20

Princess of Orange

WHEN PRINCESS MARY was born at St James’s Palace on 30 April 1662 very few of the nobility bothered to visit her mother in her lying-in chamber to offer their compliments, which they surely would have done if the child had been a boy or if they had known that the new occupant of the royal cradle would one day be queen.

The unwanted Princess was baptized a few days later in the Chapel Royal at St James’s, her parents’ official residence, according to the rites of the Church of England. Her godparents included the valiant old Cavalier, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, her father’s friend and cousin. She was named after her great-great-grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, whom, as a young girl, she was to resemble closely in looks. She inherited the lustrous, almond-shaped eyes, the alabaster skin and the rich brown locks so typical of the Stuart women, as well as the exceptional height of the Scottish Queen, which made both women stand out among their contemporaries.

As a girl and the offspring of King Charles II’s younger brother, James, Duke of York, Mary was of little account. This may have saved her from the ministrations of the royal physicians, whose well-meaning but ignorant practices had already killed off her elder brother, Charles, Duke of Cambridge. It was perhaps as well the boy had died, since the circumstances of his birth meant that his legitimacy would always have been called into question.

By the time Mary was born the strains were already showing in her parents’ marriage, as they were bound to do when the man felt that he had been trapped. Anne Hyde was a commoner, the daughter of Sir Edward Hyde, a Wiltshire lawyer who had become Charles II’s Lord Chancellor during his long exile on the Continent. As a reward for her father’s loyalty, Anne had been appointed maid of honour to Charles’s sister, the widowed Mary, Princess of Orange, at her court at The Hague. Clever and witty, Mistress Hyde was good company. No great beauty, she was handsome and voluptuous and soon attracted the attention of the philandering James.

What no one had foreseen was that James would be foolish enough to enter into a clandestine marriage with her – the two exchanged vows before witnesses and then consummated the union, which amounted to a marriage in the eyes of the Church – at Breda in the Dutch Republic, just a few months prior to the Restoration of the monarchy in England in May 1660. After years of penurious exile, James had not foreseen that his brother’s fortunes would change so rapidly and that he would return to his throne by overwhelming popular demand; he could then have married any princess in Europe, but he was so besotted with Anne it probably made no difference. For a royal duke and the heir to the throne to marry a commoner was a huge misalliance. When the secret began to leak out and Anne’s first pregnancy became glaringly obvious back in London in the autumn of 1660, it embarrassed the royal family and scandalized society.

Anne’s father was so appalled that he said he would rather she was the Duke’s whore than his wife and urged the King to punish her presumption by sending her to the Tower. The Stuarts’ royal relatives were shocked and disgusted that James should make such a base marriage. His aunt and godmother, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, was incredulous. She was living at The Hague when Anne Hyde was resident there, so that she was in a position to know that the girl had taken physick to try to induce an abortion. Surely she would not have done such a thing, she claimed in a letter to her son, if she had been legally married when she became pregnant?

Irritated with his brother, Charles had not the heart to disgrace the daughter of the man who had served him so faithfully and upon whom he was more than ever dependent to carry out the tedious business of government. The couple underwent a second, secret marriage ceremony in England and the union was subsequently recognized. The new Duchess was rather a stately figure and stepped into her role as second lady of the kingdom with ease. She had the knack of attracting people of merit and her court at St James’s was far more brilliant than that of Queen Catherine at Whitehall. She was a formidable character and it was noted that while she was not able to control the Duke’s rampant womanizing – according to Pepys’s sources, the Duke’s pimps brought women to his closet, so that ‘he hath come out of his wife’s bed, and gone to others laid in bed for him’ – she dominated him in every other respect.

Like many upper-class women who did not breastfeed, the Duchess embarked on a series of annual pregnancies, bearing a son, James, Duke of Cambridge, a year or so after Mary, and a daughter, Anne, the year after that. Two more boys and a girl followed. She was not particularly maternal: Princess Mary retained only the vaguest memory of her mother, but she was to be her father’s favourite. When she was just over two years old, Samuel Pepys was charmed by the sight of the Duke playing with her ‘just like an ordinary private father of a child’. James liked to think of himself as a fond father, but in reality he was more taken up with his work as Lord High Admiral, the court, his hunting and his women than his children. If he made a fuss of Mary on the few occasions she was brought to St James’s from her nursery at Richmond or her maternal grandfather, the Earl of Clarendon’s house at Twickenham, where she spent some of her early childhood, such an event was rare.

The York children were housed at Richmond Palace under the care of their governess, Lady Frances Villiers, and Mary’s nurse – ‘my mam’ – the gossiping Mrs Frances Langford. It was a licentious age; the fact that women were held in low esteem, as sexual objects, meant that their education was not a high priority. James’s own education had been interrupted by the outbreak of the civil war, when the royal family began its peripatetic existence. Not very well educated himself, he was not the kind of man to have a high opinion of the female mind, and probably thought that a good education would be wasted on his daughters. He did not draw up a programme of studies for them as he later did for the Prince of Wales, which was a pity as his elder daughter was highly intelligent.

Unlike the Tudor princesses, there was no question of these girls learning Latin or Greek, or even history, geography, or law. Mary’s command of English spelling, grammar and punctuation remained execrable, and judging by the chaotic state of her account books later in life her grasp of arithmetic was slender. She made good progress in French under Peter de Laine, who found her diligent. She proved a talented pupil of Mr Gibson, her dwarf drawing master, a fine miniaturist who taught her to paint on ivory. Above all, she had a good ear for music and learned to dance under the direction of the elderly Frenchman, M. Gorey, who had taught all the royal family and earned a princely £400 a year. Just short of Mary’s seventh birthday, Pepys noticed her at Whitehall: ‘I did see the young Duchess, a little child in hanging sleeves, dance most finely, so as almost to ravish me, her ears were so good.’

In 1667 both Mary’s little brothers died within a month of each other, leaving Mary and her sister Anne second and third in line to the throne, after their father. High infant mortality was all too common, but, with the exception of Mary, all the York children were born weak and sickly. Gilbert Burnet, an enemy of the Duke, maintained that James had passed a venereal disease on to his wife and that their children were nothing but ‘the dregs of a tainted original’.

The deaths of so many of her siblings – five of them during her childhood – must have left an indelible impression on Mary, perhaps sowing the seeds of the morbidity that would be such a striking facet of her adult personality. As a child in the nursery she must have been aware of the anxious whispers and panic of the nurses and rockers every time one of the children fell sick, perhaps frightened by the presence of the black-clad physicians with their doomed expressions and desperate remedies. Then there were the suddenly empty cradles, the little waxen corpses laid out in dark candlelit chambers swathed in black, and the burials with all the pomp of royal mourning.

As it became ever more apparent that King Charles’s Portuguese Queen would remain childless, the York children grew in importance. The question of their upbringing took on added impetus at the beginning of 1669, when their father made the most momentous and politically damaging decision of his life. He abandoned the High Anglicanism of his youth and embraced Roman Catholicism. Knowing what anathema the Church of Rome was to Englishmen, Charles begged his brother to reconsider, or at least keep his conversion a close secret. When the Duchess followed suit, her father Clarendon, a staunch Anglican, was horrified and wrote to warn her of the inevitable consequence: ‘That she would bring all possible ruin upon her children, of whose company and conversation she must expect to be deprived; for, God forbid, that, after such an apostasy, she should have any power in the education of her children.’

The question did not arise, because the Duchess was already entering upon her final illness. Constant childbearing had destroyed whatever pretensions she had to a good figure, and she had alleviated her unhappiness at James’s womanizing by overeating. A courtier wrote that it was an edifying sight to watch the Duchess at table, where she indulged her hearty appetite. The memory of her corpulence probably accounted for Mary’s later terror of becoming fat. Even as the Duchess gave birth to her eighth child, however, she was dying of cancer. Mary must have known her mother was desperately ill, but there is no evidence that she was brought to say a final goodbye on her deathbed, perhaps because of the hushed-up scandal over the Duchess’s change of faith. ‘Truth, truth,’ Anne replied when a well-meaning Anglican chaplain approached to ask if she remained true to the faith, ‘what is truth?’ Then, turning to her husband, she muttered, ‘Duke, Duke! Death is terrible – death is very terrible,’ and died.

The immediate impact of their mother’s death and James’s conversion was that Mary and Anne were removed from their father’s care, lest he contaminate them with his Catholicism. They became children of state. Nobody minded that their education was being badly neglected, as long as they became good little Protestants. Dr Edward Lake and Dr Doughty gave them religious instruction and, later, Charles chose as their preceptor Henry Compton, Bishop of London. A fierce Anglican, he was a vigorous opponent of Catholicism. He instilled in the Duke’s daughters an unshakeable conviction that the Church of Rome was in grave error, scarred by centuries of abuse and deviation from pure truth.

James loathed him and, when the time came, sulkily refused to give his permission for Mary’s confirmation. He protested that ‘it was much against his will that his daughters went to church and were bred Protestants; and that the reason he had not endeavour’d to have them instructed in his own religion, was because he knew if he should have attempted it, they would have immediately been quite taken from him.’ Compton simply went over his head and gained the King’s permission to proceed.

It was about the time of her mother’s death in 1671, when Mary was nine years old, that she developed a schoolgirl infatuation with a young lady of the court, Frances Apsley, who was a few years older. In her letters to Frances, Mary, the rather neglected child, assumes an air of world-weary sophistication. ‘If I had any nuse to tel you I wold, but hear there is none worth a chip,’ she wrote, adding, ‘Tho St Jeames is so dul as to afford no news dear husban now Windsor may shake hands with it.’ It is interesting that Mary, playing the role of wife, wrote these letters in a language that not only expressed heterosexual husband/wife conflict, tension and desire, but also positions of domination and submission, authority and obedience – terms that corresponded to the patriarchal world around her.

Mary lived mainly apart from her uncle’s dissolute court, but at Christmas 1674 she made her debut in John Crowne’s masque, Calisto, or the Chaste Nymph, in which she appeared ‘all covered in jewels’. After this exciting glimpse of the grown-up world, when the young ladies waiting in the wings were able to cast surreptitious glances at dashing young gallants, such as Mary’s cousin, the bastard Duke of Monmouth, in the audience, Mary’s letters to Frances became more passionate. She started to address her as Aurelia, the part she had played in the masque, signing herself Mary Clorine. The letters were replete with protestations and vows of eternal love, outbursts of jealousy and accusations of infidelity, lamentations over her lover’s indifference, enticements and threats. She spoke of ‘violent love’, ‘rude longing’, being carried away ‘in ecstasy’. ‘I love you with a love that was never known by man,’ she assured Aurelia. Although she used quires of paper dashing off letters written with a ‘new crow quil pen’, they were invariably full of excuses for her tardiness in writing:

Why dear cruel loved blest husban do you think I do neglect my wrighting you your self know I could not Monday senat [sennight, in other words, seven night or a week ago] was the King’s beirth day so tusday I slept till eleven a cloke Thursday morning I was so busie trying on mantos and a gown that I did not see Mr Gipson [Gibson, her dwarf drawing master, who carried her letters to Frances] nor had I time to wright Saturday you know I could not wright Tusday last I took fisike [physick – it was a regular practice to take a laxative] so pray judg yourself when I could wright I confese dear Aurelia I am in fault if my dear dear dear husban think so.

It was two years after his first wife’s death before James remarried, choosing as his bride the beautiful fifteen-year-old Princess Mary Beatrice D’Este of Modena. ‘I have brought you a new playfellow’ was how he broke the news to his elder daughter, who was only four years younger. The prospect of the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic, a relative of the Pope no less, caused riots and Mary and her sister, watching from the mullioned windows of St James’s Palace, might have seen the angry bonfires lit in protest. However, Mary found a new friend in her stepmother, who grew to love her as her own daughter. Just as Mary admired the older and very pretty Frances Apsley, she must have admired the new Duchess and basked in the attention she gave her.

Four months into the marriage, Mary Beatrice joined the Duke’s daughters at Richmond when she discovered that James had a mistress in Arabella Churchill. Far from looking disdainfully on her stepmother’s tears like her stoical sister Anne, the emotional Mary would have sympathized with her distress at her husband’s betrayal. Her feelings found expression in a letter to Frances: ‘Who can imagin that my dear husban can be so love sike for fear I dont love her but I have more reson to think that she is sike of being wery of me for in tow or three years men are always wery [weary] of their wifes and looke for a Mrs. [mistress] as sone as they can get them.’

Endearingly innocent for her age, the romantic girl who had only known life in palaces and worn the richest silks and finest lawns next to her skin swore that she would live with Frances and ‘be content with a cottage in the contre [country] & cow a stufe peticot & wastcot in summer & cloth in winter a litel garden to live upon the fruit & herbs it yields or if I could not have you so to myself I would go a beging be pore but content what greater hapynes is there in the world then to have the company of them on [one] loves to make your hapynes compleat.’

Her idyll was about to be rudely shattered by the arrival of a real husband.

Towards the end of October 1677, Mary and her sister were at St James’s when they heard of the return of the court from Newmarket several days earlier than expected. An informal meeting had been arranged between Mary and her cousin, Prince William of Orange, who had joined his uncles at the races and accompanied them back to London. As the only child of the royal brothers’ eldest sister, Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange, William was in the line of succession after James and his daughters. It is not certain whether Mary had encountered William on a previous visit when she was a child, but the impression she would have formed of him now, through the romantic eyes of a girl of fifteen, is unlikely to have been favourable.

The Dutch Prince was old – nearly twenty-seven – and seemed older because his slight frame was hunched and stooped. At five feet six and a half inches, he was of average height for a man of his time, but small compared with his Stuart uncles, who were just over six feet tall, and he would have had to look up at Mary, who as a grown woman was five feet eleven. In the damp, fog-thickened London air and the dark candlelit rooms, he wheezed as if unable to breathe. There was no court repartee in the few words he did utter in a thick Dutch accent. Unlike the fashion-conscious fops of the court with their periwigs and gaudy clothes, this Prince wore his own dark hair loose and a black suit, so plain as to look like one of the despised Dissenters. His features were aquiline, with a nose ‘curved like the beak of an eagle’. Only his dark eyes made an impression, lighting up with a brilliant lustre when he saw something he admired. And he admired the beauty, the gentle disposition, the charm and the good manners of the tall girl standing before him. So much so that he instantly went to his uncle the King and asked for her hand in marriage.

Rumours of a marriage between William and Mary had occurred intermittently, but until now he had not been in a position to think of it. He had been too busy fighting for his country’s survival in the face of French aggression. When he had opened negotiations with his uncles at Newmarket, he had shocked them by saying that he must meet the young lady before any proposal could be made. James was outraged. Naturally, he considered Mary a great prize. Not only was she the first daughter of the crown, heir to the throne after himself, but she was a beauty. For some time, James had been strung along by the French ambassador, Barillon, who on instructions from Louis XIV had led him to believe that a marriage between Mary and the Dauphin was in the offing. Such a marriage would have the additional advantage, in James’s eyes, of necessitating her conversion to Catholicism. He had no wish to see Mary wed to this stern Dutch Calvinist, who drew his title from a small principality in the South of France and was merely the elected Stadholder of the Dutch Republic. He neither liked nor trusted his nephew.

The King was ruled by other considerations. Perhaps if he married his niece to her Protestant cousin some of the heat would be taken off him, whose nefarious dealings with Catholic France had long been suspected. James’s blatant Catholicism had caused Charles endless trouble with Parliament and he recognized that some concession had to be made to Protestant sentiments. He had promised his brother he would not dispose of Mary’s hand without first obtaining his consent. Of course, being Charles, this promise was ignored. ‘’Od’s fish,’ he declared, when reminded of it, ‘I know I promised, but he must give his consent.’ Ever obedient to the King’s wishes, James gave in, but with an ill grace.

Something of James’s disapproval must have communicated itself to his highly strung daughter when, after dinner at Whitehall on 21 October, he came to St James’s and led her into her closet to break the news of her impending marriage. Mary promptly burst into tears. Her chaplain, Dr Lake, noted that ‘she wept all that afternoon and all the following day.’ Louis XIV never seriously entertained the idea of marrying Mary to his son; how could a prince of the blood royal marry the daughter of a commoner, someone of the half-blood? But when he heard the news, he protested to James that he had given his daughter to his mortal enemy. While commenting publicly that William and Mary were nothing but a couple of beggars who were well matched, in private he conceded that their marriage was the equivalent to him of the loss of an army.

The country was ecstatic about the forthcoming union of two Protestant heirs to the throne. In the succeeding days the members of the Privy Council, the Lord Mayor and aldermen and the judges trooped to St James’s to congratulate the couple. On Lord Mayor’s Day, the whole royal family attended the show in the City, followed by a lavish banquet. The City noted with approval William’s serious dress and demeanour, one City wife commenting, ‘What a nice young man he looked, not like those popinjays at the court!’

The marriage ceremony at which Bishop Compton officiated took place on William’s birthday, Sunday, 4 November 1677, between eight and nine o’clock at night. It was a small private family affair held in the bride’s apartments at St James’s. A slightly inebriated Charles gave his tearful niece away and his quips were the only mark of joviality in the otherwise subdued atmosphere. When William laid the coins symbolic of his worldly goods on the prayer book, Charles urged Mary to ‘Gather it up, gather it up and put it in your pocket, for ’tis all clear gain.’ The solemn couple must have looked a strange sight before the clergyman, the red-eyed statuesque Mary being so much taller than her wheezing bridegroom. A heavily pregnant Duchess of York looked on, no doubt with pity for her young stepdaughter, whom she would miss terribly. The bride’s sister, Anne, was absent, as she was unwell.

The following day, William’s closest friend, Hans Willem Bentinck, came to present the new Princess of Orange with William’s magnificent wedding present to her: £40,000 worth of jewels, including the huge pearls she wore in all her subsequent portraits and the ruby ring ‘she came to value above her kingdom’. Mary was also to have the Little Sancy, a great diamond which her late mother-in-law had pawned to raise funds for the exiled Charles II, and a huge single pearl drop earring which her grandfather, Charles I, had worn to the scaffold. The value of the jewellery was equivalent to Mary’s dowry, which was paid late by her chronically insolvent uncle, in tiny grudging instalments, or not at all. After the ceremony, Mary’s tears continued and she proved obdurate when William urged her to move out of St James’s, where her sister Anne and others now lay sick of the smallpox, and into the apartment that had been placed at his disposal at Whitehall. She was adamant that she would not leave her home until the very last minute.

They could not depart from London until after Queen Catherine’s birthday ball on 15 November, when Mary appeared wearing all her jewels. By this time, William had completely run out of patience with his tearful adolescent bride and was anxious to leave his uncle’s dissolute court and return to business at home. His coolness towards Mary at the ball, where he danced with her only once, was noticed with indignation. This was the moment when he acquired the names ‘Caliban’ and the ‘Dutch Abortion’, and when the belief took root that William treated his wife badly. It was quite unfounded.

The crossing to Holland was rough, and, as the couple travelled in separate yachts, William had to watch his wife’s being tossed in the water. She was the only person on board who was not seasick. Their arrival found the port of Rotterdam iced up. They embarked on sloops that took them to a fishing village further along the coast and William carried his exhausted wife up the beach. There were no coaches to meet them and the party walked three miles along the icy lanes before being picked up and driven to the palace of Honselaersdijck. Here, Mary’s mother, as plain Anne Hyde, maid of honour to the previous Princess of Orange, had played games of ninepins with young English gallants in the gallery. Now it was one of several splendid houses of which William’s fifteen-year-old wife would be mistress.

To Mary’s surprise and delight, she liked her new country, and the Dutch people immediately took her to their hearts. When she made her state entry into The Hague, her regal bearing was evident, but she gave the impression of being pleased and wanting to please. All her life, she had heard nothing but jokes and sneers about the hated Dutch republicans – who had fought three naval wars with England in the last quarter-century – but she was curious and intelligent enough to make up her own mind about her new people. She won the Dutch over with her easy charm, her gaiety and conversation, while the good housewife in her admired their order, neatness and cleanliness, the antithesis of what she had been used to in London.

The couple spent the first weeks of their marriage quietly ensconced at Honselaersdijck, getting to know each other. Soon the impressionable young girl, so hungry for affection, had fallen in love with her solemn husband, admitting in a letter to Aurelia that ‘she had played the whore a little’. She saw a new side to William. In the Dutch Republic he was a hero, who would fight to the last ditch rather than surrender his country to the French. With his male friends, loyal, long-term companions of the hunting field and his military campaigns, William was relaxed and at his most jovial, sharing animated conversation. The intensely feminine Mary had no intention of intruding into this male world and showed no jealousy of his preference for their company. After the stresses of public life, she would offer William peace and tranquillity. When he came to join her in her rooms, they spoke English together, and she would entertain him with light chatter, a delightful distraction from the cares of state.

Life at William’s court was more sedate than at Whitehall, but it obviously agreed with Mary. Its sobriety calmed her over-excitable temperament. There would be the occasional ball when she would indulge her love of dancing, sometimes until dawn, but otherwise social life consisted of private dinner parties with friends such as the Bentincks, tea parties in which the expensive new drink was imbibed, and endless games of cards. While regretting that she had taken to card playing on Sundays, her former chaplain Dr Lake heard that ‘the princess was grown somewhat fat, and very beautiful withal’. Mary quickly learned Dutch and made friends among the Dutch ladies, while the people would be treated to the sight of the Princess and her attendants passing along the canals in her barge, embroidering while Mary’s chaplain read to them. The Dutch approved of a princess whose hands were never idle and with such domestic virtues.

The couple shared an appreciation of fine painting, inherited from their grandfather, Charles I; Mary had exquisite taste and soon William entrusted her with the embellishment and furnishing of their homes at Honselaersdijck, Soestdijck, Dieren and, in due course, Het Loo. She would build up a fine collection of blue and white Chinese porcelain, brought from the East by Dutch traders as ballast for their ships. Together they were interested in the design and planning of the gardens, with their smart box topiary and hedging, and in the introduction of new plants from more exotic climes. In the gardens of Het Loo, Mary, who loved birds, would have an aviary.

When the time came for William to return to the army, Mary accompanied him as far as Rotterdam, where her uncle, Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, was pleased to note ‘a very tender parting on both sides’. Mary wrote to Frances expressing a sorrow she had never known, even worse than her sadness at leaving her country, her family and friends:

I suppose you know the prince is gone to the Army but I am sure you can guese at the troble I am in … I never knew sorrow for what can be more cruall in the world then parting but parting so as may be never to meet again to be perpetually in fear … for god knows when I may see him or wether he is nott now at this instant in a batell … I recon him now never in safety ever in danger … oh miserable live that I lead now.

The partings and Mary’s anxiety for William’s safety were to be the pattern of their married life.

Mary was already pregnant, but nevertheless she set off in a bone-jolting coach in the harsh conditions of a Dutch winter to join William first at Antwerp then at his castle at Breda. The result was disastrous. She had a miscarriage and probably one with consequences. If she had been at home at The Hague, she would have been able to call on the services of Dr Drelincourt, the brilliant gynaecologist and embryologist, or Cornelis Solingen, a renowned surgeon and obstetrician. Neither was available at Breda, and it is possible, in view of Mary’s subsequent gynaecological history, that an infection set in that rendered her sterile. Meanwhile, it was clearly not advisable for a young woman in a delicate condition to be gadding about after her soldier husband. Her father wrote anxiously from London, expressing his sorrow at the miscarriage and urging ‘pray let her be carefuller of herself another time’.

Mary’s health remained poor, but then in the summer of 1678 she was overjoyed to experience the symptoms of pregnancy again. While the King and the Duke were at Newmarket, Mary Beatrice decided to pay a visit to her stepdaughter, whom she had dubbed her ‘dear Lemon’ in compliment to her husband’s title of Orange, bringing her sister Anne and a small party to The Hague to cheer her up. They found Mary in good spirits and her pregnancy seemed to be progressing well. On the party’s return to England, James was unusually effusive in a letter to William. The Duchess, he wrote, was ‘so satisfied with her journey and with you, as I never saw anybody; and I must give you a thousand thanks from her and from myself, for her kind usage by you: I should say more on this subject, but I am very ill at compliments, and you care not for them.’

By the spring of 1679, anti-Catholic hysteria in England and the Whigs’ determination to exclude James, Duke of York, from the throne had left the King with no alternative than to send his brother and sister-in-law into exile. Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands was their chosen destination. Its proximity gave Mary Beatrice the opportunity to visit Mary again. She was indignant to find that she ‘had spent the nine months since her pregnancy in great loneliness’, taking away an impression of William’s coolness towards his wife which coloured James’s view of him in the future. It was clear by now that something was wrong. As Mary’s delivery date came and went, it became apparent that she was not pregnant at all. The sickness and malaise and lack of periods which had been taken for pregnancy, the intermittent fevers she had been experiencing which were so similar to the ague, or malaria, common in the Low Countries, were possibly symptoms of an ongoing gynaecological infection.

The disappointment was profound, leaving Mary low and depressed. Although she never ceased to hope for children, and was generous enough to rejoice at others’ good fortune in having them, she and the Prince were to remain childless. She began to spend a lot of time alone, praying and meditating, and steeping herself in books on divinity and history, making up for the defects in her education. Deep introspection and sadness were an increasingly prevalent aspect of Mary’s mentality, not helped, as she became more absorbed in religious devotion, by her belief in her unworthiness before an exacting God.