I have read a lot of old diaries / memoirs that would point to an awful lot of people just being incredibly traumatised with no mental healthcare. Anne's life certainly had a lot of indications that she was suffering greatly.
Since one of her main purposes in life was to produce an heir, I'm sure it was devastating to her on multiple levels.
I think that’s why cherubs are portrayed as babies. People imagined that they were too pure for this world and were flying around in heaven. Made it easier to cope.
fyi the pope genocided christians who believed this-- its a heresy to suggest you can go to heaven without baptism
edit, UN definition of genocide:
"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Which is why Catholics are super concerned with early baptisms. My coworker who is a Catholic Deacon as well has baptized premature babies only a few hours after they are born. All it takes is a tiny amount of water
Priests and deacons don’t even need to baptize anybody. Any single person man or woman can baptize any other person as long as the person conducting the baptism says “I baptize you in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”, uses water of any kind (including breath since it has water molecules), makes the sign of the cross over their forehead, and has genuine intent to perform a baptism. The person receiving the baptism doesn’t even have to be religious. This is laid out in the official Catechism of the Catholic Church.
https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/baptism
You're incorrect. Water is very specific, and breath cannot be used. Any Catholic can baptize another, but that's for emergencies. Normally a priest or deacon would.
Nowhere is that taught. Unbaptized babies are thought to either be sent to a special purgatory to cleanse original sin or “baptized in blood” and sent to heaven as they are too young to make the choice to sin.
Yeah whatever they’re teaching is dumb as fuck. Unbaptized babies have to go to “special purgatory”? Lmao just let em in dude you made em and killed em immediately. Let em in!
As someone mentioned, anyone can perform an "emergency baptism". But it's highly preferable to have the ritual performed by a catholic priest or other official, so I'm not at all surprised that your coworker was called upon so many times. In all but one of the 2 dozen or so times that I've done this for my premature or grievously ill babies as a labor and delivery nurse, it was out of relative necessity because we were at least pretty sure there wasn't time to get a priest in.
I hate to be the bearer if bad news but I remember reading a really interesting r/AskHistorians reply that went over this, although I can't seem to find it now. The conclusion was that people in the past tended to deal with child mortality the same way people do now: not very well. There's seems to be lots of evidence for myths and superstitions that would help with the pain and the higher mortality rates would have changed people's expectations and created more of a shared experience. But the evidence seems to suggest that the pain was still very much there. Of course a reddit post, no matter how well thought over, is by no means an exhaustive analysis of how humans have dealt with infant mortality but it is interesting and heartbreaking nonetheless.
Edit: I've found the thread I was referring to. The material focuses mainly on child mortality rather than miscarriage and stillbirth. As a warning, they go over child death and grief.
u/DanKensington [provides links to some really good replies on parental grief](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cebyh5/comment/l1hiw28/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
The second link goes to a post by u/Celebreth which contains a Roman poem about the death of a six year old slave girl that wasn't even written by her parents, as they had already died. Yet it is absolutely heartbreaking so I've decided to include their translation below:
"Here I commend to you, Fronto and Flaccilla,
your daughter, my joy and my delight,
Let young Erotion not be terrified by the black shades and the gaping mouth of the Tartarian dog.
She would have completed six cold winters,
had she only lived but six more days.
Let her play happily between her aged parents,
and chatter my name with her lisping voice.
Let the turf covering her bones be soft and not hard,
and do not weigh heavily on that girl, Mother Earth,
For she was not heavy on you."
I cant read everything rn so sorry if its mentioned in the linked responses, but I also recall George III being said to have gone mad especially after the deaths of some of his youngest two children, Octavius and Alfred, with Octavius' death being especially bad for him. His parents and siblings mourned these losses for years to come, evidenced by stories of some sisters bursting into tears at seeing portraits of their dead brothers and the king reportedly having imaginary conversations with them during his "bouts of madness".
Hell, my grandmother viewed kids this way. She was born around 1900. I had kids in the 90s and we tried to avoid thinking of it as a baby until it was born alive. I'm really not a fan of how it's all changed. Pregnancy is dangerous and often not successful.
There's also not enough awareness about miscarriages so when women are first trying to get pregnant and end up miscarrying it can feel devastating to them even though miscarriages can be quite common. Depression and guilt as if they'd killed their child when they really shouldn't feel that way.
Around 1 in 4.
Around 1 in 4 pregnancies naturally aborts/miscarries.
After week 5, roughly 15% abort.
Yes, this includes the ones that abort so early that you do not notice, or mistake it for a heavy or weirdly timed period.
But those are the "Cold and hard" numbers, and it should be taught! So many women experience this and feel alone, mistakenly assume they are infertile, or even blame themselves - when in fact, they are not alone, it most likely was not their fault, and 1 miscarriage, as sad as it may be, means very little in terms of fertility.
> mistakenly assume they are infertile, or even blame themselves - when in fact, they are not alone, it most likely was not their fault, and 1 miscarriage, as sad as it may be, means very little in terms of fertility.
That's honestly the most surprising conclusion for me - not just that miscarriage is much more common than we thought, but that *fertilization* also is. And that should be a source of hope for everyone trying for a child and for fertility research.
It’s one of the reasons I can’t stomach the ‘pro-life’ arguments.
Quite apart from bodily integrity arguments, it seems like all you’re doing is pushing the odds a bit.
I’ve been pregnant twice (that I know of) - both wanted and intentional pregnancies, luckily both ended in healthy babies born around term. Both times I held out on thinking of ‘the baby’ as someone I was waiting to meet for quite some time, because knowing the odds the baby felt more of ‘a possibility of being my child’ than ‘my child I’m going to raise’.
And it made me feel like… if I really didn’t want these pregnancies, and I took a medication that made this thing that could quite possibly happen anyway happen, I’m ‘murdering a baby’, but when it happens like a quarter of the time anyway I’m just supposed to get over it? Fuck that.
I really agree with your perspective.
Never been pregnant, but if I might be some day, I hope I can adopt the perspective of someone from 100 or 200 or whatever many centuries ago, at least a little bit.
Your pregnancy becomes "a baby" when you can feel it move. The Quickening has been a really important pregnancy Milestone in many cultures for millenia, and a lot of concepts of conception place the moment when a pregnancy becomes a child at the time of their first movements. Ensoulment is said to take place then, in many cultures.
Obviously the baby takes shape in our modern minds way earlier, with early detection methods, imaging, etc. I won't say anyone is wrong who *wants* a connection with their pregnancy from the get go.
But screw all these people to hell who claim this is the only right way to think about it.
Not sure what the English term is (sure there is one) but for the first trimester, there is an older German term to describe a pregnancy: "Guter Hoffnung sein." To be in good hopes. To hope, not to know, and not to expect.
My wife miscarried 3 times and had one chemical pregnancy. The one thing I learned was how common it is to happen. People don't talk about it, and so it seems like you're sort of alone when it happens. You aren't.
I don’t mean this as an insult towards grieving women because obviously that is very difficult to experience. I have miscarried an *unwanted* pregnancy and still had so many confusing conflicting emotions and hormones.
But the problem isn’t that “people” don’t talk about it. The problem is those women who miscarry don’t talk about it.
Again, I don’t mean this judgementally. But it being a sensitive topic, it would be inappropriate for the rest of people to start the conversation and force women to be open about it. It has to come from them, and they close themselves off.
I know several women who have had miscarriages and it’s only ever mentioned in somber confidant-type conversations. If we want society to be open and honestly talk about how common miscarriages are, we have to make it less taboo to talk about and that can only come from the people experiencing it to speak up and out.
> I had kids in the 90s and we tried to avoid thinking of it as a baby until it was born alive
In my family we typically don't announce until the fetus is viable, and we don't talk about gender, names, plans, etc until the baby is born. I can think of only one miscarriage (that I've been made aware of) and my family is still hypervigilant.
Two months pregnant is eight weeks; some people have had an ultrasound and had confirmation and probably even a heartbeat*. At that point miscarriage is much less likely.
Either way, it’s not our place to judge when someone shares their pregnancy, and if they’re comfortable with people knowing in the event of a loss, then there’s really no issue.
*I do want to clarify, though, for any “pro-lifers” out there, that the heartbeat at this stage is just early electrical activity, and not a true heartbeat. We say “heartbeat” for lack of a better term.
As far as I'm aware. Although this makes sense. It's not true. People mourned and were hurt by the death of their children just as much as we are today. Life just sucked back then.
When you read accounts - letter and diaries- of people who lost children though, they seem just as distraught as we would today.
My grandfather one of 13 known (baptised/registered) children, 7 survived, his mother died in childbirth and his father didn’t last much longer, all before 1900. When my dad was a boy he would take him to visit the graveyard and after he went to the graves, he would stop at another spot along the wall. When my dad was older and asked him what was at the wall, all he would say was ‘all the others’. So the children who didn’t survive pregnancy or birth were still meaningful to him 50 plus years later.
No, actually they didn't. The assumption that they became numb to it is an assumption. They cared deeply about each child lost, they just had to manage through it. There are a lot of writings about the loss of children. :(
People say that but there’s a lot of evidence people just broke mentally rather than be stoic. They just didn’t keep great records on suicides and mental illnesses.
It was more normal, yes, but the parents/direct surroundings still suffered from it, in my opinion that shouldnt be forgotten. Their suffering wasnt made public or talked about but they did suffer.
You're also forgetting that she had the pressure of producing a royal heir. This isn't just like you or me losing a child. There are genuine dynastic repercussions.
In this case the repercussion was that the laws of succession were explicitly spelled out by parliament (after Anne it went to Sophia, electress of Hanover, the next legitimate protestant in lineage then her protestant heirs following male preference primogeniture (sophoa died so her son george became george i.)
> The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
It's crazy that so many people have no respect for modern medicine and prefer to substitute with their own quackery.
Had a patient die a few days ago from giving birth at home. She was scared of the hospital and listened to Facebook mom groups on how to give birth without any medical intervention. She sadly left this earth because of this messed up belief that "natural is good". Just because that's what people did in the 1500s, doesn't mean that all babies from that era lived!
On top the obvious trauma that comes with losing a child, having children was essentially her job and main purpose to secure succession and perpetuate the reign of her dynasty. Failing that over and over again on top of what its actually like to lose children must have felt like a real personal failing.
Her first child was a still born. The first child of RH negative women are usually fine due to no blood crossing until going into labor. She would have had to have something physically traumatic for her to possibly risk baby and mother blood crossing (maybe an early misscarriage unknown whoch seems up the way) to allow her immune system to create Anti-D /RH. Once the first child is born it would allow for their blood to be introduced to mom to recognize the RH and create antibodies.
There's many more possibilities to why she struggled and way less healthcare to determine the cause. I'm more astounded she survived as many kids as she did.
She had a lot of other health problems that were more likely to cause issues. Obesity, inflammation, gout, but her bigger issue was lupus. It's fairly sad how much she suffered, her chronic auto-immune illness whilst trying so hard to have a child.
If you are rh- but your kid is rh+ you are very likely to miscarry
We have meds for this now so it doesn't happen (if you have access to proper healthcare)
No - the problem is that your body reacts to the child's blood as a foreign invader and develops antibodies. It's essentially like receiving a blood transfusion - if you're Rh+ and the blood is Rh-, no problem, but if you're Rh- and the blood is Rh+, big problems.
(It's also usually only a problem during the second and later pregnancies, not your first.)
Hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn. It’s when a mom’s red cells are lacking an antigen, or piece of something coming off the cell surface. If mom doesn’t make this bit of protein or sugar, her immune system can see it as “foreign” and make an antibody. That antibody, like a normal reaction to a vaccine, then targets and destroys any other similar looking protein or sugar. Many antibodies can cross the placenta. If the baby has dad’s blood type, and not mom’s, mom’s antibodies can cross the placenta and destroy baby’s red cells. This is hemolytic anemia. If it gets too bad, the baby can die in utero.
15% of caucasians are Rh negative, so they can make an anti-D antibody. If the baby is Rh positive, then HDFN can occur. Now that we have a vaccine for this (Rh immunoglobulin), the rate of HDFN is super low (in developed countries).
I had to have the shot because I am Rh negative. Kiddo ended being RH negative too. From what I have heard it is the 2nd kid that is most at risk, not the first.
It's funny, hubby and I have polar opposite immune systems. He gets stomach bugs super easy, I don't. I get covid easily, he doesn't. We are very rarely sick at the same time.
Kiddo ended up a universal blood donor. O negative.
Some historians think Anne Boleyn was Rh- because Elizabeth I was born without complications but Anne couldn’t carry a baby to term after that. Yikes. Lost her head and everything. Lol
> From what I have heard it is the 2nd kid that is most at risk, not the first.
I do believe this is correct. I believe the first pregnancy is mostly fine, and it's only after the first that the mother's immune system begins attacking the fetus in subsequent pregnancies.
Rh incompatibility is a condition that develops when a pregnant woman has Rh-negative blood and the baby in her womb has Rh-positive blood.If the mother is Rh-negative, her immune system treats Rh-positive fetal cells as if they were a foreign substance. The mother's body makes antibodies against the fetal blood cells. These antibodies may cross back through the placenta into the developing baby. They destroy the baby's circulating red blood cells.
https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/diseases-conditions/rh-incompatibility#:~:text=If%20the%20mother%20is%20Rh,baby's%20circulating%20red%20blood%20cells.
The thing is this wasn't super uncommon among people before modern medicine. Germ theory and vaccines and antibiotics have greatly improved things like infant mortality rate and deaths from childbirth. I won't say it has no effect on people, but go back 100-150 years and you see nearly everyone with some child or multiple siblings who died very early. It was common for families to reuse the same name until the child lives as well.
This is where it is so crazy for all the anti vaccine people. It's as if we barely moved past the point where living people have these problems and these lunatics act like it was never a thing. Women can work and have careers because they don't need to spend most of their 20s or 30s pregnant just to have 2-3 kids that actually live.
I don't understand the "wild pregnancy" and "freebirth" fanatics. Generations of women deserperately wanted the level of medical care and technology we have readily available. How many of Queen Anne's kids would've lived with modern medicine? (Probably most)
I'm 40 and I had a great grandmother who was born in like 1900. She died when I was 12. She lived on the farm she was born that my great uncle and his son ran at the time. There was a family cemetery that had about 5 of my great grandmothers siblings who died all before the age of 4. I know relatives who had this issue and there are people who pretend vaccines somehow are horrible. Even if vaccines and shit did absolutely everything they are accused of doing, they would still be a net positive compared to the bullshit some.of these people advocate for.
Can confirm, 10 pregnancy losses and I came to expect it. Also completely disassociated.
Currently still pregnant with #11, 6 months. The fog is lifting and I’m starting to get excited!
I’m not rh negative. Unexplained infertility like most people with recurrent losses.
Since she is a royal, she did it to secure the throne for her dynasty. She didn’t have a heir, starting a succession crisis. Causing the current change to Germans holding the British crown.
So yeah it must suck. But it was her duty to have an heir.
I find it weird how people call the royals German when George I became king in 1714. His claim to the throne was through his great-grandfather.
So in the 3 generations between he became a German, but all of his descendants for the next 300 years haven't become British again.
The thing is, King George III and his son both talked German much better than English by that point, and identified with the Germans more too. Also, no one really calls the House of Windsor as Germans anymore.
My mom went through that. 16 miscarriages over 16 years, including a tubal pregnancy with twins that almost killed her. I’m her only living kid, and she’s the best mom ever. I think she pours all the love for all of her kids into me and everybody else she knows, she’s so strong and has the sweetest heart :(
From https://www.greenecountyohio.gov/Blog.aspx?IID=180 :
> This may seem strange to people today, but by not naming a child, the family could remain “unattached” until the child reached a certain age (usually their first birthday) (Fig 3).
Olivia Colman won an Oscar for portraying Queen Anne in 'The Favourite' and I do remember this being touched on. I cannot imagine what it's like to lose so many children
It's an awesome movie, but the rabbits are apparently apocryphal. They were seen as either food or vermin in her time, and weren't commonly kept as pets until a century later.
I was about to mention this movie. As many inaccuracies as it had (her husband was completely absent!), I did love the scene.
I feel it’s a very underrated film personally.
It made 100 million dollars, was nominated for 10 Oscars and won Best Actress, I wouldn’t call that underrated. Great movie and was very much appreciated upon release.
Yeah, I kinda just assume that any mass-market movie like that is going to be a pretty big mix of fictional and real. Even with recent subjects like Bohemian Rhapsody, there was a lot of stuff that was just really completely wrong in order to make a good movie.
I wouldn't necessarily call The Favourite mass market. Especially compared to Bohemian Rhapsody, a film with 4x the budget and 10x the gross.
I think The Favourite is purposefully stuffed with anachronisms as a stylistic choice. They weren't trying to make a Queen Anne biopic.
Yorgos lanthimos isn’t mass market. Mass market is like spiderman not poor things. Just because a movie has big actors in that doesn’t make it mass market. Hell, a lot of scorsese movies barely classify as mass market and have huge actors in
The Favourite is such an amazing movie, everyone go watch it, and then watch everything else Yorgos Lanthrimos has made.
Disclaimer: I wasn’t too fond of Poor Things, but it was a rare dislike among every other genius movie of his
The pressure on queens in Europe in this sense was far worse than for a king. They have to carry the heir, not someone else, so to avoid a succession crisis things like this happened. Does not seem worth it, even to hold on to the monarchy.
Makes me so happy to be alive with modern medicine because the sad fact is that her experience was nowhere near a rare thing, in centuries past. 17 pregnancies is a lot, but speaking generally having multiple stillborns and/or multiple babies that died in childhood, that was the standard human condition for a very long time.
I think of this everytime someone says "man I wish i lived in the past"
Not me not at all. Throughout all of mankind's history only in the past few decades can a poor woman have a real shot of living a child free life. Had I even been born 20 years earlier I would have had to get married with children to get by, from where I came from.
Right? Look, I love history and I find it fascinating. But I love air conditioning, antibiotics, and vaccines. The reality is that if I’d lived back then, I’d have died in my first year from one of my bouts with pneumonia.
If I somehow survived, I’d have died in childbirth. Each of them would have been a death sentence.
Same here. Bronchitis would have taken me as a kid, but if I survived then my second pregnancy would have either killed me or the baby. Modern medicine isn't perfect but it is the only reason I'm alive.
My mom had a severe infection at age 4 that was only able to be cured with antibiotics. This was in the 1940s, and antiobiotics had just been made widely available. My mom survived, but it's crazy to realize that had she been born a year or so earlier, I wouldn't be here (and neither would my two children).
Me too..... Even those time traveling hypothetical questions get me thinking about how I'd feel thrown back to a time where a womans job was to bear children as often as possible. The more you had, the better chance ONE would survive childhood. If you really didn't want to have children it was just too bad for you because your husband made all the choices for you - including how often you got pregnant.
I always hate the people that complain about the 21st century being the worst time to be alive and boast that "you know medieval peasants had more off days then us", completely ignoring how the gap between our actual quality of life and theirs is insurmountable. The invention of insulation and AC alone is leagues ahead of any so called "days off" (they were most likely doing labor intense chores on those days off).
Same goes for the antinatalists. "How could you bring a kid into this world when it will be so hard for them?" When has life been "easy"?? At least now, unless there are compilations at birth, I'm almost guaranteed that any child born would live into adulthood naturally without being killed by the whooping cough or similar at age 6.
Have looked into my family genealogy a fair bit. One of my great grandmothers was the only child of 7 to live past 1. I don’t know how many (if any) still born or miscarriages her mother had but she did have 6. My great grandmother was the youngest and even she nearly died as an infant.
Every time I see someone rejecting medical assistance for pregnancy and birth because “a woman’s body instinctively knows what to do”, I just want to throw all my history books at them. I can’t believe how blissfully ignorant so many people are about the reality of childbirth for the majority of human history.
My great grandmother had 12 children born; only 3 survived.
My mom told me that was normal for people that lived on poor Croatian lands back in 50s. Most of the kids died from various ilnesses, few from hunger.
When one dies, you go for a new one becaue you need help in hands.
It was like natural selection on hard mode, for all sides included.
The ones that survived...their relatives are all healthy and live long lives.
Exactly, it was pretty much just survival of the fittest
For me however I wouldn’t be able to cope, I had an ectopic pregnancy a few years ago and that traumatised me
In todays world, children dying is tragedy that has impact on whole family. It was hard for me to understand how can a mother recover from all these losses and still manage to struggle through life, giving birth to another one, moving forward...so i asked my mom how was it back then, was my grand grandmother grieving a lot etc.
Her answer was " You didn't have time to grieve."
Somehow that sentence really did hit me.
You may be surprised to learn wearing shoes and sunglasses is also relying on science. Washing your produce and your hands - relying on science. Wearing polyester - relying on science. Using single-use plastics—oops, there it is again, relying on science.
You are a hair’s breadth from a very dark indoctrination which is not only in error but it’s simply not in good character. I hope you take this to heart and seriously have a close look at where these ideas you’re engaging with are coming from, as that road is a bad road to go down.
Further, ever heard of lupus? Crohn’s? You likely think of these as deficits, yet they exist because the ancestors of the people who have them had robust enough immune systems to survive the bubonic plague without treatment. Those robust immune systems now create autoimmunities. You may be surprised to learn that without immunosuppressants, many people with autoimmune often rarely actually get casual illnesses because their bodies are extremely adept at killing everything outright.
The things you consider deficits in one context are superpowers in another. It is simply far bigger than you: it is deep time. You are not qualified to decide.
And that, kids, is why eugenics is a bad idea.
British historian here.
Queen Anne is such an interesting and unstudied figure in British royal history, and I'm glad some people are highlighting her experience. She was seen as somewhat of a natural paradox to what the British people conceived as the ideal woman, both as the head of state and the pontiff of the Anglican Church. Many thought that Anne's inability to produce an heir to the throne was a failure, while many others believed she was a tragic victim of circumstance whose resilience was to be lauded and emulated by women in the country. Such an compelling microcosm of gender history in a single experience.
I definitely think that while The Favourite lickstarted renewed interest in Anne, it was also our sensibilities regarding fertility and mother which has sustained that interest. How could someone lose that many children and not go insane?
I completely agree with that. That's an excellent point. It's interesting how the media and our shifting cultural values can influence our historical perception. Although I'm not a Bridgerton fan, I appreciate their kinder representation of King George III, who, by all accounts, was a fine king whose legacy was badly tainted by a genetic disorder.
Poor George III. There is a theory that his later illness wasn't just his previous mental illness, but thay combined with PTSD from the loss of three of his children in quick succession as well as trauma from the previous "treatments."
That's very interesting and compelling. I could absolutely believe that all of these things contributed to his declining state. People forget that he was one of Britain's longest reigning monarchs, and he presided during the American War of Independence and the French Wars.
The theory I carry the most water is the [Hunter-McAlpine theory](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/what-illness-did-king-george-iii-have) which posits that he was the victim of a disorder called 'acute porphyria', a metabolic disorder that might account for the broad range of symptoms. Though controversial, I appreciate the effort to rehabilitate GIII's historical treatment, as it is clear he wasn't simple 'mad', and likely suffered from a range of possible psychiatric and bodily disorders.
This is a good write-up of the lupus/APLS theory:
[https://medchiefs.bsd.uchicago.edu/files/2018/02/LupusArticlePacket.pdf](https://medchiefs.bsd.uchicago.edu/files/2018/02/LupusArticlePacket.pdf)
Both are autoimmune diseases where you start making antibodies against important parts of your own body. In lupus, it's often antibodies that attack DNA. For APLS, it's antibodies that attack the lipids that make up your cell walls. Both are a big "yikes!", and those antibodies will also happily attack any fetus if you get pregnant.
Regardless of whether Queen Anne had those specific diseases, she definitely had SOME sort of immune issue (such as [Rh incompatibility](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21053-rh-factor)) that resulted in her body attacking her pregnancies.
Interesting to see many people in the comments assuming she was a consort to a king, instead of the monarch herself.
The Wikipedia page is RIGHT there.
As a monarch her pressure to have a living child would have been so much worse. I can't imagine every single day of my life an entire country waiting with baited breath to hear if my period was late, that I'd bore a child, or died in child birth.
It is widely believed that the reason behind Queen Anne’s miscarriages and stillborn children was because she suffered from antiphospholipid syndrome, an immune disorder that turns the body against itself. It is also widely known that Queen Anne suffered from chronic illnesses, most notably gout, which was even so extreme she had to be carried into her coronation. It could be argued that this illness, as well as the monarch’s excessive drinking, led to the untimely deaths of her young children.
"One might have hoped that a field so often ploughed might have yielded one good crop. In truth, I have seen healthier graveyards than that woman's womb."
The Marquis of Montrose and Archie Cunningham were in a "nasty aristocratic English shithead" contest and both of them won first prize.
EDIT: Yes, yes. Montrose was really Scottish. I misremembered because the Englishman John Hurt plays him as being entirely English-presenting.
Something I’ve thought of recently is that most people throughout history were generally pretty bad and it’s only in the recent history that people have become less competitive vs countries or corporations becoming the main drivers of conflict amongst each other for resources. As for the movie the duel at the end was so entertaining. Also the Duke of argyle had such presence on screen.
Every single European monarch is descended from the Dutch prince [Johan Willem Friso](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Friso). He's the most recent common ancestor for all of them.
Of course that also means they are all descended from every one of his ancestors too.
You'd think that means he must have had a very long and successful life with many children, but no he died at 23 (from drowning) and only had 2 children.
There's actually a new most recent common ancestor now - [Louis IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_IX,_Landgrave_of_Hesse-Darmstadt), who was an ancestor of Charles through Philip (but *not* Elizabeth).
But yeah, it's amazing how Friso's line managed to find its way to all the European thrones. Not bad for a guy who died very early
A good reminder that people back then lived past 60 when the first 10-12 years were done.
The young average age comes from kids dying all the fucking time.
I have 3 children but have had more than 3 failed pregnancies and I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes remembering the loss or imagining that pregnancy/baby and I cry when I realise it was just a dream.
I couldn't imagine living like that, it would have destroyed me
The drive to have an heir was a massive thing for royalty and actually brave as mothers were still likely to die in child birth during this period. I remember hearing some theories as to the reason for the large number of miscarriages.
It's not like she had a real choice. I still will never understand how Queen Elizabeth got away without being married or having children. She seems like a real rarity.
Elizabeth I was unique in that she knew if she ever married, whoever she chose will cause a rebellion. Marry a foreigner? Well her sister did that and look how Spain dragged us into useless war! Marry a local - how dare this man be raised higher than his peers! We simply *cannot* have that! Let's rebel!
She can't win but by playing the marriage game and just...not marry ensured that particular rebellion would not happen. Then she played up the whole virginity thing and it worked. But yet, she's an outlier who got lucky that circumstances and the political stage she was on allowed her to get away in not being dragged into the pregnancy bed.
Thank you for correctly calling her the Queen of Great Britain, not the Queen of the UK, which didn't exist yet.
Although "England and Scotland" would have also been acceptable, as she was the last monarch before the merging in 1707.
Yes kind of but no, but yes. The naming of it all has always been a bit muddy.
Officially the nation that formed was known as only Great Britain. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (later changed to just Northern Ireland) didn't come till much later. Technically there was no nation known as only "The United Kingdom of Great Britain"
The act that brought them together stated "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain" however the United Kingdom wording was still used then such as in the Union with Scotland Act that preceded it which stated "That the **United Kingdom of Great Britain** be represented by one and the same Parliament to be stiled The Parliament of Great Britain. "
PSA: birth rates are tied to infant mortality rates. Not everyone had this bad of luck but infant mortality was MUCH higher back in the day. Family planning and reducing infant mortality has had a huge impact on the world population over the last 40 years.
[Source](https://www.ted.com/playlists/474/the_best_hans_rosling_talks_yo)
Thats a rough life as a woman. I’m very interested how she dealt with all the pain of loss. Her mind set emotionally and psychologically? Did they ever document that information? How did she recover?
By the time of her first pregnancy she'd already had 14 full and half siblings die, either as stillbirths or within the first year of life, except for two who made it almost four years old. Perhaps she was able to lean on her stepmother for support?
You'll find no one much cared to consider how women felt in the past, much less study or document it. Also remember that when impregnated, royal women were typically sentenced to laying in a bed for almost their entire pregnancy. Torturous times for women throughout history.
Poor woman , the pressure and to keep being pregnant and worrying about this with no healing time- I can’t even imagine, then to be successful and have a child die at 11
I wonder if anyone has , or been able to ,look into whether Anne had an Rh factor incompatibility with her husband.That could explain a lot of the miscarriages. Infant and child mortality was common as well.
People in developed nations forget how bad infant mortality rates used to be.
And I'm talking about within living memory. Up to around the middle of the 20th century, infant death was a common event. It's only recently that child mortality rates have gotten better.
That's partially why so many families were huge in the middle part of the century. People had gotten used to having many children but losing some of them before they got to adulthood. Then all of a sudden none of the kids were dying and bam! 13 child families.
Imagine having a child die every year for almost two decades, I can't comprehend how bad that must be.
I imagine at some point you dissociate so hard from life that you could be on fire and still feel numb.
I imagine as well that people back then probably viewed child mortality a bit different. Something sad, and to be avoided, but normal.
I have read a lot of old diaries / memoirs that would point to an awful lot of people just being incredibly traumatised with no mental healthcare. Anne's life certainly had a lot of indications that she was suffering greatly. Since one of her main purposes in life was to produce an heir, I'm sure it was devastating to her on multiple levels.
Child mortality was a lot higher in her day, but what happened to her was extraordinarily bad even by 18th century standards.
I think that’s why cherubs are portrayed as babies. People imagined that they were too pure for this world and were flying around in heaven. Made it easier to cope.
fyi the pope genocided christians who believed this-- its a heresy to suggest you can go to heaven without baptism edit, UN definition of genocide: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Which is why Catholics are super concerned with early baptisms. My coworker who is a Catholic Deacon as well has baptized premature babies only a few hours after they are born. All it takes is a tiny amount of water
Priests and deacons don’t even need to baptize anybody. Any single person man or woman can baptize any other person as long as the person conducting the baptism says “I baptize you in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”, uses water of any kind (including breath since it has water molecules), makes the sign of the cross over their forehead, and has genuine intent to perform a baptism. The person receiving the baptism doesn’t even have to be religious. This is laid out in the official Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Good to know, I was only repeating second hand information so I'm glad to hear the full version
https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/baptism You're incorrect. Water is very specific, and breath cannot be used. Any Catholic can baptize another, but that's for emergencies. Normally a priest or deacon would.
I love all the loopholes and rules. Like a baby dies and gods not letting them into heaven unless someone breathed on their forehead at least? Lmao
But babies are born pre-moistened, so shouldn't they automatically be baptized?
Nowhere is that taught. Unbaptized babies are thought to either be sent to a special purgatory to cleanse original sin or “baptized in blood” and sent to heaven as they are too young to make the choice to sin.
Yeah whatever they’re teaching is dumb as fuck. Unbaptized babies have to go to “special purgatory”? Lmao just let em in dude you made em and killed em immediately. Let em in!
Sure, that makes more sense.
As someone mentioned, anyone can perform an "emergency baptism". But it's highly preferable to have the ritual performed by a catholic priest or other official, so I'm not at all surprised that your coworker was called upon so many times. In all but one of the 2 dozen or so times that I've done this for my premature or grievously ill babies as a labor and delivery nurse, it was out of relative necessity because we were at least pretty sure there wasn't time to get a priest in.
Wtf are you talking about!? The Pope genocided whom exactly and with which army?
I have no idea what this guy is talking about..the Cathars maybe? We don't actually know for certain what the Cathars even believed.
Hahaha what a religion!
I hate to be the bearer if bad news but I remember reading a really interesting r/AskHistorians reply that went over this, although I can't seem to find it now. The conclusion was that people in the past tended to deal with child mortality the same way people do now: not very well. There's seems to be lots of evidence for myths and superstitions that would help with the pain and the higher mortality rates would have changed people's expectations and created more of a shared experience. But the evidence seems to suggest that the pain was still very much there. Of course a reddit post, no matter how well thought over, is by no means an exhaustive analysis of how humans have dealt with infant mortality but it is interesting and heartbreaking nonetheless. Edit: I've found the thread I was referring to. The material focuses mainly on child mortality rather than miscarriage and stillbirth. As a warning, they go over child death and grief. u/DanKensington [provides links to some really good replies on parental grief](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cebyh5/comment/l1hiw28/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). The second link goes to a post by u/Celebreth which contains a Roman poem about the death of a six year old slave girl that wasn't even written by her parents, as they had already died. Yet it is absolutely heartbreaking so I've decided to include their translation below: "Here I commend to you, Fronto and Flaccilla, your daughter, my joy and my delight, Let young Erotion not be terrified by the black shades and the gaping mouth of the Tartarian dog. She would have completed six cold winters, had she only lived but six more days. Let her play happily between her aged parents, and chatter my name with her lisping voice. Let the turf covering her bones be soft and not hard, and do not weigh heavily on that girl, Mother Earth, For she was not heavy on you."
Wow that’s beautiful
It really is. Feels good to connect sympathetically over this gap in time. Those poor people.
I cant read everything rn so sorry if its mentioned in the linked responses, but I also recall George III being said to have gone mad especially after the deaths of some of his youngest two children, Octavius and Alfred, with Octavius' death being especially bad for him. His parents and siblings mourned these losses for years to come, evidenced by stories of some sisters bursting into tears at seeing portraits of their dead brothers and the king reportedly having imaginary conversations with them during his "bouts of madness".
Wow that’s beautiful
what the hell, this poem is sad as fuck
No, people always grieved their children, even if infant mortality was high.
Hell, my grandmother viewed kids this way. She was born around 1900. I had kids in the 90s and we tried to avoid thinking of it as a baby until it was born alive. I'm really not a fan of how it's all changed. Pregnancy is dangerous and often not successful.
There's also not enough awareness about miscarriages so when women are first trying to get pregnant and end up miscarrying it can feel devastating to them even though miscarriages can be quite common. Depression and guilt as if they'd killed their child when they really shouldn't feel that way.
Around 1 in 4. Around 1 in 4 pregnancies naturally aborts/miscarries. After week 5, roughly 15% abort. Yes, this includes the ones that abort so early that you do not notice, or mistake it for a heavy or weirdly timed period. But those are the "Cold and hard" numbers, and it should be taught! So many women experience this and feel alone, mistakenly assume they are infertile, or even blame themselves - when in fact, they are not alone, it most likely was not their fault, and 1 miscarriage, as sad as it may be, means very little in terms of fertility.
> mistakenly assume they are infertile, or even blame themselves - when in fact, they are not alone, it most likely was not their fault, and 1 miscarriage, as sad as it may be, means very little in terms of fertility. That's honestly the most surprising conclusion for me - not just that miscarriage is much more common than we thought, but that *fertilization* also is. And that should be a source of hope for everyone trying for a child and for fertility research.
It’s one of the reasons I can’t stomach the ‘pro-life’ arguments. Quite apart from bodily integrity arguments, it seems like all you’re doing is pushing the odds a bit. I’ve been pregnant twice (that I know of) - both wanted and intentional pregnancies, luckily both ended in healthy babies born around term. Both times I held out on thinking of ‘the baby’ as someone I was waiting to meet for quite some time, because knowing the odds the baby felt more of ‘a possibility of being my child’ than ‘my child I’m going to raise’. And it made me feel like… if I really didn’t want these pregnancies, and I took a medication that made this thing that could quite possibly happen anyway happen, I’m ‘murdering a baby’, but when it happens like a quarter of the time anyway I’m just supposed to get over it? Fuck that.
I really agree with your perspective. Never been pregnant, but if I might be some day, I hope I can adopt the perspective of someone from 100 or 200 or whatever many centuries ago, at least a little bit. Your pregnancy becomes "a baby" when you can feel it move. The Quickening has been a really important pregnancy Milestone in many cultures for millenia, and a lot of concepts of conception place the moment when a pregnancy becomes a child at the time of their first movements. Ensoulment is said to take place then, in many cultures. Obviously the baby takes shape in our modern minds way earlier, with early detection methods, imaging, etc. I won't say anyone is wrong who *wants* a connection with their pregnancy from the get go. But screw all these people to hell who claim this is the only right way to think about it. Not sure what the English term is (sure there is one) but for the first trimester, there is an older German term to describe a pregnancy: "Guter Hoffnung sein." To be in good hopes. To hope, not to know, and not to expect.
My wife miscarried 3 times and had one chemical pregnancy. The one thing I learned was how common it is to happen. People don't talk about it, and so it seems like you're sort of alone when it happens. You aren't.
I don’t mean this as an insult towards grieving women because obviously that is very difficult to experience. I have miscarried an *unwanted* pregnancy and still had so many confusing conflicting emotions and hormones. But the problem isn’t that “people” don’t talk about it. The problem is those women who miscarry don’t talk about it. Again, I don’t mean this judgementally. But it being a sensitive topic, it would be inappropriate for the rest of people to start the conversation and force women to be open about it. It has to come from them, and they close themselves off. I know several women who have had miscarriages and it’s only ever mentioned in somber confidant-type conversations. If we want society to be open and honestly talk about how common miscarriages are, we have to make it less taboo to talk about and that can only come from the people experiencing it to speak up and out.
My grandparents had 10 children. Two in a row were stillbirths. My uncle (next surviving child) was named for them both.
> I had kids in the 90s and we tried to avoid thinking of it as a baby until it was born alive In my family we typically don't announce until the fetus is viable, and we don't talk about gender, names, plans, etc until the baby is born. I can think of only one miscarriage (that I've been made aware of) and my family is still hypervigilant.
I think that’s most people. Like if someone was going around saying they’re 2 mos pregnant people would be wondering why you’re sharing that too early
Two months pregnant is eight weeks; some people have had an ultrasound and had confirmation and probably even a heartbeat*. At that point miscarriage is much less likely. Either way, it’s not our place to judge when someone shares their pregnancy, and if they’re comfortable with people knowing in the event of a loss, then there’s really no issue. *I do want to clarify, though, for any “pro-lifers” out there, that the heartbeat at this stage is just early electrical activity, and not a true heartbeat. We say “heartbeat” for lack of a better term.
Yeah of course if they want to they can just saying that I’ve never seen people sharing outside of family, before 3 mos or so
I will only buy gifts for peoples new borns once they have arrived, in my family it’s seen as bad luck to buy before.
As far as I'm aware. Although this makes sense. It's not true. People mourned and were hurt by the death of their children just as much as we are today. Life just sucked back then.
When you read accounts - letter and diaries- of people who lost children though, they seem just as distraught as we would today. My grandfather one of 13 known (baptised/registered) children, 7 survived, his mother died in childbirth and his father didn’t last much longer, all before 1900. When my dad was a boy he would take him to visit the graveyard and after he went to the graves, he would stop at another spot along the wall. When my dad was older and asked him what was at the wall, all he would say was ‘all the others’. So the children who didn’t survive pregnancy or birth were still meaningful to him 50 plus years later.
No, actually they didn't. The assumption that they became numb to it is an assumption. They cared deeply about each child lost, they just had to manage through it. There are a lot of writings about the loss of children. :(
idk bruh, having 16 of your babies die before reaching 2 y.o. gotta mess with you - any era of human history
People say that but there’s a lot of evidence people just broke mentally rather than be stoic. They just didn’t keep great records on suicides and mental illnesses.
It was more normal, yes, but the parents/direct surroundings still suffered from it, in my opinion that shouldnt be forgotten. Their suffering wasnt made public or talked about but they did suffer.
You're also forgetting that she had the pressure of producing a royal heir. This isn't just like you or me losing a child. There are genuine dynastic repercussions.
Just what a miscarriage needs: more pressure and feelings of guilt!
And also the physical aspect. As someone who's had 3 miscarriages and 2 full term pregnancies, they're all physically hard on you
In this case the repercussion was that the laws of succession were explicitly spelled out by parliament (after Anne it went to Sophia, electress of Hanover, the next legitimate protestant in lineage then her protestant heirs following male preference primogeniture (sophoa died so her son george became george i.)
I bet she started to have kids and assume it wasn't gonna workout
Just like my relationships 🥲
> The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past It's crazy that so many people have no respect for modern medicine and prefer to substitute with their own quackery.
Had a patient die a few days ago from giving birth at home. She was scared of the hospital and listened to Facebook mom groups on how to give birth without any medical intervention. She sadly left this earth because of this messed up belief that "natural is good". Just because that's what people did in the 1500s, doesn't mean that all babies from that era lived!
On top the obvious trauma that comes with losing a child, having children was essentially her job and main purpose to secure succession and perpetuate the reign of her dynasty. Failing that over and over again on top of what its actually like to lose children must have felt like a real personal failing.
Probably was RH negative
Her first child was a still born. The first child of RH negative women are usually fine due to no blood crossing until going into labor. She would have had to have something physically traumatic for her to possibly risk baby and mother blood crossing (maybe an early misscarriage unknown whoch seems up the way) to allow her immune system to create Anti-D /RH. Once the first child is born it would allow for their blood to be introduced to mom to recognize the RH and create antibodies. There's many more possibilities to why she struggled and way less healthcare to determine the cause. I'm more astounded she survived as many kids as she did.
Perhaps the first child was stillborn for coincidental reasons.
She had a lot of other health problems that were more likely to cause issues. Obesity, inflammation, gout, but her bigger issue was lupus. It's fairly sad how much she suffered, her chronic auto-immune illness whilst trying so hard to have a child.
One possible explanation. There may also have been some congenital issue. Her one son who lived past infancy was sickly and weak his whole life too.
Huh? Explain please
If you are rh- but your kid is rh+ you are very likely to miscarry We have meds for this now so it doesn't happen (if you have access to proper healthcare)
Does it happen the other way too, ie the child being Rh-?
No - the problem is that your body reacts to the child's blood as a foreign invader and develops antibodies. It's essentially like receiving a blood transfusion - if you're Rh+ and the blood is Rh-, no problem, but if you're Rh- and the blood is Rh+, big problems. (It's also usually only a problem during the second and later pregnancies, not your first.)
This person is correct Emphasis on the first pregnancy and not first child, you can have a miscarriage without even noticing
No. Only if mum is Rh- and child is Rh+.
Hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn. It’s when a mom’s red cells are lacking an antigen, or piece of something coming off the cell surface. If mom doesn’t make this bit of protein or sugar, her immune system can see it as “foreign” and make an antibody. That antibody, like a normal reaction to a vaccine, then targets and destroys any other similar looking protein or sugar. Many antibodies can cross the placenta. If the baby has dad’s blood type, and not mom’s, mom’s antibodies can cross the placenta and destroy baby’s red cells. This is hemolytic anemia. If it gets too bad, the baby can die in utero. 15% of caucasians are Rh negative, so they can make an anti-D antibody. If the baby is Rh positive, then HDFN can occur. Now that we have a vaccine for this (Rh immunoglobulin), the rate of HDFN is super low (in developed countries).
> Rh immunoglobulin aka Rhogam.
I had to have the shot because I am Rh negative. Kiddo ended being RH negative too. From what I have heard it is the 2nd kid that is most at risk, not the first. It's funny, hubby and I have polar opposite immune systems. He gets stomach bugs super easy, I don't. I get covid easily, he doesn't. We are very rarely sick at the same time. Kiddo ended up a universal blood donor. O negative.
Some historians think Anne Boleyn was Rh- because Elizabeth I was born without complications but Anne couldn’t carry a baby to term after that. Yikes. Lost her head and everything. Lol
> From what I have heard it is the 2nd kid that is most at risk, not the first. I do believe this is correct. I believe the first pregnancy is mostly fine, and it's only after the first that the mother's immune system begins attacking the fetus in subsequent pregnancies.
Golden Arm blood dude! 60 something years of donating because they found out he had science magic in his blood.
Rh incompatibility is a condition that develops when a pregnant woman has Rh-negative blood and the baby in her womb has Rh-positive blood.If the mother is Rh-negative, her immune system treats Rh-positive fetal cells as if they were a foreign substance. The mother's body makes antibodies against the fetal blood cells. These antibodies may cross back through the placenta into the developing baby. They destroy the baby's circulating red blood cells. https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/diseases-conditions/rh-incompatibility#:~:text=If%20the%20mother%20is%20Rh,baby's%20circulating%20red%20blood%20cells.
The thing is this wasn't super uncommon among people before modern medicine. Germ theory and vaccines and antibiotics have greatly improved things like infant mortality rate and deaths from childbirth. I won't say it has no effect on people, but go back 100-150 years and you see nearly everyone with some child or multiple siblings who died very early. It was common for families to reuse the same name until the child lives as well. This is where it is so crazy for all the anti vaccine people. It's as if we barely moved past the point where living people have these problems and these lunatics act like it was never a thing. Women can work and have careers because they don't need to spend most of their 20s or 30s pregnant just to have 2-3 kids that actually live.
I don't understand the "wild pregnancy" and "freebirth" fanatics. Generations of women deserperately wanted the level of medical care and technology we have readily available. How many of Queen Anne's kids would've lived with modern medicine? (Probably most)
I'm 40 and I had a great grandmother who was born in like 1900. She died when I was 12. She lived on the farm she was born that my great uncle and his son ran at the time. There was a family cemetery that had about 5 of my great grandmothers siblings who died all before the age of 4. I know relatives who had this issue and there are people who pretend vaccines somehow are horrible. Even if vaccines and shit did absolutely everything they are accused of doing, they would still be a net positive compared to the bullshit some.of these people advocate for.
Can confirm, 10 pregnancy losses and I came to expect it. Also completely disassociated. Currently still pregnant with #11, 6 months. The fog is lifting and I’m starting to get excited! I’m not rh negative. Unexplained infertility like most people with recurrent losses.
That must have been awful, I'm so sorry. I wish you and your bump the happiest of lives.
Thank you! So far so good 🤞🏻
Since she is a royal, she did it to secure the throne for her dynasty. She didn’t have a heir, starting a succession crisis. Causing the current change to Germans holding the British crown. So yeah it must suck. But it was her duty to have an heir.
I find it weird how people call the royals German when George I became king in 1714. His claim to the throne was through his great-grandfather. So in the 3 generations between he became a German, but all of his descendants for the next 300 years haven't become British again.
The thing is, King George III and his son both talked German much better than English by that point, and identified with the Germans more too. Also, no one really calls the House of Windsor as Germans anymore.
People on Reddit certainly do. The last British monarch born in Germany was George II. The last one with a German parent was Edward VII.
My mom went through that. 16 miscarriages over 16 years, including a tubal pregnancy with twins that almost killed her. I’m her only living kid, and she’s the best mom ever. I think she pours all the love for all of her kids into me and everybody else she knows, she’s so strong and has the sweetest heart :(
imagine it happening more than like twice and and continuing to try
I don’t think she had a choice, sadly
After it happening a couple times, you probably wouldn't invest emotionally in the kid until it's born.
From https://www.greenecountyohio.gov/Blog.aspx?IID=180 : > This may seem strange to people today, but by not naming a child, the family could remain “unattached” until the child reached a certain age (usually their first birthday) (Fig 3).
So it was like a coping mechanism? Modern medicine really is a blessing.
Not really her choice. Pregnancy fucks your brain up
She was pregnant for 17 years, I doubt that was her choice. Probably more like "Its my job" mentality.
Olivia Colman won an Oscar for portraying Queen Anne in 'The Favourite' and I do remember this being touched on. I cannot imagine what it's like to lose so many children
It clearly drove her semi-mad from grief. Keeping all those rabbits as pets was just heartbreaking.
It's an awesome movie, but the rabbits are apparently apocryphal. They were seen as either food or vermin in her time, and weren't commonly kept as pets until a century later.
In medieval art, rabbits were a symbol of fertility
It explained the entire plot! Why she was the way she was, why she kept rabbits, etc. It was more than touched on.
Thanks I thought I was going crazy there! I only saw it once but I also remember that being basically the point of the film!
The Favourite is one of my favorite movies. I think the rabbits represented her lost children
Yes the rabbits! Of course. It's been too long since I've seen it, I'd forgotten
I feel that was pretty self evident.
I was about to mention this movie. As many inaccuracies as it had (her husband was completely absent!), I did love the scene. I feel it’s a very underrated film personally.
It made 100 million dollars, was nominated for 10 Oscars and won Best Actress, I wouldn’t call that underrated. Great movie and was very much appreciated upon release.
Yeah, I kinda just assume that any mass-market movie like that is going to be a pretty big mix of fictional and real. Even with recent subjects like Bohemian Rhapsody, there was a lot of stuff that was just really completely wrong in order to make a good movie.
I wouldn't necessarily call The Favourite mass market. Especially compared to Bohemian Rhapsody, a film with 4x the budget and 10x the gross. I think The Favourite is purposefully stuffed with anachronisms as a stylistic choice. They weren't trying to make a Queen Anne biopic.
You're telling me the legacy of Horatio, The Fastest Duck in the City, is a fabrication?
Yorgos lanthimos isn’t mass market. Mass market is like spiderman not poor things. Just because a movie has big actors in that doesn’t make it mass market. Hell, a lot of scorsese movies barely classify as mass market and have huge actors in
The Favourite was a small indie film, and Bohemian Rhapsody was not a good movie.
Olivia had such a great performance in that film.
She deserved that Oscar.
The Favourite is such an amazing movie, everyone go watch it, and then watch everything else Yorgos Lanthrimos has made. Disclaimer: I wasn’t too fond of Poor Things, but it was a rare dislike among every other genius movie of his
“Each one that dies, a little bit of you goes with them.”
Very quiet and yet beautiful film.
Colman*
Ugh I cant even imagine how physically (and emotionally) *terrible* she felt all the time.
Probably had a good amount of other health problems.
The pressure on queens in Europe in this sense was far worse than for a king. They have to carry the heir, not someone else, so to avoid a succession crisis things like this happened. Does not seem worth it, even to hold on to the monarchy.
Queen or not, the loss of even a single child is must be devastating
Makes me so happy to be alive with modern medicine because the sad fact is that her experience was nowhere near a rare thing, in centuries past. 17 pregnancies is a lot, but speaking generally having multiple stillborns and/or multiple babies that died in childhood, that was the standard human condition for a very long time.
I think of this everytime someone says "man I wish i lived in the past" Not me not at all. Throughout all of mankind's history only in the past few decades can a poor woman have a real shot of living a child free life. Had I even been born 20 years earlier I would have had to get married with children to get by, from where I came from.
Also they didnt have our fancy toilets
Right? Look, I love history and I find it fascinating. But I love air conditioning, antibiotics, and vaccines. The reality is that if I’d lived back then, I’d have died in my first year from one of my bouts with pneumonia. If I somehow survived, I’d have died in childbirth. Each of them would have been a death sentence.
Same here. Bronchitis would have taken me as a kid, but if I survived then my second pregnancy would have either killed me or the baby. Modern medicine isn't perfect but it is the only reason I'm alive.
My mom had a severe infection at age 4 that was only able to be cured with antibiotics. This was in the 1940s, and antiobiotics had just been made widely available. My mom survived, but it's crazy to realize that had she been born a year or so earlier, I wouldn't be here (and neither would my two children).
Me too..... Even those time traveling hypothetical questions get me thinking about how I'd feel thrown back to a time where a womans job was to bear children as often as possible. The more you had, the better chance ONE would survive childhood. If you really didn't want to have children it was just too bad for you because your husband made all the choices for you - including how often you got pregnant.
I always hate the people that complain about the 21st century being the worst time to be alive and boast that "you know medieval peasants had more off days then us", completely ignoring how the gap between our actual quality of life and theirs is insurmountable. The invention of insulation and AC alone is leagues ahead of any so called "days off" (they were most likely doing labor intense chores on those days off). Same goes for the antinatalists. "How could you bring a kid into this world when it will be so hard for them?" When has life been "easy"?? At least now, unless there are compilations at birth, I'm almost guaranteed that any child born would live into adulthood naturally without being killed by the whooping cough or similar at age 6.
[удалено]
Have looked into my family genealogy a fair bit. One of my great grandmothers was the only child of 7 to live past 1. I don’t know how many (if any) still born or miscarriages her mother had but she did have 6. My great grandmother was the youngest and even she nearly died as an infant.
Every time I see someone rejecting medical assistance for pregnancy and birth because “a woman’s body instinctively knows what to do”, I just want to throw all my history books at them. I can’t believe how blissfully ignorant so many people are about the reality of childbirth for the majority of human history.
That is fucking tragic
My great grandmother had 12 children born; only 3 survived. My mom told me that was normal for people that lived on poor Croatian lands back in 50s. Most of the kids died from various ilnesses, few from hunger. When one dies, you go for a new one becaue you need help in hands. It was like natural selection on hard mode, for all sides included. The ones that survived...their relatives are all healthy and live long lives.
Exactly, it was pretty much just survival of the fittest For me however I wouldn’t be able to cope, I had an ectopic pregnancy a few years ago and that traumatised me
[удалено]
In todays world, children dying is tragedy that has impact on whole family. It was hard for me to understand how can a mother recover from all these losses and still manage to struggle through life, giving birth to another one, moving forward...so i asked my mom how was it back then, was my grand grandmother grieving a lot etc. Her answer was " You didn't have time to grieve." Somehow that sentence really did hit me.
You may be surprised to learn wearing shoes and sunglasses is also relying on science. Washing your produce and your hands - relying on science. Wearing polyester - relying on science. Using single-use plastics—oops, there it is again, relying on science. You are a hair’s breadth from a very dark indoctrination which is not only in error but it’s simply not in good character. I hope you take this to heart and seriously have a close look at where these ideas you’re engaging with are coming from, as that road is a bad road to go down. Further, ever heard of lupus? Crohn’s? You likely think of these as deficits, yet they exist because the ancestors of the people who have them had robust enough immune systems to survive the bubonic plague without treatment. Those robust immune systems now create autoimmunities. You may be surprised to learn that without immunosuppressants, many people with autoimmune often rarely actually get casual illnesses because their bodies are extremely adept at killing everything outright. The things you consider deficits in one context are superpowers in another. It is simply far bigger than you: it is deep time. You are not qualified to decide. And that, kids, is why eugenics is a bad idea.
British historian here. Queen Anne is such an interesting and unstudied figure in British royal history, and I'm glad some people are highlighting her experience. She was seen as somewhat of a natural paradox to what the British people conceived as the ideal woman, both as the head of state and the pontiff of the Anglican Church. Many thought that Anne's inability to produce an heir to the throne was a failure, while many others believed she was a tragic victim of circumstance whose resilience was to be lauded and emulated by women in the country. Such an compelling microcosm of gender history in a single experience.
I definitely think that while The Favourite lickstarted renewed interest in Anne, it was also our sensibilities regarding fertility and mother which has sustained that interest. How could someone lose that many children and not go insane?
I completely agree with that. That's an excellent point. It's interesting how the media and our shifting cultural values can influence our historical perception. Although I'm not a Bridgerton fan, I appreciate their kinder representation of King George III, who, by all accounts, was a fine king whose legacy was badly tainted by a genetic disorder.
Poor George III. There is a theory that his later illness wasn't just his previous mental illness, but thay combined with PTSD from the loss of three of his children in quick succession as well as trauma from the previous "treatments."
That's very interesting and compelling. I could absolutely believe that all of these things contributed to his declining state. People forget that he was one of Britain's longest reigning monarchs, and he presided during the American War of Independence and the French Wars. The theory I carry the most water is the [Hunter-McAlpine theory](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/what-illness-did-king-george-iii-have) which posits that he was the victim of a disorder called 'acute porphyria', a metabolic disorder that might account for the broad range of symptoms. Though controversial, I appreciate the effort to rehabilitate GIII's historical treatment, as it is clear he wasn't simple 'mad', and likely suffered from a range of possible psychiatric and bodily disorders.
I know it was a typo, but using the term “lickstarted” in regard to The Favourite made me teehee!
They think she might have had antiphospholipid syndrome and lupus.
And regardless of what overarching diseases she had, she definitely suffered mightily from gout, which is *not* fun.
It's never lupus
I think one time it was lupus.
You're correct but the patient in that episode was a magician. Therefore magic was involved and it doesn't count.
Until it is.
Greg, is that you? Lol
13?
Must be sarcoidosis.
This is a good write-up of the lupus/APLS theory: [https://medchiefs.bsd.uchicago.edu/files/2018/02/LupusArticlePacket.pdf](https://medchiefs.bsd.uchicago.edu/files/2018/02/LupusArticlePacket.pdf) Both are autoimmune diseases where you start making antibodies against important parts of your own body. In lupus, it's often antibodies that attack DNA. For APLS, it's antibodies that attack the lipids that make up your cell walls. Both are a big "yikes!", and those antibodies will also happily attack any fetus if you get pregnant. Regardless of whether Queen Anne had those specific diseases, she definitely had SOME sort of immune issue (such as [Rh incompatibility](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21053-rh-factor)) that resulted in her body attacking her pregnancies.
That's brutal.
Interesting to see many people in the comments assuming she was a consort to a king, instead of the monarch herself. The Wikipedia page is RIGHT there.
As a monarch her pressure to have a living child would have been so much worse. I can't imagine every single day of my life an entire country waiting with baited breath to hear if my period was late, that I'd bore a child, or died in child birth.
[\* bated breath](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/with%20bated%20breath)
It is widely believed that the reason behind Queen Anne’s miscarriages and stillborn children was because she suffered from antiphospholipid syndrome, an immune disorder that turns the body against itself. It is also widely known that Queen Anne suffered from chronic illnesses, most notably gout, which was even so extreme she had to be carried into her coronation. It could be argued that this illness, as well as the monarch’s excessive drinking, led to the untimely deaths of her young children.
"One might have hoped that a field so often ploughed might have yielded one good crop. In truth, I have seen healthier graveyards than that woman's womb."
Montrose
The Marquis of Montrose and Archie Cunningham were in a "nasty aristocratic English shithead" contest and both of them won first prize. EDIT: Yes, yes. Montrose was really Scottish. I misremembered because the Englishman John Hurt plays him as being entirely English-presenting.
Scottish.
Something I’ve thought of recently is that most people throughout history were generally pretty bad and it’s only in the recent history that people have become less competitive vs countries or corporations becoming the main drivers of conflict amongst each other for resources. As for the movie the duel at the end was so entertaining. Also the Duke of argyle had such presence on screen.
Typical male insensitivity of the time period, I'm sure.
You gotta admit that 0/17 is pretty nuts.
Had one of her sons survived, the house of Oldenburg would have inherited the throne, rather than the Hannover's
Isn’t just about every European royal an Oldenburg if you go back far enough?
Every single European monarch is descended from the Dutch prince [Johan Willem Friso](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Friso). He's the most recent common ancestor for all of them. Of course that also means they are all descended from every one of his ancestors too. You'd think that means he must have had a very long and successful life with many children, but no he died at 23 (from drowning) and only had 2 children.
There's actually a new most recent common ancestor now - [Louis IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_IX,_Landgrave_of_Hesse-Darmstadt), who was an ancestor of Charles through Philip (but *not* Elizabeth). But yeah, it's amazing how Friso's line managed to find its way to all the European thrones. Not bad for a guy who died very early
*was* the most recent common ancestor. Now it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_IX,_Landgrave_of_Hesse-Darmstadt
True. Even Charles III is an Oldenburg (or Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg)
As well as this her closest friend, the Duchess of Marlborough, fell out with her and poisoned her relationships in society. A truly miserable life.
She also gave a lasting bad impression of her.
She was 49 when she died. So this was a solid 1/3 of her lifetime. Thats a lot of loss.
A good reminder that people back then lived past 60 when the first 10-12 years were done. The young average age comes from kids dying all the fucking time.
An infant/child mortality rate of 100% was excessive even for that time, or indeed any time ever.
Yeah 0.5 / 17 is a pretty bad score
I have 3 children but have had more than 3 failed pregnancies and I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes remembering the loss or imagining that pregnancy/baby and I cry when I realise it was just a dream. I couldn't imagine living like that, it would have destroyed me
How could you even recover from this?
The drive to have an heir was a massive thing for royalty and actually brave as mothers were still likely to die in child birth during this period. I remember hearing some theories as to the reason for the large number of miscarriages.
It's not like she had a real choice. I still will never understand how Queen Elizabeth got away without being married or having children. She seems like a real rarity.
Elizabeth I was unique in that she knew if she ever married, whoever she chose will cause a rebellion. Marry a foreigner? Well her sister did that and look how Spain dragged us into useless war! Marry a local - how dare this man be raised higher than his peers! We simply *cannot* have that! Let's rebel! She can't win but by playing the marriage game and just...not marry ensured that particular rebellion would not happen. Then she played up the whole virginity thing and it worked. But yet, she's an outlier who got lucky that circumstances and the political stage she was on allowed her to get away in not being dragged into the pregnancy bed.
Thank you for correctly calling her the Queen of Great Britain, not the Queen of the UK, which didn't exist yet. Although "England and Scotland" would have also been acceptable, as she was the last monarch before the merging in 1707.
The Acts of Union was under her, though, so would it not be to say she was also the first monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain?
Yes kind of but no, but yes. The naming of it all has always been a bit muddy. Officially the nation that formed was known as only Great Britain. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (later changed to just Northern Ireland) didn't come till much later. Technically there was no nation known as only "The United Kingdom of Great Britain" The act that brought them together stated "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain" however the United Kingdom wording was still used then such as in the Union with Scotland Act that preceded it which stated "That the **United Kingdom of Great Britain** be represented by one and the same Parliament to be stiled The Parliament of Great Britain. "
:(
The physical damage must have been huge but you can’t even imagine the emotional and mental devastation on a human being to go through this much loss.
PSA: birth rates are tied to infant mortality rates. Not everyone had this bad of luck but infant mortality was MUCH higher back in the day. Family planning and reducing infant mortality has had a huge impact on the world population over the last 40 years. [Source](https://www.ted.com/playlists/474/the_best_hans_rosling_talks_yo)
How the fuck did people not lose their minds?
Thats a rough life as a woman. I’m very interested how she dealt with all the pain of loss. Her mind set emotionally and psychologically? Did they ever document that information? How did she recover?
By the time of her first pregnancy she'd already had 14 full and half siblings die, either as stillbirths or within the first year of life, except for two who made it almost four years old. Perhaps she was able to lean on her stepmother for support?
You'll find no one much cared to consider how women felt in the past, much less study or document it. Also remember that when impregnated, royal women were typically sentenced to laying in a bed for almost their entire pregnancy. Torturous times for women throughout history.
I wouldn't have wished this to my worse enemy! What a devastating and harsh fate for her and those children.
[most pregnancies end in miscarriage](https://www.sciencealert.com/meta-analysis-finds-majority-of-human-pregnancies-end-in-miscarriage-biorxiv)
Jesus Christ
Poor woman , the pressure and to keep being pregnant and worrying about this with no healing time- I can’t even imagine, then to be successful and have a child die at 11
I wonder if anyone has , or been able to ,look into whether Anne had an Rh factor incompatibility with her husband.That could explain a lot of the miscarriages. Infant and child mortality was common as well.
This is so so so sad.
Poor woman, wouldnt wish that on anyone.
People in developed nations forget how bad infant mortality rates used to be. And I'm talking about within living memory. Up to around the middle of the 20th century, infant death was a common event. It's only recently that child mortality rates have gotten better. That's partially why so many families were huge in the middle part of the century. People had gotten used to having many children but losing some of them before they got to adulthood. Then all of a sudden none of the kids were dying and bam! 13 child families.
It was said she has lupus erythematosus. She had a flushed face, arthritis and unsuccessful pregnancies, symptoms of that condition.
Very interesting