Maria of Modena: The queen who started a revolution
She was an Italian Catholic in a ferociously anti-papist English court. An aspiring nun in a hotbed of hedonism. Breeze Barrington follows the extraordinary trials and tribulations of James II & VII’s second wife, Maria of Modena
Shortly after the queen rose on 10 June 1688, she felt a familiar swell of pain. “Send for the king!” she called, while her ladies helped her back into bed.
Maria (Mary) of Modena was in labour. Soon the room in St James’s Palace began to fill: some 70 people crowded in to watch the queen give birth. There was no screen to shield her, and the bedcurtains were kept open as she screamed in pain: “I die! Oh! You kill me! You kill me!”
Her cries were so terrible that many said they could hardly bear to listen. Yet the king – James II & VII – exhorted the members of his council to come nearer, to look more closely. He had heard the rumours that the pregnancy was fake, and was determined to ensure that no one could say this child was not born of the queen.
The sight of so many faces so close to Maria was overwhelming; she could not give birth with so many men looking on her, she said. But while James stooped to cover her face with his periwig, the rest of her body remained on full display – and everyone present witnessed that crucial moment.
That evening, the London Gazette reported the news to the citizens of the capital: “This day between 9 and 10 in the morning the Queen was safely delivered of a PRINCE.” Protestant England now had a Catholic heir – and a constitutional crisis.
It did not take long for the crisis to unfold. To keep the queen warm as her labour began, a serving woman had placed a bedpan full of hot coals under the blankets. That simple act prompted whispers that a child had been smuggled in – and, whether or not anyone believed the rumour, it provided sufficient pretext for seven politicians and nobles to invite William of Orange to invade England, launching the episode now widely known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’.
If Queen Maria of Modena is known today, it is for these events of 1688. But behind the story of political upheavals lies another tale – of an Italian Catholic princess who, at just 15 years old, was sent to a Protestant country that feared ‘popery’ more than anything else. There she would marry a man 25 years her senior, heir to the English throne. It is the story of a young woman whose purpose in life was seen as the breeder of heirs, but who deserves to be viewed as far more than merely a Catholic womb.
Dynasty in decline
Maria Beatrice d’Este was born on 5 October 1658 in Modena, around 23 miles north-west of Bologna in northern Italy. Though once a great ruling dynasty, by the mid-17th century the Estensi family was much in decline. Maria’s father died when she was not yet four years old, leaving her two-year-old brother, Francesco, to take his place as Duke of Modena, with their mother, Laura, acting as regent. A formidable and highly educated woman, Laura kept her children at what Maria later called an “awful distance” from her, and was determined that both of them would be scholars.
Much of Maria’s education took place in the convent attached to the palace, and she felt at home in that life of devotion to God, in a place of education, community and friendship. While still a child, she determined that she would become a nun. Unbeknown to her, events unfolding in England would soon change the course of her life.
Anne Hyde, the first wife of James, Duke of York – younger brother of King Charles II – died in 1671. Her body was hardly cold before talk turned to James’s remarriage. Charles’s nine-year marriage to Catherine of Braganza had produced no children, so James was the heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, and would have to make a dynastic match with one of the princesses of Europe. James sent his trusted friend the Earl of Peterborough as ambassador extraordinary, to find him a wife and future queen. After many months of searching, Peterborough encountered a portrait of a beautiful young girl, and wrote to James and Charles that he had “found his mistress and the Fortune of England”.
The fact that Maria wanted to become a nun mattered little to these powerful men. When she told Peterborough that she would rather throw herself in the fire than marry James, he replied that he “could not believe… that she was made for any other end than to give Princes to the World”.
Tellingly, another powerful man had taken an interest in the match: Pope Clement X. He informed Maria by letter that, in marrying James, she would open herself “to a vaster field of merit than that of the virginal cloister”: by bearing Catholic heirs, she could bring England back to the true faith. After reading this letter, she cried for three days – to the extent that she was held down by force. Peterborough merely wrote that: “The princess at last gave herself up to the will of her friends.” Over in England, James sent a note to his daughters, Mary and Anne, explaining that he had “found a new playfellow”. They were 11 and 8 years old, respectively; Maria was 14.
Controversial match
Maria arrived at the hedonistic court of the ‘Merrie Monarch’ in 1673, completely unprepared for what she encountered there.
“I cannot yet adapt myself to this state – a state to which, as you know, I have been opposed,” she wrote to her former mother superior. “Many nights I weep and grieve and cannot get rid of this melancholy.”
The match caused controversy. Cruel and scurrilous pamphlets circulated, in which it was hoped that she would “be envenom’d with the pox” and to “die before 20, rot before 16”.
But though young in years, Maria was resourceful. She learned English quickly, and began to navigate court politics by using the kind of soft power for which the Estensi family was so celebrated – notably, through patronage of the arts. The poet John Dryden wrote verse in her honour, Dutch artist Peter Lely painted her portrait, and the court was filled with the sounds of Italian opera – “the first that had been in England of this kind”, according to renowned diarist John Evelyn.
As her friendship with her stepdaughters burgeoned, Maria encouraged their talents for singing and dancing by commissioning The Masque of Calisto. This was a lavish spectacle even by the standards of the Restoration court, and the princesses – along with Maria’s favoured maid of honour, Sarah Jennings (later Sarah Churchill, Queen Anne’s ‘favourite’) – took the starring roles.
Shortly before the masque’s first performance, Maria gave birth to her first child. It was not the hoped-for boy, but the infant’s parents were overjoyed, and named her Catherine Laura – Catherine after the queen, Laura after Maria’s mother. Soon after, Maria had her daughter baptised in her rooms – as a Catholic. When her brother-in-law, King Charles II, learned what she’d done, he smiled and patted her hand. That was all very well, Charles said, but the child would be raised in the English church, so she would have to be baptised again, as a Protestant.
This experience gave Maria a concrete understanding of her position at court for the first time. Her children were not just her own, but children of the crown; though she gave birth to them, she had no say over their upbringing. (Tragically, Catherine Laura did not live long; though Maria was pregnant a total of 12 times, only two of her children survived to adulthood and one outlived her).
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Maria’s own life as Duchess of York was one of constant uncertainty, as anti-Catholic feeling intensified. Parliament was increasingly divided into two factions, Tories and Whigs; the former supported hereditary monarchy, while the latter was implacably opposed to James ever becoming king. Meanwhile, tensions were rising more broadly in London. The years after Maria’s arrival in England were marked by two plots. The first, the so-called ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678, was a series of accusations by the fantasist Titus Oates, who claimed to have unearthed treasonous Catholic plans to kill the king. Despite being a complete fabrication, it resulted in imprisonments and the execution of some of Maria’s close friends, and she and James were sent into exile – first in Brussels, then in Scotland.
The second plot was real, and came shortly after James and Maria’s return to court in 1682. Had it been successful, the ‘Rye House Plot’ of 1683 would have seen Charles and James assassinated, with James, Duke of Monmouth – Charles’s favourite illegitimate son – made king.
It was over the years following the Rye House Plot that Maria was finally able to recreate something of the life of female friendship and intellectual endeavour that she had enjoyed in the convent in Modena. Two of her maids of honour, Anne Kingsmill (later Finch) and Anne Killigrew, were prodigiously talented: both were poets, and Killigrew was also a painter. Among her maids more generally, Maria encouraged a culture of learning and intellectual endeavour, and both Annes produced work in her honour.
Two pieces in particular provide a snapshot of this shared creative life, both depicting Maria as the goddess Venus. The first, a collaboration between Kingsmill and Killigrew, was a masque entitled Venus and Adonis – a proto-feminist retelling of the classical myth. The second was Killigrew’s painting Venus Attired by the Graces, featuring both Annes among the Graces. A new dawn of women’s art and poetry seemed on the horizon.
A Catholic queen
On 6 February 1685, Charles II died suddenly, aged 54. Maria mourned him deeply – though was wary of displaying her grief in public. “I was so greatly afflicted by the death of King Charles that I dared not show how much,” she wrote, “lest I be suspected of hypocrisy.” Despite their worries about the reception they might encounter, James and Maria were welcomed as the king and queen. This gave her an opportunity for greater patronage: the writer Aphra Behn wrote a celebratory coronation ode, and Anne Killigrew painted coronation portraits. Then tragedy struck again in April when Killigrew died of smallpox, aged just 25.
The new king, James II & VII, had learned all the wrong lessons from the execution of his father, Charles I; he thought that anyone who disagreed with him was against him, and believed that all of parliament were his enemies. His longstanding mistress, Catherine Sedley, was made a countess, and seemed to hold more influence over him than anyone, including his wife. It was said that Maria “loves her husband in all sincerity” but that “she is an Italian, and very proud”. She decided that, unlike queens who had come before, she would not tolerate this situation, and told James to choose: his mistress or his wife. If he continued his affair, she would leave England. “Give her my dower,” she told him. “Make her Queen of England, but let me see her no more!” If James was surprised by this outburst, he would soon be even more astonished when he encountered Maria’s priests, all on their knees, begging him to send away his mistress and save his soul. Overwhelmed, he agreed.
These growing tensions were heightened by the absence of a male heir. Maria had not been pregnant in three years so, at the end of August 1687, went to Bath to take the waters in search of fertility. Her treatment became a form of popular entertainment: members of the public flocked to the galleries to watch her bathe as an Italian orchestra performed. Almost immediately afterwards Maria became pregnant but, no sooner had she found out, rumours began – fuelled (perhaps even started) by King James’s daughter Anne, whose own anti-Catholicism had turned her against her father and stepmother.
Hot coals in a bedpan
After the keenly observed birth of Prince James Francis Edward in June 1688, the rumours only intensified. Some said that the pregnancy had been a hoax; others claimed that Maria had miscarried, or that the child had been a girl and replaced with a boy. All agreed that the child, who was given the title of Prince of Wales, had been smuggled into the room in a bedpan, even though at least two Protestant witnesses saw the bedpan full of hot coals at the beginning of the labour.
The seven men who wrote to encourage the invasion by James’s nephew and son-in-law, William of Orange, exploited these rumours, including in their letter the claim that the child was an imposter. William ensured that his fleet landed on 5 November – a day on which effigies of the pope were ritually burned in bonfires.
Fearing for their safety, James and Maria took their baby and fled into exile at the court of Louis XIV in France. They never stopped believing they might be able to get back the throne. But it wasn’t to be, and they remained at Saint-Germain-en-Laye for the rest of their lives. Here, freed from the obligations of queenship, Maria could once again devote herself to patronage of the arts and of women’s education. In some ways, her life had come full circle: she became the patron of a convent of the Visitation – the same order that she had wanted to join as a child.
Maria outlived her husband by 17 years, bearing him another child in exile. She “has been overwhelmed with calumnies,” James said of Maria on his deathbed. “But time, the mother of Truth, will I hope, at last make her virtues shine as bright as the sun.”
MARIA'S MOMENTS
The times and travails of a Catholic queen
1662:
1673: On her 15th birthday, Maria begins the journey to England to take her place as Duchess of York, escorted by her mother
1675: Maria’s first child, Catherine Laura, is born in January but dies in October. Racked with grief, Maria suffers the first of multiple miscarriages
1678: Titus Oates comes forward with tales of a Catholic conspiracy against Charles II, and in 1679 Maria and James are sent into exile. While she is away, Maria’s four-year-old daughter, Isabella, dies in London
1682: The court of James and Maria returns to England. Maria’s new maids of honour include the poet Anne Kingsmill and the poet/painter Anne Killigrew
1685: Charles II dies on 6 February. James and Maria’s coronation is on 23 April
1688: Maria gives birth to James Francis Edward Stuart on 10 June, an event dubbed the “baby in the bedpan myth”. It is the catalyst for the so-called Glorious Revolution – the invasion of Britain by William of Orange
1689: With Maria and James in exile in France, William and his wife, Mary (James II’s daughter), are crowned as joint monarchs of England, Scotland and Ireland on 11 April
1718: Maria dies in Paris on 7 May. She is buried at the convent in Chaillot, of which she has been a patron while in exile
Breeze Barrington is a cultural historian specialising in the artistic cultures of the 17th century. Her new book is The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court (Bloomsbury, July)
This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine