The official Admiralty records of the trial of Mary Read and Anne Bonny are not extant. There’s no doubt that the two women existed, or that they turned pirate, but the stories about them rely on a pamphlet printed in Jamaica some time after the trial, and on A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, which was published even later.
And Charles Johnson was Daniel Defoe. If truth conflicted with legend, Defoe was the man to print the legend. In my opinion, he could not have had access to the details of Read’s and Bonny’s lives that are recounted in his history.
He was as interested in criminals as he was in everything else, perhaps more so; unusually for the age he lived in, he was fascinated by daring women. The real, and necessarily extraordinary, truth about Mary Read and Anne Bonny eluded him, so he made it up. (He needed the money anyway.)
What was good enough for Defoe is good enough for me, so I concocted my own story for the two women in order to weave it through the reign of the also extraordinary – and underrated – Queen Anne, best of all the Stuarts.
To do it I have involved real people: the queen, of course; her two warring ministers, Harley (Earl of Oxford) and St John (Viscount Bolingbroke); her two warring women, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and Abigail Masham, née Hill; Daniel Defoe, William Greg, Kit Ross, Captain Blackader, Francesca and Dudley Bard and others, in a fictional murder mystery.
There is more than one suggestion in contemporary accounts to suggest that Queen Anne indulged in spiritous liquors. It’s hard to blame her; the twelve years of her reign were harassed, especially the last one when Bolingbroke and Harley were quarrelling virtually across her deathbed.
Sarah and Abigail fought tooth and claw to dominate her. Both of them were wooed by vested interests trying to sway the queen in their direction. Anne’s reputation has suffered through the apologia Sarah later wrote about their relationship – almost a character assassination.
In fact, the last of the Stuarts wasn’t as persuadable as Sarah made out. But while Elizabeth I made her prevarication look like strength, Anne’s looked like weakness. Yet ‘Can any think me so blind as not to see through these things?’ she said of the attempts to manipulate her.
Despite the war in Europe, Anne’s reign brought a standard of calm and respectability to England which it never knew before. She refused to let either Whig or Tory party persecute the other too far. There were no political executions during her time. She presided over the Union of England and Scotland. She saw herself as the mother of her people and wished that all of them would play happily together.
It seems possible that Prince Rupert of the Rhine did make a morganatic marriage with Francesca Bard, the sort that was prevalent in Europe at the time. Francesca was certainly received with all honour at the court of Hanover by Electress Sophia, Rupert’s younger sister, though later she left Germany and settled down with the Jacobite exiles at St-Germain-en-Laye, but I’m quite sure she was not involved in any plot other than to put James Francis on the throne. (He was the Old Pretender, incidentally, father of the Young one.)
From there, I’ve speculated on what might have been. If Francesca and Rupert’s son, Dudley Bard, had married before his death, his child might well have had a better claim to the crown than the Hanoverian who became George I. It is true that the offspring of morganatic marriages are not supposed to be eligible for their father’s or mother’s titles, but it would have been the bloodline that mattered to those who set such store by a Stuart succession.
In order to squeeze the story into the reign I have concertinaed a few dates, so that Anne Bonny and Mary Read stand trial rather earlier, and Defoe finds himself in the pillory rather later, than really happened.
Whether Alexander Selkirk and Defoe ever met, as I have them do on a ship returning from the West Indies, or whether Defoe ever went to the West Indies, nobody knows. Selkirk’s own account of his years as a castaway on the island of Juan Fernandez was going the rounds and would have been widely read. But it was Daniel Defoe, in Robinson Crusoe, who made the story immortal.
It’s worth pointing out that the death of Joshua, as it is recounted by his mother in Chapter Twenty One, was in fact visited on a real runaway slave.