Anne Hyde

Anne became a general favourite with the people she met either at The Hague or at the Princess of Orange's country house at Teylingen. She was very attractive and stylish, and attracted many men. One of the first men to fall in love with Anne was Spencer Compton, a son of the Earl of Northampton. However, Anne quickly fell in love with Henry Jermyn, who returned her feelings. Anne dismissed Jermyn just as quickly when she met James, Duke of York, the son of the deposed king. On 24 November 1659, two or three years after she first met him, James promised he would marry Anne. Charles, James's brother, forced him reluctantly into this, saying that her strong character would be a positive influence on his weak-willed brother.

Anne was visibly pregnant and the couple were obliged to marry. They held an official but private marriage ceremony in London on 3 September 1660, following the restoration of the monarchy. The wedding took place between 11 at night and 2 in the morning at Worcester House – her father's house in the Strand – and was solemnised by Dr. Joseph Crowther, James's chaplain. The French Ambassador described Anne as having "courage, cleverness, and energy almost worthy of a King's blood".

Anne was ill for 15 months after the birth of her youngest son, Edgar. She bore Henrietta in 1669 and Catherine in 1671. Anne never recovered from Catherine's birth. Ill with breast cancer, she died on 31 March 1671. On her deathbed, her two brothers Henry and Laurence tried to bring an Anglican priest to give her communion, but Anne refused and she received viaticum of the Catholic Church. Two days after her death, her embalmed body was interred in the vault of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Westminster Abbey's Henry VII Chapel. In June 1671, Anne's only surviving son Edgar died of natural causes, followed by Catherine in December, leaving Mary and Anne as the Duke of York's heiresses.

After Anne Hyde's death, a portrait of her painted by Willem Wissing was commissioned by the future Mary II; this used to hang above the door of the Queen's Drawing Room of the Garden House at Windsor Castle. Two years after the death of his first wife, James married a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena, who bore James Francis Edward, James's only son to survive to adulthood. James became king of England, Ireland, and Scotland in 1685, but was deposed during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The throne was then offered by Parliament to Anne's eldest daughter Mary and her husband William III of Orange. After Mary died in 1694 and William in 1702, Anne Hyde's only surviving child Anne became queen of the three kingdoms and, in 1707, the first sovereign of the united Kingdom of Great Britain.