBx: Ponder this reality. A mere three centuries ago, one of the richest people in the world was arguably materially poorer than is any randomly selected person who is today in the bottom quintile of the U.S. income ‘distribution.’
Yes, Queen Anne had title to lots of land and she lived in a large, richly decorated palace that swarmed with all manner of servants to attend to her desires. But this daughter of a king (James II), sister of a queen (Mary), and then queen herself obviously had many desires that no one then could possibly satisfy – desires such as better medical care.
There’s no way to prove the correctness of what I’m about to say, but if Queen Anne (say, at the age of 30) were given the option of living her royal life as and when she did, or – having been accurately informed of what the American economy would be like in 2025 – transported three centuries into the future into some randomly selected economic position in 2025 America, it’s a good bet that she’d have chosen the latter.
Anne Stuart of 5133 Kensington Dr., Carmel, Indiana, married to George, with three children and their first grandchild soon to be born – and living in 2025 on an annual income of $73,000 – is vastly wealthier than Anne Stuart of Kensington Palace 320 years ago.
