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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Molly McClain
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 505 - 527
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2008

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References

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

2 Mary to Apsley, 9 August [1678], BL Loan 57/69, 140–41.

3 Gregg, Edward, Queen Anne (London, 1980), 275–76Google Scholar. See also Ophelia Field, “Queen Anne's Ladies,” Gay and Lesbian Review 11, no. 3 (May–June 2004): 21–23, and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough: The Queen's Favorite (New York, 2003); Harris, Frances, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Bray, Alan, The Friend (Chicago, 1998), 67, 168Google Scholar.

5 Mendelson, Sara and Crawford, Patricia, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), 245, 245 n. 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, David, Queen Anne (New York, 1970), 25Google Scholar.

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

7 Traub continued, “We would do well to consider how this question of anachronistic terminology can morph into an ontological question—what is lesbianism in any given era?—as well as how these queries might be supplemented with an epistemological question: how do we know it? Although nothing in Bray's corpus provides clear answers to these questions, in its performance of ambiguity, tension, and irresolution his work urges us to ask them.” Traub, Valerie, “Friendship's Loss: Alan Bray's Making of History,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 352, 354CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Gowing, Laura, “The Politics of Women's Friendship in Early Modern England,” in Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter, and Miri Rubin (London, 2005), 131–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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. Andrew Lynch and Philippa Maddern (Nedlands, Australia, 1995), 47–61.

9 Monconys, Balthasar, Les Voyages de M. de Monconys en Angleterre, 5 vols. (Paris, 1695), 3:38Google Scholar.

10 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols., ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley, 1979–83), 3:300–301.

11 Ibid., 5:268.

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14 Mary to Apsley, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 189.

15 Ibid., 75.

16 Britain, Great, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (CSPD), 1671 (London, 1895), 7Google Scholar.

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20 Harris, Frances, Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (Oxford, 2003), 194Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 106.

22 Morrison, ed., The Bulstrode Papers, 311.

23 Great Britain, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (HMC), The Manuscripts of His Grace the 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 de Beer, E. S., Diary of John Evelyn (London, 1959), 602Google Scholar.

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 Delaval, Elizabeth, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, ed. Douglas G. Greene, Surtees Society 190 (Durham, 1978), 120Google Scholar.

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 earliest that we can reliably date the letters—given the information contained in them—is 1675. It is not clear why Bathurst settled on this earlier date. He may have been influenced by the variations in Mary's handwriting—from a large, childish scrawl to a more tightly written, seemingly adult hand. But it seems that 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.

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

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

37 Harris, Transformations of Love, 80–81, 154–57; St. de Sales, Francis, Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. Michael Day (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Veevers, Erica, Images of Love and Religion: Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. Andreadis suggested that Katherine Philips “appropriated a male homosexual poetic discourse, with its platonism, its implicit eroticism, and its impassioned arguments via conceits … because this discourse suited the deeply intimate nature of the emotions she sought to chart and for which she sought a vehicle” (Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, 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 Mendelson, Sara, “Sexual Identities in Early Modern England: The Marriage of Two Women in 1680,” Gender and History 7, no. 3 (November 1995): 362–77Google Scholar.

40 Winn, James Anderson, “When Beauty Fires the Blood”: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), 65Google Scholar. Traub suggested that cross-dressing plays may have blinded contemporaries to “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 françois (Paris, 1669). Shortly after their publication, two pirated editions appeared, one in Cologne and one in Amsterdam. The original publisher issued another printing of the first edition, a second edition, and a sequel containing additional letters, all in 1669. Another pirated edition appeared in Dijon. A third edition appeared in 1672. Roger L’Estrange produced the first English translation, Five Love Letters From a Nun To A Cavalier Done Out of the French Into English (London, 1678). Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Lewisburg, PA, 2000), 11. See also Alcover, Madeleine, “Essai de Stemmatologie: La datation du manuscript des Lettres portugaises,” Papers on Seventeenth-Century French Literature 12, no. 23 (1985): 621–50Google Scholar.

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

45 Cyr, Myriam, Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery behind a Seventeenth-Century Forbidden Love (New York, 2006), 89–91Google Scholar, 100. The author translated the letters into English using the 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.

51 Ibid., 163.

52 Ibid., 181–82.

53 Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 45.

54 Crowne, John, Calisto; or, The Chaste Nimph: The Late Masque at Court (London, 1675)Google Scholar; Lady Gerard to Anne Wrey, 4 February 1674/75, GD406/1/11685, National Archive of Scotland. The performance of the masque was delayed until 22 February 1674/75. As this date fell during Lent, the Spanish and French ambassadors declined to attend, leaving only the Venetian ambassador Girolamo Alberti, the Swedish envoy, and the Dutch ambassador to witness the performance. However, ambassadors may have attended one of the dress rehearsals in December with the king and court. Andrew R. 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 the tale of chaste love between women. She suggested that, by the late seventeenth century, this story came to be conflated with perverse acts of the tribade (Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, 229–75). See also Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, 155–70; Kathleen Wall, The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature (Kingston, Ontario, 1988); Carol Barash, 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.

56 Harris, Transformations of Love, 226.

57 Crowne, John, The Dramatic Works of John Crowne, 4 vols., ed. James Maidment and W. H. Logan (Edinburgh, 1873–74), 1:260.Google Scholar

58 Faderman, Lillian, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981), 23–30Google Scholar.

59 Crowne, The Dramatic Works of John Crowne, 1:267–73.

60 Ibid., 322–23.

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.

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

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

69 Field, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, 44.

70 Gowing, Laura, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 2003), 66, 68Google Scholar.

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 the early seventeenth century, when traditions of personal service had begun to decay, courtiers like King James I's favorite, the duke of Buckingham, were accused of sodomy and even witchcraft (Bray, The Friend, passim). See also Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York, 1992).

72 Bray suggested, “It is at this point, towards the end of the seventeenth century, that one can see a 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 might normally apply to oneself, to one's neighbor or one's friend. The change gave the ‘sodomite’ a new actuality and was quickly evident in violent action directed against homosexuality on a scale without precedent in English history” (Bray, The Friend, 218). Meanwhile, Traub's chapters 5, 6, and 7 “point to the mid-seventeenth century as an inaugural period in the construction of the erotic meanings of modernity” (Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, 231). Andreadis dated the shift in attitudes toward female same-sex eroticism to the late sixteenth century, while Susan Lanser argued 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 Century Studies 32, no. 2 (Winter 1998–99): 179–87.

73 Gowing, “The Politics of Women's Friendships in Early Modern England,” 133.

74 Kroll, Maria, ed., Letters from Liselotte: Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine and Duchess of Orléans, ‘Madame,’ 1652–1722 (New York, 1971), 32–33Google Scholar.

75 Ibid., 32–33.

76 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, Archdeacon and Prebendary of Exeter, Chaplain and Tutor to the Princesses 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 being threatened is Frances's dismissal from Mary's intimate circle: she is important enough to hear the secret, but only if she can keep it to herself” (Gowing, “The Politics of Women's Friendship in Early Modern England,” 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.

87 Frances Apsley to Princess Mary, n.d., BL Loan 57/69, 190 (draft). Gowing wrote: “There is humour here: the obsequious courtier blends with the slavishly devoted lover. But there is also a very real sense of the dangers of familiarity between princess-wife and friend-husband” (Gowing, “The Politics 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.

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

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 lowborn political threat. Her emphasis on the couple's social inequality might have been a signifier of the sexual nature of the relationship. Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in 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.

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

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 Doebner, R[ichard], 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), 43Google Scholar.

103 Historical Manuscript Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Denbigh, Preserved at Newham Paddox, Warwickshire, pt. 5 (London, 1911), 83–85Google Scholar.

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 of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 18.

106 Articles by Lois Schwoerer and Melinda Zook provide the two most thoughtful commentaries on the political role of this seventeenth-century British queen. Lois G. Schwoerer, “Images of Queen Mary II, 1689–94,” Renaissance Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 717–48, and “The Queen as Regent 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. Louise O. Fradenburg (Edinburgh, 1992), 170–91.

107 The duchess of Marlborough compared Queen Anne's friendship with Abigail Masham to King Charles II's relationship to the duchess of Portsmouth: “You cannot but remember … how many affronts King Charles had, that was a man, upon account of the Duchess of Portsmouth; and I think I need not say a great deal to show how much worse it is for your Majesty, whose character has been so different from his, to be put in print and brought upon the stage perpetually for one in Abigail's post” (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 intimate female friends, including matronly monarchs with seventeen pregnancies behind them, could be interpreted as purveyors of sexual vice” (Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, 156–57).