22

Sovereign and Consort

ON 13 FEBRUARY 1689 William and Mary, hand in hand, entered the Banqueting House at Whitehall, where almost exactly forty years previously their grandfather, Charles I, had lost his head for upholding the divine right of kings, and took their places on chairs beneath the canopy of estate. Both Houses of Parliament were present as the Declaration of Rights, outlining the conditions on which they were to be offered the crown, was read aloud to the Prince and Princess, who remained holding hands, a posture surely designed to placate those who had wanted to vest the crown in Mary alone and to underscore the dual nature of the new monarchy. The Speaker advanced and asked if they would accept the crown as joint sovereigns. Illustrating Mary’s subordinate status, William answered for both of them; Mary’s contribution was merely ‘her looks and a little curtsey’.

It was the first time since her arrival in London the previous day that she had shown what was considered to be the correct demeanour. Courtiers who already resented the Dutch usurper had looked forward to Mary’s coming. Their latent xenophobia had been roused by his obvious preference for his Dutch cronies. At least she was an English princess, a Stuart born and bred in England, and would know how royalty should behave. Unlike her dour, inaccessible husband, they knew Mary to be gracious, charming, lively and gregarious. They thronged to Whitehall to see her, only to be shocked by the manner in which she entered her father’s palace. ‘She came into Whitehall, jolly as to a wedding, seeming quite transported with joy,’ noted the diarist John Evelyn reprovingly. Surely this was not how the daughter of a dethroned king should act when taking possession of his palace?

Not only had Mary been deliberately installed in the same apartment, but also slept in the same bed Queen Mary Beatrice had shared with James. ‘She ran about it, looking into every closet and conveniency, and turning up the quilts of the beds, just as people do at an inn, with no sort of concern in her appearance,’ Sarah Churchill commented scathingly in her Conduct, written many years after the event. ‘I thought this strange and unbecoming conduct; for whatever necessity there was of deposing of King James, he was still her father, who had been lately driven from that very chamber, and from that bed; and if she felt no tenderness, I thought, at least, she might have felt grave, or even pensively sad, at so melancholy a reverse of fortune.’

Mary’s affected gaiety, verging on hysteria, continued the next day, the day of the ceremony at the Banqueting House. ‘She rose early in the morning,’ Evelyn heard from a relative who was waiting on her, ‘and in her undress, before her women were up, went about from room to room, to see the convenience of Whitehall.’

Admiring Mary as he did, Gilbert Burnet was perplexed by her inappropriate behaviour. William had written ordering her to ‘put on a cheerfulness’, she admitted, adding that she was aware of the raised eyebrows and frowns of disapproval. She had clearly gone too far, as it was not a part that came naturally to her. William was adamant that they would not be apologetic for the overthrow of James’s regime, but his instructions to his ever obedient wife had struck the wrong note and she knew it.

A glance at Mary’s journal, which presents her side of the story and was written up at the end of each year perhaps with her historical reputation in mind, reveals that she felt anything but cheerful at the prospect of assuming her father’s crown. She did not want it. She wrote that ‘I had been only for a Regency, and wished for nothing else’, but she was bound to play her part in William’s plans. She dreaded the prospect of being Queen, ‘knowing my heart is not made for a kingdom and my inclination leads me to a retired quiet life’, but the fact that William would now be King ‘lessened the pain, but not the trouble of what I am like to endure’.

There was a feeling among the English that events had somehow moved too fast and that matters had not turned out as expected. They had believed William’s manifesto, which stated he came only to guarantee the calling of a free Parliament, which everyone agreed was the only remedy for the ills that had arisen under James’s rule. As far as most people were concerned, James was still their rightful sovereign, even if he had been a disaster. For them, there had never been any question of deposing him, only of forcing him to rule according to the laws of the land. When William ended up with the crown, many felt they had been duped.

In lieu of James, who had taken refuge with his wife and son at the French court, someone had to fill the void. In January 1689 a convention was elected to settle the question, but the debate only intensified. One solution was to place Mary on the throne alone. In theory, there was nothing to prevent her elevation as queen by right of inheritance: the only drawbacks were William’s vociferously expressed opposition; her own diffidence about her abilities, a reflection of her limited education and adherence to conventional ideas about women’s place in society; and the prevailing patriarchal ideas about female rule and the relationship of husband and wife.

A century after Elizabeth I’s Armada triumph, and only forty years after the civil war era when women had been unusually active in politics and religion, the English were once again debating a woman’s capacity to rule. It is significant that the issue had been given an airing only a year after Mary’s marriage in 1677, when François Poulain de la Barre’s essay, translated into English as ‘The Woman as good as the man, or the equality of both sexes’, argued that women were capable of leading armies, holding ecclesiastical office and acquitting themselves as ministers, governors and advisers to monarchs.

The Exclusion Crisis had focused attention on Princess Mary as one of several possible claimants to the throne. Perhaps it is no coincidence that books about Queen Elizabeth appeared in 1675, 1680, 1683, 1688 and 1689, which provided specific illustration of the capacity of a woman to govern England. When James Crouch, whose vignettes of great women in the past purported to show that ‘women can equal, if not exceed, the deeds of man’, published his Female Excellency, or the Ladies’ Glory in 1688, he surely had it in mind that Mary was heiress presumptive.

As early as 26 December 1688 a small group of Tories led by Lord Danby sought to make Mary queen regnant, with William her consort. Their purpose was to preserve a façade of legitimacy and to further their own political interests. As queen, Mary would obscure, or at least soften, the violations to the principles of legitimacy and direct hereditary succession that were necessary to achieve a Protestant monarchy. The deliberately circulated rumour that James’s son was suppositious had served its purpose; the Tories wanted no further disruption to the principle of divinely inspired, hereditary monarchy.

Throughout January 1689 arguments for and against Mary becoming sole queen were aired in the convention and in the press. Members of the Commons insisted that the English monarchy was hereditary, but that James’s son suffered a natural and legal incapacity; since the child was no longer in the country, it was further argued, his legitimacy could not be determined either way. They stressed that Queen Elizabeth had proved a woman could rule ‘gloriously’ and asserted that ‘there is no other way to have peace and quiet, but by recognizing the Princess’. They suggested that to promote William in place of his wife would ‘sully’ his glory.

The publication of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha in 1680 had reinforced the patriarchal ideology of the time. Men opposed to Mary becoming sole queen fell back on traditional views of women’s place in society and marriage. In the convention an MP stressed the danger England faced from France and urged members to ‘chuse a King to go before us and fight our battells … [which] a Woman cannot so well do’. Another pointed out that it was against the law of nature to expect William to be subject to his wife.

The idea of making Mary queen regnant and William her consort appalled the Prince, his friends and Mary herself. Burnet even argued that since Mary, as William’s wife, was a femme covert, it could be said the crown, hers by inheritance, already belonged to her husband. This betrayed his ignorance of the sixteenth-century Act Concerning Regal Power, which had been passed to safeguard the kingdom when Mary Tudor was in a similar situation. As a magistrate, it declared, the Queen was the equivalent of a man; to all intents and purposes, she was a man. Only as a woman should she defer to her husband. Even if William were to accept the role of consort, what would happen to him in the event of her death? After everything he had risked and invested, he wanted a life tenancy at least.

William realized that if he did not force a decision, the English would talk and argue for ever. He declared that he had no intention of being his wife’s ‘gentleman usher’ or of holding ‘anything by the apron strings’. He would accept nothing dependent on the life of another or on ‘the will of a woman’. He let it be known that unless he was offered the crown ‘he would go back to Holland, and meddle no more in their affairs’. Very grudgingly he conceded that he would accept a joint monarchy with his wife, but only if the ‘sole and full exercise of the regal power’ was vested in him. Mary would have the title of Queen only. She would not have the Sword of State carried before her as her sovereign predecessors had done.

The coronation ceremony on 11 April 1689 contained subtle details which indicated that Mary’s status was subordinate to her husband’s. Although a second orb, sceptre, Sword of State, and a special chair were made for Mary, and although the couple replied simultaneously to each proposition put to them as the ceremony unfolded, kissed the Bible together, and received homage jointly, the symbols of sovereignty were reserved for William. He was anointed first. The spurs were touched to his heels alone; he received the ring first and he was crowned before Mary. The significance of these distinctions was obvious.

Official documents and all prayers and litanies of the Church ran in the names of both monarchs, but in conformity with William’s assumed superiority, his name always preceded Mary’s. Most medals cast to commemorate the coronation showed William and Mary as joint monarchs, their busts facing each other within wreaths of roses and oranges. In one, however, William is depicted as the Belgic Lion crowned. The lion drives away James II and his Jesuit adviser, Petre, who is holding the baby boy. Serpents underfoot indicate discord and evil. On the reverse of the medal are two female figures, representing Mary and Anne, as suppliants before the throne of Jupiter (William), while Saturn (James), Jupiter’s father, who had conspired against his son’s interests, is shown in flight, devouring the infant. There could be no doubt here of Mary’s feminine, subordinate role.

The Jacobites deliberately misinterpreted the official coronation medal, which depicted Jove thundering against Phaeton, who was driving a chariot over a burning world, conveying the idea that James had nearly destroyed the government of England and was displaced so that it could be saved. His supporters likened Mary to the Roman matron, Tullia, who had urged her husband to kill her father so that they could inherit the crown. Like Phaeton in his chariot, Mary-Tullia had driven over the remains of her dethroned father.

Even before Mary reached England, men who knew she had declined the opportunity to be sole queen disparaged her as either very good or very stupid. For the first year or so of the dual monarchy, she was portrayed as a politically naïve woman with the essentially feminine characteristics of a queen consort. Her beauty was only fitting in a queen, however, and inspired much comment. A young lady of the Russell family wrote:

At night, I went to court with my lady Devonshire, and kissed the Queen’s hands, and the King’s also … He is a man of no presence, but looks very homely at first sight: yet, if one looks long at him, he has something in his face both wise and good. As for the Queen, she is really altogether very handsome; her face is agreeable, and her motions extremely graceful and fine. She is tall, but not so tall as the last Queen. Her room is mighty full of company, as you may guess.

Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn a living by her pen, found in Mary’s beautiful face the ‘God-like’ attributes of monarchy, which she identified as gracious sweetness, affability, tender mercy, and true piety – but these were also the ideal womanly virtues.

Mary had not just the looks, but all the charm and social skills her husband lacked. ‘She smiled upon all, and talked to everybody,’ Evelyn noted. If the nobility could not easily resort to William, they felt that they could approach the Queen for favours. But it soon became apparent that she would do nothing without referring to her husband. What was the point of a queen who could grant no favours? Gradually, they drifted away and left her alone.

It came as something of a relief to Mary. In her journal she complains that ‘I was come into a noisy world full of vanity.’ It was not the peaceful life she was used to, when she would attend prayers four times a day. In England she had ‘hardly leisure to go twice, and that in such a crowd, with so much formality and little devotion’. A loyal daughter of the Anglican Church, Mary craved the blessing of William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the approval of the clergy, but they were not forthcoming. The archbishop might have had his differences with James, but he was his anointed sovereign to whom he had given his oath of allegiance. ‘Tell your princess first to ask her father’s blessing; without that mine would be useless,’ Sancroft told Mary’s messengers.

Increasingly, Mary found herself lonely and isolated. ‘I found myself here very much neglected, little respected, censured by all, commended by none,’ she wrote. At court and elsewhere she was subjected to insult for her disloyalty to her father. When her father’s ex-mistress Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, told friends that she was going to court, she was warned that Mary, with her strict ideas about morality, would treat her ‘on no higher foot than her father’s daughter’, to which the witty Catherine replied, ‘Then I will treat her like her mother’s.’ When Mary duly acknowledged her coolly, Catherine retorted, ‘Why so proud, Madam? For if I broke one commandment with your father, you broke another in coming here.’

The Revolution had been a violent disruption of the patriarchal ideal. James, the King, father of his people, had been ejected from his kingdom, while as father he had been overthrown by his children. As the daughter who had perpetrated the deed and been set up as sovereign in his place, Mary was the butt of Jacobite propaganda.

When not identified with Tullia, the Jacobites referred to her as ‘Moll’. A ‘Moll’, in the colloquial usage of the time, was a woman of ill repute. By calling her Moll, they identified her as a thief, who had stolen the crown, and as a whore, who had lusted for power and sold her soul as well as her body for three kingdoms. They represented the sexual relationship between her and William as either perverse or perversely non-existent and transformed her into ‘the whore’, unsatisfied, lusting for the phallus as she had lusted for power, the masculine domain. William, the homosexual who had failed to satisfy his youthful wife’s sexual appetite or to provide an heir, was accused of impotence. An impotent king symbolized a dysfunctional body politic.

Even at the theatre Mary was insulted. When she went to a performance of Dryden’s Spanish Friar, the whole audience turned to watch her reaction to the words:

Very good: she usurps the throne: keeps the old King

In prison; and at the same time is praying for a blessing:

O religion and roguery, how they go together!

It was worse in the fourth act:

A crown usurped, a distaff on the throne …

What title has this Queen but lawless force?

She could only bury her face in her fan.

In 1690 a Jacobite poem entitled ‘Female Parricide’ ran:

Oft I have heard of impious sons before

Rebelled for crowns their royal parents wore

But of unnatural daughters rarely hear

’Till those of hapless James and old King Lear.

Controversial plays such as King Lear and Richard III were banned.

In William’s absence at the wars, Mary was lonely and isolated. Her natural confidante should have been her sister, Anne, but relations between them had soured very quickly. Anne was aggrieved that Mary’s husband had usurped Anne’s place in the succession and, what’s more, he treated her husband, the kindly but ineffectual George, with scant respect. Petty quarrels about Anne’s allowance and lodgings were magnified out of all proportion, with Anne’s friend Sarah Churchill fanning the flames of Anne’s jealousy of her sister and resentment of her brother-in-law. Soon the sisters were not speaking to each other and Anne had ostentatiously removed herself from court.

‘In all this I see the hand of God, and look on our disagreeing as a punishment upon us for the irregularity by us committed upon the revolution,’ Mary confided sadly in her journal. Soon she suspected that Anne was in correspondence with their father and that Sarah’s husband, John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, hedging his bets, was engaged in treasonable activity with the exiled court. When he was dismissed in 1693, Mary advised Anne that Sarah could no longer remain in her service. Defiantly, Anne came to court, bringing her friend. The wife of a disgraced man should not appear at court and Anne, who was a stickler for etiquette, knew this. It was a deliberate insult to William and Mary.

‘I must tell you I know what is due to me,’ Mary wrote to her sister, ‘and expect to have it from you.’ Anne refused to dismiss her favourite. ‘My sister has not mistaken me,’ Mary told Anne’s emissary. ‘I never will see her upon any other terms than parting with Lady Marlborough – not for a time, but for ever! I am the Queen,’ she exclaimed, ‘I will be obeyed!’ The sisters remained unreconciled.

The perception of Mary began to change in 1690 when William decided that he would personally lead England’s army against James in Ireland, who, with French help, was attempting to reclaim the throne. Although it was a dual monarchy, the administrative power rested in William’s hands alone and therefore the question arose of who would rule in his absence. At first he was inclined to leave the Privy Council in charge but subsequently, probably because he felt he could trust Mary implicitly to follow his lead, he proposed that she should rule as regent. He could not have made a better choice. She was entirely devoted to him and without personal ambition.

Although Mary was fully conscious of her public position and political value, she was a firm believer that ‘women should not meddle in government’. Diffident and untried, she confided to William her concern that she ‘should not make a foolish figure in the world’. She so underestimated her own abilities that she later told Sophie of Hanover: ‘a woman is but a very useless and helpless creature at all times, especially in times of war and difficulty. I find by my own sad experience, that an old English inclination to the love and honour of the nation signifies nothing in a woman’s heart and without a man’s head and hands.’

The Regency Act of May 1690 enabled Mary to exercise regal power in her name and William’s during his absence, but gave William authority to override her acts and specified that upon his return all powers reverted to him. The Act inspired new public respect for Mary, who developed her own style of queenship. Like Queen Elizabeth before her she understood the importance of symbolic gestures. A naturally majestic figure with presence, she used the trappings of sovereignty to inspire reverence and loyalty. She would dress in royal robes and, seated on a throne in the Banqueting House, receive the London citizens.

Reluctant she might have been, presenting the image expected of her as the loyal, deferential wife, but she was not unwilling or ineffective. During her four regencies, she issued thirty-seven proclamations, ordered fasts, heard petitions, reviewed troops, censored the press, called and prorogued Parliament, made appointments to the Church, navy and administration, and pardoned, transported, imprisoned and executed criminal and treasonous subjects. It was no mean achievement.

She had a Council of Whigs and Tories of varying degrees of loyalty, who thought that they would be able to take advantage of the inexperienced woman. They soon learned otherwise. Recognizing her lack of knowledge and experience, her initial silence at Council meetings enabled her to conceal her ignorance, listen to all the arguments, and form judgements on the nine members, some of whom tried to dominate or circumvent her. She proved an astute judge of character and adept at composing differences and reconciling members to courses of action they had not originally intended. She referred all major decisions to William, sitting up late into the night straining her eyesight in the candlelight to write him long letters. ‘I ever fear not doing well, and trust to what nobody says but you,’ she told him.

In an emergency there was no time to consult William and here Mary acted courageously and decisively. There was treason and suspicion of treason in the higher reaches of government, all the more serious in that the country was at war. There was a traitor in the Council and Mary suspected it was Lord Mordaunt, betraying secrets to France. When treachery was exposed, she did not hesitate to act. In 1690 she insisted that her uncle, Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, be arrested for corresponding with her father. Later that year a planned uprising of some of James’s supporters was discovered. The conspirators were seized, tried and sentenced to death. Mary signed the warrant of one of them, whom she had known since childhood, in great distress, but showed no sign of weakness.

Soon the French fleet was in the Channel and Admiral Herbert was showing a marked reluctance to engage it, but ‘lay drinking and treating his friends’. Mary was about to relieve him of his command when he engaged the French off Beachy Head. But he let the Dutch do all the fighting, keeping the English fleet to the rear and then retreating into the Thames. After the inevitable defeat, Mary was mortified, writing to the Dutch government to give her personal apology.

Although she was rapidly gaining the love of her people through her dedication, piety and goodness, Mary’s health was suffering under the strain of it all. Her day began at six, when she was awoken with tea – one of her expensive indulgences – and she spent two hours reading and writing. Prayers were at eight, followed by business for four or five hours until dinner. There were cards and public receptions from four until seven. Evening prayers and supper over, she would attend to her private correspondence until midnight or the early hours of the morning. She went to sleep in the knowledge that she might be woken at any hour to deal with a national emergency. Through all this she had to cultivate a serene manner and an inscrutable countenance, to mask her feelings so that no one would guess the condition of affairs by her expression. ‘I must grin when my heart is ready to break,’ she told William, ‘and talk when my heart is so oppress’d I can scarcely breathe.’

On top of all this, she had to contend with the very real threat of assassination and was distraught with worry about William. Contrary to the belief of her critics, she did feel a sense of guilt over her father and fear for his safety. She confessed her anxieties to Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, during the Irish campaign. After William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, believing her father to be a prisoner – he had actually fled to Dublin and then to France – she wrote to William: ‘I know I need not beg you to let him be taken care of, for I am confident you will for your own sake. Yet add that to all your kindness, and, for my sake, let people know you would have no hurt come to his person.’ Her attitude changed in 1692 when she learned that James was party to a scheme to assassinate William. She was ashamed that ‘he who I dare no more name father was consenting to the barbarous murder of my husband … I fancied I should be pointed at as the daughter of one who was capable of such things, and the people would believe I might by nature have as ill inclinations.’

James’s defeat in Ireland did nothing to reduce the Jacobite threat. In the New Year of 1692 a French force of 20,000 men gathered at La Hogue, on the Cherbourg peninsula, where James joined them with a contingent of Irish soldiers. A new invasion scare swept England, putting fresh heart into the Jacobites. There was a plot to seize Mary on her father’s landing. She was sure that she would be murdered. There were fears of disloyalty in the navy, which Mary addressed by appealing directly to her officers, expressing her complete confidence in them. The Queen’s appeal led the men to sign a statement promising their support. At the same time, she went to Hyde Park to review the few troops – those whom William had not taken to Europe – who were left to defend the country.

At this moment, James unwittingly came to her aid. He issued a declaration, promising that on his restoration he would continue much as before, and listing hundreds of names on whom his vengeance would fall. It was so ludicrous that the Jacobites hurriedly sought to publish a toned-down version, but Mary was too quick for them. Showing that she had learned a great deal from William about the value of propaganda, she promptly had James’s declaration printed and distributed, with her own comments on it.

When an Anglo-Dutch fleet under Admiral Russell and Lieutenant-Admiral Van Almonde won a great victory at La Hogue, a grateful Mary immediately despatched £38,000 for distribution among her seamen. This was a rare instance of royal generosity. Normally rewards promised before battle fail to materialize after victory. As a further mark of her appreciation, Mary promised that the unfinished royal palace at Greenwich would be transformed into a hospital for sick and disabled seamen. Her popularity among her people soared. She should have ordered a public thanksgiving for La Hogue, but typically wanted to make it a joint thanksgiving for the victory that she was sure would be William’s at Steinkirk. Instead, he was defeated with terrible losses. ‘Will should have knotted,’ was the English people’s verdict – referring to Mary’s new hobby of tying linen threads into knots to keep her agitated hands occupied – ‘and Moll gone to Flanders.’

In 1692 A Present for the Ladies went so far as to compare her with Queen Elizabeth, not least because her actions preceding La Hogue evoked comparison with Elizabeth’s at Tilbury, and the following year a medal commemorating her regency shows her holding a palm branch in one hand and a mirror in the other. The hand holding the mirror rests on a rudder, signifying that the Queen guides the ship of state with mildness and prudence.

Mary’s handling of affairs won her the gratitude of William and of many in the government. When Parliament presented her with an address of thanks for her ‘prudent care in the administration of government’ Mary made a response characteristic of her deep-seated view of the position of women. Curtseying to her husband and the assembly, she replied, ‘I thank you, gentlemen, for your address. I am glad I have done everything to your satisfaction.’ Nothing could have been further from the way Elizabeth would have reacted, but Mary’s modest demeanour was more typical. Her femininity was effective.

Her diffidence accorded well with patriarchal sentiments. The Whig propagandists were able to present her as the good wife, confidently, if only temporarily, managing the kingdom. In deference to patriarchal anxieties about female rule, she did not ‘reign’ – a masculine performance – but ‘managed’, as ‘became a wife’. Her power was not to be feared, for it was merely that of a wife executing a husband’s commands. When Bishop Burnet later praised her talent for government, he was at pains to assure his audience that she ‘never affected to be masculine’.

Not only did she win applause for the efficient discharge of her duties, but she was praised for the graceful way in which she surrendered her powers whenever William returned. A Dialogue Concerning Women compared her with the Roman general Cincinnatus, who had left his private duties to take on public responsibilities, but willingly returned to private life at the end of the crisis. It was an apt comparison, for Mary liked nothing better than to resume the consort’s role, looking after her husband, carrying out her social and charitable duties, looking out for the moral welfare of the nation, and redesigning her palaces and gardens at Kensington and Hampton Court.

The royal couple decided to leave Whitehall, with its grim reminder of Charles I’s execution, associations with Stuart corruption, and the smoke-filled atmosphere of London, which played havoc with William’s asthma. Lord Nottingham’s ‘sweet villa’ at Kensington was acquired for 18,000 guineas and Sir Christopher Wren was engaged to transform it into something resembling a palace. Wren found the Queen an exacting employer but a lady of exquisite taste. Several times a week she would walk from Whitehall to Kensington, her tall figure striding across the parks with her architect at her side, to check progress.

At Hampton Court the idea was to pull down Cardinal Wolsey’s old palace and build a magnificent new European palace on the model of Versailles, but an outcry at the extravagance of it all meant that the plans had to be modified. A new building, which resembled Het Loo in many respects, was added to the old, leaving large sections of the Tudor building, including the clock tower and kitchens, intact. Pending the completion of the works, Wren transformed an old Tudor gatehouse on the river into a Water Gallery for the Queen, providing temporary accommodation for her, complete with her own marble bathroom with hot and cold running water – a great novelty.

In the homes she created, Mary rediscovered something of the serenity of the domesticated existence she had enjoyed in Holland. The Queen’s subjects could admire her talent for embroidery in her bed curtains, the new printed calicoes imported from the East, and the large collection of blue and white Delftware and porcelain from China she had heaped on Grinling Gibbons’s elaborately carved oak chimney-pieces and tiered shelves. Together with her introduction of pug dogs and the concept of keeping a goldfish as a pet, Mary set an enduring national trend for chintz and blue and white china and inspired her people’s love of gardening.

Gardens were a passion for Mary, providing respite from other cares. Daniel Defoe had once seen her walk past him in the park looking truly animated as she discussed with Wren the laying of the foundations of the gardens at Kensington; it was as if, he said, she was conscious that she would only have a few years to enjoy them. It was no coincidence that the layout of the gardens at Kensington and Hampton Court were French-inspired, since the designers William and Mary employed were Huguenots. At Hampton Court long gravel walks and avenues of trees were complemented by canals and fountains, which William planned with the Huguenot Daniel Marot, their principal garden designer, while the Dutch influence was seen in the divisions of the garden into sections devoted to specific purposes.

The tight geometrical patterns owed less to art than to the science of mathematics, explaining why Daniel Marot was referred to as the ‘royal mathematician’. Plants and flowers were cultivated in tubs – a new concept in England – neatly outlining the courtyards and punctuating the walkways, while rows of neat box marked the boundaries. The couple brought their own orange trees from Holland and Mary had glasshouses built for a large collection of tropical plants and flowers despatched from Virginia, the Canaries and the West Indies. Her botanist, Leonard Plunkenet, looked after a rare collection of over 400 exotic plants. Gardening was Mary’s greatest extravagance, but she comforted herself with the fact that ‘it employed many hands’.

As queen, Mary championed moral, social and religious reforms – a forerunner of the modern monarchy’s obligation to lead by moral example and play an active philanthropic role. She was appalled at the immorality, pugnacity, rough manners, swearing and drunkenness, and lack of religious devotion she found among her people on her return to England. This behaviour was endemic in all classes. In an age that still believed that a nation’s sins could bring down God’s wrath, Mary was surprised ‘to see so little devotion in a people so lately in such eminent danger’. She issued numerous proclamations to reform manners and discredit drinking, but her good intentions made little headway.

A loyal daughter of the Anglican Church, she used her influence in ecclesiastical appointment to moderate the extremism of right-wing Anglicans. After his victory at the Boyne, she urged William to strengthen the Anglican Church in Ireland and to use some of the confiscated estates to endow schools. She was tolerant both of the non jurors – the bishops and clergy who had refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary because they had taken a prior oath to James – and the Dissenters, who had won only modest religious toleration in the Revolution settlement and whose condition she sought to ameliorate. She continued to support the Society of the French Gentlewomen at The Hague and gave generously to their fellow Huguenot refugees in England. She supported Thomas Bray, the founder of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In 1693 in support of the petition of James Blair, a clergyman from New England, she arranged for an endowment of £600 a year for the College of William and Mary in Virginia to train missionaries.

Nor did she neglect charity to individuals. Her account books show that she gave sums to ‘a poor woman at Hampton Court’ and ‘for Mrs Miller a blind woman’, and many others. She had made herself responsible for the upkeep of a little boy and girl boarded with a woman in Kensington. Some of the last entries in the accounts show that these orphans received ‘for cutting the boys hair & new combs 5s 6d’, ‘apothecarys bill when the boy was sick 8s’, ‘2 pair of gloves & new ribin for the girls cap 7s’, ‘a cosy winter coat twelve shillings’. As she entered her final illness, she was concerned that her few debts be paid, her charities be continued, and that her servants should be looked after, obligations that her husband, in his profound grief at her death, would honour.

On the night of 21 December 1694 Mary, suspecting that she had contracted smallpox and was likely to die, sat up all night in her closet, going through her papers, preserving some and burning others. She was sufficiently conscious of her image to destroy anything discreditable. It is significant that her journal remained virtually intact. These memoirs abound with traditional notions of the proper place of women, according very much with the way the Whigs presented her and which would remain the standard view of her over succeeding centuries. Fortunately, enough of her letters to Frances Apsley, discovered in an attic 300 years later, and to William survived to provide insights into her lively, engaging personality and her acute political sense.

Her untimely death on 28 December 1694 at the age of thirty-two provoked an extraordinary outpouring of public grief. William was utterly distraught, surprising the many who had always considered him cold. His attachment for Mary evidently went much deeper than anyone had ever guessed. ‘He said, during the whole course of their marriage, he had never known a single fault in her,’ Burnet wrote, ‘there was a worth in her that nobody knew besides himself.’

James refused to mourn a daughter who had long been dead to him. He forbade his court at St Germain to go into mourning and asked Louis XIV to issue the same instruction at Versailles. The Jacobites saw her early death as divine retribution. The Modenese ambassador summed up their feelings when he reported:

The news will have reached you of the death of the Princess of Orange [as she was still referred to by those who did not recognize the regime] of putrid smallpox after three days’ illness … That Princess, young, beautiful, and reputed the delight of a rebellious people, is suddenly become a frightful spectacle, and a subject for their bitter tears. She was a daughter who sinned against the commonest and most indispensable law of Nature ordained by God – that of honouring her parents …

If James and the Jacobites thought the demise of Mary would weaken William’s hold on the throne, they were sadly mistaken. The English drew together in grief, rallying round William in his terrible loss. The most elaborate funeral ever accorded a sovereign was planned. The court and the country were plunged into the deepest mourning. The embalmed body of the Queen was taken from Kensington to Whitehall, hung with yard after yard of black cloth, where it was to lie in her bedchamber until the route to the Banqueting House could be made ready with black-covered walkways. Here, where less than six short years previously she had accepted the crown, she was to lie in state for three months. From 21 February, members of the public were admitted to pay their last respects. Even though it was so cold that the Thames had frozen, they took up their positions in the snow from six in the morning, being admitted only from noon until five.

They found the inside of the Banqueting House ablaze with candles. Twelve gentlemen-at-arms stood on either side of the empty throne. The Queen lay with her hands crossed over her breast on draperies of purple velvet fringed with gold. At her head were the crown of state, the sceptre and the orb, at her feet the sword and the shield. At each corner of the open coffin stood one of her ladies swathed in deepest mourning, relieved by others every half an hour. In an alcove behind curtains of purple velvet inscribed with the Orange family motto, Je Maintiendrai, William mourned in private, his deep grief concealed from the curiosity of his subjects.

The state funeral took place on 5 March, when the bells of the parish churches tolled all over England. The honour of chief mourner went to the Percy heiress, Elizabeth, Duchess of Somerset, the highest lady in the land after Princess Anne, who was pregnant. Women were conspicuous in the funeral procession. Three hundred poor women led the funeral cortège, followed by the officers of Mary’s household, her chaplains, the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, and Sir Christopher Wren, Surveyor-General of the Works. It was appropriate he was here. As a public tribute to Mary, William had decided to press on with Wren’s building of the Greenwich Hospital for Sick and Disabled Seamen, a project dear to her heart. For the first time ever, members of both Houses of Parliament, all 500 of them, attended a royal funeral. The Great Seal of William and Mary had been broken on her death although, since this was a dual monarchy, Parliament continued to sit.

Preceded by the banners of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France and Chester, Mary’s Master of the Horse, Lord Villiers, led her favourite mount. The Queen’s coffin was carried in an open chariot drawn by eight horses, a man leading each of them. Six peers acted as pallbearers. One of the Queen’s bedchamber women rode at each end of the chariot, guarding the body. The Duchess of Somerset, as chief mourner, followed behind, flanked by the Lord Privy Seal and the Lord President of the Council. The Duchess’s long mourning train was carried by two duchesses. Eighteen peeresses, six ladies of the bedchamber, six maids of honour and six women of the bedchamber brought up the rear. As they wound their way from the Banqueting House by way of Whitehall Palace to Westminster Abbey, the ladies’ trains dragged in the snow and remained wet while they sat in the chilly stone edifice through the long funeral service.

Henry Purcell, who had been employed as singer and organist in the Chapel Royal and at Westminster Abbey for most of his life and who had composed many celebratory odes for Mary on happier occasions, had composed the music. The Queen’s Funeral March with its repeated muffled strokes was followed by the Canzona and then his new choral setting of ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, shut not thy merciful ears unto our prayers, but spare us, Lord most holy…’, before the measured tones of the Funeral March were resumed.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Tennison, took the opportunity in his funeral sermon to reprimand the congregation for their sinful lives. The Queen’s untimely death was a sign of God’s anger because her people had ignored her many proclamations urging them to reform and show more devotion to God. They had not been sufficiently grateful for their recent delivery from popish tyranny and had lost a good and pious queen through their failure to heed her advice and follow her example. He praised her for discharging both roles as wife and queen in exemplary fashion; she was commended for the piety and purity of her court, her skill in governing and her avowed desire to heal religious divisions.

After the service, the Duchess of Somerset and a few of the female mourners accompanied the coffin and a small party into the vault for the interment. Their duty to their royal mistress severed by death, Mary’s household officers broke their white staves and threw them and their keys of office into the vault. Then Mary was shut into the impenetrable darkness as it was sealed.

There is no doubt that Mary’s death was a severe blow to the Revolution. She had not only been the more legitimate half of the dual monarchy, but also the more popular. The Williamite press responded by producing a deluge of literature in praise of the late Queen, which also further glorified the King and justified the Revolution again. The numerous essays, elegies and sermons that poured forth reiterated the familiar themes – Mary as virtuous, pious, beautiful, industrious and charitable – an excellent queen and a devoted, loving and obedient wife. Burnet’s Essay on the Memory of the Late Queen, portraying her as a woman with no appetite for government, its burdens unwillingly assumed and modestly managed, in complete union with William, dominated the Whig-Liberal vision of Mary through succeeding centuries.

The effective exercise of political power exalted Mary in the eyes of her contemporaries, even though she emphatically denied wishing to exercise that power. As ever, the challenge was to reconcile the political leadership of a woman with patriarchal ideas of female inferiority, complicated by the fact that Mary was a wife as well as a queen, in a dual monarchy which was unique in English history. There is no need now to defer to those patriarchal assumptions that have defined her. Mary proved both a stronger and more competent ruler than either she realized or posterity has understood.