Mary of Modena (; ) was Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland as the second wife of James VII and II. A devout Roman Catholic, Mary married the widower James, who was then the younger brother and heir presumptive of Charles II. She was devoted to James and their children, two of whom survived to adulthood: the Jacobite claimant to the thrones, James Francis Edward Stuart, and Louisa Maria Stuart. Mary and Francesco's mother, Laura, was strict with them and acted as regent of the duchy until her son came of age. Mary's education was excellent;

Mary was described by contemporaries as "tall and admirably shaped", and was sought as a bride for James, Duke of York, by Lord Peterborough. Lord Peterborough was Groom of the Stool to the Duke of York. A widower, James was the younger brother and heir of Charles II of England. Duchess Laura was not initially forthcoming with a reply to Peterborough's proposal, hoping, according to the French ambassador, for a "grander" match with the eleven-year-old Charles II of Spain. Whatever the reason for Laura's initial reluctance, she finally accepted the proposal on behalf of Mary, and they were married by proxy on 30 September 1673, she just shy of 15, he being 39.

Modena was within the sphere of influence of Louis XIV of France, who endorsed Mary's candidature and greeted Mary warmly in Paris, where she stopped en route to England, giving her a brooch worth £8,000. Her reception in England was much cooler. The English public, who were predominantly Protestant, branded the Duchess of York – as Mary was thereafter known as until her husband's accession – the "Pope's daughter". Parliament threatened to have the marriage annulled, He had secretly converted to Catholicism around 1668. Mary first saw her husband on 23 November 1673 OS, on the day of their second marriage ceremony. James was pleased with his bride. Mary, however, at first disliked him, and burst into tears each time she saw him. Nonetheless, she soon warmed to James. From his first marriage to Anne Hyde, a commoner, who had died in 1671, James had two daughters: Lady Mary and Lady Anne. They were introduced to Mary by James with the words, "I have brought you a new play-fellow". Mary played games with Anne to win her affection. That Mary loathed gambling did not stop her ladies compelling her to do so almost every day. Consequently, Mary incurred minor gambling debts. At this time the Duchess of York was on excellent terms with Lady Mary, and visited her in The Hague after the younger Mary had married William of Orange. She travelled incognito and took Lady Anne with her.

Popish Plot and exile

The Duchess's Catholic secretary, Edward Colman, was, in 1678, falsely implicated in a fictitious plot against the King by Titus Oates. The plot, known as the Popish Plot, led to the Exclusionist movement, which was headed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. The Exclusionists sought to debar the Catholic Duke of York from the throne. Their reputation in tatters, the Yorks were reluctantly exiled to Brussels, a domain of King Charles II of Spain, ostensibly to visit Lady Mary—since 1677 the wife of Prince William III of Orange. Accompanied by her not yet three-year-old daughter Isabella and Lady Anne, the Duchess of York was saddened by James's extra-marital affair with Catherine Sedley. Mary's spirits were briefly revived by a visit from her mother, who was living in Rome.

230px|thumb|upright|Mary in the year of her husband's accession, 1685, in a painting by the Dutch artist [[Willem Wissing|alt=An informal portrait of Mary. She has a long handsome face, dark eyes and black hair. Her hair, her brown satin dress and plain linen undergarment are in fashionable disarray. She clasps a white dog.]]

A report that King Charles was very sick sent the Yorks hastily back to England. The danger was compounded by the fact that Monmouth enjoyed the support of the Exclusionists, who held a majority in the English House of Commons. Lodging in Holyrood Palace, the Yorks had to make do without Ladies Anne and Isabella, who stayed in London on Charles's orders. The Yorks were recalled to London in February 1680, only to return again to Edinburgh that autumn; this time they went on a more honourable footing: James was created King's Commissioner to Scotland. Separated from Lady Isabella once again, Mary sank into a state of sadness, exacerbated by the passing of the Exclusion bill in the Commons. Isabella, thus far the only one of Mary's children to survive infancy, died in February 1681. Isabella's death plunged Mary into a religious mania, worrying her physician. Exclusionist-dominated Parliament, suspended since March 1681, never again met in the reign of Charles II. Therefore, the Duke and Duchess returned to England, and Mary gave birth to a daughter named Charlotte Mary in August 1682; Charlotte Mary's death three weeks later, according to the French ambassador, robbed James of "hope that any child of his can live"—all James's sons by his first wife died in infancy. James's sadness was dispelled by his revival in popularity following the discovery of a plot to kill him and Charles. The objective of the plot, known as the Rye House Plot, was to have Monmouth placed on the throne as Lord Protector. The revival was so strong that, in 1684, James was re-admitted to the Privy Council, after an absence of eleven years.

Queen consort (1685–1688)

Despite all the furore over Exclusionism, James ascended his brother's thrones easily upon the latter's death – which occurred on 6 February 1685 OS – possibly owing to the risk that the said alternative might provoke another civil war. Mary sincerely mourned Charles, recalling in later life, "He was always kind to me." Mary and James's £119,000 coronation, occurring on 23 April OS, Saint George's day, was meticulously planned. Precedents were sought for Mary because a full-length joint coronation had not occurred since the coronation of King Henry VIII and Queen Catherine. France, too, was preparing for Mary's imminent demise, putting forward as its candidate for James's new wife the Duke of Enghien's daughter. The Queen was then trying to make her brother, the Duke of Modena, marry the former, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici.

In February 1687, Mary, at the time irritated by James's affair with Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, moved into new apartments in Whitehall; Whitehall had been home to a Catholic chapel since December 1686. Her apartments were designed by Christopher Wren at the cost of £13,000. Because the palace's renovation was thus far unfinished, James received ambassadors in her rooms, much to Mary's chagrin. Five months later, shortly after the marriage talks with Tuscany collapsed, the Queen's mother, Duchess Laura, died. Duchess Laura left Mary "a considerable sum of cash" and some jewellery. William III of Orange, James's nephew and son-in-law, sensed popular discontent with James's government; he used the death of Mary's mother as a guise to send his cousin Count Zuylestein, to England, ostensibly to condole the Queen, but in reality as a spy.

thumb|upright=1.45|[[Mary II of England in a painting by Sir Peter Lely|alt=Formal seated portrait of Mary II. She wears a grey satin decollatage dress and a blue satin cloak with gold swathes at her shoulders. Her hair is formally arranged in curls and she wears a necklace of large grey pearls.]]

Having visited Bath, in the hope its waters would aid conception, Queen Mary became pregnant in late 1687. When the pregnancy became public knowledge shortly before Christmas, Catholics rejoiced. Protestants, who had tolerated James's Catholic government because he had no Catholic heir, were concerned. The Protestant disillusion came to a head after the child was known to be male, and many Protestants believed the child was spurious; Mainly by mismanagement on James's part, these rumours had some excuse as from personal prejudice he had excluded many from the ceremony whose testimony must have been counted valid; most of the witnesses were Catholics or foreigners, and several, such as his daughter Anne and the Protestant prelates, or the maternal relatives of his daughters, whom the new birth would remove from the direct succession, were not present.

Anne and her elder sister, Mary, still suspected that their father had thrust a changeling upon the nation. Count Zuylestein, returning to the Netherlands shortly after the birth, agreed with Anne's findings. The invitation assured William that "nineteen parts of twenty of the people throughout the kingdom" wished for an intervention. James, however, backed by Louis XIV of France, still considered himself king by divine right, and maintained it was not within parliament's prerogative to depose a monarch. Louis gave the exiled royal couple the use of Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where they set up a court-in-exile.

Mary quickly became a popular fixture at Louis XIV's court at Versailles, where diarist Madame de Sévigné acclaimed Mary for her "distinguished bearing and her quick wit". Because Mary was accorded the privileges and rank of a queen, Maria Anna was outranked by her. In spite of this, Louis and his secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, became close friends with Mary. James was largely excluded from French court life. His contemporaries found him boring, and French courtiers frequently joked that "when one talks to him, one understands why he is here." Mary gave birth to a daughter, Louise Mary, in 1692. During James's campaign, Mary supported his cause throughout the British Isles: she sent three French supply ships to Bantry Bay and £2,000 to Jacobite rebels in Dundee. She financed those measures by selling her jewellery. Money problems plagued the Stuart court-in-exile, despite a substantial pension from Louis XIV of 50,000 livres.

Estensi succession

The collapse of James's invasion of Ireland in 1691 upset Mary. Her spirits were lifted by news of the marriage of her brother, the Duke of Modena, to Margherita Maria Farnese of Parma. When, in 1695, Mary's brother died, the House of Este was left with one progenitor, their uncle Cardinal-Duke Rinaldo. Queen Mary, concerned for the dynasty's future, urged the Cardinal-Duke to resign his cardinalate, "for the good of the people and for the perpetuation of the sovereign house of Este". Rinaldo's bride, Princess Charlotte Felicitas of Brunswick-Lüneburg, was, according to Mary, "of an easy disposition best suited to [the Duke]". Duke Rinaldo refused to release the former, and left the latter £15,000 in arrears. In 1700, five years later, Rinaldo finally paid Mary her dowry; her inheritance, however, remained sequestered, and relations with Modena worsened again when Rinaldo allied himself with Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.

Regency (1701–1704)

thumb|220px|Mary's coat of arms as Queen of England. Depicting the [[Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom|Royal Coat of Arms of England, Scotland and Ireland impaled with a minor version of her father's arms as Duke of Modena. In light of religious sentiment at the time, it was presumed unwise to reproduce her father's arms in full, since the quarterings are divided by a "Pale Gules charged with the Papal keys ensigned with the Tiara".|alt=A heraldic shield emblazoned with the emblems of France, Scotland, England, Ireland and the House of Este.]]

In March 1701, James suffered a stroke while hearing mass at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, leaving him partially paralysed. Fagon, Louis XIV's personal physician, recommended the waters of Bourbon-l'Archambault, to cure James's paralysis. The waters, however, had little effect, and James died of a seizure on 16 September 1701. Louis, contravening the Peace of Ryswick and irritating William, declared James Francis Edward King of England, Ireland and Scotland as James III and VIII. Mary acted as nominal regent for her minor son. Before his death, James II expressed his wish that Mary's regency would last no longer than their son's 18th birthday.

thumb|left|upright|[[James Francis Edward Stuart, Mary's only surviving son, in a portrait by Antonio David. It was largely ignored in England. Mary was not swayed by Belhaven's argument, so a compromise was reached: James Francis Edward, if he became king, would limit the number of Catholic priests in England and promise not to tamper with the established Church of England. Soon after, Lovat travelled to the court-in-exile at Saint-Germain, and begged Mary to allow her son to come to Scotland.

Later life

Having wished to become a nun in her youth, Mary sought refuge from the stresses of exile at the Convent of the Visitandines, Chaillot, near Paris, where she befriended Louis's penitent mistress, Louise de La Vallière. There, Mary stayed with her daughter for long periods almost every summer. It was here, too, in 1711, that Mary found out that, as part of the embryonic Treaty of Utrecht, James Francis Edward was to lose Louis's explicit recognition and be forced to leave France. Deprived of the company of her family, Mary lived out the rest of her days at Chaillot and Saint-Germain in virtual poverty, unable to travel by her own means because all her horses had died and she could not afford to replace them.

Following her death from cancer on 7 May 1718, Mary was remembered fondly by her French contemporaries, three of whom, Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, the Duke of Saint-Simon and the Marquis of Dangeau, deemed her a "saint". Mary's remains were interred in Chaillot among the nuns she had befriended.

Issue

{| class="wikitable"

|-

!Name!!Birth!!Death!!Notes

|-

| Unnamed child

| colspan=2 align=center|March or May 1674

| stillbirth

|-

| Unnamed child

| colspan=2 align=center|October 1675

| stillbirth

|-

| Charles, Duke of Cambridge

| 7 November 1677

| 12 December 1677

| died of smallpox

|-

| James, Prince of Wales "the Old Pretender"

| 10 June 1688

| 1 January 1766

| married 1719, Clementina Sobieska; had issue

|-

| Louisa Maria Teresa

| 28 June 1692

| 18 April 1712

| died of smallpox

|}

Ancestry

Notes

References

Citations

Bibliography

  • Allan Fea (1909). James II and His Wives. Meuthon and Co.
  • Brown, Beatrice Curtis (1929). Anne Stuart: Queen of England. Geoffrey Bles.
  • Chapman, Hester (1953). Mary II, Queen of England. Jonathan Cape.
  • Fraser, Antonia (2002). King Charles II Phoenix.
  • Fraser, Antonia (2007). Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. Phoenix.
  • Gregg, Edward (1980). Queen Anne. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  • Haile, Martin (1905). Queen Mary of Modena: Her Life and Letters. J.M. Dent & Co.
  • Harris, Tim. (2007). Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685–1720. Penguin.
  • Maclagan, Michael; Louda, Jiří (1999). Line of Succession: Heraldry of the Royal Families of Europe. Little, Brown & Co.
  • Marshall, Rosalind (2003) Scottish Queens, 1034–1714. Tuckwell Press.
  • Oman, Carola (1962). Mary of Modena. Hodder & Stoughton.
  • Starkey, David (2007). Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. Harper Perennial. .
  • Turner, FC (1948). James II. Eyre & Spottswoode.
  • Uglow, Jenny (2009). A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration. Faber & Faber.
  • Waller, Maureen (2002). Ungrateful Daughters: The Stuart Princesses Who Stole Their Father's Crown. Hodder & Stoughton.
  • Mary of Modena from the online Encyclopædia Britannica.

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