Modern and historical descriptions of Queen Anne (r. 1702–14) have left us with the caricature of an overweight, awkward and prudish woman whose court was unattractive to artists, courtiers and politicians, and whose reign was marked by ill-health and an over reliance on her court favourite Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.[i] The general Whig picture painted of the queen, with the help of her contemporaries such as the Duchess of Marlborough after their friendship ended, was one of a ‘weak, dull and easily led monarch’ who was ‘plump, ungainly, near-sighted’.[ii]
The relative completeness of Queen Anne’s Office of the Robes accounts, particularly in the period 1702–11, mean that we can get a very accurate picture of what clothing commissioned and worn by the queen during this time. Her accounts show an engagement with several defining elements of early eighteenth-century fashion.[iii]
These include new Anglo-French styles, new lightweight textiles and garments, increased consumption from a wide range of tradespeople, and the patronage of female mantua-makers and milliners whose increased presence challenged the ways that women’s clothing was made and sold in London and at court.[iv]
In the late seventeenth century, the Stuart court did not have strict dress codes and very few tradespeople were exclusively patronised by the royal family. The slow movement of fashionable shopping districts to the West-End of London near palaces and parliament during the final decades of the seventeenth century demonstrate the increasing influence of the court on fashion and the reliance of London’s tradespeople on the court.
As Princess of Denmark during this time, Anne patronised many fashionable tradespeople in the West End, including the Cherets who owned a French shop in Covent Garden and Peter Lombard who was the tailor to Catherine of Braganza, Mary II, the Duchess of Marlborough and the Duchess of Somerset. Letters written by Anne also detail her fondness for the new and fashionable mantua gown or manto during this period.[v]
It is not surprising then that Anne’s interest in fashion continued when she became queen and her clothing largely adhered to the popular styles of the time. When she took the throne in 1702, gone were the stiff-bodied gowns preferred by her sister Mary II a decade prior.[vi]
Instead, Anne’s clothing consisted primarily of mantua gowns and loose informal gowns of various types such as night gowns, which were worn over fashionable stays and petticoats. Petticoats account for the single largest category of dress items in the queen’s accounts. They were made from various silk and woollen fabrics and were often trimmed with furbelows, a style of gathered flounce or trim.[vii]
A variety of accessories and headwear were also sourced from seamstresses and milliners, including hoods, fontanges, paper patches, steinkirks and muffs. Popular literature from the period mentions all these goods as being in the latest fashion.
During the first five years of her reign, Queen Anne’s clothing was incredibly colourful and reflected the shift, noted by John Styles, ‘towards lighter, more colourful, and more highly patterned fabrics’ at the turn of the eighteenth century.[viii] Greens, reds and blues dominated, usually in combination with yellows, blacks, grey, gold and silvers.
Anne was also fond of imported cotton and silk textiles from the East Indies. Bills from her mantua-maker dating to 1701–2 contained charges for garments such as ‘a red white & green Indian Callico night gown lyned with an Indian green Cheyney [Chinese] taffaty’ and ‘a green & gold straw atlas night-gown lyned with a Scarlet Indian Crape’.[ix]
This was not to last though. The Calico Act of 1701 forbid the buying of most silks and printed calicoes from ‘Persia, China or East India’ to protect the English wool and silk industries.[x] While this law was regularly defied, the wardrobe accounts show that Anne mostly followed them.
After these bans, the queen’s clothing was largely made from English and European satins, taffetas, Norwich crapes, brocades and damasks, that are described as striped, chequered and changeable, ‘flowered with several colours’ or with ‘red and blue and figures’, the latter likely referring to popular bizarre silks.[xi]
Anne was the first Stuart queen to use fashionable new staymakers and the first to solely employ tradeswomen, such as mantua-makers, petticoat-makers and seamstresses, to make her clothing.
The wardrobe accounts of Catherine of Braganza and Mary II show that they still retained their as ‘in-ordinary’ court tailors as well as ‘extra-ordinary’ dressmakers for these purposes.[xii] This not only marked a shift in how court dress was made, but mantua-makers were the most fashionable tradespeople for womenswear at the time.[xiii]
As well as embracing new tradespeople, Anne’s Office of the Robes also embraced new fashion trends during her reign. In 1708, bills from Mrs Hawker the petticoat-maker listed petticoats made with whalebone, likely those ‘new-fashioned’ hoop petticoats that had only just begun to be mentioned in the press.[xiv] Between April 1710 and January 1711, the queen received eighteen petticoats made with ‘border, whalebone, & riban for binding’ from her petticoat maker.[xv] Anne’s early adoption of the hoop petticoat demonstrates that she was keen to take on new, cutting-edge fashions.
In comparison to other Stuart queens, Anne’s wardrobe was not as overtly French or foreign as previous Stuart monarchs.[xvi] Anne was born and raised in England to an English mother, and unlike her sister Mary she had not lived in a foreign court. Anne’s primary tradespeople were all English. Of those tradespeople who were French, most appear to have been Huguenot refugees or their descendants.[xvii]
Her tendency to shy away from ostentatious French styles and tradespeople is likely due to the political situation during her reign, including her father and brother in exile at the French court and protracted war with France.[xviii]
Queen Anne’s love of the manto, her outward adherence to bans against East Indies and French goods imposed by parliament, the patronage of English artisans by her Office of the Robes, and her early adoption of garments such as the English hooped petticoat, suggest that the queen was not a dowdy or unfashionable monarch that her detractors decried. Her engagement with fashion was not only one of personal interest but also spoke to the moment of the early eighteenth century, with its messy internal politics, continental power struggles, expanding global trade and changing consumer marketplace.
This extract was adapted from my new Open Access article ‘Queen Anne’s Wardrobe: Fashion, Sartorial Politics, and the Representational Strategies of the Last Stuart Queen’ in the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, available to read here.
To learn more about the roles of the Duchess of Marlborough as Mistress of the Robes and the other women who managed, sold, made and cared for Queen Anne’s clothing, preorder my book!
[i] R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan court: Queen Anne and the decline of court culture (Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 202; Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage: the Arts in England, 1660-1750 (Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 111; Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: Images of Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (Yale University Press, 2013), p. 589; Foss, Age of Patronage, 111; Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 290–94.
[ii] Bucholz, Augustan Court, pp. 69, 202; Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, p. 294.
[iii] Hannah Greig, ‘Faction and Fashion: The Politics of Court Dress in Eighteenth-Century England’, Apparence(s) 6 (2015): https://doi.org/10.4000/apparences.1311
[iv] Sarah A. Bendall, ‘The Queens’ Dressmakers: Women’s Work and the Clothing Trades in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, Women’s History Review 32.3 (2023), pp. 389–414 (pp. 389–94).
[v] BL: Add MS 61424, fols. 46–50; West Sussex Record Office, Petworth House Archives: 252–90 (Receipted accounts of the Countess of Ogle, afterwards Duchess of Somerset, 1679 – 1715); Diana de Marly, ‘Fashionable Suppliers 1660–1700: Leading Tailors and Clothing Tradesmen of the Restoration Period’, The Antiquaries Journal 58.2 (1978), pp. 333–51 (p. 348); Bendall, ‘The Queens’ Dressmakers’, p. 400.
[vi] Bendall, ‘The Queens’ Dressmakers’, p. 401.
[vii] BL: Add. MS 61407, fol. 29v.
[viii] John Styles, ‘Fashion and Innovation in Early Modern Europe’, in Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800, ed. by Evelyn Welch (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 33–55 (p. 37).
[ix] BL: Add. MS 61407, fol. 20v.
[x] An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, from the Earliest Accounts, vol. 2 (Logographic Press, 1787), p. 646. Plain white cotton cloth was still imported for printing in England until the second Calico act of 1721.
[xi] Bizarre silks that featured asymmetrical, bold, colourful designs with exotic plants or motifs inspired by Asian textiles, which were woven in in Spitalfields as well as in in France, Italy, Spain and Holland. BL: Add MS 61407, fols 76v–77v; Peter Thornton, ‘The ‘Bizarre’ Silks’, The Burlington Magazine 100.665 (1958), pp. 265–70 (p. 265–6).
[xii] Bodies and stays worn by Catherine of Braganza and Mary II were made by their tailors. Bendall, ‘The Queens’ Dressmakers’, pp. 399–401.
[xiii] The popularity of mantua-makers at the turn of the eighteenth century saw many guilds in England attempt to ban them from training and working. Pam Inder, Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid: British Dressmaking in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 11–24.
[xiv] BL: Add MS 61407, fol. 88v; Erin Mackie, ‘Lady Credit and the Strange Case of the Hoop-Petticoat’, College Literature 20.2 (1993), pp. 27–43 (pp. 41–42); Kimberly Chrisman, ‘Unhoop the Fair Sex: The Campaign Against the Hoop Petticoat in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 30.1 (1996), pp. 5–23 (p. 8).
[xv] BL: Add. MS 61407, fol. 113v.
[xvi] Charles II and James II dressed in French styles and had French tailors. Hayward, Stuart Style, pp. 117–20, 136–39.
[xvii] Bendall, The Women who Clothed the Stuart Queens, pp. 196–97, 307 (note 92).
[xviii] In 1706, parliament banned the importation of ‘French alamodes, lustrings, ribbons, and laces’. William Farrell, ‘Smuggling Silks into Eighteenth-Century Britain: Geography, Perpetrators, and Consumers’, Journal of British Studies 55.2 (2016), pp. 268–94 (pp. 268–9).
