Anne, the eldest, had shown her spirit early in life whilst residing with George I.; she had a proud, imperious nature, and her temper was, it must be owned, put to a severe test.  The only time that George I. did the English the honour of choosing one of the beauties of the nation for his mistress, was during the last year of his reign.  The object of his choice was Anne Brett, the eldest daughter of the infamous Countess of Macclesfield by her second husband.  The neglect of Savage, the poet, her son, was merely one passage in the iniquitous life of Lady Macclesfield.  Endowed with singular taste and judgment, consulted by Colley Cibber on every new play he produced, the mother of Savage was not only wholly destitute of all virtue, but of all shame.  One day, looking out of the window, she perceived a very handsome man assaulted by some bailiffs who were going to arrest him:  she paid his debt, released, and married him.  The hero of this story was Colonel Brett, the father of Anne Brett.

The child of such a mother was not likely to be even decently-respectable; and Anne was proud of her disgraceful preeminence and of her disgusting and royal lover.  She was dark, and her flashing black eyes resembled those of a Spanish beauty.  Ten years after the death of George I., she found a husband in Sir William Leman, of Northall, and was announced, on that occasion, as the half-sister of Richard Savage.

To the society of this woman, when at St. James’s, as ‘Mistress Brett,’ the three princesses were subjected:  at the same time the Duchess of Kendal, the king’s German mistress, occupied other lodgings at St. James’s.

Miss Brett was to be rewarded with the coronet of a countess for her degradation, the king being absent on the occasion at Hanover; elated by her expectations, she took the liberty, during his majesty’s absence, of ordering a door to be broken out of her apartment into the royal garden, where the princesses walked.  The Princess Anne, not deigning to associate with her, commanded that it should be forthwith closed.  Miss Brett imperiously reversed that order.  In the midst of the affair, the king died suddenly, and Anne Brett’s reign was over, and her influence soon as much forgotten as if she had never existed.  The Princess Anne was pining in the dulness of her royal home, when a marriage with the Prince of Orange, was proposed for the consideration of his parents.  It was a miserable match as well as a miserable prospect, for the prince’s revenue amounted to no more than L12,000 a year; and the state and pomp to which the Princess Royal had been accustomed could not be contemplated on so small a fortune.  It was still worse in point of that poor consideration, happiness.  The Prince of Orange was both deformed and disgusting in his person, though his face was sensible in expression; and if he inspired one idea more strongly than another when he appeared in his uniform and cocked hat, and spoke bad French, or worse English, it was that of seeing before one a dressed-up baboon.