Love, Friendship, and Power: Queen Mary II's Letters to Frances Apsley

505

Journal of British Studies 47 (July 2008): 505–527! 2008 by The North American Conference on British Studies.All rights reserved. 0021-9371/2008/4703-0002$10.00

Love, Friendship, and Power: Queen Mary II’sLetters to Frances Apsley

Molly McClain

In 1675, a thirteen-year-old Mary Stuart (later Queen Mary II) wrote thefirst of over eighty passionate letters to a young female courtier, FrancesApsley, in which she played the role of the loving, often neglected, wife.

She expressed her intense love and devotion to Frances, her “dearest, dearest,dearest, dearest, dear husband,” writing page after page of endearments.1 Hersister Anne (later Queen Anne) also corresponded with Frances, playing the malerole of “Ziphares” to Frances’s female “Semandra.” Anne and Mary adopted pennames drawn from seventeenth-century dramas and also competed for the affectionof the much older Frances. Mary continued the correspondence even after hermarriage to William, prince of Orange, in 1677. She told Frances that “thoughI have played the whore a little, I love you of all things in the world.” She describedthe child in her womb as a “bastard” and declared Frances to have been cuckoldedby the prince.2 At the same time, she expressed jealousy of Frances’s other friends,including her sister Anne, and feared that time and distance would cause theirlove to wane.

How do we understand the friendship between Mary and Frances? BetweenFrances and Anne? On the one hand, the letters could be taken as evidence offemale homosexuality at the Restoration court. Anne, later in life, was accused oflesbian tendencies by the duchess of Marlborough, who claimed that she had “noinclination for any but of one’s own sex.”3 On the other hand, the correspondence

Molly McClain is associate professor and chair of the history department at the University of SanDiego. She is grateful to the earl of Bathurst for permission to cite family papers on loan to the BritishLibrary. She also thanks Cynthia Caywood, Anna Clark, Margaret C. Jacob, Victoria de la Torre, twoanonymous reviewers, and members of UCLA’s European History and Culture Colloquium for com-menting on earlier drafts of this article.

1 Mary, Princess of Orange, to Frances Apsley, n.d., British Library (BL), Loan 57/69, 171. See alsoBenjamin Bathurst, Letters of Two Queens (London, 1924), 92–94. Spelling and punctuation have beenmodernized and abbreviations extended.

2 Mary to Apsley, 9 August [1678], BL Loan 57/69, 140–41.3 Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London, 1980), 275–76. See also Ophelia Field, “Queen Anne’s

506 " McCLAIN

might be dismissed as playacting by girls modeling their future relationships withmen. Mary and Anne measured their love for Frances by the standards of a woman’slove for her husband and a husband’s love for a wife. They both became dutifulwives.

The baroque language in which Mary, in particular, expressed her feelings alsomakes interpretation difficult. As Alan Bray pointed out in The Friend, the languageof love is both a language and a convention. It could be heartfelt; it also couldbe hollow. Among men, the use of terms such as “bedfellow,” “gossip,” and“mistress” could express kinship, a form of friendship that united families. It couldalso indicate a rough humor, “the humor of homoeroticism,” that supported thepatriarchal values of early modern society. He argues that context is crucial to theinterpretation of symbolic language and bodily signs of friendship like the kiss,the gesture, and the embrace. Bray encourages scholars to investigate what thelanguage of love “signified in the public context of power and place.”4

This article explores the literary and political context in which Mary, in particular,developed an intimate friendship with Frances Apsley. It examines the extent towhich her expressions of love and friendship were influenced by the conventionsof late seventeenth-century novels, poetry, and theatrical plays. Mary adoptedtheatrical personalities in her correspondence with Frances and copied the “fem-inine” literary style promoted by French romantic novels and epistolary tracts. Shealso was influenced by the libertinism practiced at King Charles II’s court. Hercorrespondence suggests that she understood, and perhaps imitated, the powerrelationships between monarch and mistress, courtier and king. Finally, the articleexamines the political consequences of emotional intimacy. Mary’s friendships, firstwith Frances Apsley and later with other women at court, helped her to circumventthe powerful Villiers family and to develop patronage relationships of her own.Anne’s friendships, meanwhile, provided her with a channel of communicationwith privy councilors and powerful male courtiers. For both sisters, passionatefriendships shaded into political alliances with no clear-cut dividing line betweenthem.

The essay draws upon two decades of pioneering work on the history of earlymodern women. In 1998, Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson drew scholars’attention to the correspondence between Mary Stuart and Frances Apsley thathad been published in 1924. They noted the reluctance of male biographers ofthe Stuart sisters to deal with the question of homosexuality, suggesting that DavidGreen, in his biography Queen Anne, “had difficulty with these ‘charming ridic-ulous letters’ and invokes ‘a doctor’ to explain that intimacy between women waspossible without implying any homosexual basis at all.”5 Since then, much workhas been done to explore the nature of female sexuality in early modern England.Major studies of female homoeroticism have focused on the question of how totalk about lesbianism before the advent of modern identity categories. Authorswho address the issue of the historicity of nomenclature and resolve it in different

Ladies,” Gay and Lesbian Review 11, no. 3 (May–June 2004): 21–23, and Sarah Churchill, Duchessof Marlborough: The Queen’s Favorite (New York, 2003); Frances Harris, A Passion for Government:The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford, 1991).

4 Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, 1998), 67, 168.5 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford,

1998), 245, 245 n. 199; David Green, Queen Anne (New York, 1970), 25.

LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, AND POWER " 507

ways, include Harriette Andreadis, Terry Castle, Emma Donoghue, Valerie Traub,Martha Vicinus, and Elizabeth Susan Wahl.6 Recently, scholars have also engagedwith Bray’s argument that “homoeroticism is part of a networked system of socialrelations,” although Traub noted that many “have limited their engagement withhis thesis primarily to the perception of parallels between a growing stigma re-garding female intimacies and the increasing legibility of sodomy.”7 A useful articleby Laura Gowing shows how Bray’s narrative of friendship can be used to un-derstand the close relationships developed among elite women, particularly thoseat court.8 This article extends her analysis by focusing on the love letters of ayoung woman who, one day, would be queen.

Mary (1662–94) and her sister Anne (1664–1714) were the only survivingchildren of a royal marriage to a commoner. Their father, James, duke of York,the brother of King Charles II, married Anne Hyde, the daughter of Lord Chan-cellor Clarendon, in 1660. During the early years of the Restoration, the dukeand duchess of York were at the center of court life. They maintained apartmentsat both St. James’s and Whitehall Palace and were said to be “better lodged thanthe king or queen.”9 On summer evenings, when the heat and dust kept courtiersfrom walking in St. James’s Park, the Yorks took barges on the river, listened tomusic, ate supper, watched fireworks, and talked. During the winter months, thecourt organized balls, “crammed with fine ladies.”10 They danced fast-paced cou-rantes and English country dances such as “Cuckolds All Awry,” an appropriatechoice given the sexual mores at the Restoration court.

Mary and her sister were brought up on the fringes of court life. Their nurserywas established at Twickenham, an ancient dower-palace of the queens of England,located along the Thames, not far from Richmond. Occasionally, the small childrenwould be brought to St. James’s to see their parents. James was particularly fondof Mary for she looked very much like him, with the same complexion, heavy

6 Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714(Chicago, 2001); Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture(New York, 1995); Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801(1993; repr., New York, 1996); Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England(New York, 2002); Martha Vicinus, “‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: The Historical Roots ofthe Modern Lesbian Identity,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 467–97, and IntimateFriends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago, 2004); Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Re-lations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, 1999). See alsoSharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton,NJ, 2007).

7 Traub continued, “We would do well to consider how this question of anachronistic terminologycan morph into an ontological question—what is lesbianism in any given era?—as well as how thesequeries might be supplemented with an epistemological question: how do we know it? Although nothingin Bray’s corpus provides clear answers to these questions, in its performance of ambiguity, tension,and irresolution his work urges us to ask them.” Valerie Traub, “Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Makingof History,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 352, 354.

8 Laura Gowing, “The Politics of Women’s Friendship in Early Modern England,” in Love, Friendshipand Faith in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter, and Miri Rubin (London, 2005),131–49. See also Patricia Crawford, “Friendship and Love between Women in Early Modern England,”in Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. AndrewLynch and Philippa Maddern (Nedlands, Australia, 1995), 47–61.

9 Balthasar Monconys, Les Voyages de M. de Monconys en Angleterre, 5 vols. (Paris, 1695), 3:38.10 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols., ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley, 1979–83),

3:300–301.

508 " McCLAIN

curls, and dark eyes. He held her in his arms even while transacting naval business.Pepys once watched him “with great pleasure play with his little girle—like anordinary private father of a child.”11

Repeated pregnancies took their toll on the duchess of York’s health. She in-dulged a taste for rich foods and sweetmeats, causing one contemporary to describeher as “one of the highest feeders in England.”12 She spoiled both girls, feedingthem treats and encouraging them to drink chocolate, a fashionable new vice. Asa result, Mary’s younger sister Anne became as round as a ball.13 In 1668, theduchess sent the three-year-old to France to see if doctors there could remedy thechild’s “defluxion” of the eyes. Mary, meanwhile, was placed under the authorityof a governess, Lady Frances Villiers, daughter of the earl of Suffolk and wife toSir Edward Villiers. She moved from Twickenham to Richmond Palace in Surreywith two young brothers, both of whom subsequently died there.

Lady Frances’s four youngest daughters—Elizabeth, Barbara, Anne, and Cath-erine—became Mary’s closest friends. She was particularly fond of Barbara, “poor,dear, distressed Bab,” who infuriated her mother by eloping with Captain JohnBerkeley.14 Later, Mary and Anne also spent time in the company of the fourFortrey sisters, the daughters of Samuel Fortrey of Kew, their close friend MaryCornwallis, and Anne Trelawney. The girls played cards, gossiped, dressed, readplays, and watched theatrical performances. They took lessons in French, dancing,music, and drawing as well as training in the basic tenets of the Anglican faith.They talked of “mad pranks” and teased their chaplain Dr. John Doughty abouthis “mistress.”15 They also wrote lengthy letters to one another while secretedaway in their closets, smuggling them to and from Richmond and St. James’sPalace by means of the painter, William Gibson.

In January 1671, the duchess’s health, already bad, declined precipitously. Anewsletter noted that “Her Royal Highness has for these several weeks past beenunder an extraordinary distemper of body, at the best keeping her chamber, butmost commonly her bed.”16 She was unable to attend the balls and masqueradesheld in honor of the prince of Orange. On 30 March she felt well enough toattend a dinner at the Burlington’s house in Picadilly. Shortly after her return,however, she collapsed. She died on 31 March 1671, only thirty-three years old.

After the death of her mother, Mary was drawn into life at court. Although shewas still very young, barely nine years old, she understood that her participationin balls, masquerades, revels, and ballets was intended to showcase her desirabilityas a marriage partner. In February 1672, she was displayed before ambassadorsfrom Sweden and France as a potential wife for either King Charles XI of Swedenor the Dauphin of France. She performed in a court ballet, or masque, in thequeen’s lodging at Whitehall “to the great satisfaction of their Majesties and RoyalHighness there present.”17 It was also rumored that the king planned to offer her

11 Ibid., 5:268.12 Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont (London, 1910), 318.13 Alfred Morrison, ed., The Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents Formed by

Alfred Morrison: The Bulstrode Papers, vol. 1, 1667–1675, 2nd ser. (London, 1897), 112.14 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 189.15 Ibid., 75.16 Great Britain, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (CSPD), 1671 (London, 1895), 7.17 Morrison, ed., The Bulstrode Papers, 214.


hand in marriage to his twenty-one-year-old nephew, William, prince of Orange.It was taken for granted that members of the royal family would marry for dip-lomatic, not personal, reasons. The duke of York had violated that rule when hemarried Anne Hyde; neither he nor his daughters would be permitted to makethe same mistake.

Mary’s father also was on the marriage market following the death of the duchessof York. Forty years old, hard-faced, and full of crude sexual energy, he unthinkinglyoffered his hand to Lady Bellasis. The king refused, however, telling him angrilythat he could not play the fool a second time. England needed a diplomatic alliancewith either the Spanish or the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg. Finally,he settled on Princess Mary Beatrice of Modena, daughter of Alfonso IV d’Este,duke of Modena.18

Mary met her new stepmother in late November 1673, soon after the latter’sarrival at Whitehall. Her father told her that he had “provided a playfellow” forher. In fact, the fifteen-year-old duchess of York was only three or four years olderthan her stepdaughter. Mary may have found it awkward to be presented withevidence of her father’s sexuality, particularly when it involved a woman close toher own age. It was generally thought that the duchess had “greater youth thanis necessary.”19 James, however, seemed to prefer women with slender, even child-like, figures.

The arrival of the new duchess brought many young women to court. Com-petition for a place in her household was fierce. It was said that “virgins allmostscratched out one an other’s eyes to be maides of honour.”20 These included MaryKirk, Isabella Boynton, Eleanor Needham, and Sarah Jenyns (who would laterbecome the duchess of Marlborough). Their function was to “adorn the court,”to help entertain the ladies who came to visit the duchess, to accompany her whenshe walked or rode out, and to dance at balls and masques. They were young,ranging in age from fourteen to nineteen, pretty, and stylishly dressed. Theirfamilies hoped that they would both “learn handsome Fashions, Graceful Behav-iour, Noble Entertainments,” and find a suitably rich and well-connected hus-band.21 A “mother of the maids” or governess was employed to protect theirhonor, but a few girls had no wish to be protected. Instead, they aspired to bemistresses of the duke of York or other prominent courtiers, often with scandalousresults. Mary Kirke, for example, had liaisons with the duke of York, the duke ofMonmouth, and the earl of Mulgrave. In 1675 she gave birth to a son in themaid’s lodgings at St. James’s Palace and, soon afterward, retired in disgrace toFrance. A few weeks later, the duchess of York’s secretary learned that the dukeof Monmouth, “ever in some amour,” had begun to court Eleanor Needham.“Her Royal Highness has very ill luck with her maids of honour,” he wrote.22 Notlong after, the mother of Sarah Jenyns threatened to remove her daughter from

18 John Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (1978; repr., London, 1989), 71–75.19 Rachel Lady Russell, Letters of Rachel Lady Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1853), 1:13.20 Frances Harris, Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin

(Oxford, 2003), 194.21 Ibid., 106.22 Morrison, ed., The Bulstrode Papers, 311.

510 " McCLAIN

court on the grounds that “two of the maids [of honor] had had great bellies atcourt and she would not leave her child there to have the third.”23

As the third Anglo-Dutch War drew to a close in 1674, gossip once again linkedtwelve-year-old Mary with the prince of Orange.24 Members of Parliament par-ticularly favored the idea of a Protestant match. By this time, it was clear thatCharles II would not produce a legitimate heir. Instead, his brother and his off-spring would inherit the throne. The duchess of York might well produce a maleheir, but, in the event she did not, Mary would succeed her father. One authorsaw the marriage as a means by which “future disputes about the Crown will bequieted, as were those bloody controversies between York and Lancaster by theprudent marriage of Henry VII.”25 Others considered it to be insurance againsta future war with the Dutch. At this point, however, the match existed only inrumor, not in reality. In fact, the king was so little interested in cultivating theprince of Orange that he commissioned a re-enactment of the Dutch defeat atsiege of Maastricht that had been taken by Louis XIV the preceding summer.26

For her part, Mary paid more attention to the romantic affairs conducted byothers than to her own marital future. Tall for her age (she would grow to 5 feet11 inches), she had self-confidence, imagination, a flair for drama, and a love ofconversation. In fact, it later was said that she “grew weary of anybody who wouldnot talk a great deal.”27 Her letters from 1674 describe the scandalous behaviorof the maids in the York household. She referred to Eleanor Needham as “mypoor Juno which name I write with a cipher, oh, sure you might guess, beingcipher was named, what has befallen her, poor rogue.” She had become pregnantby the duke of Monmouth and was now “so big that I can [not] tell how she willbe able to go any longer on. . . . The rest of the story I will tell you when I dosee you again for, as I was writing of it to you, I bethought myself that it was ofso great importance that I durst not trust pen and ink with it.”28 Her fascinationwith dangerous romantic intrigues was shared by most young women at court.Elizabeth Delaval, who served as a maid of the privy chamber to Queen Catherineof Braganza, wrote, “At court our maid’s place there chief happiness / in newcaught lovers, who flatteries express / in looks and words, nay in their very dress.”29

She also began a romantic affair of her own. Around 1675, she began writinglove letters to the eighteen-year-old Frances Apsley (born ca. 1668–1727), daugh-ter of the duke of York’s treasurer.30 She described herself as “your obedient wife,

23 Great Britain, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (HMC), The Manuscripts of His Gracethe Duke of Rutland, 4 vols. (London, 1888–1905), 2:32.

24 HMC, 14th Report, Appendix IV (London, 1894), 99; Sir William Temple to the Earl of Essex,25 October [1673], BL Stowe 203, 113–14.

25 CSPD, 1673–75 (London, 1904), 132.26 E. S. de Beer, Diary of John Evelyn (London, 1959), 602.27 Memoirs of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, together with her Characters of her Contemporaries and

her Opinions, ed. William King (London, 1930), 18.28 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 75–75v.29 Elizabeth Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, ed. Douglas G. Greene, Surtees

Society 190 (Durham, 1978), 120.30 In his 1924 edition, Bathurst arranged the letters in what he thought was chronological order.

He guessed that they started in 1671, soon after the duchess of York’s death. However, the earliestthat we can reliably date the letters—given the information contained in them—is 1675. It is not clearwhy Bathurst settled on this earlier date. He may have been influenced by the variations in Mary’s


Mary Clorine” or “your wife that love[s] you as my life” or “your obedient, loving,constant wife.” She characterized Frances as “my dear Aurelia” or “dearest hus-band” or “dear, cruel, loved, blessed husband.”31 Their pen names were drawnfrom contemporary drama. “Clorin” was a character found both in John Dryden’sAn Evening’s Love; or, The Mock Astrologer and in Francis Beaumont’s The FaithfulShepherdess. “Aurelia” was a character in Philip Massinger’s The Maid of Honour.Mary’s letters were filled with expressions of marital love and devotion: “To tellmy dearest dear husband how much I love her would be but to make you wearyof it, for all the paper books and parchments in the world would not hold halfthe love I have for you, my dearest, dearest, dearest, dear Aurelia.”32

Frances’s letters do not survive, but she participated in this drama by playingthe role of the husband. Tall and thin, with a horsy face, Frances never attractedthe interest of either the duke or the king. Jenyns referred to her unkindly as “theNag’s Head.”33 However, her imagination and high spirits endeared her to theduke’s young daughters, whom she saw on a daily basis. In her letters, she chidedher wife for failing to write more often, offered favors to others as a way of makingher jealous, and imagined herself heartbroken when Mary did not promptly returnher letters. “Who can imagine that my dear husband can be so lovesick for fear Ido not love her?” Mary wrote, “But I have more reason to think she is sick ofbeing weary of me for in two or three years, men are always weary of their wivesand look for mistresses as soon as they can get them.” However, she reassuredher “again, for my part, I have more love for you than I can possibly have for allthe world. Besides, you do not expect from me a letter like your own this morning,for I am sure Mr. Dryden and all the poets in the world put together could notmake such another.”34

Frances Apsley came from a family with a long history of service to the crown.Her father Sir Allen Apsley (1616–83) served both as the duke of York’s treasurerand receiver-general and as his spokesman in the House of Commons. He hadfought as a royalist during the Civil War and maintained a regular correspondencewith Edward Hyde, a distant relation, afterward. Shortly before the Restoration,he joined the duke of York’s household. He also gained the financially rewardingposts of keeper of the King’s Hawks and keeper of the North Park of HamptonCourt. He maintained close political ties with Clarendon, so much so that thepoet Andrew Marvell regarded him as one of the latter’s henchmen. A hard-drinking, foul-mouthed courtier, he resembled his more brilliant cousin, JohnWilmot, earl of Rochester, whom he later served as executor, though he used hisintelligence to better ends. He helped his sister, Lucy Hutchinson, to save herhusband, the regicide John Hutchinson, from execution. He also reordered York’sfinances after 1666 and served as the duke’s spokesman in the Commons, de-fending his marriage to Mary of Modena in October 1673. By 1675, he had

handwriting—from a large, childish scrawl to a more tightly written, seemingly adult hand. But it seemsthat even as a young married woman, she wrote badly. She often apologized that her letters were so“ill [written] that I am afraid you cannot read it.” Bathurst, Letters of Two Queens, 44; Mary to Apsley,n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 185–86.

31 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 58, 165, 180, 189.32 Ibid., 189.33 Field, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, 34.34 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 168–69.

512 " McCLAIN

gained sufficient wealth and standing to build a house in St. James’s Square wherehe and his family moved the following year.35

Lady Frances Apsley (1645–98) also played an important role in the York house-hold, serving the first duchess of York until her death in 1671. She secured placesfor her daughters Isabella and Frances as lady of the bedchamber and maid ofhonor, respectively, to the second duchess. She knew of the Stuart sisters’ affectionfor her daughter Frances; in fact, she encouraged Frances to correspond with Maryand Anne as a way of ensuring her family’s connection to the royal family aftertheir move to St. James’s Square. However, she probably considered these romanticattachments in light of the general theatricality of court life.

Drama, real or imagined, was part of the everyday experience of courtiers livingin or around Whitehall and St. James’s. Gentlemen and women occupied theirtime with the game of love, pursuing secret alliances and intrigues, displayinggrand passion and indulging in sordid affairs, ruining the hopes of their rivals andhoping against hope for a “serious amour,” or a “grande tendresse.” A semi-fictionalaccount of court life in 1675, written by Marie Catherine Baronne d’Aulnoy,described the disappointments and triumphs of leading courtiers. In one scene, adiscouraged duke of Argyle reminds the duke of Monmouth of “the miseries onesuffers even in the happiest of passions through the caprices of our mistresses,through jealousies, through genuine anger. . . . If one only realised the annoyancesto which one exposes oneself when one commences to love, . . . one would avoidthem with more care than one avoids death!” Monmouth, the ardent lover, replies,“I uphold Love; I am unable to deny him. A man who is indifferent never knowsreal pleasure. Love makes us brave every evil Fortune; Love inspires us to the mostnoble and exalted sentiments; Love gives us desire to excel—however difficult ourway may be, Love makes it easy.”36

In the 1670s, the court experienced a brief revival of the fashion for “seraphiclove,” an intense emotional relationship that might elevate one to a higher spiritualplane. Courtiers drew on Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life andhis Treatise of the Love of God. They also read Robert Boyle’s treatise, Some Motivesto the Love of God, better known as Seraphick Love. John Evelyn wrote of hisfriendship with the maid of honor, Margaret Blagge, as “seraphic.” London cler-gymen engaged in “seraphic discourse” with their female parishioners while court-iers remarked on the king’s lack of interest in the “seraphic part” of lovemaking.Gentlemen and women gave one another coterie names. Robert Boyle’s sisterLady Warwick and Lord Berkeley addressed one another as “Harmonia” and“Constans” while Boyle called himself “Philaretus,” or “lover of virtue.” Evelyn’sfemale friends were dubbed Cyparissa, Platona, Electra, Alcidonia, and Ornithia.Meanwhile, the poetess Katherine Philips, “the Matchless Orinda,” celebrated herlove for Anne Owen, “Lucasia.”37

35 Paul Seaward, “Apsley, Sir Allen (1616–1683),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London,2004), accessed 10 October 2004: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/600; The Diary of Sam-uel Pepys, 7:416.

36 Marie Catherine Baronne d’Aulnoy, Memoirs of the Court of England in 1675, trans. Mrs. WilliamHenry Arthur, ed. and rev. George David Gilbert (1913; rev. ed., London, 1927), 65, 197–98, 285.

37 Harris, Transformations of Love, 80–81, 154–57; St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the DevoutLife, trans. Michael Day (New York, 1961); Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: HenriettaMaria and Court Entertainments (New York, 1989). Andreadis suggested that Katherine Philips “ap-


At the same time, same-sex erotic relations provided entertainment at court. In1663, Samuel Pepys described a mock marriage that King Charles II arrangedbetween his mistress Barbara Palmer, countess of Castlemaine, and a young womanhe wished to bed, Frances Stuart, later duchess of Richmond. The courtly gameincluded all the activities associated with weddings. The “bride” put her hair inribbons, threw the sock, and happily tumbled into bed with the “groom.”38 Therewas even a real marriage between the beautiful eighteen-year-old Arabella Hunt,who had appeared in the court masque Calisto in 1675, and a woman, Amy Poulter,who represented herself as a man.39 John Dryden’s first success was The RivalLadies, in which two women spent most of the play disguised as men. Accordingto James Winn, such plays permitted “a more psychological kind of titillation: theyallowed the audience to imagine what it would be like to change sex, to play atthe kind of game Castlemaine may have organized at court.”40

Mary’s letters show her to be familiar with the idea of love as a spirituallyelevating force but she never refers to Frances as a “Seraph.” Nor does she considerherself to be a model of virtue. In fact, she more often refers to herself as a sinnerwho had neglected her love and required absolution. “This letter is to make anatonement,” she wrote, “. . . for all my faults, I confess I have been to blame,”including her “extreme idleness” and failure to write more often.41 In anotherletter, she asks Frances not “to deny me any longer your pardon whilst I can haveit or I shall die and not be able to receive it.” She ends, “believe my conversiontrue, your penitent wife, Mary Clorine.”42

Mary more often imitated the epistolary style made popular by Lettres portugaisestraduites en francois, an international bestseller.43 The work consisted of five pas-sionate letters written by a Portuguese nun, Mariane, to a Frenchman who hadseduced and abandoned her. The letters seemed so true to life, so emotionallyexpressive, that the public believed them to be written by a woman. Not until thetwentieth century was the author identified as a man. In the meantime, generations

propriated a male homosexual poetic discourse, with its platonism, its implicit eroticism, and its im-passioned arguments via conceits . . . because this discourse suited the deeply intimate nature of theemotions she sought to chart and for which she sought a vehicle” (Andreadis, Sappho in Early ModernEngland, 62).

38 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 4:37–38.39 Hunt would later become a famous lutenist and soprano at the court of Queen Mary II. Patricia

Crawford and Sara Mendelson, “Sexual Identities in Early Modern England: The Marriage of TwoWomen in 1680,” Gender and History 7, no. 3 (November 1995): 362–77.

40 James Anderson Winn, “When Beauty Fires the Blood”: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden(Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), 65. Traub suggested that cross-dressing plays may have blinded contemporariesto “the eroticism evident in their language of desire.” Valerie Traub, “The (In)Significance of ‘Lesbian’Desire in Early Modern England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC,1994), 80.

41 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 50.42 Ibid., 47.43 Lettres portugaises traduites en francois (Paris, 1669). Shortly after their publication, two pirated

editions appeared, one in Cologne and one in Amsterdam. The original publisher issued another printingof the first edition, a second edition, and a sequel containing additional letters, all in 1669. Anotherpirated edition appeared in Dijon. A third edition appeared in 1672. Roger L’Estrange produced thefirst English translation, Five Love Letters From a Nun To A Cavalier Done Out of the French IntoEnglish (London, 1678). Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Lew-isburg, PA, 2000), 11. See also Madeleine Alcover, “Essai de Stemmatologie: La datation du manuscriptdes Lettres portugaises,” Papers on Seventeenth-Century French Literature 12, no. 23 (1985): 621–50.

514 " McCLAIN

of Europeans came to believe that the literary expression of passion, melancholy,and desire was the sign of a woman in love. In fact, to write “a la portugaise”became “a veritable code for a certain style—written at the height of passion in amoment of disorder and distress.”44 The publication of the Lettres must haveproduced a particular frisson of excitement in the English court given the Por-tuguese origins of Queen Catherine who, like the nun, had devoted her life to anunfaithful man.

In the Lettres portugaises, Mariane expressed the most intimate feelings of herheart. She wrote to her lover, “Unfortunate love! You were betrayed and youbetrayed me with false expectations. A passion that held such sweet promise nowbrings a mortal despair more cruel than the absence that provokes it.” She de-scribed her failure to resist his love: “I was consumed by your assiduities, yourexuberance inflamed me, your kindness fascinated me, you won me with yourvows, I was seduced by my own violent inclination, and what follows such sweetand joyful beginnings are but tears and sighs, and a grievous death for which Ifind no remedy.” Still, she could not forbear telling him, “I love you a thousandtimes more than my life, and a thousand times more than I can think. How youare dear to me and how you are cruel!”45

Like the Portuguese nun, Mary wrote of seduction and betrayal, nonreciprocatedlove and painful longing. She feared that when Frances moved away from court“she will forget her poor wife here at St. James’s and find some mistress in herneighborhood.”46 She later reproached her friend for failing to take the opportunityof meeting her at church. She described her as “an unkind, hard-hearted, cruel,inhuman, barbarous, fair creature who, first, with all the charms of friendship andpleasing conversation did win my heart. Then, when she had got it sure, she heldit fast.”47 She described how she had “waited day after day, still wishing for a letter,thought every minute an hour, each hour an age.” She hoped that a letter ex-pressing her anger might provoke Frances to write, “I, in despair, sat down towrite this letter hoping my just rage should make me say such things as wouldprovoke you to write something should kill me quite that with my latest breathI might bless the author of my death. If it were daggers, darts or poisoned arrowfrom you, I could endure them all for one kind word. If I had but one kind lookfrom you, I should die happy.”48 She could not bear the thought of Frances’s“indifference” and begged her to remember her “vows and protestations” thatshe had made “when you were in love. . . . For pity, then for charity, for remem-brance of our former kindness and love, let me have a little love.”49 She also soughther physical presence, to “have my belly full of discourse with you.”50

44 Katherine A. Jensen, “Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a Woman inSeventeenth-Century France,” in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. ElizabethC. Goldsmith (Boston, 1989), 25–45; Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, andEpistolary Fictions (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 95.

45 Myriam Cyr, Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery behind a Seventeenth-CenturyForbidden Love (New York, 2006), 89–91, 100. The author translated the letters into English usingthe first edition published by Charles Barbin.

46 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 189v.47 Ibid., 177.48 Ibid., 187v–188.49 Ibid., 164.50 Ibid., 52.


In some letters, she incorporated pieces of rhymed verse, writing, “I love youwith a heart entire, I am for you all one desire, I love you with a flame morelasting than the vestal’s fire. Thou art my life, my soul, my all that heaven cangive. Death’s life with you, without you, death to live.” She continued:

What can I say more to persuade you that I love you with more zeal than any lovercan. I love you with a love that ne’er was known by man. I have for you excess offriendship, more of love than any woman can for woman, and more love than eventhe constantest love had for his mistress. You are loved more than can be expressedby your ever obedient wife, very affectionate friend, humble servant to kiss the groundwhere on you go. To be your dog in a string, your fish in a net, your bird in a cage,your humble trout. Mary Clorine.51

She also made reference to plays enacted on the Restoration stage. After a quarrelwith Frances, she accused her friend of having “forsaken me quite” for her sisterAnne. She lamented that “my happy sister has the cornelian ring unhappy I shouldhave had. She will write to you now, unkind Aurelia.” Then, she took off in aflight of literary fancy, imagining her sister to be “happier than ever I was for shehas triumphed over a rival that once was happy in your love, ’til she with heralluring charms removed unhappy Clorine from your heart.” She imagined Francesand Anne whispering and laughing together, “as if you had said, now we are ridof her, let us be happy, whilst poor, unhappy I sat reading of a play, my heartready to break, for I read where Masinissa comes first to Sophonisba and thoughtthat scene so like my misery it made me ready to cry.” The play was NathanielLee’s Sophonisba; or, Hannibal’s Overthrow in which Masinissa, king of Numidia,joined the Roman general Scipio in the Second Punic War to defeat Carthage. Inthe scene Mary described, Sophonisba, a Carthaginian noblewoman, confrontedMasinissa with his betrayal. Mary continued, writing that before her sister, “Iwould not show my weakness but now with Sophonisba I may cry out. She thinksme false though I have been most true and thinking so what may her fury do.”Here, she reversed gender roles, placing herself in the role of the warrior Masinissaand Frances in the role of the heroine Sophonisba, who ended her life by takingpoison. Imagining the death of her beloved, Mary suddenly pulled back: “If Ihave said any nonsense, pray forgive it for I think I am almost mad.” She ended,“with this prayer I leave you that in your new choice you may be most happy,that she may love you as well as I, for better I am sure she cannot. So with myprayers, I leave you to think sometimes of your unfortunate, Mary Clorine.”52

Mary could easily imagine herself as a character in a theatrical for she spentmuch of her time reading plays and French romances. She read the most popularEnglish playwrights of the age, including John Dryden, Thomas Otway, NathanielLee, William Davenant, William Wycherley, Nahum Tate, and Aphra Behn. Shealso dipped into the works of a previous generation, including Sir Philip Sydney’sArcadia and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess. French workspopular among young court women included Magdeleine de Scuderi’s Artamenes;or, the Grand Cyrus and Honore d’Urfe’s Astrea, a Romance. Delaval, an avidreader, later described these as “ill chosen books, such as romances are, which

51 Ibid., 163.52 Ibid., 181–82.

516 " McCLAIN

serve only to please our fancy not to guide our judgment, and to make our minutespass away (’tis said by some) less tediously than they would do, were we otherwiseemployed.”53

Mary also performed in the court masque Calisto; or, The Chaste Nimph writtenby John Crowne. The extravagant production was designed to display the thirteen-year-old Mary’s eligibility for marriage before an audience of foreign ambassadorsfrom France, Spain, and the Netherlands. One contemporary wrote, “There is amasque acted at the cockpit one this night wherein is most of the ladies at courtactors, my Lady Mary the duke’s daughter and all in general of the great ones.. . . It is said this is practiced against the Prince of Orange comes which is thoughtwill not be long.”54 She took the part of the heroine, Calisto, “a chaste and favouritenymph of Diana, beloved by Jupiter.” Anne ( just turned ten) took that of Nyphe,Sarah Jennings acted Mercury, while Henrietta Wentworth (later mistress of Mon-mouth) was Jupiter. Margaret Blagge played the lead, Diana. In fact, all of theleading characters, even Jupiter and Mercury, were played by women. Crowneplundered the tales of Ovid to create an extravagant court production featuringsea gods and tritons, water nymphs and shepherds. The only serious difficulty wasthat Ovid’s tale required forcible seduction of Calisto by Jupiter, a scene impossibleto depict even on the Restoration stage. In the end, Crowne removed the rapescene and caused the plot to turn on Calisto’s successful resistance to the attemptedseduction. However, as Frances Harris notes, “by no conceivable extension of theterm could even this much bowdlerized version of the fable be described in wordsor actions as ‘exactly Modest.’”55

Rather than shock the audience by depicting sexual violence, the playwrighttitillated it by turning the assault on Calisto’s chastity into an attempted lesbianseduction. Jupiter transforms himself into the goddess Diana, to whom Calistoowes obedience, then woos her as a lover. The idea of Diana as a seductress wouldhave scandalized audiences of an earlier era. In Elizabethan and early Stuart courtmasques, Diana always was depicted as the archetype of virgin power and militantchastity. However, after the Restoration, according to Harris, “this high seriousnesswas rapidly deflated. Court women in masquerade or sitting for their portraits

53 Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 45.54 John Crowne, Calisto; or, The Chaste Nimph: The Late Masque at Court (London, 1675); Lady

Gerard to Anne Wrey, 4 February 1674/75, GD406/1/11685, National Archive of Scotland. Theperformance of the masque was delayed until 22 February 1674/75. As this date fell during Lent, theSpanish and French ambassadors declined to attend, leaving only the Venetian ambassador GirolamoAlberti, the Swedish envoy, and the Dutch ambassador to witness the performance. However, ambas-sadors may have attended one of the dress rehearsals in December with the king and court. AndrewR. Walkling, “Masque and Politics at the Restoration Court: John Crowne’s Calisto,” Early Music 24,no. 1 (February 1996): 30. See also Harris, Transformations of Love, 223–30.

55 Harris, Transformations of Love, 225. Traub analyzed the Calisto myth as it appeared in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century dramatized versions, pointing out the ambivalent meanings attached to thetale of chaste love between women. She suggested that, by the late seventeenth century, this story cameto be conflated with perverse acts of the tribade (Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early ModernEngland, 229–75). See also Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, 155–70; Kathleen Wall, TheCallisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature (Kingston, Ontario, 1988); CarolBarash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (New York,2000), 47; and Jean I. Marsden, “Rape, Voyeurism, and the Restoration Stage,” in Broken Boundaries:Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed. Katherine M. Quinsey (Lexington, KY, 1996):185–200. I am grateful to Cynthia Caywood for the last reference.


would be decked with the emblems of the virgin goddess, in deliberate appro-priation or knowing parody of the myth.”56 Jupiter’s decision to adopt the guiseof Diana must have caused a snort of laughter in the audience: “Disguis’d likeher, I’ll kiss, embrace, be free.” Mercury responds, “Yes, and persuade her too,’tis chastity.” He continued, “The Nymph will all Diana does allow; Nay thinkshe liv’d in some mistake ’til now.”57

The rape scene itself was both lengthy and explicit, calling to mind the lesbiancomponent of some male erotica. The cross-dressed Henrietta Wentworth, asJupiter, returned to her own gender as Diana or, alternately, was replaced on stageby Margaret Blagge as Diana (the stage directions are unclear). In either case, theaudience was reminded of the changeable nature of sexual identity. Jupiter, dis-guised as Diana, reveals to Calisto that “your merits breed / In my lost heart astrange uncommon flame: / A kindness I both fear and blush to name; / Nay,one for which no name I ever knew, / The passion is to me so strange, so new!”Calisto recoils from his/her advances, fearing that her heretofore chaste mistresshas been infected by Cupid’s “bloody darts” and requires a cure. Jupiter/Diana,however, seeks to persuade the nymph that their love would be a prelude toheterosexual lovemaking, a suggestion that would have been familiar to readersof male erotic literature.58 He/she calls on Calisto to “smile, smile upon me sweetly,or I die. / Suppose me now, some beauteous god, or Jove / The King of gods,and think your self in love.” Finally, Calisto’s unwavering virtue forced Jupiter todrop his disguise and to confront her, “Your killing beauty is one great offense;/ But your chief sin is too much innocence.” As she would not accept his loveor his promise of a heavenly throne, he determined to storm her virtue. He causedwinds to carry her off and hold her captive to await his pleasure.59

In the end, Calisto’s reward for virtue was an earthly crown in a world concernedonly with the pursuit of “pleasure and love.” Jupiter retracted his promise to turnCalisto and Nyphe into heavenly stars “before they have tasted the pleasures oflove.” Instead, he decided to keep them “to grace some fav’rite crown,” a linedirected to the ambassadors in the audience. In the spectacular finale, Calisto andNyphe appeared under a canopy made of yards of multicolored silk, gauze, andtinsel ribbon before a backdrop of gods and goddesses. They were encouraged tofollow the advice of the chorus, to chase all pleasure but love from their hearts:“We’ll kindle our selves into stars with embracing: / We’ll every moment ourpleasures renew, / Our loves shall be flaming, and lasting and true.”60

In her letters, Mary pursued the kind of passionate relationship encouraged bylate seventeenth-century writers. She did not behave like the “chaste nymph,”waiting to be seduced by a more sophisticated lover. Instead, she demanded theattention of a much older girl. “I intend to plague you with letters now, dearest,dear Aurelia,” she wrote, “there shall be no end of my letters.” She resolved tomake it her study to please “my dearest, dear, dear, dear husband” who could no

56 Harris, Transformations of Love, 226.57 John Crowne, The Dramatic Works of John Crowne, 4 vols., ed. James Maidment and W. H. Logan

(Edinburgh, 1873–74), 1:260.58 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from

the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981), 23–30.59 Crowne, The Dramatic Works of John Crowne, 1:267–73.60 Ibid., 322–23.

518 " McCLAIN

longer have cause to complain about a “disloyal wife.”61 She evoked pastoralimagery, imagining herself as “poor in everything but love, poor but content. . . .For what greater riches can I desire than love of you and I hope it is repaid byyou, for if you did love me as I do you, I could live and be content with a cottagein the country, a cow, a stuff petticoat and waistcoat in summer and cloth in winter,a little garden to live upon the fruits and herbs it yields, or, if I could not haveyou so to myself, I would go a begging, be poor but content.”62

In her early letters, Mary advanced toward, then retreated from, the sexualdesire implicit in their correspondence. “Clorine” was, at first, a character thatshe could put on, then take off, an identity separate from herself. Around 1675she wrote that “both Lady Mary and Clorine have received kindness alike. I donot know which you have obliged the most but which soever it is, Clorine is somuch Aurelia’s servant that she shall ever be your obedient wife.” She signs“Mary,” skips a line, then writes “Clorine.”63 In another letter, she beggedFrances to “think of me as your faithful wife, true to your bed” before realizingthe sexual implications of what she had written. She then added, “by all ourloves I am, if not as your wife, you will accept me as your affectionate friend.”64

Only when pressed did she express herself in a forthright manner. In 1676, sheanticipated the consequences of Frances’s move from court to St. James’s Square:“now I shall very seldom or never see you but in a grave visit with your mother.”She insisted, “I shall never think you my husband if I don’t talk with you as weused to do, for I love Mistress Apsley better than any woman can love a woman,but I love my dear Aurelia as a wife should do a husband, nay, more than is ableto be expressed.”65

The fact that Mary and Frances measured their love by the standards of awoman’s love for a man perhaps made their correspondence acceptable to othersat court. Their exchange of letters was not a secret. Sarah Jenyns, a young maidof honor who later would become Anne’s intimate friend, knew about it. So didher governess, Lady Villiers, Frances’s mother Lady Apsley, and the court painterGibson. Even the king knew of his nieces’ passionate friendships. According toSarah, he remarked on Anne’s lengthy correspondence with Mary Cornwallis, aRoman Catholic and the daughter of Katherine Cornwallis, the duchess of York’sbedchamber woman. Anne had written, “it was believed, above a thousand lettersfull of the most violent professions of everlasting kindness” over the course ofthree or four years. Indeed, “K[ing] Charles us’d to say, No man ever loved hisMistress, as his niece Anne did Mrs. Cornwallis.”66

It was not uncommon for patrons and courtiers to use elevated language toexpress loyalty and devotion. In his study of patronage in early modern France,Arthur L. Herman Jr. found that patrons, clients, and creatures used a “languageof fidelity” that reflected a Christian vision of a deferential society held togetherby bonds of love. Examples of such language can be found in the flowery andextravagant rhetoric of dedicatory epistles, in “effusive letters of gratitude from

61 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 73.62 Ibid., 173.63 Ibid., 174v.64 Ibid., 185–86.65 Ibid., 183–183v.66 Harris, A Passion for Government, 32–33.


clients to patrons, and the endless complaints and reproaches for ingratitude.”67

Linda Levy Peck noted the use of such language by Henry Howard, earl of North-ampton, in a letter to Charles Cornwallis, ambassador to Spain in the first decadeof James I’s reign: “I made election of your worth so faithfully, I affected yourown person so sincerely, I drew your love out of the bunch so particularly . . . Imade your interest my own so indifferently . . . and therefore the condition ofthe contract standing still in force you need fear no forfeitures.”68 Ophelia Fieldnoted the use of endearments by the countess of Sunderland, who wanted to placeher daughter in service at court. She wrote to Sarah Churchill in the early 1680s:“I covet very few things more than to have you kind to me, which I shall endeavourto deserve by all the ways within my poor power and persuade you by all theactions of my life that you have none in the world more faithfully and sincerelyyours.”69

Patronage relationships also could express homoerotic desire. In elite house-holds, physical intimacy was often a sign of favor. Men might share a bed, publiclyembrace, eat together, exchange rings or other gifts, and even jokingly refer toone another as their “mistress” without necessarily engaging in sodomy, as Braypointed out. Similarly, women might sleep with one another without giving riseto scandal. Gowing noted that “political friendship between women involved care-fully judged shades of physical closeness.” To sleep in the same bedchamber—orbed—with a woman of higher status could suggest “esteem, kinship and obliga-tion.” In 1605, Anne Clifford regretted missing the opportunity to go with ArbellaStuart to Oxford “and to have slept in her chamber, which she much desired, forI am the more bound to her than can be.” Sharing a bed with the older womanmight have brought Clifford “one step closer to her network of friends and allies.”Other bedmates were more intimate friends. Clifford wrote that the night she laywith her cousin, Frances Bourchier, and Mrs. Mary Cary, was “the first beginningof the greatness between us.” Gowing suggested that “this ‘greatness’ meantemotional and physical intimacy, and perhaps sexual contact as well.”70

In the early seventeenth century, female intimacy was not likely to be considereddangerous. Elizabeth Wahl noted that many late Renaissance literary and theatricalworks “depict homoerotic relations between young women without disruptingpatriarchal authority since such desire signalled a necessary stage in a woman’spsychosexual development, functioning almost as a rite of puberty that would‘naturally’ give way to heterosexual ‘maturity’ in marriage.”71 However, at somepoint between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, heterosexual desire began

67 Arthur L. Herman Jr., “The Language of Fidelity in Early Modern France,” Journal of ModernHistory 67, no. 1 (1995): 6, 13–14, 21.

68 Linda Levy Peck, “‘For a King Not to be Bountiful Were a Fault’: Perspectives on Court Patronagein Early Stuart England,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 1 (January 1986): 39.

69 Field, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, 44.70 Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New

Haven, CT, 2003), 66, 68.71 Wahl, Invisible Relations, 10. Male intimacy was far more problematic. During periods of political

unrest, the language and dynamics of male friendship could be recast as corrupted or inverted. In theearly seventeenth century, when traditions of personal service had begun to decay, courtiers like KingJames I’s favorite, the duke of Buckingham, were accused of sodomy and even witchcraft (Bray, TheFriend, passim). See also Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York, 1992).

520 " McCLAIN

to be defined as “normal” and contrasted with the perverse.72 Gowing noted, “Bythe late seventeenth century, in women’s writing, at least, intense female intimacywas not necessarily innocent.”73

The depth of feeling, sexual imagery, and emotional intensity expressed by Maryin her letters to Frances suggest that same-sex love was not simply a phase thatshe passed through on her way to maturity. Nor was it entirely the product of apatron-client relationship. Mary remained Frances’s “wife” after her marriage toWilliam, prince of Orange. In fact, she described their relationship in far moreexplicit sexual terms after her marriage than before.

In November 1677, after years of prevarication and diplomatic intrigue, Marymarried William, prince of Orange. Although she had been prepared for marriage,she was surprised by her husband’s appearance and his rough, soldier-like character.Twelve years older and four inches shorter than his bride, he had been ravagedby the smallpox virus. He spoke slowly, his words punctuated by a deep, drycough. She found his manners to be appalling. After the wedding ceremony atWhitehall, the prince decided to dine with friends in the city rather than joininghis new bride. The duchess of Orleans later learned that he had “kept the kingand the bride, who had been put to bed in the bridal chamber, waiting until aftermidnight.” When Charles II asked what had kept him so long, “he replied thathe had been gambling after supper, threw himself into a chair and had his valetundress him then and there.” To make matters worse, he went to bed in hiswoolen underwear. The king, joking, suggested that he take them off. But Williamreplied “that since he and his wife would have to live together a long time shewould have to get used to his habits; he was accustomed to wearing his woolens,and had no intention of changing now.”74

The crudeness of her husband’s behavior hit Mary like a blow. The duchess ofOrleans remarked, “I am not surprised that the princess is struck dumb at suchmanners. It reminds me of the comedy of the husband of the shrewish Kate,”referring to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.75 William ignored his new wife atthe queen’s birthday ball though she dressed “very richly with all her jewels.”According to Mary’s chaplain, “the court began to whisper the prince’s sullenness,

72 Bray suggested, “It is at this point, towards the end of the seventeenth century, that one can seea radically different attitude to homosexuality. It is at this point that the images of the masculine‘sodomite’ lost the alien associations that had kept it at such a distance from an image that one mightnormally apply to oneself, to one’s neighbor or one’s friend. The change gave the ‘sodomite’ a newactuality and was quickly evident in violent action directed against homosexuality on a scale withoutprecedent in English history” (Bray, The Friend, 218). Meanwhile, Traub’s chapters 5, 6, and 7 “pointto the mid-seventeenth century as an inaugural period in the construction of the erotic meanings ofmodernity” (Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, 231). Andreadis datedthe shift in attitudes toward female same-sex eroticism to the late sixteenth century, while Susan Lanserargued for a linguistic shift in the eighteenth century. Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England,chap. 2; Susan Lanser, “Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts,” Eighteenth CenturyStudies 32, no. 2 (Winter 1998–99): 179–87.

73 Gowing, “The Politics of Women’s Friendships in Early Modern England,” 133.74 Maria Kroll, ed., Letters from Liselotte: Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine and Duchess of Orleans,

‘Madame,’ 1652–1722 (New York, 1971), 32–33.75 Ibid., 32–33.


or clownishness, that he took no notice of his princess at the play and ball, norcame to see her at St. James’s.”76

Mary and Frances parted in the confusion of late night revels at the queen’sball. “You went away so much sooner than I expected that I did not see my dearto take my leave of her,” Mary wrote, “for though I know you did not design totake it publicly yet I hoped you would have had some discourse better than wehad that night before for I was then so sleepy.” She begged her to keep her wordand “not forget your poor Clorine that loves you better than can be expressed.”She described herself as “your one true wife” who would “die condemned” shouldshe ever forget to write and express her love. She ended with a coquettish plea,“but, of all things, pray be not in the fashion to keep mistresses to break yourpoor wife’s heart. Indeed, I am impatient ’til I hear from you. Pray do not delaybut answer my letter by this same messenger and believe me your true wife, humbleservant, and most affectionate and loving friend, Mary Clorine.”77

Mary “wept grievously all the morning” of her departure from London. Sheand the prince took a barge from Whitehall, accompanied by the king and queen,the duke of York, the duchess of Monmouth, and other courtiers. When QueenCatherine tried to comfort her with stories of her own experience as a young bridein a foreign country, she replied petulantly, “but, madam, you came into England,but I am going out of England.”78

Marriage did not deter Mary from continuing her romance with Frances. InDecember, she wrote from The Hague: “Do not think my love is so weak thatcrossing the sea will put it out.” She signed herself “Mary Clorine” and added“you see, though I have another husband, I keep the name of my first.”79 Maryknew that she “must be content to live without seeing you, which I once thoughtI could never have done, but your leaving St. James’s House began this parting. . . still continue writing to me and loving me as long as you and I shall live.”80

She also described their relationship in sexual terms, suggesting that Franceshad been cuckolded by the prince of Orange. In August 1678, she told her friendthat she might be pregnant:

It is what I am ashamed to say but, seeing it is to my husband, I may though I havereason to fear, because the sea parts us, you may believe it is a bastard. But yet Ithink upon a time of need I may make you own it since ’tis not out of the four seas.In the meantime, if you have any care of your reputation consequently, you musthave of your wife’s too. You ought to keep this a secret since, if it should be known,you might get a pair of horns and nothing else by the bargain. But, dearest Aurelia,you may be very well assured, though I have played the whore a little, I love you ofall things in the world.81

76 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, Archdeacon and Prebendary of Exeter, Chaplain and Tutor to thePrincesses Mary and Anne . . . in the years 1677–1678, ed. George Percy Elliott, Camden Society 1(London, 1847), 9–10.

77 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 178–179v.78 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, 10–11.79 Mary to Apsley, 17 December [1677], BL Loan 57/69, 155.80 Mary to Apsley, 11 January [1677/78], BL Loan 57/69, 71–71v.81 Mary to Apsley, 9 August [1678], BL Loan 57/69, 140v–141. Gowing noted the strangeness of

this letter but attributed it to Mary’s desire to keep her pregnancy a secret: “What is really beingthreatened is Frances’s dismissal from Mary’s intimate circle: she is important enough to hear the secret,

522 " McCLAIN

Moreover, her letters continued to reveal conflict, jealousy, ambivalence, allemotions which generally accompany a sexual relationship. She and Frances quar-reled over unanswered letters and sharp replies. “What pleasure canst thou haveto torment a poor creature thus . . . ,” she wrote, “pray consider you undo meif you don’t forgive me. You with your anger wound me more than you canimagine.”82 They also accused one another of seeking to end the relationship.When Frances behaved “as if I were a cruel mistress instead of a kind wife,” Maryresponded with fury: “’Tis I should rather complain that after so long time, youshould fear to say anything to me for, sure, you can’t have so ill an opinion ofme to believe absence or time can change me in anything, especially after all theassurances I have given that I am still the same Clorine and you still my dear,dear, dear Aurelia and ever shall be.” She added that Frances had “grown incon-sistent herself” and, perhaps, “would be glad of a pretense to fall out. . . . Takeheed it do not prove so, for ’tis dangerous to vex a lover and a woman for youknow those are two desperate things when they are angry.”83

Mary recognized that her status as a married woman—and a princess—hadchanged the balance of power in her relationship with Frances, although shecontinued to claim that her feelings had never, and would never, change. Whenthey were younger, Mary had leveled their difference in social status by adoptingthe subordinate role of wife to Frances’s husband. Now, however, her friend couldnot accept this distinction. Frances continued to talk in a “fine romantic way ofyour heart,” but it was clear that her letters were becoming more formal.84 “Youare grown so insupportably formal which, to your wife, is but ill usage,” Marywrote in 1680, for “it argues coldness.” By contrast, she claimed that “I love evento distraction, do not faintly love so that the seas can drown my passion or thegrave swallow it or fire consume it, but what is so strong to outlive all these andeven death itself, if it be possible.”85 A month later, however, she received another“grave, ceremonial letter from you that, if anything would make me doubt of yourlove, it would be that. Pray, dear husband, leave off your compliment and writeto me with the same freedom we have ever used.”86 The only existing draft of aletter written by Frances is remarkably formal, perhaps even ironic:

Since it was my hard fate to lose the greatest blessing I ever had in the world, whichwas the dear presence of my most beloved wife, I have some comfort that she is takenfrom me by so worthy and so great a Prince, for so he is in the opinion of all goodmen. Your Highness has put a hard task upon me to treat you with the same familiarityas becomes a fond husband to a beloved wife he dotes upon, whom I ought toreverence and adore as the greatest princess now alive. When I flatter myself with theblessing God and yourself have given me in so dear a wife, I think what the scripturesays, that man and wife are but one body and then your heart is mine, and I am suremine is yours, but if I behave myself to you as I am bound in duty to your Highness,I must ask your pardon for my presumption, yet since my life depends upon it, for

but only if she can keep it to herself” (Gowing, “The Politics of Women’s Friendship in Early ModernEngland,” 145).

82 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 170v.83 Mary to Apsley, 23 July [1680], BL Loan 57/69, 29.84 Mary to Apsley, 17 June [1681], BL Loan 57/69, 19v.85 Mary to Apsley, 20 September [1680], BL Loan 57/69, 35.86 Mary to Apsley, 24 October [1680], BL Loan 57/69, 23.


I can live no longer than your favour shines upon me, it will be a great charity inyour Highness to continue your love and bounty to a husband that admires you anddotes upon you and an obedient servant that will always serve and advance you.87

By 1682, Mary recognized that her friend had grown distant, no longer ableto write about intimate feelings. Frances hesitated even to tell Mary about herforthcoming marriage to Sir Benjamin Bathurst. “’Tis very unkindly done thatyou have not once writ me word of this but that I must hear it from strangersfirst,” Mary scolded, “I know ’tis a hard thing to say, I am to be married, yet onecan always write more than one can say and to a friend one need simply nothingso special, so true a one as you have always found me.”88

Mary, for her part, felt both anger and grief. She wrote to Frances, “for God’ssake, put me out of my pain and let me know it, if ever you have loved me, ifever you have loved your prince, if ever you have loved or do either father, mother,sister, brother, and, last of all, if you love your dear husband, I conjure you to letme know it, and that quickly, or I shall conclude you never did care for me norfor any I have named.” She instructed her to “make no beginning nor ending,put no name nor no superscription” on the letter but enclose it in a note to hernurse Mrs. Langford “or let my sister herself send it.”89 She must not have receivedthe answer she wanted for the tone of her next three letters changed. Instead ofwriting of her feelings, she formally thanked Aurelia for letting her know of hersister’s affairs and hoped “you will continue your good counsels to us both andnever flatter neither.”90 In another polite note, she thanked Frances for orderinga paper book but explained that she could write little, “indeed, I have not timeat present.” However, she added what she must have considered to have been astinging reminder of their former love: “When the young gentleman kiss you next,think of me.”91

She must have suspected that Frances’s affection was, to some extent, motivatedby political ambition. Once Mary was no longer in England, her value as a sourceof patronage diminished significantly. Anne remained far more useful to Francesand her new husband. In fact, the two young women corresponded regularly from1679 until 1683, when Anne became absorbed in her friendship with Sarah, duch-ess of Marlborough.

Since Mary played the role of France’s wife, Anne became Frances’s male loverin a peculiar triangulation of gender roles. In her letters, Anne adopted the char-acter “Ziphares,” writing to his mistress, “Semandra,” characters drawn from Na-thaniel Lee’s Mithridates, King of Pontus (1678), a tragedy dramatizing a partic-ularly lurid moment in Roman history. The character of Ziphares, the king’s goodand noble son, was based on the earl of Dorset to whom the play was dedicated.

87 Frances Apsley to Princess Mary, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 190 (draft). Gowing wrote: “There ishumour here: the obsequious courtier blends with the slavishly devoted lover. But there is also a veryreal sense of the dangers of familiarity between princess-wife and friend-husband” (Gowing, “ThePolitics of Women’s Friendship in Early Modern England,” 144).

88 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 125.89 Mary to Apsley, 29 December [1682], BL Loan 57/69, 101–2.90 Mary to Apsley, 23 February [1682/83], BL Loan 57/69, 148–49.91 Mary to Apsley, 3 May 1683, BL Loan 57/69, 103.

524 " McCLAIN

The role of Semandra, the chief heroine, in love with and loved by Ziphares, wasplayed by Anne during her stay in Edinburgh in November 1681.92

Anne did not have her sister’s gift for language, but she also expressed affectionfor her friend, writing from Brussels in 1679: “Dear Semandra, none deservesmore love from everybody than you, nor none has a greater share in my heartthan yourself, excepting whom you know I must love better,” perhaps referringto her favorite, Mary Cornwallis. “I am not one of those who can express a greatdeal and therefore it may be thought I do not love so well,” she added, “butwhoever thinks so is much mistaken for though I have not, maybe, so good a wayof expressing myself as some people have, yet I assure you I love you as well asthose that do and perhaps more than some.”93

Mary’s jealousy of her sister’s friendship with Frances, once strong, began tofade. In 1681, she wrote to Frances, “You have taken away of clearing my doubts,dear husband, which would make me your rival if it were to any but your PrinceZiphares.”94 She also relied on Frances to protect her sister’s interests and to keepher from “ill company,” in particular, Mary Cornwallis. By 1682, the seventeen-year-old Anne had become absorbed by an intimate relationship with Cornwalliswhom Sarah Churchill described as the “first favorite.” According to one source,Sarah ruthlessly displaced her rival by telling the duke of York that Cornwallis haddelivered love letters from John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave, to his daughter.95

Frances, one of Sarah’s friends, wrote to Mary about the episode in December1682. Mary responded by telling her that she agreed with her assessment ofCornwallis: “and had I known of the friendship at first, I should have done all Icould in the world to have broke it off, but I never knew anything in the world’til such time as she was forbid.” She was “surprised and troubled” to find Anneconcerned at the loss of her friend and she asked Frances “to let me know if therebe any new ones in hand that I may endeavor to stop it if it be not to her advantageor, at least, do my best, for I think nothing more prejudicial to a young womanthan ill company.”96

After 1682, Mary turned her considerable energy into her relationship with herhusband, only to be rebuffed. A taciturn man, he had little patience with his wife’semotional extravagance. He ignored her and, instead, pursued sexual relationshipswith other women (and men) in and around the Dutch court. In 1680, the Englishchaplain, Dr. Thomas Ken, told Henry Sidney that he was “horribly unsatisfiedwith the Prince, and thinks he is not kind to his wife; he resolved to speak with

92 The Smock Alley Players performed Mithridates before the duke and duchess of York at the TennisCourt of Holyrood House, Edinburgh, in 1681. Joseph Ashbury, leader of the players, coached Annein the part of Semandra when the duchess’s maids of honor decided to put on the play at Holyroodon 15 November 1681. William van Lennep, “The Smock Alley Players of Dublin,” ELH: A Journalof English Literary History 13, no. 3 (September 1946): 219–20.

93 Princess Anne to Apsley, BL Loan 57/71, 66.94 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 19.95 Field, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, 33–34. The duchess of Marlborough later tried

to undermine Queen Anne’s relationship with Abigail Masham, whom she considered to be a lowbornpolitical threat. Her emphasis on the couple’s social inequality might have been a signifier of the sexualnature of the relationship. Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argumentin England, 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999), 210–11; Donoghue, Passions between Women, 164.

96 Mary to Apsley, 23 February [1682/83], BL Loan 57/69, 148–49.


him, though he kicks him out of doors.”97 He and Sir Gabriel Sylvius thoughtthat Princess Mary was “sensible of it, which doth contribute to her illness; theyare mightily for her going into England, but they think he will never give hisconsent.”98 In 1681 the prince took “a particular fancy” to a French actor namedBrecour, according to the English envoy.99 In 1685, he began an affair with Eliz-abeth Villiers, a maid of honor and Mary’s childhood friend, scandalizing thecourt. Mary, however, allowed herself to be persuaded that rumors of the affairwere part of a plot to separate her from her husband. Dr. John Covell wrote that“the Princess’s heart is ready to break, and yet she every day with Mrs. Jessonand Madame Zuylestein counterfeit the greatest joy and look upon us as doggedas may be. We dare no more speak to her. The Prince hath infallibly made her hisabsolute slave, and there is an end of it.”100

She endured her husband’s infidelity and ill treatment, believing that he lovedher. In 1690, she ended her letters with the following pleas: “Do but continueto love me and I can bear all things else with ease”; “Farewell, I will trouble youwith no more, but only desire you whatsoever happens to love me as I shall youto death”; “Adieu, think of me, and love me as much I shall you, who I love morethan my life”; “I . . . do flatter myself mightily with the hopes to see you forwhich I am more impatient than can be expressed, loving you with a passion whichcannot but end with my life.”101 At the end of 1691, she recalled that she hadfelt “truly thankful to God” when he returned safely home from campaign, “andmust not forget to observe how kind the king is, how much more of his companyI have had since he came home this time, than I used to have.”102 Her patiencewith his infidelities surprised no one at court. They described her as “more amiable,to take all well, than any other woman or girl that we know.” Still, those closestto her noticed that she seemed discontented. She was heard to say that “whenone marries young, and that at fifteen, one does not know what one does, andbefore one turns thirty, one and the other tire of each other.” She also noted “thathusbands do not love their wives, however beautiful they might be, and that theyare accustomed to attach themselves elsewhere.” It was “gathered from that dis-course, and a few others applicable to her, that she is not happy, especially sincemy lord her husband mocks her on account of her corpulence, but also becausehe lacks of conjugal fidelity.”103

Mary did not continue her friendship with Frances Apsley after her accessionto the throne of England in 1689. She may well have encountered her in thecompany of her sister Anne, for Frances’s husband, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, servedas treasurer and receiver-general of the princess and her husband, Prince George

97 Henry Sidney, Diary of the Times of Charles II, 2 vols., ed. R. W. Blencowe (London, 1843), 2:19–20.

98 Ibid., 26–27.99 Thomas Plott to William Blathwayt, 25 February 1681, BL Add MS 37979, 83–84.100 Bevil Skelton to the Earl of Middleton, 10/20 November 1685, BL Add MS 41812, 230–33;

Dr. John Covell to Skelton, 5/15 October 1685, BL Add MS 15892, 264–65.101 Mary II to William III, 29/19 June 1690, The National Archives: Public Record Office, SP 8/7,

116–19, 122, 164, 178–81.102 R[ichard] Doebner, ed., Memoirs of Mary Queen of England (1689–1693) together with her Letters

and those of James II and William III to the Electress Sophia of Hanover (London, 1886), 43.103 Historical Manuscript Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Denbigh, Preserved

at Newham Paddox, Warwickshire, pt. 5 (London, 1911), 83–85.

526 " McCLAIN

of Denmark. Frances’s father, meanwhile, had been appointed Governor of theEast India Company (1688). From the point of view of the Apsley family, theirdaughter’s friendships with Mary and Anne had resulted in two very significantpolitical rewards. But their correspondence, and their intimate friendship, endedwell before the Revolution of 1688.

Frances was, and perhaps had always been, a good courtier: modest, private,and protective of her mistress’s interests. She had kept their letters secret, as Maryhad asked her to do. She never wrote memoirs describing her life at the Stuartcourt nor did she reveal details of her romantic attachment to Queen Mary. Shestored their correspondence in a leather box at her country house at Cirencester.Her descendants assumed that the love letters, in particular, were addressed toMary’s husband, William III. Not until the early twentieth century did scholarsrealize that letters to Mary’s “dearest husband” or “dear, cruel, loved, blessedhusband” were, in fact, romantic letters to a female friend.104

Mary’s correspondence with Frances Apsley tells us a great deal about the char-acter of the queen. In particular, it makes sense of her decision to subordinateherself to her husband to create a joint monarchy—William and Mary. From avery early age, she had come to see herself as a “wife,” the weaker half of a maritalwhole. She idolized Frances, and later her husband, sacrificing her own power tothem. She imagined herself as a long-suffering, duty-bound, tragic figure in aromance of her own making. Despite the fact that she was a leading actor in oneof the most important episodes in English history—the Revolution of 1688—shepersuaded many contemporaries that she lacked “bowels,” as the duchess of Marl-borough observed.105 As a result, most historians pay little attention to QueenMary, treating her as simple and unassuming, a model wife with no political as-pirations or, it seems, personality of her own.106

The letters also provide evidence about the nature of sexuality at the Restorationcourt. It appears that same-sex relationships between young women were toleratedso long as they remained private matters within elite social circles. As a result,Mary and Anne could pursue romantic affairs with their courtiers, or “mistresses,”gaining not only emotional support but also opportunities for the expression ofstrong emotions ranging from anger to joy. This may have been particularly im-portant for elite women; they could not choose their husbands but they couldchoose female (and male) lovers and friends. They could recreate the dramaticpossibilities that they saw on stage or read in books. They could also write—inpoems, letters, and books—about their own desires. At the same time, same-sexliaisons may have reinforced, rather than undermined, patriarchal values. Mary

104 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 58.105 Marlborough wrote, “And here I cannot forbear saying that whatever good qualities Queen Mary

had to make her popular, it is too evident by many instances that she wanted bowels.” Memoirs ofSarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 18.

106 Articles by Lois Schwoerer and Melinda Zook provide the two most thoughtful commentarieson the political role of this seventeenth-century British queen. Lois G. Schwoerer, “Images of QueenMary II, 1689–94,” Renaissance Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 717–48, and “The Queen asRegent and Patron,” in The Age of William and Mary: Power, Politics and Patronage, 1688–1702, ed.Robert P. Maccubbin and Martha Hamilton-Phillips (Williamsburg, VA, 1989), 217–24; Melinda Zook,“History’s Mary: The Propagation of Queen Mary II, 1689–94,” in Women and Sovereignty, ed. LouiseO. Fradenburg (Edinburgh, 1992), 170–91.


and Anne watched as the king and their father elevated sexual companions topositions of influence at court. They also saw the scramble for status among gen-tlewomen eager to trade sexual favors for money, title, and power. The fact thatthey, too, chose mistresses suggests that they both understood the language ofsex, patronage, and politics spoken at court.107

In the early eighteenth century, Anne (now Queen Anne) continued the malepractice of elevating female favorites to positions of power and influence. Theduchess of Marlborough and, later, Abigail Masham served as both courtiers andmistresses of the queen. By this time, however, both political culture and attitudestoward female sexuality had begun to change. Relationships that had been con-sidered unremarkable a generation earlier now became matters of public debate.Ballads and pamphlets, probably penned by Churchill and her secretary, referredto the queen’s “unnatural affections” and her “dark Deeds at night.”108 Emotionalintimacy between women, particularly when it interrupted the flow of politicalinfluence, could no longer be viewed as an innocent diversion or the by-productof a patronage relationship. A line was to be drawn between lovers and friends.

107 The duchess of Marlborough compared Queen Anne’s friendship with Abigail Masham to KingCharles II’s relationship to the duchess of Portsmouth: “You cannot but remember . . . how manyaffronts King Charles had, that was a man, upon account of the Duchess of Portsmouth; and I thinkI need not say a great deal to show how much worse it is for your Majesty, whose character has beenso different from his, to be put in print and brought upon the stage perpetually for one in Abigail’spost” (Weil, Political Passions, 206).

108 Gregg, Queen Anne, 275. Traub viewed this as a pivotal moment in the history of lesbianism.She wrote that Churchill’s attack “was the result of a transformation in discourse, wherein intimatefemale friends, including matronly monarchs with seventeen pregnancies behind them, could be in-terpreted as purveyors of sexual vice” (Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England,156–57).