page_title: Anne of Denmark
section_title: Separate life
hierarchical_section_title: Anne of Denmark / Relationship with James / Separate life
caption_attribution_description: Elizabeth Stuart, eldest daughter of James I/VI of England and Scotland. She married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and briefly ruled as queen of Bohemia. Nicknamed the Winter Queen, because of the short tenure she and her husband had in Bohemia.
context_page_description: Anne of Denmark was Queen consort of Scotland, England, and Ireland by marriage to King James VI and I.
  The second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark, Anne married James in 1589 at age 14 and bore him three children who survived infancy, including the future Charles I. She demonstrated an independent streak and a willingness to use factional Scottish politics in her conflicts with James over the custody of Prince Henry and his treatment of her friend Beatrix Ruthven. Anne appears to have loved James at first, but the couple gradually drifted and eventually lived apart, though mutual respect and a degree of affection survived.
  In England, Anne shifted her energies from factional politics to patronage of the arts and constructed her own magnificent court, hosting one of the richest cultural salons in Europe. After 1612, she suffered sustained bouts of ill health and gradually withdrew from the centre of court life. Though she was reported to have been a Protestant at the time of her death, evidence suggests that she may have converted to Catholicism at some point in her life.
  Historians have traditionally dismissed Anne as a lightweight queen, frivolous and self-indulgent.
context_section_description: In London, Anne adopted a cosmopolitan lifestyle, while James preferred to escape the capital, most often at his hunting lodge in Royston. Anne's chaplain, Godfrey Goodman, later summed up the royal relationship: "The King himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the Queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together." Anne moved into Greenwich Palace and then Somerset House, which she renamed Denmark House. After 1607, she and James rarely lived together, by which time she had borne seven children and suffered at least three miscarriages. After narrowly surviving the birth and death of her last baby, Sophia, in 1607, Anne's decision to have no more children may have widened the gulf between her and James.
  The death of their son Henry in 1612 at the age of eighteen, probably from typhoid, and the departure for Heidelberg of their daughter Elizabeth in April 1613, after marrying Frederick V, Elector Palatine, further weakened the family ties binding Anne and James. Henry's death hit Anne particularly hard; the Venetian ambassador was advised not to offer condolences to her "because she cannot bear to have it mentioned; nor does she ever recall it without abundant tears and sighs". From this time forward, Anne's health deteriorated, and she withdrew from the centre of cultural and political activities, staging her last known masque in 1614 and no longer maintaining a noble court. Her influence over James visibly waned as he became openly dependent on powerful favourites.
caption: Anne's daughter Elizabeth, c. 1606, by Robert Peake the Elder
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