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Mary of Modena: life of the week
00:46:32
Breeze Barrington explores the extraordinary story of Mary of Modena – the Italian-born queen consort to James VII and II – and considers how her controversial childbirth in 1688 paved the way for the Glorious Revolution
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Breeze Barrington
Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and significant figures, from ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. Imagine being forced to give birth to a baby in front of as many as 80 witnesses amid a climate of suspicion and fear in which many are calling for your husband's head. This was the fate of Maria, or Mary of Modena, the second wife of the man crowned King James II of England and 7th of Scotland, a Catholic Italian princess shipped to England to marry James when she was just 15. Maria's faith and foreignness later became literally lightning rods for xenophobia and misogyny in Restoration era England, eventually leading to the Glorious Revolution. In this episode, you'll hear from historian and author Breeze Barrington, whose new book the Graces, tells the story of Maria and the women who surrounded her in the merry courts of Charles ii. She was speaking to Eleanor Evans, who.
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Eleanor Evans
Her life is so often a little bit lost in terms of stories about succession and restoration and revolution, and I'm so pleased that we're going to be bringing her and her legacy to our listeners today. Before we do dive into her life. I wondered if we could give a bit of context about the England that she finds herself in, where we sort of meet her. In your book, who's on the throne, what's happening and why is her role so important in this story of succession?
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Breeze Barrington
So when Maria arrived in England, it was 1673, so at this point it was Charles II on the throne. He'd been on the throne since 1660, so about 13 years. And this is the kind of the big moment of Restoration after the English Civil War, after a sort of 10 year period of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. And Charles II comes back as king. And when he came back, there was a huge amount of sort of celebrating and a lot of hope of what this new reign might look like and a real sort of sense of positivity by the time we're at 1673, I think some of the shininess, if you like, has fallen off Charles II a little bit. And although he's not in a dangerous position or anything like that, he's not sort of fulfilled all of the promises and all of the hopes and expectations that may have gone with his Restoration in the way that the reality is never quite as good as a dream. So he's at this period 1673, and. And it's very clear as well that he's not going to have a legitimate child. So this is a reign which is quite new, which is on fairly rocky foundations as a sort of newly restored monarchy, which may not have a great future. So she kind of comes into an England which is not at war, is not about to be at war, but it's feeling a little bit unsettled, I'd say. And she comes into a court which is absolutely loving being back, which is absolutely loving the Restoration, which is just having an absolutely wonderful time, which is full of merrymaking, which is full of debauchery, which is full of parties. So it's a very sort of strange and slightly febrile environment that she enters into.
- [05:00]
Eleanor Evans
So we have Charles on the throne, making merry in his court. Let's bring in James here. So this is Charles's younger brother, then the Duke of York, and he's looking for a new wife. Why do eyes turn towards Maria?
- [05:13]
Breeze Barrington
Yes, so he had been married before, James had married Anne Hyde, who had been a lady in waiting to his sister over in Holland. And they met during exile. They had a very sort of exciting affair and he promised her marriage when she became pregnant. And this didn't really go down very well. But Charles II felt that the marriage ought to be honoured. Her father was his great advisor, Edward Hyde, and he felt it was the right thing to do. So this marriage went ahead. So James had essentially been married to a commoner and she was often thought of as a real upstart and treated like that at court. They'd have two surviving children at this point, both of whom were daughters, but she died in 1671 and it was almost straight away talked about James needed a new wife and he wasn't going to be allowed to do what he did before. He was going to have to have a proper dynastic marriage from a princess from the courts of Europe. Now, James's only real stipulations were that she must be Catholic and that she must be beautiful. So this is still quite a wide net amongst the princesses of Europe. But his friend Lord Peterborough was sent away to try and find this sort of ideal princess for him. And he went all the way through sort of France and Germany and he met lots of princesses, but essentially he saw this painting of a young woman in a house in Paris and it was of Maria d' Este and he wrote home, I have found the future of England. He just knew from this painting that she was going to be the one. So he made his way over to Modena and he made his addresses to her mother, Laura. Laura was acting as regent in Modena at the time. Maria's father had died when she was just four. So Laura was acting as regent until her son came of age. So Laura has this meeting with Peter in which she says, this isn't going to happen. Maria wants to become a nun and there's a lot of sort of back and forth, but what essentially happens is that the Pope wrote to Maria and said, this is your duty, you are responsible for this marriage, for bringing England essentially back to Catholicism. So at this time, although England was a Protestant country, it was an open secret that James had converted to Catholicism and this is part of his stipulation that the princess that he married must be a Catholic. So Maria at this point really realizes she's got no choice and she just breaks down and she has to agree to this marriage. So this is a 15 year old girl who'd wanted to become a nun, who is now being told by the Pope that instead she's got to go to England and she's got to marry the 40 year old heir to the English throne and it's her responsibility to essentially breed Catholic heirs, to have a Catholic boy and that he will be the future of Christendom her role in.
- [08:07]
Eleanor Evans
This dynastic succession story is really put upon her and she's moved across Europe as this pawn with very little agency, it seems. And we'll go into a little bit more throughout this conversation, how she perhaps challenges that throughout her life, but I wonder if we can stay on her as a 15 year old for a second and you can take us into this journey. What's her arrival in England like? That you just mentioned is quite a different picture. It's debauched. There's all sorts of things going on in Charles II's court. How does she deal with this?
- [08:35]
Breeze Barrington
Yeah, so, I mean, Maria's education and kind of upbringing at the point that she would have arrived in England was very, very sheltered. She'd essentially grown up in a convent. She was highly, highly educated, so she spoke sort of ancient languages. She had a really good grounding of the kind of the classics and history and all sorts of things. Really rounded education that she'd had. And as I said, she'd expected to be able to spend her life in a convent. And continuing on like that, she was unlikely to have really met very many men at all or met very many people. And certainly her life was dictated by very strict codes of behaviour and probably not with a great deal of affection, especially not physical affection. Her mother always expected her to behave with a certain amount of decorum and she always kept her children at, I think Maria called it so awful a distance that she always had this kind of separation. So other than the friends that she would have had in the convent, and I think quite a close relationship with her younger brother, she would have had this very, very sheltered, very, very kind of quiet upbringing and strict upbringing. So when she's then sent to England, as you say, she enters a completely different world and she really starts that straight away. So we have this wonderful series of drawings that a court artist, Willem van de Velde, made, which detail her journey, especially the part where she goes from Calais to Dover and then up to London. And in that we can see the names of the ships that she traveled on. So there were several sort of ships sent to escort her over. Some of these are named after mistresses. You have one of the boats which is named after Barbara Villiers, the King's main sort of favourite mistress at that time, and another boat which is named after his queen. So she already can tell, if she knows to look, that this is going to be a court where mistresses and queens sit right alongside each other and where that's very, very open. She then arrives on the shores of Dover. And the first thing that happens is James goes up to her and he grabs her and he kisses her and, and he says that he's dazzled by the beauty of her eyes. Now Maria just bursts into tears. This is completely overwhelming. I mean, first of all, she really has no idea who this man is. The marriage, as it happened, happened by proxy, which means that some Peterborough, the ambassador who was sent for her, he stood in for James in the marriage. So this is a man she's never met before, he's a lot older than her and he's just grabbing her. Like I said, she's probably never been touched by a man before. So. So this is an incredibly overwhelming experience and not a very good start to the marriage. But the marriage has happened, she's taken up to London and in London there are great crowds outside Whitehall palace hoping to catch a glimpse of her. But what they actually do is they take her in via a back entrance because there's a lot of fear about what might happen to her. So when the marriage was formally announced, there was a big sense against the marriage. And the night before she arrived there were effigies of the Pope being burned in the streets. And one report says that if she'd arrived that night, she would certainly have been martyred. So she arrives in this very anti environment as a Catholic princess, especially an Italian Catholic princess, she's not very welcome by the people at large. She's not at all welcomed by Parliament and there are lots of courtiers who are also reluctant to have her there. So it's quite a difficult beginning for her in every way, really.
- [11:59]
Eleanor Evans
It is a febrile atmosphere for sure. There's lots for her to be dealing with as a young 15 year old. How much do you know about her own feelings at this stage? How much can be known? Did she write? Did she leave much trace of that?
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Breeze Barrington
She did leave some. So she wrote a lot of letters back to the nuns and the convent in Modena that she'd left behind. And we have one particularly sort of sad letter from that time which she wrote in very, very early days, where she says, I am in good health, dear Mother, thank God, but I cannot yet accustom myself to this state of life to which, as you know, I have always been so averse. So I cry many times and grieve much, being unable to rid myself of melancholy, though blessed be God, this is my cross. So we have this, you know, she's very young, but there's a real, really sort of deep emotional attachment still to her, to her mother superior at the convent, but also this incredibly sad reflection on how she's trying to cope. But she just is very much struggling. And this is not going to have been helped at all by the fact that she realized quite early on that it wasn't just Charles II who was very promiscuous, but her husband James was as well. So he had a long standing mistress called Arabella Churchill, who, when Maria arrived, was pregnant with his child. And this continued on. So she has quite a lot to deal with amidst all of this. There are rumours circulating around that she's the Pope's bastard daughter and all these awful kind of scurrilous pamphlets that are being written which say things like they hope she'll be envenomed with the pox, you know, and sort of die before 18 and all of these things. So she has a lot to contend with. We don't know how much she knew about the pamphlets, but they're still very much there and she'll have been aware of that atmosphere.
- [13:44]
Eleanor Evans
So she's up against a lot. And another tragic through line of her story that we can't really escape is that you mentioned she's sort of shipped to England to breed Catholic heirs, essentially, and this process, to give it a very horrid term, begins almost immediately, doesn't it? Can you take us into her personal struggles and what that means for this broader story of succession as well?
- [14:08]
Breeze Barrington
Yes, absolutely. And you're right, it begins straight away. I mean, actually, one of the first accounts we have from the day that she arrived in England was a note written in James's diary where he says that she was wedded and bedded that night and that's all he writes about it. So immediately there's a kind of everyone knows what she's there for and she's highly observed all the time. You know, any sort of changes to her body or anything are watched out for. There's a sort of expectation and a waiting for her to become pregnant, which does happen early on. So she arrived in the autumn, winter and she was pregnant at the beginning of the next year. The first pregnancy, she miscarried, but she was then pregnant again a few months later. So this is the kind of, the beginning of many, many pregnancies, miscarriages and children who die in infancy. In the years that she was in England, she had about 10 pregnancies and the only sort of surviving child, we'll get onto that later, is the sort of the cause of a great deal of trouble for her. But she goes through a terrible time with that. It's worth saying, though, that although this was terribly sad and very difficult for her, especially when she was so young, it wasn't particularly unusual for the time. Mortality rates in the country were terrible. And so, for example, her stepdaughter Anne, when she married and became an adult and married, she had something like 17 pregnancies and had no children who survived to adulthood. So this is a very difficult thing for her, but it is also something that lots of these women had to cope with at the time. But she obviously had this sort of added pressure of this need to have a child and the expectation that she should and that she would.
- [15:43]
Eleanor Evans
You mentioned Anne there, his stepdaughter, and I wonder if we can turn to her relationship with her stepdaughters little in this picture, the princesses from James first marriage, what is her place at court and what's her relationship with these young princesses like, particularly in that picture?
- [15:57]
Breeze Barrington
So, as I was sort of saying, she knew that she wasn't necessarily very popular when she arrived. I think what she really tried to do was to work very, very hard in every sense to bring people around. So, partly that involved learning English very quickly, but it also involved different kinds of patronage, so patronage in terms of commissioning artists and poets, traditional patronage like that. But she also took on this kind of role of patronage of her stepdaughters, even though she was very close to them in age. You know, when James had found out he was married to her, he actually sent a note to Princess Mary saying he'd found a playfellow for her. So there's a sense that they're actually only a few years apart in age. But Maria does approach this as, I am your stepmother and this is how I'm going to try and fulfil that role. So it's partly friendship, but it is also with a sort of a duty of care that involves helping them to grow as people, I suppose. So one of the ways that she does this in the first, even months of her being there, is that she commissions a court mask in which the princesses will take this starring role. So the princesses both had very beautiful singing voices, were brilliant at dancing. This is one of the ways in which she kind of pushes their abilities and promotes their talents is this court mask.
- [17:13]
Eleanor Evans
And for any listeners who haven't sort of clocked the timeline yet, we should say that these princesses are very important to this wider story. We've got Princess Mary and Princess Anne as well, who are both future queens. We'll probably come onto that a little bit more as we go into Story of Revolution and beyond. But I want to stay on her patronage a little bit more because that's such a wonderful part of your new book, the Graces, and what she does more broadly, bringing women into positions that perhaps might have been harder to find at court, in terms of art and literature and so on.
- [17:46]
Breeze Barrington
Yes, absolutely. So I think it's quite clear from early on that she has ambitions in this direction. So the first of her maids of honour that I would say she kind of takes under her wing, if you like. So her maids of honor are these very young women, probably similar sort of age to her, sometimes even a bit younger, who are sent to court by their parents. They often necessarily have enormous amounts of money, but they're sort of highly born. And becoming a maid of honour is a very good thing because it means the court will pay your dowry for you. So one of these maids of honour, an early maid of honour, was a woman called Sarah Jennings. And Sarah Jennings went on to become Sarah Churchill, who. Anyone who's read the favourite or seen the film will be familiar with the story of Sarah Jennings and Sarah Churchill. She became the great favourite of Princess Anne, later Queen Anne, and these are the kind of early days where that relationship began. So, as we know, Sarah went on to become one of the preeminent stateswomen of her generation. And this role that she had at court really helped her to begin that Maria was a great supporter of her, both sort of financially, but also in terms of giving her a good position at court and a good kind of step up to be able to achieve the ambitions that she had. But this particularly comes out later. So around the early 1680s, Maria's court is joined by two new maids of honour who are called Anne Killigrew and Anne Kingsmill. Anne Kingsmill went on to be Anne Finch, who is very celebrated today, as well as a very great poet. So this is really where the patronage kind of women, if you like, comes to a fore. And these women are poets and they're painters, and Maria sets up this sort of environment for them in which they'll be taken seriously. So at this time, it is a really. It's really a court ruled by men in terms of artistic output. You have these men called the court wits, which perhaps is what they called themselves, but it really stuck. So they essentially sort of rule all of that kind of literary world. And we have one example where Anne Killegrew put out a poem and sort of circulated it at court and she writes this poem afterwards in which she records basically reports that she was accused of plagiarism, that she was accused of not having written the poem herself because she was a woman and a woman couldn't have written something that good. And it's a very angry poem. It's a very brilliant poem. And it's a real sort of showing off every sort of bit of learning and literary ability to kind of say, well, if I didn't write that, are you really going to say I didn't write this? And it's an absolutely wonderful, wonderful poem. But this is the environment. And we have Anne Finch later on in her life, she sort of wrote that she was glad that she mostly kept how much work she was producing the work to herself because she didn't want to be thought of as this is a quote, a versifying maid of honor. So it gives this sort of sense of the world that they're living in, but that Maria is really trying to create this little haven in which they can just try and they can explore.
- [20:51]
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Breeze Barrington
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Breeze Barrington
Death is coming for our family.
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- [22:26]
Breeze Barrington
Every style, every home.
- [22:28]
Eleanor Evans
It does sound, it comes across in your book that she is such a champion of creating this space and fostering this space for women in the Restoration era court. And it's really wonderful to read about and very poignant in many ways. And another poignant moment that really struck me in your book is when Princess Mary is matched with William of Orange again for various other dynastic reasons to shore up this succession line from the Stuart. And she and Catherine of Braganza, both, who have been moved across Europe to match with royal men, are now, you know, steering this young woman in Princess Mary towards her own match. I just found that such a poignant moment in your book.
- [23:09]
Breeze Barrington
Yes, it was really devastating to think about when I was writing it. That really struck me too, the sense that these are all women who, as sort of young, mid teenagers, were just sent abroad to marry someone they'd either never met or had only really recently met in the case of Mary. And I mean, for somebody like Mary, who was so fun loving, who was so bright, who was so sort of sparky and so loved to be kind of sent away to a court which was notoriously very, very different, very much more reserved, where there was going to be much less of the kinds of entertainments that she liked spending time doing and things like that. And to this sort of man who, although I think she did come to love him quite dearly later on, on first meeting, did not endear himself to her at all. And who she knew was something of a sort of laughingstock amongst her uncle and her father as well. So it's this very, very tragic moment. But as you say, she's then sort of being counseled through it, if you like, by Maria, by Catherine. And these are women who really sum up what it was to be a royal woman at that time, that sons would stay in rule and women were. The girls were sent away to be married for dynastic political reasons.
- [24:22]
Eleanor Evans
Yes. So Princess Mary being matched with the Dutch William of Orange is just one piece of this sort of succession puzzle that's sort of falling into place. Meanwhile, Charles II is under some pressure, isn't he, to work out what is going to happen with his brother James and whether James will indeed succeed him as a Catholic. There's pressure from all sorts of factions that don't want this to happen and obviously Maria's alongside this. What does this anti Catholic sentiment mean for Maria at this time?
- [24:52]
Breeze Barrington
Yeah, and this is actually very much bound up in this marriage of Mary because James's desire to send her off to France is sort of met with a, you absolutely cannot do this by Parliament. The kind of, you can't send her to be aligned with France for all places, or any other Catholic country. So sending her to the good Protestant Holland is much more appealing to them because Mary is still the heir to the throne at this point. So James would succeed Charles, but after Charles, she's still the eldest child because Maria and James have not yet had a son. So by sending her off to a Protestant country, this is all still quite assured. What happens when Mary is about to be married, though, is that Maria is pregnant and Maria gives birth to a boy. So this is the first boy that she has. And he didn't live very long. There was a smallpox epidemic at the time and he died as a little baby. But this is kind of a dry run, if you like, of what people fear that actually there is going to be this Catholic heir after all, and what are we going to do about it? So this is something which really pervades Maria's life at the English court, this constant worry about what she will be able to do and this fear of England going back to Catholicism, which really kind of underscores everything that happens to her. So not very long after Mary is sent off to Holland, the first sort of rumblings, if you like, of quite an extreme plot, begin to happen when two men, one called Israel Tung and Titus Oates, come forward with what we know were completely false allegations of a planned Catholic uprising which would see to have Charles II executed and would essentially involve Catholics overrunning the country and, and sort of murdering Protestants in their beds. And Oates and Tongue say that they have this plot, that they've seen the sort of the names of people involved and that it sort of penetrated the absolute heart of the court. Even Queen Catherine is implicated in a way which is obviously completely outrageous. For everything that she suffered with Charles, she must have been the most loyal to him out of everybody, really. And this is something which really angered Charles. And I think that Tito X probably realised he'd gone too far when he made that allegation. He did redact it, but this is the kind of atmosphere we're in. Everyone is being accused and actually even Maria's personal secretary, a man called Edward Coleman, was found guilty and he was executed as a traitor, which means that he was hung, drawn and quartered for his alleged role in this fake plot. And this goes on for years of their life. And during this time they are sent away into exile. Charles thought it would help if they weren't around, that maybe things would calm down a bit if they weren't sort of there in everybody's eye line. So initially they were sent to Brussels and then they were sent to Scotland. While they're away, this is where the exclusion crisis comes in. So Parliament brought forth a bill and it had three readings which would basically have had James barred from the line of succession. There were different ways that this might have gone, so different people supported different things in Parliament. But some would have Mary put on the throne, some would have had him replaced with the Duke of Monmouth, who was Charles II's eldest illegitimate son, who was very popular at court and in the country. So there are different versions that this might take, but essentially they all want to kind of shift him out of the line of succession. James is obviously over in exile, quite worried about what's going to happen here. But Charles was always fairly firm and in the end he paraded Parliament and he never called it again, and that was sort of the end of that. But there's a very real chance that this bill would have passed had he not done so.
- [28:30]
Eleanor Evans
So these are all very big issues in British history, but we will probably leave them there for now. Just to return to our focus, which is Maria. So obviously she's being moved again all over the place, into exile. They come back and then, just to move us on, you know, a bit more in his story, then King Charles dies. What does this mean for Maria? Do we know how she felt about it and what comes next?
- [28:54]
Breeze Barrington
Yeah. So when Charles died in 1685, Maria and James had been back at court for a few years and things. Although there was another sort of plot, the Rye House plot, which would also have sought to have James executed too. But after that point, things did sort of calm down for her a little bit. But then 1685 comes and Charles II dies fairly unexpectedly, and Maria, I think, found this exceptionally difficult, that she had been very, very close to Charles from the first day that she met him. She'd had a real sort of love and affinity with him. And she wrote about it later that she'd loved him, you know, long before she sort of grew to love anybody else at court, that she really had found a friend in him. But she's also very worried when he dies of how she'll be perceived in her grief. So she's worried. She writes letters saying that she's worried that she'll be thought false because she really just can't stop crying and people won't believe that she is really that sad. So there's also this kind of sense of an atmosphere in which she's still not sure of her position, I suppose, and in which you're always looking for ulterior motives. That gives a bit of a sense of the court at the time when he first died, I think her and James were probably rather worried about what would happen to them. A few years earlier they were in exile and now they're sort of their monarchs. So are they going to be accepted? Is the first question. And the answer is yes, very much so. James gave a speech to Parliament in which he sort of promised leniency and tolerance, and he said he wasn't going to sort of change his status quo. And he spoke very well and they were very impressed and they were very happy and they gave him an enormous allowance, which was actually a lot more than they'd ever given Charles. So this starts off in a very positive way and he has this sort of beautiful coronation. And although on the day of the coronation, you can already see these signs, these ill omens that things like when the flag was raised at the Tower of London to indicate the crowning of the king, the flag tore off in the wind and the crown, when it was placed on his head, wouldn't stay on. And actually, very tragically for him, one of his sons, by his mistress, Catherine Sedley, died the same day. So there are all of these sort of ill omens towards them. So having started off very well, it quite quickly seems like it might not work out so well after all. And he also very quickly begins to ostracize Parliament and ostracize the people and behave really, in all the ways he said he wouldn't. So things do go downhill quite quickly, having started well. But for Maria, I think that this kind of. This period of losing Charles, this sort of man that she'd really looked up to and who had been a great friend, and I should say as well that her maid of honour, Anne Killigrew, also died the same year. And there's a real sense of loss which comes with this. Even though there's an initial positivity about this, the beginning of this reign and potential hope, it's absolutely shrouded in grief for Maria.
- [32:00]
Eleanor Evans
Okay, so the scenes set of it there for what comes next. We have James, who has been crowned as James VII of Scotland and second of England. We've got these ominous signs, we've got sort of increasing tensions. And amid this, Maria is still on this quest, if you like, to produce a Catholic heir, which is causing even More tension and fear elsewhere in the country and we've got William and Mary waiting in the wings. All this sort of coalesces, doesn't it, in 1688. I wonder if you can take us closer to the event that became known as the baby in the bedpan scandal.
- [32:37]
Breeze Barrington
Yes, absolutely. I'll just say, as you say, you've got sort of William and Mary perpetuating in the wings. But one thing I ought to really have said before when they first came to the throne, was that there was one attempted rebellion. The Duke of Monmouth, who I mentioned before, did leader rebellion and uprising in an attempt to take the throne, and was pushed down and was executed. So that just sort of goes again with that sense of we're actually going to try and stick with this king that we. That we've chosen here. So this story rather begins in 1687, I think. So Maria of Modena went to Bath to take the waters in the hope that it would help her to become pregnant. She hadn't been pregnant for a few years and the two pregnancies she'd had before this had both ended in miscarriage. She had no living children at this point, so she's really concerned that she needs to have this child and she needs to have this son in order to secure this line. So she goes to Bath and she takes the waters and this is a very public event. You know, people can go and just watch her sitting in the water alongside this sort of big balcony. At the same time that she's doing that, James goes to a holy well in Wales and he immerses himself in the water there and he prays for God to give him a child. And just before this, her mother. One of the very last things her mother Laura did before she died was she went to visit a shrine in Italy and she too prayed for this child. So you have this kind of three pronged attack, if you like, in this attempt to have to finally have this child. And quite quickly after, they meet again in Bath, where Maria's been taking the water. Maria is pregnant. And this is announced in December of 1687. Now, almost straight away, there are whispers that this isn't true or that there's something wrong here. They say, oh, she's already 29. How could she possibly have a child at that age? They say she hasn't been pregnant for years. How could she just get pregnant now? And there are already these whisperings that it might not be true. And this just goes into overdrive as the pregnancy goes on. There are continued rumours that Actually, at a point, she's had miscarriages and then she's pretended that she hasn't, that she's never been pregnant, that she's just pretending that she has. And there are all these sort of reports of, oh, well, have you seen her stomach? Have you seen if her breasts are leaking milk? Have you touched it and felt it kick? That all of this time she's being looked at, she's being touched, she's being prodded and she's very. She takes a real step back and she refuses to let lots of people see her when she's changing and things like that. At this time, it's quite normal for lots of members of the court to be there in the morning for what was called her levee when she was getting up. But she tries to make this a slightly more private event when she knows what people are saying, because, understandably, it's extremely upsetting and distressing when you're in that sort of. When you're heavily pregnant and everyone just wants to gawp at you like that. So it's a very difficult situation for her. And. And it just increases and increases. And then you get to this point in June 1688, where Maria goes into labour. There are already rumours at this point that since they say the pregnancy is not real, that a child will be smuggled in, they're already kind of. These foundations have already been laid, these rumours are already there that there's going to be an attempt to smuggle a different child in. So when she goes into labour, James calls as many people as of the court to watch as possible. And by the time the room is sort of filled up, there are something like 80 people there. Most of them are men and lots of them are kind of being herded to the end of the bed to sort of have as good a look as they can. And there's this sort of point where Maria says to James, you know, could you. I can't bear to do this with so many men looking on me. And he covers her face with his wig so that she can't see them. So it's this really disturbing image. It's not unusual for royal births to have been observed. I mean, I was reading that, I think actually that was going on until the beginning of the 20th century. But this amount of people is quite different to that. And this kind of sense of you must be here, you must witness, is certainly singular. When the baby's born, it is carried to a different room to be sort of cleaned, to be wrapped. And James asks The men, the sort of, the main men of the court, if you like, to go and go follow the baby to have a look. He doesn't want there to be a minute where this baby is left alone and that people can't see it. So he's really, really careful to make sure everyone knows that this baby really was born and it's a boy. It is this longed for boy which they had so hoped for, which they thought would cement their future, which would, from Maria's point of view, fulfil her obligations, which she would have done her duty to the Pope. But it is the birth of this baby which is their downfall, because the rumours don't end just because everybody saw it. The rumours continue. And people say that the baby was smuggled into the bed in a bedpan which had been put to heat the bed because it was a cold morning, even though there were witnesses that said they'd seen the pan full of hot coals. And a bedpan isn't anything big enough to put a baby in anyway. But this is the rumour that really takes root, which spreads and it allows the pretext for seven politicians, aristocrats, to send a letter over to William of Orange inviting him to invade England and to us up James from the throne, which he does on the 5th of November. So he really capitalizes on that date, this date where the effigies of the Pope and Catholics are sort of richly burned on bonfires in a sort of national day of Catholic hatred. This is the day that he chooses to arrive and he makes his way up the country and gains support as he goes. So James and Maria decide that the safest thing to do is to flee to France, which they did at the end of 1688.
- [38:39]
Eleanor Evans
So it's obviously a watershed moment in national history, but clearly such an important moment for Maria and her family as well. So they safely make it to France. They are there in exile. Then what does the next stage of her life look like?
- [38:55]
Breeze Barrington
So over in France, they initially have a lot of hopes of getting back. So there are attempts, armed attempts. There are, you know, people call it a sort of bloodless revolution, which isn't quite true. I mean, that moment of 1688 certainly didn't, didn't sort of turn into a civil war, as many people would have feared. But in the years after, there are many battles fought and there are many who die. But William is the kind of the successful person who comes out of that, much to the distress of James and Maria, who are over in exile and who are feeling deeply Betrayed. Remember, William III was James's nephew. He's married to his daughter Mary, so she also comes and she's crowned queen, so she's involved in the sort of usurping of her father. And lots of these rumours, when they were spread, were being spread by Princess Anne, who'd really turned against them. So there's this sense of these initial women who Maria had taken under her wing, having completely turned on her, the other of whom, of course, was Sarah Churchill, who also turned on them, who also, with Anne, left the court and went over to the side of William. So I think that these sort of initial days, she must have felt completely at sea. You know, she's just. She's been let down by everyone that she kind of loved the most, except, I suppose, for her husband, who is there with her and isn't sort of sharing in the sorrow. So these early days, I think there's a lot of hope of getting back. There's a lot of sense of betrayal and there's a lot of uncertainty about what the future will look like. It's very easy for us to look back and sort of think, oh, yes, the glorious revolution that happened as quite a straightforward thing. But in the moment, nobody really knows what's going to happen and nobody knows what the future will hold. They've also got this sort of memory of the execution of Charles I, James father still very, very much in their minds. This is not that long ago. So it's a very tense, febrile atmosphere. But in France they stay and Maria does actually have another child, a daughter called Louisa, who lives to be 18. So one of the sort of. The older of the children that she has. And when they're in exile and they have Louisa, they invite the members of the court to go and have a look at that birth in the Ca. You know, they thought this might be a boy too. Let's try and sort of. Let's try and prove that this one's real. But nobody comes. And I think this is kind of the last moment where they realise that they're probably going to have to stay and that actually people don't really want to know the truth. So in this exile, lots and lots of people do go into exile with them. Some of her sort of maids of honour and things like that, Anne Finch, tried to go with them, but they were stopped at the border. Her husband, Henrietta Finch, actually spent quite a lot of time in prison and there was a lot of fear, from Anne's point of view, about what might happen to him. So not Everyone can go, but some do. A poet called Jane Barker, for example, she went to the court with them. She was a fellow Catholic and she produced poetry there. But one of the main ways that Maria was able to sort of fulfil her ambitions was actually to become the patron of a convent nearby. So this was a convent of the Order of the Sisters of the Visitation, which was the same order that she'd wanted to join as a princess in Modena. So there's a way in which she kind of her life comes full circle. This convent had been founded by Henrietta Maria when she had been in exile, the wife of Charles I. So there's a sort of sense of these Catholic queens in exile going to this convent. But this is actually. This is really where Maria ends up, almost sort of where she wanted to have begun. There is something rather lovely about that.
- [42:12]
Eleanor Evans
Yeah, definitely. This full circle moment is quite touching, actually. And as we sort of move towards the final chapter of her story and her final years, I mean, we've covered a lot of big moments in history in this conversation, and you can sort of see why Maria's story perhaps does get a little bit lost amid all this. So I'm really glad that we can, you know, begin to foreground a bit of it in your episode. And I should just say at this point that you've written about Maria of Modena for the August issue of BBC History magazine, which will be out once our episode is, and readers will be able to read it on historyextra.com as part of their subscription as well. So please do go check that article out. But back to Maria's story. As we approach these final moments in her life, any final thoughts you'd like to leave listeners with about her enduring legacy as well?
- [43:01]
Breeze Barrington
Yes, absolutely. So, I mean, in her sort of final years, so she. The last 17 years of her life, she lived. James had died in 1701, so she was a widow for those last sort of 17 years of her life. And as I say, she had a daughter who died at 18, but she still had this boy. The boy is the only one of her children who outlived her. So initially she sort of tries to help him to get his throne back. But as time goes on, you know, they've been given this great palace at St Germain, but as time goes on, Louis increasingly feels that he probably shouldn't be that much on the wrong side of William. So he says, the son can't stay anymore, so the son ends up having to move to Italy. So she's quite. She's there sort of without any of her family living in France in this way. And she increasingly really just spent her time in this convent. And it's sort of reported that she became even more sort of pious than she had been before, which is saying quite a lot. And she essentially lived in a life of confession, a life of devotion, and a life almost exclusively in this convent. So it's quite a lonely image of her that we have at the end, I think. So when Maria died in 1718, she was 59 years old and she was buried in the convent at Chaillot, where she actually remained until the French Revolution, when the convent was destroyed. But this is the sort of the final resting place that she chose to be in. The thing I would like, if you have a sort of a take home from Maria, is of what a strong and powerful woman she really was. She's somebody who had an enormous amount of adversity in her life and she was always having her life sort of pulled apart in ways that she had no power over. But every time that happens, we see her rebuild it again and we see her find a way to live again, and we see her making friendships again and finding a way to live her life. So I think that the words I would use to describe her would really be resilient, strong and powerful. And everybody who met her, even ones who didn't like her because she was a Catholic Italian princess, when they knew her, everyone sort of had to admit that she was exceptionally impressive. So I think that, yes, one of the things I'd like you to sort of take away from this is her great resilience and her great appeal.
- [45:26]
That was historian and author Breeze Barrington speaking to Eleanor Evans. Breeze's book, the the Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court is out now. Thanks for listening to today's Life of the the Week. Be sure to join us again next time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past.