Anyone who has ever taken the guided tour of Blenheim Palace will remember the life-size statue of Queen Anne, beautifully carved out of a solid piece of Carrara marble by Jean Michael Rysbrack, gazing regally down the 180 feet of the Long Library.

Some might remember too that the dedication on the plinth, bearing testimony to the Queen's “munificence” in granting Blenheim to the Duke of Marlborough and his successors, spells her name “Ann”, without the final ‘e’.

Guides at the Palace explain that until the publication of Dr Samuel Johnson's Dictionary in 1755, there was really no correct or incorrect way of spelling.

Curiously enough, though, Anne Somerset, in her new biography Queen Anne, quotes the first Duke’s wife Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough — the Queen’s best friend for many years, and the recipient of a vast amount of correspondence — as saying: “Her letters were very indifferent, both in sense and spelling.” Ms Somerset goes on to say that the accusation was unfair, “given the standards of the day”.

But the small putdown is typical of the lovely but feisty Duchess, embittered by being ousted from the Queen’s affections by rival Abigail Masham.

Somehow, we (posterity) have become accustomed to thinking of sad Queen Anne — who was undeniably poorly educated, fat, over emotional, and eventually childless despite 17 pregnancies — as almost incidental to the great events of her reign.

Ms Somerset points out that “rather than the Queen, the Duke of Marlborough is seen as the towering figure” of the age. Yet in these pages Queen Anne is treated with the sympathy she deserves — and she emerges as a surprisingly successful ruler of a country which even Sarah said “has never been thought very easy to govern”.

And of course, shadows of her achievements haunt our politics still.

For instance, it was during her reign that Great Britain came into being with the passing of the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 — an Act which Queen Anne saw as “lasting and indissoluble”.