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Not Just the Tudors
The Restoration Queen: Maria of Modena
00:58:01
How James II's wife Maria of Modena defied all of society's expectations
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
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Adam Wild
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, we're just two best pals talking about pop culture, dating and also exposing.
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
Each other's deepest, darkest secrets.
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Adam Wild
And if you've ever been ghosted, we have a little segment called Left on Red where we call the person who ghosted you and say, hey, why'd you do that? And usually it leads to some pretty embarrassing and explosive things. Yeah, yeah. So check out the Adam Wild and Jack show, available every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
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Unknown
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In the popular imagination, the Restoration court of Charles II is a bawdy circus dripping in decadence, scandal and libertinism. It's a world of royal mistresses, powdered wigs and endless intrigue, where women flit in and out of history as muses, lovers and pawns. But what if this vision is only half the story? What if, behind the rouge smudged revelry, there was another court entirely, one shaped not by men but by women? Today we'll be pulling back the velvet curtain on a hidden network of women painters, poets, queens in waiting, and maids of honor whose friendships, creativity and quiet resistance reshaped the Stuart world. At its heart is Maria of Modena, a teenage Catholic princess sent from Italy to Protestant England and who, rather than shrinking into the shadows, built a vibrant, female led court, one of salons, masks and patronage, where women found agency, expression and sisterhood in a time that offered them little else, from the bold brushstrokes of Anne Killigrew to the literary voice of Anne Finch. From the wit of Sarah Churchill to the subversive splendor of court performances, the Restoration was a crucible not just of sexual politics, but of female power. Joining me today is the historian Dr. Breeze Barrington, whose book the the Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court brings this extraordinary world to life. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Breeze, welcome to the podcast.
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
Hello. Thanks so much for having me.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It was a particular painting that inspired you to write this book, wasn't it? What was so special about that painting?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
Yes, that's right. I was doing my PhD at the time, and I often wrote for magazines like Apollo, doing reviews and things like that. So I was reviewing this exhibition called Bright Souls, which was at the Lyon and Turnbull Gallery in just north of Hyde park in London. And the exhibition was absolutely magical. It brought together works by England's first three female painters. And. And they were Joan Carlisle, Mary Beale and Anne Killigrew. And as I said, all of the works in there I thought were absolutely remarkable. And it told the most incredible story about women who had very little access to professional training, but who had still managed to create, and particularly in the case of Jane Carlisle and Mary Beale, to actually work professionally, in Mary Beale's case, to be the primary breadwinner for the majority of her sort of married life. And this was an exceptional story in itself. When it then came to the room that had the paintings by Anne Killigrew, I saw something quite different happening in that Anne Killigrew didn't work as a professional painter in the sense that she wasn't paid money for the work, but she clearly took herself very seriously. And her paintings have this really sort of clear engagement with classical literature, with other painters, and with all of these sort of different components coming together. So there was something in the way that the women congregate together, the way that they're in the sort of center of the canvas, the way that the other figures. There's a satyr bringing in fruit, there's a cupid sort of flying above, but they're looking away. They're not sort of part of this. The painting is really drawing you to looking at these three women who are just in conversation. They're just relaxed, they're just together. And it was so different from other paintings of the graces that I'd seen before, where they're always of performing in some way, they're always dancing, they're always sort of singing, they're often nude. And these graces are all clothed. Venus is naked, but she has her back turned to us. You don't really see her body and she's just bathed and she's about to be attired. So it was all of these different things together were telling such a different story about the Graces and about this sort of. This goddess. It was a much more intimate scene than I had seen before. But also there was something slightly odd about the painting in that the background was incredibly accomplished, the expressions of the women, the Graces, were incredibly accomplished. But the figure of Venus was slightly off. She has this very sort of long back, a slightly sort of small head. There was something slightly incongruous going on. And then when I looked at the panel beside it, I sort of realised that Anne Kidigrey, when she painted it, was at the very most 25 years old. And so what was really exciting about this was sort of thinking about this young woman who's obviously very, very gifted, has probably any formal training, but who is still learning, who's still sort of. This is a sort of in progress talent that you're seeing. And the other thing that then really captured my imagination was seeing that the figures in the painting, Venus and the Graces, were thought to represent real women. So this wasn't just a painting, but this was a representation of real friendships, of a real network of women. So Venus was thought to be Maria of Modena and the Graces were her maids of honour. Anne Killigrew was one of these maids of honour at the time, and she seems to be positioning herself in the painting at the feet of her mistress. And they're in a particularly sort of in particular conversation with each other. The other Graces were thought to represent Anne Finch that time, Anne Kingsmill, who I'd heard of. I'd sort of studied her at university. And the other, Sarah Churchill, who was also another maid of honour of Maria of Modena, though she was maid of honor earlier. So there was this sort of sense when I was looking at it, of all these people who I'd heard of before, although I must admit I haven't heard Van Killegou then, working together, living together at this court, which, you know, is often forgotten about. It sort of sits between that sort of restoration period and everything that came before that, and then the sort of glorious revolution that Mary of Modena in this sort of court of Mayor of Modena and James II really gets lost in that sort of history. So I just thought it was the most incredible story and the most wonderful painting. And when I saw it again Quite recently, at the Tayton exhibition, the now you see Us exhibition, I was sort of struck anew by just how vibrant it is and how aesthetically extraordinary it is.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Given that we have these real life women represented in this painting, this is particularly exciting. And one of the reasons why is because women's lives in this period are harder to reconstruct than those of men. Why is that?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
This is One of the great challenges in this book was actually how little was left behind. And I think when I started researching it, it was sort of naive. Part of me thought I would find things, which is absolutely out of the question, as it turned out. I think part of the reason. So when we're thinking about writers, when we're thinking about painters, these things require people to care about the work. When it's sort of poetry or plays, things need to be either published in the first place, which a lot of the time they weren't. Lots of women only circulating coterie, as did lots of men at this time. That actually coterie circulation was a much more kind of courtly way of producing work. But most sort of successful writers would have been published at some point. And then you require those works to be kept in print, to keep being read. And in some ways, the same thing goes with paintings. Although the single thing exists, you need people to be interested in who that artist is, in preserving that. These are all kinds of records or tangible physical objects which either get kept or they get lost or they get destroyed. And one of the things I've encountered with these women, both in terms of the sort of the art production, but also the letters, all of the different records that we might have for these women, is that people weren't all that interested for a long time and lots of things got lost. So even ones who were well considered in their lifetimes, people like Anne Killigrew, although she had quite a rocky start to her poetic career, at least she did become quite established amongst her circle. And she was thought of as a great poet and a great painter on her death. And her father actually had some of her work published, but subsequent generations didn't seem as interested. And, you know, it's really these kind of centuries in between of the stories of men being sort of routinely favoured over the stories of women, which means that things just go missing. But thinking again about somebody like Anne Killigrew, we do have this selection of her works which was published and which has miraculously survived the passage of time. It was sort of reprinted enough or kept enough in a family collection that we have it to this day. But even that is a sort of a selection of her work. So her father, when he had the work published on her death, he wrote in his introduction that he'd only picked the choice works. So. So actually we have no idea sort of what proportion of her output has been collected in these words. This could be a tiny, tiny amount. And we don't know what sort of judgment calls he was making about what to include and what not to include. So even when there's been preservation, there's still a kind of aspect of loss. And I think that that's really prevalent. I also found in this research that when it came to people like Maria of Modena, lots of the archival work that I expected to be there, lots of the letters, lots of the household accounts, you know, the sort of the basic day to day things which does survive for lots of royal courts and lots of royal women were just not there. And I do think that there's something, perhaps, I don't want to say more sinister that's happened here, but I think that after the Glorious Revolution, there wasn't a care to keep these documents. Whether it's a sort of act of destruction or just a sort of a negligence of keeping. This is a whole period of history that people wanted forgotten almost as soon as it had happened. So combining the sort of the difficulty of women's work being produced and the sort of difficulty of this sort of period of history not being something that people wanted to acknowledge has meant that very, very little survives in terms of hard evidence, if you like, of the things that these people wrote and the things that these people did. One of the things I really felt, though, when I was working through the evidence which has been left behind is that although there are gaps, there's also enough there that you can really feel these people come through and they become human again through the words they did leave. And, you know, one of the things that I, sort of a mantra that I started saying to myself going through was absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And there will be something there that you can find. This Killigrew painting is a great example of that. It's one work out of, you know, we know that she produced many, many more. Very few survive. But this is one work we have and it tells an entire story about a life that she had as a maid of honor at this court, a relationship she had with her fellow maids, with her mistress, and an environment in which she was able to produce, which tells us a huge amount, really.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's think a bit about this court at the heart of it is Maria of Modena, also known as Mary. And she was given a mission by the Pope as she set sail for England. Let's start with that. What was it?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
Yes, that's right. So Maria of Modena was born an Este princess in Modena. At the end of the 1650, 1658, she was born and she'd led a very, very sheltered, secluded life in Italy. She was just a daughter, as they say, or as they said then she had a younger brother who would inherit the dukedom, and her father died when she was very young. So she was essentially raised by her mother, by her governesses. It was a very sort of female led world that she was in. And she was mostly raised in a convent which was attached to the palace which her mother had founded. And all she had really wanted for as long as she was sort of old enough to have these kinds of desires was to become a nun. And she was absolutely determined from a very, very young age that was her destiny. And nobody really seemed to tell her that was going to be a problem. And perhaps they didn't think it would be. We do have a record that says that her mother considered a marriage before, a diplomatic, dynastic marriage before, but nothing really sort of came of it. But then when it came to 1671 and James, who was Duke of York then, the future James ii, when his wife Anne Hyde died, they started to look around the courts of Europe for a new wife, for a new Duchess of York. James was the heir to the throne. At this time, it was quite clear that Charles II wouldn't have any legitimate children. And James needed to be making these kind of dynastic marriages and he needed to have ideally male heirs. He had two daughters from his first marriage, but they were hopeful for a male heir. So a good friend of his, Lord Peterborough, was sent around the Courts of Europe to find the new Duchess of York. And he saw this painting of a very young girl when he was in Paris, which turned out to be Maria. He saw it at the home of her cousin and he said, this is it, this is it, she's the future of England. That was basically his phrase, the future of England. So he went to Modena and he petitioned for her hand for the Duke of York. Although Laura was initially, who's her mother, Laura was initially sort of in her favor. And so, no, she wants to become a nun. She's not sort of available for marriage. She was then, you know, Laura then received letters from the Pope's nephew saying, I hope that you'll change your mind. This is very important that we have this marriage. Go ahead. And in the end, after Maria continually refused and refused, the Pope himself sent her a letter saying, it's your duty to marry James. It is your duty to bring. This is the sort of the crux of it for her. It's your duty to bring England back to the papal fold. James, at this point, although he wasn't openly a Catholic, it was widely known, it was a sort of open secret that he'd converted to Catholicism. And in marrying this sort of Catholic princess, there was this possibility all of a sudden that they would have Catholic heirs, that the future kings or queens of England might be Catholics. So this was her whole sort of thing. She was only 14 at the time. It's worth pointing out she's very, very young. She was 14 years old. She wanted to become a nun and the Pope had just written her a letter saying, you thought that your calling was for that and I really appreciate your dutiful devotion to God, but actually your calling is elsewhere and outside of. I think you sort of phrased in a sort of outside the virginal cloister, you'll find your destiny sort of thing. So she was sent to England, age 14. She actually left on her 15th birthday. She had this long journey through Italy, through France, and she arrived on the shore of Dover in the middle of winter. And she would never have felt anything quite so cold as that before, I think. And James grabbed her and kissed her and said he was dazzled by her eyes and her beauty, and you just can't imagine what sort of shock this would have been. James was 40 years old and she was 15. When he had been younger, he was reportedly very handsome, but he had terrible smallpox scars. His face had been really quite ravaged by years at sea during the sort of the Protectorate, when he lived abroad, and he'd been part of the navy in France and also in Spain, and he's a complete stranger. I think this is probably the first time in her life that a man had ever touched her who wasn't a doctor. It must have been an extraordinary experience and really distressing.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. I think it's so easy to forget the challenges that these foreign royal brides experienced, the absolute price that was paid by them for their family power, for their status, for dynasties. Do you have a sense of what Maria's emotional state would have been?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
We have very good documentary evidence for this, surprisingly. There are several. Well, there are an awful lot of letters which she wrote, some of which were to the Nuns from the convent that she'd left, and lots of them were to her family and her brother in particular, she wrote to all the time. And these letters have been mostly preserved. The letters in the state archive in Modena, which are to her family, there are hundreds and hundreds of them. They're an most extraordinary treasure trove. The letters to the nuns existed for quite a long time and there's something interesting about that, that the sort of female community saw this benefit of keeping these documents about women. There's something rather beautiful about the way they were preserved there. But in recent years, to do with convents closing and things being moved, these letters are in a kind of strange stasis at the moment. So we're not 100% sure where they are, but we know a lot about her frame of mind at that time because of these letters which survive. So these ones that she wrote to her mother superior, where she talks about the great pain that she's experiencing, she says things like, you know, I try to be happy, but I can't accustom myself to this way of life. And. And we have these for a very long time, really, when she first arrives, that she's trying very, very hard, but she just is miserable. And, you know, she sort of says these heartbreaking things like, you know, God be praised, this is my cross, and this sort of idea that she's trying to see a purpose in this suffering. But for a long time we have these letters where she's saying, I'm really trying, but I hate this.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how was she received at the English Church?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
Not particularly well by a lot of people. So the marriage negotiations had been secret, is probably overstating it, but it was known that Parliament wanted James to marry a Protestant princess, but he stipulated that he wanted to marry a Catholic princess. That that was sort of an absolute deal breaker for him. So lots of these negotiations were kept under wraps and it was very much hoped that. That she would arrive in England before Parliament was recalled after the summer. Now, this didn't happen. The reason they wanted that was because they thought the Parliament would insist on Protestant princess. And they did try to annul the marriage, but by the time they sort of found out, she was on her way and it was too late. But when she arrived, this Catholic princess from Italy, which is probably the worst kind of Catholic she could be because of the associations with the Pope, and indeed there were lots of rumours before her arrival that she was actually the Pope's bastard daughter, and. And there was sort of scurrilous pamphlets that circulated, which said that they hoped she'd be envenomed by the pox and all of these really awful things. And we have this letter actually, from James, the only letter that survives that he wrote to her, which tries to kind of console her just before she arrives. It says that he sent her new chaplain and that he would explain to her so that she wouldn't be afraid about what had been going on. And what he meant by that was all of these things of Parliament trying to annul the marriage, but also these raging bonfires in the streets where effigies of the Pope were being burned. And there was someone, an observer wrote that had she arrived that night, she would almost certainly have been martyred. So she arrives in this very, very febrile atmosphere, and actually she was sort of taken into Whitehall palace, was the first place she arrived in London, and she was actually taken in through a sort of back door so that no one would see her, because they were in fear, really, of what might happen. As time went on, things sort of changed a little bit. Not necessarily in the country at large, although people who met her did warm to her. She was certainly always popular. If you met her, people were always very taken by her beauty and also by her sort of poise, that she was a very impressive woman. But at court, things sort of improved. When she first arrived, she had very few things, like you would expect the new princess to have lots of poems written for them, lots of sort of offerings to them, but she didn't have very much of this in comparison to someone like Catherine of Braganza, Charles II's wife. And I think it is that sort of thing of James having been Catholic and her being a Catholic, this sort of sense of what she symbolized was quite different from what Catherine of Braganza symbolized. But, you know, she worked very, very hard. She'd arrived in this place, she didn't speak the language, she didn't know any of the sort of court manners. You know, she. It was a completely different world, but she worked very, very hard and she learnt. Not only did she learn English very quickly, but she learned how to navigate this completely alien world. And she learned pretty quickly. So I think that as time went on, she became increasingly popular.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The other part about her reception, I suppose we can see reflected in the press at this time, what was her public image and how influential was the press at this point?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
So where the press becomes particularly interesting to think about for her is a little bit later. There are lots and lots of sort of propaganda type pamphlets which circulated, particularly when she did give birth to this baby boy in 1688, which perhaps we would come onto a bit more later. But it's this sort of. It's this moment when the press went absolutely wild, and she was certainly represented very badly in the press in that instance. And often she was kind of portrayed throughout her life, really, in the press, portrayed as this sort of very, very pious, devout, but sort of overly zealous, that I think that there's quite a classic way of Catholics being depicted at this time of kind of the bigot, the zealot, the sort of the overly obsessive. And she certainly came under scrutiny in that sense.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You mentioned that Maria works hard to impress the English. What did she do?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
Maria was an Este princess. She was the daughter of this great Este dynasty, which, although by her generation it was much in decline, it had been this really significant family in the way that these big Italian families happened. You know, that you think of the Medici, you think of the Borgias, the Estes were up there, as I said, by the time she was born, they were much in decline. They'd lost a lot of land, and they were much. Kind of, militarily speaking, they were much weaker than they had been in the past, but they really knew the power of display, the. They really knew the power of splendor, and they were great patrons of the arts. So I think that when Maria arrived, she thought, okay, this is what I'm going to do. You might not like me now, but I'll show you what I can do, and I will use that splendor to my advantage. And I think one of the things that's interesting to think about is what she would have seen when she was there. So she would have been walking through these palaces and on the walls of those palaces, or were much of the sort of the remnants of Charles I's great art collection and also works that Charles II had added to it. And lots of these paintings were actually from this collection from Mantua called the Gonzaga Collection, which Charles I had bought in this sort of enormous purchase, and that had been put together by Maria's ancestor, Isabella d'. Este. And I think there's something about her seeing these paintings, you know, collected by her ancestor in this place where she now lived, and thinking, right, this is how I'm going to prove myself. So as well as sort of learning English, she really decided she started this system of patronage and that took lots of different forms, and we'll sort of come on to that, but in a sort of material way. Another Thing she did was she commissioned this court masque. And she was sort of invoking in that this sort of this English tradition, which, I mean, it had its roots initially in France, but it was a particularly sort of English thing by this point, it's been very popular at the court of Charles I. So she was sort of reinvigorating this. And part of the reason she did that was in order to show off the talents of her new stepdaughters, who were actually extremely close to her in age. So she was 15, Princess Mary, the future Mary II of William and Mary fame, she was 11, and Princess Anne, who'd gone to be Queen Anne, was nine. So they're very close in age. And actually, when James found out that he was. Just a side note, when James found out he was married to Maria, he sent word to Mary that he'd found a playfellow for her. So there's this kind of sense of them being so close in age was very kind of notable. But she saw these princesses, she saw what they were good at, which was singing and dancing, and she commissioned this mask and they took the leading roles. Now, the other people who were part of that mask were other members of the court. Some of them were Maria's maids of honor. So Sarah Churchill, who was Sarah Jennings then, played Mercury in this mask. It was a big part. And then we also had sort of the Duke of Monmouth, who was one of Charles II's illegitimate children. So there's a big sort of court spectacle where everyone's together, but it's really to showcase these young women and what they could do.
- [27:51]
Unknown
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- [28:20]
Tristan Hughes
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- [29:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Isn't that incredible to think of that proximity in age to her stepdaughters, but the way in which she is nevertheless creating opportunities for them? And how was she able to balance the Catholic faith, the sense of mission she'd come with, with assimilation to a Protestant court?
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Dr. Breeze Barrington
In some ways, that was rather taken out of our hands, and it was a real bone of contention. So when the marriage was being negotiated and it was understood that they would live at St James palace, she was told that she would have this wonderful chapel there. It was an incredibly beautiful building. It had been designed and built by Inigo Jones and has been sort of completed for Henrietta Maria. And she had lived there, the wife of Charles I. So Maria was expecting this incredible chapel attached to the palace that she lived in, and when she got there, she was told she couldn't have it. Charles told his wife, Catherine of Braganza, to claim it for herself, even though she lived in Somerset House and really didn't need it. She had her own chapel there. And the reason for this was that it was thought wise not to have Maria worship publicly. There was this fear that if she was seen to be worshipping in this church, if she could appoint Catholic priests, maybe even Italian ones, which would have been terrible, apparently, that there would be a big uprising, really, that they needed to try and kind of, although everyone knew that she was a Catholic princess, they also kind of wanted to not show it too much, to kind of keep it under wraps. So she was denied the chapel and she was basically given a kind of cupboard to pray in. And her mother, who had traveled with her initially, was absolutely furious. And she wrote to the Pope to tell him, and she wrote to Louis XIV to tell him. Louis had been very active in getting this marriage together as well. And letters came back to James and to Charles, and they weren't particularly kind, and they were incredibly angry then with Maria and with Laura, and it sort of. It turned into quite a problem. And it did very little to help what could have been a really beautiful friendship between Catherine and Maria. As these two basically strangers in this land, you know, Catherine of Braganza found it very difficult to acclimatize. She was always treated differently. She had this sort of shame of never having been able to produce an heir, and this could have been a really wonderful thing for them. But this business over, the chapel really was a source of contention, and it was a very, very long time before. It was really not until she became queen, actually, that Maria was able to worship very publicly. So that's sort of One thing that was a problem, the other thing is this kind of sense that she had all the time that she was there to have children, this sort of. And it became a kind of desperation for her at different points when she became pregnant, quite often she miscarried very often. A lot of her children died when they were infants. And, you know, all of the time we have these letters to her brother when she's talking about having had a miscarriage, about her children dying, or about having thought she was pregnant, but maybe she's not. And you just feel all the time this kind of this sense of duty that she has, but this sort of mania she has. There's this one point when she was pregnant and she wrote to her brother that she hadn't left the house for about three months, she hadn't left the palace because she was so afraid of miscarrying that she just stayed, you know, sort of as still as she could. And I mean, she didn't miscarry then. She did have the child, although the child died as an infant. And, you know, you have this sense the whole time that she's just this young woman sort of desperately trying to do what she's been asked to do and finding it very difficult. But all the while, I mean, I think this also shows the great strength of her character because all the while she's working very hard to create a world in which she can feel like she has a place. And she creates that through her relationships with her stepdaughters and through her relationships with her maids of honor, that she's always sort of building something for herself. But just on that sort of note of the children, I mean, when she was just 17 years old, she had already had three miscarriages, had one child, and that child had died. When you sort of think about how much someone of that age was going through. I hope what I've done in this book is show that kind of human side that we might think of royals, even in those days, of having had these sort of gilded lives. But when you actually dig down, when you actually think about the day to day most extraordinary suffering and most extraordinary pressure.
- [33:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. I mean, such emotional and physical cost for one who herself is still in our eyes at least, still a child. Let's talk a little bit about those around her. What sort of people did she surround herself with?
- [33:48]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
So her initial household was decided for her, which was mostly made up of daughters and wives of prominent courtiers who were close to James or close to Charles. And so, for example, Lady Peterborough, the wife of Lord Peterborough, who had arranged the marriage, she was made the groom of the stool and that was sort of the most important post, really. So people were rewarded for kind of good service. Her maids of honor, she clearly took an interest in early on. As I said, Sarah Jennings, who became Sarah Churchill, was a great favourite and she really saw in her a brilliance which is sort of knowing what we do about. Sarah Churchill is undeniable. A formidably intelligent woman and incredibly strong willed and a person who people were always drawn to. All of her relationships that we sort of know about have this sort of sense of her having the most extraordinary charisma and power over people. So I think that Maria was clearly drawn to her very, very early on. As I said, she was cast in this mask, but also in dealings with other maids of honor because there were transgressions. This is still the court of Charles ii and maids of honor were really considered fair game for the men of the court. And they were always trying to seduce them. And the word seduce probably suggests a bit more consent than was always present. But the maids of honour at Maria's court were kind of thought to be cursed, that people commented on what bad luck she had with them because they were always getting pregnant and falling into scandal and ruin. And we have this sort of instance where Sarah Jennings was sort of sent to find out what was going on with one of her maids who'd been having an affair with the Duke of Monmouth. And there's this sort of sense that that amidst all of these sort of chaotic things and things she couldn't choose, she sort of found this friend who was like minded, who she could trust to sort of to help her navigate these other situations. But it's worth saying that Sarah was about the same age as she was. So although at that court I think you grew up quite quickly, there's also the sense that they're just young girls trying to navigate something which is much more really adult than they should have been having to.
- [36:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And we mentioned at the very beginning the work of people like Anne Killigrew and Anne Kingsmill, who of course becomes Anne Finch. How pioneering was their work at this time?
- [36:17]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
So these are figures who were part of Maria's household later on, so they joined her household as maids of honor in around 1681 or 2, something like that. The records aren't all that clear, but they will have been in her household around then and they're much more likely to have been chosen by her. Certainly Anne Killigrew is someone she probably knew. Anne Killigrew Grew up at court. Her father was James II's almoner, which was a very difficult post, really, to hold if you're the sort of Protestant chaplain, essentially, of a Catholic prince. But she was sort of. She will have grown up as part of this household, so it's quite likely that Maria will have chosen her. And Finch, it's a bit less clear how well she will have known her and whether she was chosen or not. But this is a really wonderful moment for Maria because these women arrive at her court and they're obviously gifted straight away. And this is sort of, I think, what Maria's been waiting for. What she'd wanted when she left Modena was to try to recreate this world she left behind in the convent, where women learned together, studied together and were educated. And now she had these women around her, she was sort of able to sort of do something with that. Someone like Anne Killegrew, I think, was incredibly pioneering in the sense that she was so ambitious, not just that she would sort of be successful, but that she would produce extraordinary work. Part of what makes her work so interesting is that she wasn't just a poet and she wasn't just a painter, but she thought of herself as a poet painter. So what I mean by that is that she had read her classics, she knew this sort of phrase, root picture of poiesis, this idea of, you know, as in painting, so in art, and she inhabited that in her work. So lots of her paintings and poems were created to be parallel pieces. There would be commentary on each other's things. She was sort of creating an entirely different sort of way of experiencing art. Very sadly, I don't think any of those companion pieces survive. We have poems and we have paintings, but we can't actually see what it was that she was doing. But it was obviously quite different to what anyone else was doing at that time, and really what anyone else was ever doing. And she really wanted to be taken seriously. We have this very sort of heartbreaking poem that she wrote, I think, probably very early on in her writing career. It's a very angry poem and it talks about the fact that she wrote a poem and circulated it in manuscript and was accused of not having written it and having plagiarized from a man, basically. So there was this sort of sense that she was a woman, she couldn't have done it. So these are sort of barriers that all of these women are having to break through. This sort of. This idea that they're not capable because they're women. And, you know, the Person that she really cites in this poem is Katherine Phillips saying, well, nobody said that Katherine Phillips didn't write her poem, so why are you saying that and about me? And I think what really helped these women was Catherine Phillips. The existence of Catherine Phillips, this great poet of the generation before, who had been taken seriously, who'd been allowed to produce work and who was remembered as this, as she was called the matchless Arinda, this sort of pastoral name. And she'd created this circle of friendship amongst women who were part of a coterie, who wrote to each other, who circulated poems. And I think this is really at the heart of how people like Anne Killegrew and Anne Finch were able to produce was they too, had this female community where they weren't going to accuse each other of not writing their own work. And they had Maria at the centre who was championing them. Somebody like Anne Finch, though she found it very difficult. Well, to say she found it difficult is perhaps inaccurate. But she was very wary of. Of putting her name to her work much, much later in her life, really in the sort of early 18th century, long after the Court of Maria was over, she then put her name to her works and actually put them out there properly. But she was clearly already thought highly of because it was people like Alexandra Pope who really pushed her to have her work published. But one of the things that's touching about that work she later produced is that she references Maria's caught in it. She often sort of has these poems where she writes about how what a special time that was and being sort of part of that community of women.
- [40:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
For some of these women, like Sarah Churchill and Anne Finch, though in different ways, there was a question to be asked about the relationship between marriage and freedom. What were the possible costs of marriage for such women and how did they resolve this question?
- [41:04]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
Yes, Anne Finch reluctantly married. It's sort of recorded that she said no a number of times to the proposals of Heneage Finch, but she did eventually marry him and they had a very happy marriage. But what's sort of at the heart of Anne Finch's marriage, and at the heart of Sarah Churchill's marriage too, is a kind of equality that we might not have expected to find. So somebody like Hennage Finch was a huge supporter of Fan Finch's talent and he was really, really proud of her as a poet. And several of her poems are addressed to him and sort of talk about the fact that he'd asked her to write it for him. Also, later in life, when they were both living in A sort of political exile. After the Glorious Revolution, he copied out her works and after her death he edited her works. When we were talking earlier about this idea of what survives, I mean, Hannish Fincher is someone who really tried to keep. Keep her legacy alive. He was incredibly proud. And Sarah Churchill, she also sort of existed in a kind of equality with John Churchill, her husband. It was a marriage of minds. I think they both saw in each other a kind of brilliance and a kind of ambition, which meant they knew they'd be able to kind of make it together. John Churchill had been encouraged to marry someone much richer when he'd been younger. Both of them came from quite impoverished families, although they were sort of similar level of social standing and really neither of the families wanted them to marry. But this connection of minds and this connection of ambitions, I think that they both knew that they'd make something of themselves together and that they were an incredibly powerful couple together. So I think in the marriages, the ones that we sort of see being successful and see these women being able to do things, the husband is understanding of that. We also should say that, you know, these more educated women, people like Anne Finch, were able to do that because they also had had enlightened fathers who'd left money for their education or had made an effort to make sure they were educated alongside their brothers. It was quite rare for women at that time to have education at all. So I think that although these women were groundbreaking and they were brilliant, they also couldn't have done it on their own because it just wasn't a time that allowed for.
- [43:23]
Unknown
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- [44:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In 1685, Charles died and James was proclaimed king immediately. What hung in the balance for Maria and James on their accession?
- [44:17]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
I think everybody was surprised by how accepted James was as king. Initially. They'd had an extremely difficult run up to it. So they'd been in exile on two different occasions because of plots, whether real or imagined. And the first one, the Popish plot, it was called, where it's quite a sort of famous, where Titus Oates came forward with a completely fabricated plot that he said he'd discovered about this sort of idea that a huge Catholic Uprising, which was sort of aimed at killing Charles II and would sort of massacre Protestants in the streets. And it was this enormous thing. It really, really blew up. I mean, if we think about conspiracy theories and fake news now, this was an absolutely terrifying example of that. And people in Maria's household were executed as traitors, which means they were hung, drawn and quartered for things they hadn't done. It was a really, really awful time for Catholics in England. And so at this point, they were sent into exile in this sort of hope that if they weren't physically there, people would calm down a bit and that all of this would go away. And then they came back, and then it all sort of reared up again and they were sent back again. So they've been living away a lot. And then, you know, when they came back, there was this sort of other plot against them, the Rye House plot, and they had a really unstable lead up to it. So I think everybody thought that when Charles died, they'd be booted out again. And even Charles thought this. That he was sort of reported to say that, you know, when I'm gone, I think my brother will have to go on his travels again, or something along those lines. And he sort of lived his life really after the Restoration, really feeling that there was this sense that nobody wanted James to be king. There's this quote where James was telling Charles not to walk through the park without a guard, because he used to like to go around St. James park just with his spaniels. He wanted to be accessible to his people. And James said, you mustn't do this. It's too terrible, it's too dangerous. And Charles said, you know, trust me, James, no one will kill me to make you king. That there was this constant feeling that it wouldn't go well. But remarkably, he was proclaimed king. And he gave a speech before Parliament, sort of promising that everything was going to be okay, he wasn't going to change anything. And Parliament thought, well, that sounds great. They gave him a huge allowance, much bigger than they'd given to Charles, and everyone seemed contented, and they had this sort of wonderful coronation, and initially it really seemed like things were going to be okay. So I think there were stunned that things went downhill really very quickly. He was only king for three years, and it's unsurprising in a way, that happened because James always had this sort of fundamental absolutist tendency, and he'd really learned all the wrong lessons from his father's execution. He, you know, he sort of thought anyone who disagreed with him, was against him, was an enemy. He was incredibly anti Parliament, partly because he didn't think he should have to ask Parliament for anything, but also because Parliament had killed his father, there was this sort of sense that they were automatically against him, and so he was welcomed. He also went into it, really with the wrong attitude, if you like. And a sort of testament to that, or a good example of that, is the Monmouth rebellion, which happened very, very early on when he was made king, where the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles ii, who was much loved in the nation and much loved at court, led a rebellion to take the crown, essentially. Although he said that wasn't what his plan was, but it was essentially to use up the throne and take the crown, but people didn't come out for him. And it was this kind of moment where people thought, no, actually, we'll give James a go. I think they weren't ready for a potential second civil war for a start, and they really seemed to believe that this might go okay. So that was the kind of initial moment where he found he was accepted. But rather than think, oh, okay, people are on my side, he led what became known as the bloody Assizers, where anyone who had even sort of whispered any help or agreement with the rebellion was basically rounded up and executed. And it was exceptionally violent and it was exceptionally bloody. And I think this was really the first big mistake that he made, but it was a testament to how he was going to rule as king. And, yes, we can see in that the sort of the foundations of the problems.
- [49:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
As you say, it's a reign that only lasts three years, and perhaps the pivotal moment, depending on what you think is the baby in the bedpan scandal that erupts after the birth of James and Maria's son. What is the scandal?
- [49:21]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
This is a very interesting moment in 1688, because, as I said before, Maria had had a number of children and she'd had even more pregnancies, but at this point, she didn't have any living children at all. And it had been a few years since she had been pregnant as well. So there were lots of rumours, lots of whispers that she was past it. You know, she was almost 30 and she couldn't, you know, that was it. And I think she probably sort of worried about it too, because, you know, she really felt that this was her duty. She was, you know, that's the whole reason she'd been in England, was to have this Catholic air and to bring England back to the papal fold. So she went to Bath to take the waters in 1687, and she became pregnant quite quickly afterwards. Now, there's a very kind of reasonable explanation for that, which is that when James first became king, they spent much less time together, and after she took the waters, they started to spend more time together. Logical conclusion is that rather than that she was sort of suddenly barren because she was approaching her 30s, but this pregnancy was treated with great suspicion because of these years in between. And she was monitored all the time. I mean, throughout her life, her pregnancies were always sort of reported on and how her body looked and all of these different ways that she was sort of stared at and sort of investigated, if you like. Her body became this topic of speculation, but it really went absolutely wild at this time, where rumours were going around that she wasn't really pregnant, that she'd miscarried or that she'd never been pregnant in the first place, that it was all a big ruse. People were talking about whether or not they touched her stomach and felt it move, and people were trying to touch her stomach all the time. And when she refused to let people see her naked or to let them touch her, that was taken as proof that she wasn't. That it was all fake. And you can only really imagine how she would have felt, you know, this incredibly sort of vulnerable time where she also is desperate to have this child. She's lost children before, she has no living children, and all of a sudden everyone is just crowding around her. She knows they don't wish her well. There's a real sense at this time that she's completely aware of what everyone is saying and she's finding the rumours incredibly upsetting and completely ridiculous. She's just always being looked at. So I think this must have been a really, really tense time for her. She then gives birth to this child, and I think everybody knew, really, that the birth would be contested. So James made sure that there were a lot of witnesses. Now, all royal births were witnessed. That was normal. They needed to kind of see that it was, see the child be born, see that it was a legitimate process, et cetera. But this was kind of off the scale. There were nearly 80 people in that room when she gave birth and really, like, pressing in around her. So there was this sort of point when she said to James, I can't bear to have all of these men looking at me. And he covered her face with his wig so she wouldn't have to see them. But, you know, the rest of the her is all on display. She has these sort of Key members of Parliament, all of these men just at the end of her bed, just watching her give birth. And even then, even with all of these witnesses, this rumor started to circulate that the baby that they were calling the Prince, because it had been a boy, the baby they were calling this new prince, this new heir to the throne, hadn't really been born at all, but had been smuggled into the bed in a bedpan. So she had had this bedpan in the bed because it was a cold day and it was seen by lots of witnesses as being full of hot coals. But that became the rumour that she'd given birth. Either she hadn't given birth at all, or else that she'd given birth to a girl and substituted it with this boy. This really, like, took hold. Baby in the bed. Panmouth and the people who were in that room that day were all asked to give accounts and to give testimony of what they saw. And they were asked this over and over again. There was one woman there called Margaret Dawson, who had been part of her household when she arrived. She was lady of the Bedchamber. She had also been lady of the Bedchamber to Anne Hyde. So she'd seen all of James's children, every single one of his children be born, what legitimate children, that is. And she was asked, you know, decades later, when she was a very, very old woman, people would go to her and ask her again what she saw, officially and unofficially. That this kind of continued to be contested. And I think, you know, if Maria is remembered today, it's probably mostly because of this incident, this baby in the bedpan. But it should also be noted that this wasn't actually the first time this rumour had happened, that when she had been pregnant before, some people started a similar sort of rumour, but then she did miscarry, and so they didn't need to carry it out. But her mother was visiting at that time and they said, oh, the mother's brought a fake baby, and, you know, all of these things. So this was really geared against her right from the beginning. And the birth of this boy, this Catholic prince in this Protestant country was the catalyst. It wasn't the cause. There were lots of things that led up to it, but it was the catalyst, really, of the Glorious Revolution before that. I think that people might have let him be a bit more, because his heirs were still Protestants. There was still Mary, there was still Anne. So the sense that oft it was only going to be for his reign, but as soon as there was a boy Everything changed.
- [54:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's terrible to hear of the extreme humiliation, the abusive situation of having 80 people in the room whilst you give birth, and then these preposterous damaging rumors. I mean, how could a baby even fit in a bedpan for a start? So I wonder what we know as we come to an end about how Maria felt in 1688 after all this, as she had to flee England as the so called Glorious Revolution takes place, and also what that means for her women.
- [55:25]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
By this time in 1688, her life is very different, not just because she's Queen, but also because her relationships with people are very, very different. The women immediately around her. So her maids of honour that we were talking about, Anne Killigrew, Anne Finch, Sarah Churchill. Anne Killigrew died in 1685, the same year as Charles II. She was only 25, she died of smallpox and she was one of several very brilliant women who died that year. So Anne Wharton was another poet who was adjacent to the court, she died that same year. And Mary Evelyn, the daughter of John Evelyn, who was also adjacent to the court, they all died in 1685. Very, very young women in their 20s. Anne Finch had married and although her husband, Henege had a high position in the Court, she wasn't sort of officially part of the household anymore. So they still spend time together, but it wasn't in the same sort of capacity. And Anne had different duties. But the relationships which I think are important to say were remarkably different were with her stepdaughters and with Sarah Churchill. Mary had married William of Orange also when she had been 15, very, very unwillingly. And so she had been living in Holland for the last 10 years or so, really, when it came to 1688. And she had really fundamentally changed in her character, but also in her relationship to Maria. The same can be said for Anne, who, although married, had stayed at the court and she too was really poisoned against Maria and James by this point. So something really shifted and we don't know exactly when and we don't know exactly how, but it seems, I think religion is going to be at the heart of that. They were both very nervous about the idea of the future of England as a Catholic country, but I think also they were probably quite deliberately poisoned against them. So I think William probably did quite a lot of that with Mary and I think that Sarah Churchill did a lot of that with Anne, amongst other people. It seems quite clear that Anne was at least one of the first, if not the beginner of the baby in the bedpan myth. She certainly Circulated it a lot. And she was deliberately not there at the birth so she wouldn't have to give testimony. So she was very much, kind of, when we sort of saw these young princesses together who were acting in plays and spending all of their time together and being very, very close in friendship, you know, when Mary left, she and Maria were in tears because they hated having to part from each other. This really, really close relationship was completely cracked and the relationship with Sarah Churchill was completely cracked. So along the way, these relationships have completely shifted and Maria was very much alone by that point and was putting her trust in the wrong people who didn't really mean her. Well, I think that that's one of the things that has struck me about this great event, this glorious revolution, which is the sort of foundation of modern democracy, if you like, this incredibly significant political moment that, when I came to research, became clear that it was actually had a whole other story. It was the family, you know, William was James's nephew, Mary was his daughter, that actually this is a very personal. This is a family which is completely fractured. And so what Maria must have been feeling at that point, having given birth to this child in this way, had all of these rumours about her, rumours circulated by her stepchildren, by these girls, these women who she's grown up loving, it must have been absolutely heartbreaking. And the other thing to remember is that for everyone concerned, this is a really tumultuous thing that's happened. From the point of view of Maria and James, they'll have remembered the execution of Charles I. The last time there was a revolution, it resulted in the death of King. So they'll have been quite afraid of what their future looked like. But equally, on the other side, if this revolution didn't work, they'll have remembered the Bloody Assizes and they will also have remembered what Charles II did when he came back and dug up Cromwell's body and had it hung, drawn and quartered after his death and rounded up the other people who'd signed the death warrant of Charles I. So no one really knows at this point who's going to win or lose. But it's, you know, it's very personal, it's a family saga and it has the potential to be incredibly violent and incredibly bloody for either side.
- [59:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you so much for the perspective you've brought, because even in that answer alone, we see how very different things look when you consider a female point of view. It completely upends, recasts our version of history. You know, these great political events are family sagas as much as anything else. Thank you so much for the insight you've brought into the women of the Restoration court, and very best of luck with your book the Greatest.
- [60:26]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
Thank you so much. It's been great being on the podcast. Thank you.
- [60:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at Not Just Just the tutors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.
- [61:05]
Dr. Breeze Barrington
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Unknown
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