Some eighteen months after the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the award-winning author Hilary Mantel published an article called “Royal Bodies” in the London Review of Books. It was in part about Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn, and Princess Diana, but some of it focused on the Duchess of Cambridge, then pregnant with her first child. Mantel noted that,

Kate seems to have been selected for her role as princess because she was irreproachable: … She appears precision made. She seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother with no messy deviation … Once she gets over [her morning sickness], the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.Footnote 1

Mantel’s chief point was to note the way in which the bodies of royal women have been instrumentalised by the monarchy and its observers. The Daily Mail condemned Mantel for creating a “venomous attack” on the Duchess, but, as the author patiently explained, the passages the journalists objected to were describing the perception of her that had actually been established in the tabloid press.

Of course, Middleton was not the first royal woman to be defined through her physical looks or perceived fecundity. This volume testifies to the importance of the dynastic womb in England’s history and to the triumphs and tragedies of its vacillations, but it seems to me that in her focus on the female royal body, Mantel brings a fresh approach to how the discourse surrounding royalty works. “A compulsion to comment” is how Mantel puts it: “one is compelled to look at them, to ask what they are made of, and is their substance the same as ours.”Footnote 2 This chapter examines the “compulsion to comment” felt by late seventeenth-century individuals about the body and looks of Mary Beatrice of Modena, the Catholic queen consort of the Catholic James II & VII.Footnote 3 Mary Beatrice’s contemporaries were obsessed with her physicality. Her beauty, her fecundity, and her religion preoccupied their writings because, in their eyes, Mary Beatrice’s body was first and foremost a Catholic body.

The fact that Mary Beatrice’s husband was a Catholic king of a Protestant nation made the fecund body of the Queen a kind of religious incendiary device, a ticking time-bomb that might explode and destroy the spiritual fabric of the Stuart kingdoms. Even though historians tend to relegate her to the background of the events of the Orange coup d’état of 1688, Mary Beatrice secured her place in English history through her body’s ability to produce a son—the (un)wanted Catholic heir of James II.

Besides giving a potted biography of Mary Beatrice’s little-known life, this chapter explores two things that are linked to the physical attributes of a queen consort: beauty and fertility. Throughout her life, Mary Beatrice was the recipient of flattering poems, odes, and dedications. Seventeenth-century court poetry—and especially royal panegyrics—had distinct conventions with which contemporary audiences would have been familiar. These conventions shaped the interpretations and expectations of this poetry, and effusive praise of Mary Beatrice’s beauty was routine and often used in a poet’s quest for patronage. Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and Anne Killigrew were among the many poets of the age who sought Mary Beatrice’s patronage through the exuberant versification of her physical charms.Footnote 4 In doing so, of course, the body fetishized by a poetic voice (either male or female) does not have a voice of its own; the world of making words and texts was not its own. Even when she was allegorized and lauded in congratulatory terms, Mary Beatrice’s representation depended largely on the conceptualization that her body, like Kate Middleton’s, was “precision-made.”Footnote 5

Mary Beatrice herself lacked complete control of her images and depictions. This is apparent in the cruel representations of her that were produced during her period as queen consort (1685–1688) and especially so in the months surrounding the birth of her son James, the Prince of Wales. The “compulsion to comment” about the Queen’s body reached a fever pitch in 1688 as Mary Beatrice herself disappeared from view to be replaced merely by her great belly. As a queen consort, Mary Beatrice was predominantly defined by and through her belly. Pamphlets, broadsheets, songs and ballads, letters and dispatches scrutinized her body for signs. No other queen consort’s body, I think, underwent more obsessive, pernickety, and public observation, than that of Mary Beatrice of Modena, and certainly no other queen consort had a body so much discussed, praised, adored, desired, lampooned, and derided than she.Footnote 6

Duchess, Queen, and Dowager: A Life in Miniature

Mary Beatrice of Modena, the second wife of James, Duke of York was born Maria Beatrice Anna Margherita Isabella d’Este on 5 October 1658 at the Palazzo Ducale, Modena, Italy. She was the only daughter of Alfonso IV, Duke of Modena (1634–1662), and his wife Laura Martinozzi (1639–1687). A quiet girl of devout religious conviction, Mary Beatrice was educated by nuns and had intended to enter a convent. Her life drastically changed when, in the summer of 1672, her name was added to the list of possible brides for James, Duke of York, whose first wife, Anne Hyde, had died in 1671.

After protracted negotiations, the wedding was celebrated in proxy on 20 September 1673 in Modena. Five days later, on her fifteenth birthday, Mary Beatrice set out for England, arriving at Dover on 21 November. James was already 40 years old, and there were many reasons to expect that the marriage would prove a failure. Apart from the great difference in age and background, the marriage had been hastily arranged and, more seriously, had provoked bitter hostility in England. James’s unpopularity increased with what proved to be a conspicuously successful and happy marriage to this Italian Catholic princess who, rumour had it, was the Pope’s own daughter. The English tradition of anti-Catholicism was a lethal weapon in the propaganda arsenal against the Stuarts, and the presence of two Roman Catholic women at the centre of the royal court—Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II, and Mary Beatrice of Modena—inflamed tensions throughout England where, after all, the association of Catholicism with foreign threats to national independence had been a touchstone of English political culture since the age of Elizabeth I.Footnote 7

Mary Beatrice quickly settled into her new life at the English court and found genuine happiness with her husband. One of her early letters home explains how she found her contentment in James:

I cannot accustom myself to this state of life to which, you know, I have always been averse … Nevertheless, the Duke is a very good man. He has the holy fear of God and is very kind to me and would do anything to show it; he is firm and steady in our holy religion (which he professes as a good Catholic) that he would not change it for anything in the world.Footnote 8

Charles II and Queen Catherine put her at her ease and (at first) she got on well with her two stepdaughters, Mary and Anne, the offspring of James’s first wife, Anne Hyde. The new Duchess of York carried out her religious devotions in private, although she was permitted a few Catholic priests to support her spiritual needs. This was never to be an issue for Mary Beatrice who, in spite of her deep commitment to her faith, rarely attempted to proselytize her Catholicism. Unlike James, whose conversion to the Roman church made him a zealous advocate of the faith, Mary Beatrice had an altogether more tranquil and holistic acceptance of her religion and tended to eschew the outward trappings of Catholicism. Hers was a conventional faith and, “at heart she remained the good Catholic girl who wanted to retreat from the world to the simple certainties of the convent.”Footnote 9 But Mary Beatrice was wise enough to understand how divisive her faith could appear to the English. When, for instance, her mother, the Duchess of Modena, visited England in 1673 amongst great pomp and ceremony, London erupted in protests against the Duchess’s popery and her perceived destructive influence upon the King and the Duke of York. Subsequent visits by the Duchess were clandestine affairs, but even this made Mary Beatrice uncomfortable, and she insisted that thereafter she would only meet her mother on continental soil to avoid further anti-Catholic flare-ups in England. She avoided any involvement in public affairs while her husband remained Duke of York and throughout her tenure as James’s Queen, as Andrew Barclay has shown, she rarely tried to influence his policies.Footnote 10 We know of only one occasion in which Mary, as queen consort, intervened in court politics; this occurred in 1686 when she ordered James to banish Catherine Sedley, his Protestant mistress and her former maid of honour, from court. The Protestant nobles who had hoped to use Sedley in the advancement of the cause of the reformed church at James’s court were thunderstruck and appealed to the King, but Mary, with her cohort of priests, stood firm until Sedley was despatched to Ireland.Footnote 11

Mary Beatrice was a highly educated woman, well learned in letters, music, and art; she spoke several languages, including a confident Latin, and mastered English quickly and thoroughly. There is no doubt that she was the best-educated English queen since Elizabeth I. Her refined taste in Italianate art and music, architecture, and gardens was a reflection of her continental upbringing, and she was an active patron of the arts during her time in England. Although political satires depicted her fervently at prayer, Mary Beatrice was in fact very present at Court, and through her patronage of women artists and writers, she created the closest thing England ever had to a society of précieuses. She encouraged the performance of plays, masques, and operas, and bestowed on the English Court the sense of being part of the wider world of baroque culture.Footnote 12

None of this mattered to the average Englishman, of course, who simply saw Mary Beatrice as a Catholic who meddled in politics and sought to advance Catholicism. She and James weathered the trials of the brutish Popish Plot of 1678 and of the so-called Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681, which sought—but failed—to remove James from the succession due to his Catholicism. Amidst the crisis, writing to her brother, now Duke of Modena, Mary Beatrice lamented that “There are so many intrigues, bogus plots and accusations … I grieve for the extremes of suffering of the poor Catholics. The state of Catholics is pitiable. I have been forced to dismiss all the English Catholics in my household.”Footnote 13 On several occasions, Mary Beatrice and James found it expedient to remove themselves from England and went to live in Belgium (at Charles II’s command) and Scotland, where she felt some respite against the constant barraging she received in London.Footnote 14 Although later historians (especially Scots Presbyterians) depicted James’s tenure in Scotland as a reign of terror, it was not felt that way at the time—either in Scotland or in England. He governed Scotland well, no small feat given how much the nation was set against his faith; but by 1682, as Charles II recognised, “Scotland was entirely in [the Duke’s] dependence.”Footnote 15

There was no doubt that Mary Beatrice was fertile. The number and frequency of her pregnancies during the first twelve years of her marriage bear comparison with the more infamous fecundity of her younger stepdaughter, Anne: Mary Beatrice conceived eight times, with four live births, although none survived past the age of four. A rare moment of personal reflection, found in a letter to Sister Mary Laura of the Convent of the Visitation in Modena, highlights the sadness she experienced with each infant death:

It comforts me to think that I have more angels to pray for me and I should feel favoured that whereas other women bear children for this world, I have given all mine to God … He will one day comfort me by giving me a male child who shall live.Footnote 16

Mary Beatrice was therefore childless when she became queen. Moreover, at the time of her accession, the Stuarts themselves were a fractured family. Mary Beatrice had retained a very good relationship with her eldest stepdaughter Mary, who had married the dour Protestant William of Orange, a grandson of Charles I. In her many letters to her eldest stepdaughter, Mary Beatrice addressed her beloved Mary of Orange with the nickname “Lemon,” and writing to James she noted, “I hold her in much affection, and she is really a Princess of great merit.”Footnote 17 Mary, however, was under the sway not only of her ambitious husband but also of her spiteful younger sister, Anne, whose own marriage to a Protestant prince––the dull if dutiful George of Denmark––had galvanised her Anglican zeal. Anne hated Mary Beatrice and did all she could to damage her. A staunch Protestant, manically committed to the Church of England, Anne (wrongly) blamed her Italian stepmother for her father’s religious zeal.Footnote 18 What followed—and what has been wrongly termed ‘The Glorious Revolution’—was, essentially, a nasty dispute within the Stuart royal family in which the senior members, the Catholic James II and Mary Beatrice, were opposed by Anne, Mary, and William of Orange—the younger, Protestant members.Footnote 19

James II and Mary Beatrice ascended to the thrones of the Stuart kingdoms when Charles II died on 6 February 1685. They attended mass in public for the first time on 15 February 1685. Despite the fact that it was a Protestant ceremony, Mary Beatrice was crowned alongside her husband in Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1685, becoming the first consort since 1603 to participate in a coronation. No English queen consort in living memory had conformed to the Church of England, but what made Mary Beatrice’s position different was that her husband also openly acknowledged that he was a Catholic. In fact, James II and Mary Beatrice were the first Stuart King and Queen to have (overtly) shared a faith.

In late November 1687, the first rumours of the Queen’s latest pregnancy began to circulate. An official announcement confirming the fact was made on 23 December. A day of thanksgiving was held on 15 January 1688. Early in the summer, on 10 June, Mary Beatrice bore a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, the Prince of Wales, in what is perhaps the best-documented royal nativity in history. The birth of a Catholic heir coincided with James’s attempts to create religious toleration in England. It is misleading to see his policies as a desire to ‘establish’ Catholicism in England; he wanted only to ensure its survival by putting his fellow Catholics on an equal footing with members of the Church of England. But the arrival of a Catholic infant heir left James’s Protestant subjects reeling, and they quickly set in motion events that altered the course of English history. The so-called Warming-Pan Scandal—in which Protestant propaganda claimed that Mary Beatrice’s ‘child’ was an imposter, slipped into her bed to make it appear that she had given birth—is the one incident for which Mary Beatrice is popularly known.Footnote 20 It is now widely regarded as a fallacy, and no serious historian entertains the claim that Mary deceived the world with a warming-pan. At the time, however, the growth of anti-Catholicism and the Protestant predisposition to refuse to recognise a Catholic heir meant that the English political leaders could delude themselves and the nation into accepting the crude fiction that Mary Beatrice’s child was a fraud. Importantly, the rumours that this baby prince was an impostor were widely believed; it led to a number of noblemen and clergyman of the Church of England to decide that they were no longer going to tolerate the idea of having a Catholic monarch in a Protestant nation, with an established, Protestant church—of which the monarch was the supreme governor. They decided therefore to invite William of Orange to liberate England from James’s popish tyranny.

On 5 November 1688, William landed in Torbay in Devon, claiming that he was arriving to protect English liberties and law from Catholic absolutism. Over the course of the following weeks, from November to December 1688, William made progress across the south of England, finally arriving in London on 10 December. In the middle of December 1688, James fled with Mary Beatrice and her barely six-month-old child to France.Footnote 21 James’s flight into exile was taken by his enemies to mean that he had abdicated the throne, and parliament quickly invited William of Orange to ascend the throne alongside his wife, Mary, as joint monarchs. James and Mary Beatrice never set foot in England again.

Louis XIV allowed the exiled King and Queen to use his palace at St Germain-en-Laye.Footnote 22 It was there in June 1692 that Mary Beatrice gave birth to her final child, a daughter, Louise-Maria. James II died on 5 September 1701 and Mary Beatrice became his sole executor and the guardian of their son. For the next five years she was, in Jacobite eyes, the de jure regent of England, Scotland, and Ireland until, on 10 June 1706, James Stuart (James VIII & III to the Jacobites) came of age. Mary Beatrice’s public role then shrank to that of the matriarchal figurehead presiding over the court at St Germain, which, even from a Jacobite point of view, was facing a period of terminal decline. She died of cancer at the Château de St Germain on 26 April 1718; her tomb at the Convent of Chaillot was destroyed, along with the other Stuart tombs, during the French Revolution.

Compulsion to Comment: The Phoenix Queen

It is hard not to fall in love with Mary Beatrice of Modena. Her many portraits declare her to have been a strikingly beautiful woman in an age of many great beauties (Fig. 17.1).Footnote 23 Slim, graceful, and elegant, her portraits compare well with contemporary court lovelies—the Clevelands, the Gwynns, the Richmonds, and the de Kéroualles. There is a dreaminess about her perfectly formed face and no small touch of sensuousness too, but she appears more alert than the ‘sleepy-eyed’ erotic court ladies of the School of Lely. Of course, in seventeenth-century Neoplatonic thought, beauty was not simply an external pleasure—it was a reflection of inner ‘virtue’ and celebrated for its divine purity. “To possess beauty,” writes Brett Dolman, “was to own a bit of paradise [which is why] in portraiture … women appear as classical goddesses.”Footnote 24

Fig. 17.1
figure 1

Print by John Smith, after an oil painting by Godfrey Kneller, of Mary Beatrice of Modena in her coronation robes (c.1685). Rijksmuseum RP-P-OB-32.789.

Full size image

It was widely agreed that Mary Beatrice was one of the great beauties of the age. The Earl of Peterborough found her to be “Tall and admirably shaped; her complexion was of the last degree of fairness, her hair black as jet; so were her eyebrows and her eyes, but the latter so full of light and sweetness, as they did dazzle and charm too.”Footnote 25 Viscount Conway thought that she was “a proper handsome Lady, she hath very good eyes, very good features, and a very good complexion,” and, seeing her in Cambridge, Samuel Newton found that she was, “a very handsome, gracious looking person, pretty tall, not very big, black eyed.”Footnote 26 Everyone noticed Mary Beatrice’s “radiant eyes” whose “irrestless flame / Strikes envy dumb and keeps sedition tame.”Footnote 27 At the time of her arrival in England, the poet Edmund Waller paid tribute to her obvious charms: “Thus we write then: your brighter eyes inspire / A nobler flame, and raise our genius higher.”Footnote 28

Royal panegyrists were initially wary about praising Mary Beatrice when she landed in England in 1673. Catherine of Braganza had been welcomed with twenty-two poems, but only five were published to welcome Mary Beatrice. In fact, instead of panegyric, the fifteen-year-old Duchess of York’s arrival prompted a wave of anti-Catholic satire in which it was hoped she would quickly “be envenom’d with the pox” and that rather “Than in false hopes of being once a queen,” she should “Die before twenty, rot before sixteen.”Footnote 29 The famous satirical poem Signior Dildo (perhaps by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochford) was a scurrilous slur not only on Charles II’s court, but also on a selection of aristocratic women who frequented it, and focused especially on Mary Beatrice for bringing unspeakable Italian-Catholic vices into England:Verse

Verse You Ladies all of merry England Who have been to kiss the Dutchess’s Hand, Pray, did you lately observe in the Show A Noble Italian call’d Signior Dildo? This Signior was one of her Highness’s Train, And helpt to conduct her over the Main; But now she cries out, to the Duke I will go, I have no more need of Signior Dildo.Footnote

For the latest thoughts on the attribution of the poem and its edited text, see: Keith Walker and Nicholas Fisher, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and Lucina’s Rape (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 145–159.

Lusty, young, and fertile, an enthusiastic Mary Beatrice is shown in the satire newly awakened to the delights of sexual intercourse as she throws away her Italianate sex-aid in pursuit of the ‘real thing’. As a satire, Signior Dildo fanned the propaganda campaign against the Modena marriage, the succession of James, and any children he and Mary Beatrice might have, and the poem makes it clear that, amidst the endemic anti-Catholic feelings of the age, fear of Mary Beatrice’s youthful sexual energy and fertility and the resultant arrival of a Catholic heir to the House of Stuart were of paramount concern.

Whereas in 1662 poets avoided alluding to Catherine of Braganza’s faith, throughout the early 1670s, Mary Beatrice’s Catholicism informed her every representation. But it is interesting to observe that as time wore on, and it became clear that Queen Catherine would produce no children for Charles II, the written images of Mary Beatrice changed, in subtle ways, towards the positive. By 1678, the potential of her queenly fertility prompted English Catholic authors and Catholic sympathisers to look ahead and see in Mary Beatrice’s body a promising Catholic future. By the time of Mary Beatrice’s coronation in 1685, images of her as England’s beautiful Queen of Hearts had become embedded in official courtly propaganda.

Of course, panegyrists found all queen consorts beautiful (that was the chief task of their calling, after all) and that the beauty-theme had served each of the Stuart queens’ image-making very well. Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria, and Catherine of Braganza had all been eulogised in honeyed words for their extremes of power and beauty to good effect, but I suggest that none enjoyed the benefits of the beauty-panegyric more than Mary Beatrice of Modena. In fact, she received more direct praise for her beauty than any other Stuart consort. During her tenure as queen, writers realised that in praising Mary’s beauty, they could create through her a positive image of James II’s reign, whilst navigating around the awkward problem of her Catholicism. John Dryden—the Poet Laureate, Catholic convert, and staunch defender of the Stuart dynasty—described Mary Beatrice as nothing less than “Our phoenix queen”; she was a mythical fire bird, symbolic of the sun and signifier of divine royalty, nobility and (Stuart) rebirth:Verse

Verse Our Phenix Queen was portrai’d too so bright, Beauty alone could Beauty take so right: Her Dress, her Shape, her matchless Grace, Were all observ’d, as well as heav’nly Face.Footnote

John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, Volume III: Poems, 1685–1692, ed. Earl Miner and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 113.

Dryden’s opera Albion and Albanius, which was published soon after Mary Beatrice’s accession, maintained a similar theme: it depicted personifications of a miserable London, and a barren Thames enchained and desolate until, phoenix-like, Mary Beatrice, accompanied by the Graces, appeared and released them from their captivity with a gesture of her hand. Dryden’s Mary Beatrice was England’s emancipator, and the radiance of her beauty was the nation’s treasure. Dryden’s depiction of the Queen as the English Venus soon started a trend, and between 1685 and early 1688, Mary Beatrice appeared in no less than twenty-two panegyrics and three odes. To think of this explosion in panegyrics as mere flattery would be to underestimate their political acumen: in these texts, Mary Beatrice was deliberately separated from her queenly predecessors, and the poems and other writings made no allusion to her Catholic predecessors as queen consort. Mary Beatrice surpassed these queens and was compared instead with a rich range of classical goddesses, but no poets linked her with Catholic consorts from England’s history.

The most erudite and elegant expression of the Queen’s beauty motif was found in Aphra Behn’s lengthy and exuberant ode A pindarick poem on the happy coronation of his most sacred majesty James II and his illustrious consort Queen Mary (1685), in which Mary Beatrice’s loveliness was analysed in-depth for its cause and effect. Mary Beatrice was an “inchanting Ravisher,” whose “Angel Eyes, and Voice, so conqu’ring are.”Footnote 32 At nearly a thousand lines, Behn’s baroquely hyperbolic magnus opus has its eyes fixed intensely on the body of the new queen who, as Venus, is there to draw the gaze and solicit desire. To ensure that the image works, Behn’s ode cast James II as “the rough stern hero,” a lover of superhuman prowess that only his beautiful goddess-queen can withstand and satisfy. It is Mary Beatrice’s body that holds the power though—over her husband and, ultimately, over England too. In her portraits, Mary Beatrice was often shown grasping a lock of hair that falls over her naked shoulder, a motif that directly references Renaissance depictions of Venus at her toilette. The analogy with Venus, goddess of desire and procreation, was an important one. As queen consort her duty was to produce an heir, and her portraiture re-confirms that her potential to be a mother was still important.Footnote 33

Later, following her exile from England, Mary Beatrice’s detractors accused the Queen of deliberately weaponising her beauty in order to disarm and confound her critics; her beauty, it was argued, was a front for the threat she presented to the Protestant succession. Bishop Gilbert Burnet, who was no admirer of James (he equated him with the monstrous Roman emperors Caligula and Nero), and who founded the Protestant Whig interpretation of history in the late seventeenth century, offered a retrospective view of what he considered to be Mary Beatrice’s malign—if beautiful—presence. Mary Beatrice was at the time of their meeting about sixteen and,

of a full growth, a very graceful person, with a good measure of beauty, and so much wit and cunning, that during all this reign she behaved herself in so obliging a manner, and seemed so innocent and good, that she gained upon all who came near her, and possessed them with such impressions of her, that it was long before her behaviour, when she came to be queen, could make them change their sentiments of her … She avoided the appearance of a zealot or a meddler in business; all her diversion was innocent cheerfulness.Footnote 34

During her time as Queen, such negative readings of her beauty never surfaced, but in hindsight, her Whig enemies looked back upon her beauty as a danger to a Protestant succession (given Catherine of Braganza’s barren union with Charles II); Mary Beatrice’s beauty was a Popish enchantment, a bewitching façade that concealed a dangerous Catholic core. Behind the exterior of demure loveliness, Mary Beatrice plotted to undermine Protestant England forever.

We know little of Mary Beatrice’s own reaction to the panegyrics that were composed in praise of her beauty, but her unkind stepdaughter Princess Anne did tell her sister, the Princess of Orange, that the Queen was susceptible to flattery and manipulation:

The Queen, you must know, is of a very proud, haughty humour, and though she pretends to hate all forms and ceremony, yet one sees that those that make their court this way, are very well thought of. She declares always that she loves sincerity and hates flattery, but when the grossest flattery in the world is said to her face, she seems extremely well pleased with it. It really is enough to turn one’s stomach.Footnote 35

Compulsion to Comment, Iterum: The Queen’s Great Belly

“Long before Kate’s big news was announced,” writes Hilary Mantel of the Duchess of Cambridge’s first pregnancy, “the tabloids wanted to look inside her to see if she was pregnant.”Footnote 36 Mary Beatrice of Modena knew how that felt. She had fallen pregnant in the September of 1687 during a visit to Bath to take the healing waters. James had joined her there, having made a detour to St Winifrede’s Well at Holywell in Flintshire where he had prayed for a son. The combination of sulphur and prayer proved efficacious and the King and Queen were convinced that the conception was a miracle and that the child would be a boy; it was God’s sign, they announced, that England should return to the Old Faith. “It would be impossible to describe,” wrote the Tuscan Ambassador, Terriesi, that

the passion of those who do not desire it, nor the schemes and reflections of both parties, in case it should be true… No words can express the rage and anguish of [Anne] the Princess of Denmark at the Queen’s condition, she can dissimulate it to no one; and seeing that the Catholic religion has a prospect of advancement, she affects more than ever, both in public and private to show herself hostile to it, and [to be] the most zealous of Protestants.Footnote 37

Given Mary Beatrice’s long and dismal record of miscarriages, however, the question was, of course, would she prove to be pregnant and, if so, what were her chances of a successful delivery? Her physicians reported that the Queen had not had her “courses” since she had returned from Bath to Windsor at the end of September (although they noted that she had gone as long as seventeen weeks in the past without a period and without a pregnancy). Her overactive doctors bled her to the point of fainting. In December, she suddenly looked much better; her breasts began to swell and, as the doctors reported, “Her Majesty began to believe [she is with child] and carries it highly to the Princess [Anne].”Footnote 38 But the Queen was not strong and before Christmas she began bleeding; two days later she took to her bed with a nervous collapse and trembled as though she had a fever. Still, the danger subsided and on 4 January 1688, the physicians noted that her breasts were “full and round” and that all the ladies now believed her pregnant.Footnote 39

Outside, across the country, rumours abounded and pamphlets circulated. Mary Beatrice became “afflicted at hearing the satires, which are already being published, against her.”Footnote 40 For instance, a collected miscellany of lampoons printed in Astrea’s Booke for Songs & Satyrs contained two ballads about Mary Beatrice’s pregnancy. The first encapsulates the entire poem in its title: The Miracle. How… that the Queen might have a Son And how Our Lady sent the Angell Gabriel with her Smoke There Upon the Queen conceived. To the Tune of thou hadst better been starved at Nurse. The image of Mary Beatrice as a pseudo-virgin, miraculously begetting a child without the aid of her husband was lampooned in a mock court masque called The Triumphs of Fire on the Stage of Water in which a Jesuit priest gave thanks thatVerse

Verse This Deity (for we ne’re deal with other) Is fertile call’d, t’Imply a faithful Mother; … This is the Nursing Mother, t’Infants we Who the true heirs to all her Whoredoms be.Footnote

See: Rachel J. Weil, “The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming-Pan Scandal,” in The Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois G. Schoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 65–82 (esp. 75).

Mary Beatrice’s ‘motherhood’ is metamorphosed into ‘whoredom,’ with any resultant offspring being bastards.

In January 1688, New Year prayers were ordered to celebrate the Queen’s pregnancy, although in Anglican churches few people turned up to give thanks. In fact, as Lord Clarendon confided in his diary, “it is strange to see how the Queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scare any body believed it to be true. Good God, help us!”Footnote 42 The Queen’s enemies wrote that she was well past childbearing years—even though she was only twenty-nine—and that her womb was now empty; it was dropsy or some other complaint that made her belly start to swell. Cartoons showed her pinning a cushion inside her gown.Footnote 43 Anne kept up a regular correspondence with her sister Mary in which she eagerly intimated the idea of the Queen’s ‘false belly’:

For methinks, if it were not, there having been so many stories and jests about it, she should, to convince the world, make either me or her friends feel her belly; but quite contrary, whenever one talks of her being with child, she looks as if she were afraid to let anyone touch her. And whenever I happen to be in the room as she has been undressing, she has always gone into the next room to put on her smock … I believe when she is brought to bed, nobody will be convinced that it is her child, except it prove a daughter. For my part I shall not, except I see the child and she parted.Footnote 44

Many years later, Mary Beatrice challenged Anne’s recollections and explained to Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans, how she “begged Princess Anne to put her hand on her belly and feel the baby kick, but she declined to do so.”Footnote 45 Anne’s reports display great inconsistencies; on some days, she noticed that the Queen’s “great belly … is very big, but she looks better than she ever did, which is not usual: for people when they are far gone, for the most part look very ill.”Footnote 46

When Mary Beatrice gave birth, some two weeks premature, Anne was taking the waters at Tunbridge Wells (it is probable that Anne absented herself to avoid being called to witness the birth), yet she wasted no time in contacting a servant, one Mrs Dawson, a Protestant, who had been present at the Queen’s bedside, asking her for every detail. It was the longest labour she had ever seen, said Mrs Dawson, but once the child was born, the King had made a point of asking his Council to follow him and see the child for themselves. The Queen, Mrs Dawson added, was desirous of a healthy child and during her labour said that she did not care if were a girl or a boy and that, “she would compound for a girl with all her heart,” as she had often told her ladies. She continued:

When she was in greate pain … Just before ten Her Majesty called out to a midwife: ‘Oh I die! You kill me! You kill me!’ and at ten o’clock she gave birth to a son. Several people heard her say: ‘I don’t hear the child cry’—whereupon he obligingly did so. The Protestant ladys saw him before Madame Labadie carried him into the inner room, followed by the Privy Councillors.Footnote 47

Margaret Dawson rounded up her testimony with a warm tribute to her mistress: “of a milde temper and soe good to her women servants that it is inexpressible … the Queen had exposed her great belly every day to all the ladys that had the privilege of the dressing Room, which were a great number.”Footnote 48 This was not what Anne wanted to hear.

More than sixty people, including Queen Catherine and members of the Privy Council, were packed into the birthing chamber in St James’ Palace on that Trinity Sunday (Fig. 17.2). Three of the ladies in close attendance at Mary Beatrice’s bedside were Protestants.Footnote 49 In later weeks, as the strange story of the foundling child and the warming-pan began to circulate, each of the ladies took an oath to confirm that the child they helped bring forth was born of the Queen’s body. Among the Protestant ladies standing close to the bed was Lady Isabella Wentworth, who not only verified the birth before the Privy Council four months later, but when the child was fifteen repeated her testimony to the ex-Dean of Worcester, in the presence of Mrs Dawson, and signed it, saying, “she was as sure the Prince of Wales was the Queen’s son as that any of her own children were hers.”Footnote 50

Fig. 17.2
figure 2

“The Birth of the Prince of Wales,” by Pieter Pickaert (1689). Print. Rijksmuseum NG-1087-6.

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In 1706, the Duchess of Orléans wrote to assure her sister that “I know a lady present at his birth who was no friend of the Queen’s, and who admitted to me that she went there in order to investigate, and she saw the child held by the navel cord … He and his mother resemble each other like two drops of water.”Footnote 51 The German portrait artist, Godfrey Kneller, who was commissioned to paint the young Prince of Wales, was always outraged by the suggestion that the boy was not Mary Beatrice’s child. He wrote many years later:

Vat de devil! I cannot be mistaken. His fader and moder have sat to me about thirty-times a-piece and I know every line and bit in their faces. … I say the child is so like both, that there is not a feature in his face but that it belongs either to his fader or moder … I cannot be mistaken, nay, the nails of his fingers are his moder’s.Footnote 52

A Queen Observed

Nails, breasts, umbilical cords, belly, mouth, eyes, lips, hair, clothes on, clothes off, skinny, fat, dark, pale: the compulsion to comment on the body of Mary Beatrice of Modena has left her little more than a series of assemblages; like a vivisectioned Barbie doll, in her lifetime she was scattered about in prose, poetry, and paint with the conviction that a royal body was public property. In her final letter to her stepdaughter Mary—who had supplanted her as Queen—Mary Beatrice displays a sad resignation at how she and her body had been so maligned by loved ones and strangers alike. “I don’t know what to say,” she writes. “Dissemble I cannot and if I enter upon the subject that fills everyone’s mind, I am afraid of saying too much; and therefore, I think the best way is to say nothing.”Footnote 53

As a queen consort, Mary Beatrice was both an embodiment of the state and a vessel for the production of an heir, and as the future of the succession depended upon her ability to produce sons, it was significant that she upheld the traditional values of morality, chastity, and purity—all of which were codified through her beauty, so often the focus of rapt attention. But when push came to shove, the beautiful Mary Beatrice contributed to pre-existing anxieties that the English always felt about the body of a foreign queen when her Catholicism, alongside that of her husband, was seen as a national threat. The Queen’s body caused agonising anxiety for many of her subjects, and in the months leading up to the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1688, it was seen as able to endanger the independence of the realm itself. All queens consort have been subject to physical scrutiny, but in the case of Mary Beatrice of Modena, the compulsion to comment on her body rendered her little more than an object to be viewed, judged, and either accepted or rejected.