Queen Anne became queen by a remarkable string of bad luck; she came to be queen later in life, which might have been the worst luck of all. She had little formal education relevant to matters of state, in part because she went most of her adult life never expecting to become a head of state. She only came to rule due to the early death of her surviving son and after William III died without issue from his marriage to Anne's sister Mary. Anne was intimately familiar with the political dramas of her own immediate family -- her father James II of England had been deposed and her relationships with William and Mary were seriously strained -- but she was effectively disengaged from political life at the time she came to power. In the intensely partisan context of early 18th century politics, this put her at a significant disadvantage.

The film depicts the tug-of-war over the queen's attention and decision-making between representatives of the Tory and Whig parties -- Anne was ideologically aligned with the Tories, but her intimate friend Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, was allied with the Whig faction and often pressed Anne regarding political decisions. Her advisors, both formal political actors like the film's Harley and Godolphin and informal ones like Sarah Churchill, were a shifting mix of political alignments and advocated for a variety of political causes and approaches. With Godolphin, Lord Marlborough, and a host of other political heavy-hitters lining Anne's cabinet, Anne got along decently well in terms of her public-facing responsibilities as monarch; Anne met with her cabinet more frequently than any other British monarch, but the state of politics in England and overseas outstripped Anne's ability to keep up with it. Anne sought to position herself as monarch above the stark party divisions that characterized political and civic life, and to position herself as a friend to the Church; if in political matters Anne was something of a damp squib, there were the advantages of stability to consider -- she could benefit from sheer dint of not being the usurping William III, and she had done her best to prevent potential rival claimants from settling in England -- but these had their limits, and in wartime a monarch with no military experience and little understanding of strategy was a significant handicap. To her credit, Anne strove to be fully informed of political matters in various spheres, but her decision-making ability remained hampered and inhibited. At all times, Anne was hobbled by a remarkable array of poorly-managed and extremely painful chronic health issues -- severe arthritis, hemorrhoids, digestive issues, skin conditions, complications of the reproductive system related to her many pregnancies, and so on, perhaps including autoimmune diseases like lupus. These health conditions rendered her largely sedentary; she was rumored to be a heavy drinker, and to partake too heavily in rich food. If any of Anne's chronic health issues were related to diet, a poorly-understood factor in many diseases even now, they could easily have been complicated by the manner of life which wealthy Britons were expected to lead -- largely characterized by leisure and heavy consumption.

The film's depiction of Anne (played by Olivia Colman) is that of a woman in physical pain and poor spirits. Colman's Anne is shouty, intemperate, and prone to melodramatic gestures, pressed by her advisors and friends alike to an involvement in politics when her ordinary disposition would have her happier when hunting, patronizing the arts, spending time with gorgeous women, grieving her many losses, and dancing. (The historical Anne did love dancing, and resented the encroachment of her arthritic legs on her ability to participate in court dances.) The film's depiction of Restoration-era courtly pastimes is exaggerated for comedic effect -- colorful scenes of duck-racing and pelting naked clowns with fruit are present cheek-by-jowl with more realistic entertainments like musical performances, hardcore gambling, sexual liaisons, dining, dancing and partying. Anne's emotional outbursts are exaggerated as well, but this disconnect between what Anne would likely have preferred to be doing rather than governing a nation and what Anne's responsibilities actually entailed strikes me as more or less accurate. (The role of religion seems to have been elided somewhat in favor of a focus on other aspects of political life; the real Anne was remarkably devout.) In all this, Anne would hardly have been the only British monarch to prefer pleasure and piety to the day-to-day work of budgeting and diplomatic audiences, nor would she be the first head of state to be rendered petty and imperious by dint of the power they exercised over their inferiors.

In short, by many standards Anne was not a well-functioning monarch at all. She was inexperienced in governing and undereducated in matters of politics and war. Her decision-making was compromised by emotional difficulties and the political wrangling of her own close friends. She was in extremely poor health by any era's standards, at times imperious and reclusive, partial to her friends to the point of recklessness, remarkably uncharismatic, and a poor public speaker. (The Duchess of Marlborough's account has it that at times Anne would only pretend to speak in public when the dialogue turned to a topic on which she hadn't had a chance to rehearse a response. Her lips would move, and she might mumble, but she said nothing. This is from a remarkably jaundiced source -- a jilted former intimate of the Queen's, whose social standing and family life were devastated by a fall from favor -- but it paints a vivid picture of a monarch struggling to keep up with what she understood to be her own responsibilities.) But despite all this Anne was also the hereditary monarch of Great Britain; this wasn't a job she could easily excuse herself from, nor one with which she had a great deal of experience. After all the bloodthirsty drama of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, it was no real treat to be thrust into the political spotlight as head of state, and while Anne was poorly suited for the job in terms of her training and perhaps her natural facilities, she took her responsibilities and her royal prerogative seriously and strove to fulfill them. The film's reference to Sarah Churchill's revenge struck me as a reference to Churchill's memoirs, which first appeared after the queen's death and which paint Anne in a remarkably negative and childish light. (Sarah also outlived Anne by several decades and died incredibly rich.) Some of the film's characterization of Anne as weak and flaky is drawn from those same memoirs, though so is its characterization of Churchill's own faults when it depicts her as cruelly blunt, manipulative, and at times domineering. Anne's legacy as a monarch has come to be reassessed in the intervening centuries, discussed in terms of political stability and the arts rather than miscarriages and quarrels between women, but she's still famous largely for her failures and it's Churchill's dishy account of her time with Anne that's responsible for setting that tone.

Some reading:

• Queen Anne: A Biography, Anne Somerset