Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories 9781350016729, 9781350016750, 9781350016743

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Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860 Empathetic Histories Mary Spongberg

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbur y Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Mar y Spongberg, 2019 Mar y Spongberg has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page.

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Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Empathetic Histories: English Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

1

Part 1 The Gender of Whig Historiography 1

The Gender of Whig Historiography

21

2

Marie Antoinette, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Emergence of Empathetic History

39

Jane Austen, Mary Stuart and the Jacobite History of England

59

3

Part 2 The Queen Caroline ‘Affair’ 4

5

Caroline of Brunswick as Anne Boleyn: Dissenting Women Writers and Historical ‘Memoir’

79

The ‘Acquittal’ of Queen Caroline: Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Queens as Political Dissent

99

Part 3 Stuart History as Empathetic History 6

Agnes Strickland’s Mary Beatrice of Modena and the Politics of 1688

119

7

Calendaring as Empathetic History: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Letters of Henrietta Maria

137

Conclusion

155

Notes Select Bibliography Index

157 210 231

Acknowledgements I began writing this book in 2008 and due to various adventures in university administration it has taken much longer to complete than I had first anticipated. During this time, I  have incurred many debts both personal and intellectual. The book developed out of a project funded by the Australian Research Council, shared with my colleague Clara Tuite, and I thank her for inspiring my interest in Jane Austen and many other acts of kindness and intellectual generosity. Numerous colleagues have read bits or all of the manuscript, and I  will be eternally grateful for their insightful, exacting and tactful comments that have undoubtedly improved the book as it has developed. For their great generosity, I would like to particularly thank Barbara Caine, Ann Curthoys, John Docker, Moira Gatens, Paula Hamilton, Margaret Sampson and Gina Luria Walker  – without whom I do not think I would have finished this book. Other colleagues too have made wonderful suggestions for various chapters, so thanks too to Sally Alexander, Elaine Bailey, Judith Barbour, Antoinette Burton, Helen Groth, Catherine Hall, Margaret Harris, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Devoney Looser, Jennifer Millam, Nicole Moore, Olivia Murphy, Jane Rendall, Susie L. Steinbach, Pat Thane, Daniel R. Woolf and the late Michael Roberts, who has been such an enormous loss to Victorian history. I would like to thank my former colleagues at Macquarie University, who I  miss every day  – Michelle Arrow, Matt Bailey, Nick Baker, Lorna Barrow, Leigh Boucher, David Christian, Kate Fullagar, Bridget Griffen-Foley, Alison Holland, Robert Reynolds and Hsu-Ming Teo – all of whom have shown great generosity and inspired this project over many years. I would especially like to acknowledge the late Jill Roe, who really developed the genre of cultural history at Macquarie and indeed Australia, and who encouraged me to maintain my interest in women’s history at a time when we were the only two women in that department. Since moving to the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), I have had the pleasure to work with historians from across the university, and this ‘History Lab’ has kept me going, even when the mountain of administrative tasks seemed too daunting to imagine. Katherine Biber, Anna Clark, Maryanne Dever, Shaunnagh Dorsett, Anna Funder, Heather Goodall, Devleena Ghosh,

Acknowledgements

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Diane Kirkby, Peter McNeil, Tamson Pietsch and Charles Rice have all made me remember that I  was a historian before I  was a dean, and this has been more helpful than they will ever know. I would like to thank my bosses at UTS, Professors Attila Brungs and Peter Booth, for agreeing to the development leave that allowed me the time to finally bring the book together and to my colleagues on the faculty executive who did not miss me too much during my time away. I would also like to thank Sita Chopra, Katy Hughes, Penny Hume, Lara Jacques, Mo O’Moore and Natalie Wild, who have always provided me with excellent support during these five years at UTS. Particular thanks go to my research assistant, Cathryn Hawkins, who has worked with me on this book since its inception. The book would have been so much longer coming without her extraordinary commitment, encouragement and unfailing eye for detail. I also have occasion to thank my many friends in the Romantic Studies community who have provided me with opportunities to speak and many words of encouragement and helpful critique, particularly Iain McCalman, James Chandler, Will Christie, Deirdre Coleman, Christine Alexander, John Mee, Saree Makdisi and Katrina O’Loughlin. I  would also like to thank all my wonderful colleagues who worked with Gina Luria Walker on the Female Biography project out of the New School between 2010 and 2015, with a special shout-out to Koren Whipp and Penny Whitworth. I am grateful to Gillian Dow and the staff at Chawton House Library for the fellowship that allowed me to really plough ahead with the book in 2010, and to the staff at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Rare Books at Fisher Library, University of Sydney, the Pforzheimer Collection and Rare Books at the New York Public Library, and the wonderful archivists at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which is home to the Leigh Archive. I would like to thank the following journals for permission to republish parts of the chapters on Austen and the Stricklands: Journal of Women’s History, Sensibilities and Women’s History Review. I would also like to thank my editors at Bloomsbury, who have nurtured this book to fruition, and particularly Beatriz Lopez for her patience and prodding, both of which have been necessary in small and (sometimes) large doses. Several anonymous readers gave generous and insightful suggestions for strengthening the arguments in this book, for which I am very grateful. Finally, I  would like to thank my sister and brother-in-law, Josephine Spongberg and Todd Hardy, and my dear friends Jane Johnston and Brian

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Murphy, who made my visits to London so much cheerier and more gourmand than they would otherwise have been. My greatest debt, however, is to my family, Guy, Hannah, Tallulah and Riley Fitzroy, who have put up with me finishing this book for a very long time, with much good humour and many, many early morning cups of tea. I could not have finished this book without you.

Introduction: Empathetic Histories: English Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

Between 1790 and 1860 women wrote across a range of historical genres, yet their engagement with the nation’s past is rarely considered as contributing to this most formative period of English historiography.1 Historians have generally ignored the political nature of women’s historical writing during this period and have excluded them from studies of English historiography. Into the twentyfirst century, it has been possible to write histories of English historiography without recourse to a single female historian.2 The writing of English history has been understood in relation to the male historians who produced it, and to the masculinist institutions that fostered it. Whiggish history itself, and the orthodoxies enlisted by the Whig interpretation, has worked to obscure the labours of women writers who staked their place in the narratives of England’s state-building and nation formation.3 Although this process began in the seventeenth century, I  will argue that it was the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France that proved foundational to the evolution of English historiography as a masculinist discipline. With the publication of Reflections, Burke began the most crucial ideological debate of the period, consolidating understandings of the nation’s past that had been emerging since the ‘Glorious’ Revolution. On both sides of the Channel, historical understandings of the French Revolution emerged that emphatically linked events in Paris in 1789, with events that saw England’s transformation from a Catholic to a Protestant state. In England, the fact that the French Revolution began 101 years after the ‘Glorious’ Revolution had an enduring effect on English attitudes. This notion was first articulated by the Dissenting Minister the Reverend Richard Price in his sermon to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain in 1789. It was, however,

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Burke’s hostile response to Price in his Reflections that brought the idea to wider attention and ensured that various interpretations of 1688 (the year of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution) came to shape English opinion of the revolution in France. Throughout the nineteenth century, because of Burke’s influence, the French Revolution was understood through the prism of England’s revolutionary past. Burke’s Reflections rejected radical interpretations of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution and offered a defence of the rule of Britain by the monarchy and aristocracy of the eighteenth-century Whigs. In contesting the Reverend Price’s assertion that the English had the right to ‘cashier’ their kings for misconduct, Burke enlisted England’s Stuart past to defend the Hanoverian regime, to discredit revolutionary activities in France and to plead for support of the establishment in England.4 Following Burke, the writing of history became critical not only to understanding the nation’s past but also to defining the place of England and its empire in the world. During the nineteenth century, English historians wrote more on the Stuart century than on any other period.5 The politics of the seventeenth century particularly shaped English historiography as the Whig tradition hardened into orthodoxy during the Victorian period. Whether one identified as a ‘Cavalier’ or a ‘Roundhead’ became a defining feature of nineteenth-century English history writing and was emblematic of a masculinist identification with the past.6 This book takes as its starting point the idea that women writing history in the nineteenth century, as much as men, were responding to and reacting against the political debates that framed the emergence of modern English historiography. Women writers during this period were passionately engaged in the politics of history, and the histories they wrote often ran contrary to the emergent Whig historical tradition, and perhaps because of this, they are scarcely visible in any accounts of English historiography. I will argue that the occlusion of women from the history of English historical writing is largely due to the gendered nature of the politics of Whig historiography as it emerged following the ‘Glorious’ Revolution and the refusal of women writers to adopt or conform to such politics. It will be argued here that the practice of associating misrule and tyranny with ‘effeminacy’ created a complex gendered politics that has informed English historiography since the seventeenth century. One legacy of the Stuart century is a political imaginary defined by concerns about the body, sexuality and the failure of masculine authority.7 Although rooted in horror at James I’s transgressive sexuality, effeminacy and femininity became conflated during the reign of Charles I, and a deep-seated misogyny came to define English political history. The masculine realm of Parliament was opposed to the ‘feminized’ realm of monarchy in seventeenth-century political polemics, and such ideas

English Women Writers and the Nation’s Past

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were solidified and given authority by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century male historians. Such gendered politics have ensured that women of the Stuart court, but especially queen consorts, were invariably regarded as figures of controversy, treachery and scandal, and were connected to all those things that impeded England’s path to modernity. During the nineteenth century, women writers also wrote extensively on the Stuarts, but especially on Stuart queens. Although queens from other dynasties featured in women’s historical writing, it was Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I, who were singled out for particular attention, and whose fate generated considerable interest in all things Stuarts. The empathetic treatment of these queens by women writers ran contrary to the Whig tradition which depicted the decline of the Stuarts as inevitable, if not, in fact, providential. Expressions of Jacobitism in the period after 1760 have not been treated seriously by historians, although this too reflects a masculinist version of the past. Jacobite men had been welcomed back to the establishment by George III and quickly returned to the corridors of power. For such men, this marked a restoration of their former rights and privileges. For Jacobite women, however, the impact of this gesture was equivocal, as they had no rights, as such, to restore, and their political influence at court had long been ceded to Parliament. Women’s interest in England’s alternate dynasty therefore may represent something more than nostalgia or romantic affectation. Empathy for the Stuarts allowed women to articulate trauma and losses, both personal and political. Embracing Jacobitism gave women writers the impetus not only to reject the masculinist politics of the English history but also to imagine alternate narratives and counter-histories. Rewriting the past also allowed women writers to engage in contemporary political commentary, as even Protestant consorts, such as Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, were subject to the same misogynist representation as hated Catholic queens such as Henrietta Maria. Rather than offering an exhaustive history of women’s historical writing between 1790 and 1860, this book will consider how specific female-authored texts during this period were shaped by contemporary politics and how these works contributed to particular understandings of the nation’s past. The women who are the subjects of this book experimented with genre, pushing the boundaries of the novel, of memoir and biography, of travelogue and poetry, to enable them to develop alternate perspectives on England’s history. It is an aim of this book to recover these women historians, who have been rendered invisible by the narrow and masculinist scope of English historiography, and to reclaim

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the many different genres in which they wrote history, as history. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate the limitations of both orthodox English historiography and literary history and to challenge the masculinist assumptions that frame the rise of sub-genres such as social and cultural history, local history and the history of the monarchy.8 Narratives that focus solely upon the rise of the male historian in the university ignore the vast shared history between capital ‘H’ history and other genres of historical writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Histories of historiography are thus inevitably partial histories, their lens occluded by masculinist assumptions, but also limited due to their nationalist parameters. The absence of women from orthodox studies of English historiography not only reflects a gender bias but also points to its limitations, as history. Failure to grapple with the ‘prehistory’ of history as a discipline and the many genres in which historians wrote before they formed a ‘profession’ is not only ahistorical but gives very little insight into how nineteenth-century women and men consumed history and understood the nation’s past. Moreover, the exclusion of women who engaged in archival research and the other ‘scientifically objective’ methods that have come to characterize history as a discipline has ensured that accepted trajectories and parameters of orthodox historiography are less than accurate, signalling a need to consider why such narratives have been formed around only male subjects and certain institutions. In order to begin this discussion, in Part One I will explore works by Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, as both authors responded to Burke in the 1790s. Part Two focuses on the revival of Burkean sexual politics during the Queen Caroline Affair, reading the innovative studies of queens, produced by Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Benger and Mary Hays in this context. Part Three will examine the legacy of Burke’s ‘liberal descent’ during the early years of Victoria’s reign, and the rejection of this ‘Whiggish’ narrative in the works of the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green. By exploring the political context in which such texts were written, I  will demonstrate how women’s historical writing represents not merely a feminized mode of historical production, but formed a significant site of political, generic and discursive resistance to the Whig historiographical tradition. Taken together, these studies not only disclose an alternate historiography of ‘England’ but invite a rethinking of the writing of ‘British’ history since the seventeenth century. Few women wrote what would be considered ‘histories’ in the first half of the nineteenth century, but the study of the variety of hybrid historical forms that they inaugurated allows for a reframing of English historiography. While

English Women Writers and the Nation’s Past

5

historical fiction and other hybrid forms were very important to the nascent historicism of the period, this promiscuous mingling of genres has meant that both nineteenth-century reviewers and modern scholars have struggled to categorize such works. ‘History’ was a field in transition in nineteenthcentury Britain, very popular with a general readership but practised largely by ‘amateurs’, both men and women. Few of the men of letters who wrote history during this period had specialized training, and while England saw a new class of historians who worked in universities gradually emerge, these men were often slow to adopt the methods of scientific objectivity we now associate with the professionalization of the discipline.9 In fact, with their facility with languages and skills at palaeography, and indeed their willingness to seek out rare books and archival materials, it is possible to argue that the women writers studied here were more ‘professionally’ qualified as historians than some of their male counterparts in the universities.10 The generic uncertainty that characterized ‘History’ as it emerged as a modern discipline has generated considerable anxiety and defensiveness where ‘hybrid’ or quasi-historical texts are concerned and, as a consequence, women’s contribution to the development of the discipline has been largely ignored, obscured or trivialized. It is now generally accepted that women writers became more interested in ‘history’ in the nineteenth century, yet there has been no overarching investigation of this claim. Periodization is partly to blame.11 Most historiographical studies of ‘women’s history’ begin with the early twentieth century and focus on women who had university training or who were attached to progressive and feminist groups, such as Lina Eckenstein (1857–1931), Alice Clark (1874–1934) and Eileen Power (1889–1940).12 This has meant that the period between the last volumes of Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay’s History of England (1763–1783) and the rise of collective royal lives in the mid-nineteenth century is often treated as a lacuna in the emerging field of ‘women’s’ historiography. Only two article-length survey studies exist for this period, those by Billie Melman and Rosemary Ann Mitchell.13 Melman has located some sixty-six women historians ‘who amongst them produced 782 histories’ in the nineteenth century, but much of her analysis is focused on the period between 1870 and 1940.14 Mitchell, too, has produced a broad survey of the many women who wrote history during this period and their familial and intellectual networks. Importantly, she has identified ‘a tradition of women’s scholarship’ in England that has been ‘obscured by the dominant male historical tradition’.15 Billie Melman argues that the appearance of the female historical subject began to challenge the ‘hegemonic language of history and politics’ of the ‘Whig-Liberal idiom’, yet this idea has not been thoroughly

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explored.16 The dehomogenization of the ‘Whig Protestant version of the past’ is a theme that I will expand upon throughout this book, arguing that gender functioned as a category of analysis in the works of nineteenth-century women writers, allowing them to articulate other exclusions, political and religious, as well as those they experienced as ‘the Sex’. Bonnie G. Smith’s provocative study, The Gender of History covers this period too, but it is not concerned specifically with England.17 The relation Smith has drawn between trauma, cognition and affect, and women’s engagement in history has, however, been critical to my thinking in this book and has greatly influenced my reading of the relation between the French Revolution and the development of women’s historiography since the 1790s. The few historiographical studies of British women’s writing in the Victorian period always mention figures such as Agnes Strickland and Mary Anne Everett Green, but there have been no extended studies of their contribution to historical writing.18 The brief mentions that are made are significant nonetheless, because they acknowledge Strickland’s and Green’s status as England’s first ‘women historians’.19 Although women made significant and generically innovative contributions to the nation’s past between 1790 and 1860, only Karen O’Brien has really connected the philosophical and political histories of Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen to the rise of women historians in the early nineteenth century. In her meticulous study, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, O’Brien argues persuasively that the royal biographies produced by writers such as Mary Hays, Lucy Aikin and Elizabeth Benger ‘extend the Enlightenment history of manners into new emotional territory’. She attributes the increasing focus on the lives of queens and elite women among women historians to the opportunity they presented for the dramatization of ‘the encounter between a responsible individual and the intractable, opaque world of power’ which ‘gave a privileged role to female character in history in mediating the national past, and a sense of what it feels like to be a pawn in the progress of society’.20 Women writers’ focus on queens has sometimes been characterized as superficial or naïve, but as O’Brien suggests, writers such as Aikin, Benger, Hays, Green and the Stricklands were drawn to the lives of royal women because they ‘provided instances of how a female life might by its very nature, be endowed with public significance’.21 O’Brien contends that making queens a fit ‘subject for history’ permitted women writers an ‘indirect contribution to the wider debate about the civic role of the domestic and the feminine’.22 I will extend that argument here but suggest that such writers were often concerned to make a direct

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contribution, not merely to debates about the ‘woman question’, but also to query the politics that underpinned arguments about women’s exclusion from the public realm. Such arguments were unquestionably connected with particular versions of the nation’s past and, as I shall assert, to present alternate ways of viewing the role of England’s queens and queen consorts was to resist the paradigms that framed Whiggish narratives of nationhood since the late seventeenth century. Greg Kucich, too, has identified a new type of women’s historical writing emerging during the early Romantic period, one that he has termed ‘sympathetic history’.23 Whereas O’Brien has traced continuities between the philosophical histories of the eighteenth century and ‘royal lives’ that proliferated in the nineteenth century, Kucich presents ‘sympathetic history’ as a radical disjuncture in Enlightenment historiography, arguing that it emerged as women writers rejected the ‘rationalist and universalizing paradigms’ favoured by the conjectural historians of the eighteenth century. The impulse of women to write historical biographies, he suggests, was a reaction against the tendency of Enlightenment historians to efface the individual subjects of history.24 Women writers devised a variety of forms of life-writing to depict the fate of other women and, in so doing, created an affective and particularized mode of historical writing.25 Kucich argues that Romantic women writers also frequently imbued their histories with nascent feminist sentiment, allowing them to critique patriarchal privilege while simultaneously recording the trauma women suffered as a result of their participation in the great events of history. Kucich understands ‘sympathetic history’ to be an oppositional discourse and characterizes it as proto-feminist, that is, concerned to challenge the structures of masculine ‘truth’ embedded in what Jane Austen termed ‘real, solemn history’.26 While Kucich suggests that women writers generated historical texts that included ‘substantial critiques of Britain’s Tory government, its aristocratic institutions, and its patriarchal social codes’, his analysis of this writing does not engage with the politics of English historiography as it emerged in the wake of the French Revolution.27 Thus, while I  share his sense that women created a new mode of historical understanding during this period, I  will argue here that it cannot be understood without reference to the politics of English history both before and after the revolution in France. While women wrote extensively on women, they were not merely producing ‘women’s history’ but rather, by recovering and recuperating the lives of queens and other elite women, they were challenging the extreme masculinism of the Whig narrative of England’s history and allowing for the possibility of a different understanding of the nation’s past.

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Kucich is one of a number of literary scholars who have made groundbreaking contributions to the emergent interdisciplinary field of women’s historiography. Works by Devoney Looser, Rohan A. Maitzen, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Alison Booth and Lisa Kasmer have greatly enhanced our knowledge of those women who wrote ‘history’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the scope of their works.28 It is now impossible to characterize history as it evolved in this period as a ‘unified unproblematically masculine enterprise’.29 Such scholars have significantly shaped our understanding of the relation between gender and the genres of history. Most of these studies, however, focus on ‘feminine’ genres – especially biographies – which are treated as gendered diminutives of history.30 Collective female biography certainly proliferated during the early Victorian period and, as a consequence, these works have been treated by literary scholars as ‘a distinct genre of Victorian women’s writing’ primarily devoted to the promotion of Victorian domestic ideology.31 Studies such as Rohan Maitzen’s Gender, Genre and Victorian Historical Writing and Alison Booth’s How to Make It as a Woman make very important arguments about how women historians used the genre of female biography to challenge conventional assumptions within Victorian historiography, but the conventions identified are largely methodological.32 Such studies understand women’s historical writing in terms of its particularity – that is, how it contributed to a history of women (women’s lives, women’s interests, women’s pasts) – and tend to treat women as disengaged from national, religious or imperial politics. Focusing on the way in which bourgeois notions such as ‘separate spheres’ infiltrate women’s historical production in the Victorian era encourages a tendency to domesticate women’s writing and to see it as other than serious interventions into the national past. It also implies that it is only women whose gender informs their historical understanding. In this context, such critics have demonstrated how Victorian women writers sought to domesticate the power of queens, rather than interrogate the ways in which women writers showed that their role was integral to dynastic politics in Europe, or how their participation at court shaped significant moments in English state-formation.33 It has also allowed critics to gloss over some of the more radical elements of certain texts, such as their critiques of dynastic marriages, discussions of the perils of coverture and any contestation of masculinist fears about women’s corrupting political influence. Although these literary scholars have signalled that writers such as Agnes Strickland and Mary Anne Everett Green aspired to be read as historians, they generally consider their contribution as distinct from the major historiographical debates of the period.34

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This has meant that the generic innovation and specificity of the works of Mary Hays, Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Benger, Agnes Strickland and Mary Anne Everett Green have been overlooked in studies of collective female biographies and treated in much the same way as that of writers ‘Mrs’ Matthew Hall or ‘Mrs’ Forbes Bush who churned out the mostly plagiarized collections of women worthies that proliferated in the mid-century. This homogenization of women’s historical writing has led to an obscuring of the political in the works of Aikin, Benger, Hays, Strickland and Green, and to the political context in which these works were produced.

Burke and the gender of Whig history Here the ‘Whig’ interpretation of history will be defined broadly, acknowledging the various critiques that have arisen regarding the concept since it was first elaborated by Herbert Butterfield in 1931. It is true, however, that most male historians wrote ‘on the side of the Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress’.35 These men were not necessarily ‘Whigs’ in the party-political sense. The liberal descent, so defined by Edmund Burke, inflected male-authored histories of England throughout the nineteenth century regardless of their political persuasion. The meanings that Burke attached to the Revolution of 1688/1689, and the privileging of this point in constitutional history as the foundational tale of modern England, consolidated the masculinist cast to the national historiography that had been emerging since the late seventeenth century. At the same time, the masculine authority of the Crown had been transferred to an all-male Parliament, a process that inevitably shaped the ways in which women’s role in politics and history was understood. The exclusion of women from the political sphere that evolved after 1688 was thus normalized and replicated in the writings of men who produced this historical trajectory and rendered it critical to England’s rise as a modern state. It would be wrong to suggest that women were entirely eradicated from the Whig historical imaginary, rather I  shall argue here that they were positioned in ways that characterized the feminine as antithetical to England’s path to modernity. Such ideas were enhanced by an Anglo-centric understanding of European history. As Burke’s credibility was restored, male historians followed him in eulogizing the English constitution, evoking soothing myths about English liberty, which inevitably rendered the fate of the Stuarts central to the fate of

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the new ‘British’ state. The antagonism and anxieties generated by the war with France seeped readily into male-authored histories of the period. Histories of England written following Burke were infused with a ‘spirit of jingoism’.36 English nationality became ‘an object of veneration and dogmatic assertion’ as male historians and political commentators alike sought to contrast the cataclysmic eruptions in France, with the ‘Glorious’ Revolution in Britain.37 Anti-French sentiments were articulated in obviously gendered language, as the national identity of modern Britain came to be dependent on the ‘othering of France’.38 The ‘Whig’ interpretation of history, as it evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reflected and reinforced this sense of ‘Britishness’ formed in conflict with France. While the French Revolution was understood through the lens of England’s past, it also came to inform understandings of the English past into the twentieth century, as France’s path to revolution was opposed to the dignified and manly path to liberty followed in England.39 Sexual and social disorders were conflated and defined as characteristic of French history, and images of sexual transgression came to define the points where the politics of France and England converged. As the historical understanding of England’s past, espoused by Burke in Reflections, hardened into historical orthodoxy, Burke’s political heirs – such as John Wilson Croker and Thomas Babington Macaulay – not only generated particularly masculinist modes of understanding the nation’s past but also attacked the hybrid genres in which women produced history. Little attention has been paid to the response of men such as Croker and Macaulay to women’s historical writing, but here I  will argue that their influence was critical to understanding both the contemporary reception of women historians and their reputation among modern scholars.

Affective histories Although representing only a small section of Reflections, ‘Burke’s description of the lovely, once ecstatically venerated queen beset in her own bedroom by a gleefully violent band of ruffians bent on her rape and murder’ was constantly reprinted in news-sheets and pamphlets.40 This process of reprinting drew Burke’s version of Marie Antoinette’s fate to the attention of virtually the whole reading public. As critics have since observed, Burke’s romanticized depiction of Marie Antoinette was necessary in order for him to make his case that ‘the political relations of modern Europe’ should be ‘grounded in benevolizing practices

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of chivalric heterosexuality’.41 Burke’s choice to embody the trauma of the revolution in the figure of Marie Antoinette initially proved counterproductive, making his interpretation of events in France seem faintly ludicrous. Even those close to Burke viewed his admiration of the queen as naïve if not suspect, earning him much scorn among radicals, as did the affective register in which he chose to depict this scene. As the Terror progressed, however, Burke’s credibility was restored and his predictions regarding the fate of Marie Antoinette and of the Revolution seemed prescient, if not prophetic. Orthodox historiographical accounts have paid scant attention to the affective qualities of Burke’s Reflections, undoubtedly because few male historians followed his example (although Thomas Babington Macaulay is perhaps the exception here). Literary critics have long recognized the influence of novels of sensibility and gothic novels on Reflections and vice versa. As Claudia L. Johnson has observed, ‘Burke’s lurid evocation of intense female suffering gave at least as much back to sentimental literature as it initially took.’42 Such conventional accounts have not, however, explored the effect of Burke’s ‘egregious affectivity’ on historiography, although this affectivity was critical to Burke’s political and historiographical project.43 This book will trace the influence of affectivity on women historical writing between 1790 and 1860. I  will argue that Burke’s performance had unintended consequences where women writers were concerned. By representing the trauma of the revolution in female form, and eliciting empathy for both France and Marie Antoinette, Burke bourgeoisified the monarchy, allowing middle-class women to identify with the fate of the French queen. This empathetic identification was crucial to a revisioning of the historical representation of women during the Romantic period and to the development of women’s historical writing throughout the nineteenth century. The empathetic identification Burke evoked in his depiction of Marie Antoinette functioned as a form of embodied historical cognition. Historians of emotion have long recognized the significance of ‘affect’ and empathy, and there has even been discussion of an ‘affective turn’ in historiography, yet there remains an anxiety within the sub-discipline that their inquiries are somehow opposed to or tangential ‘to the historical enterprise’.44 Underpinning such an opposition is a sense that political history is bereft of emotion, an idea that emerged with the rise of ‘scientific’ history. This book traces the moment that such opposition was formed and became gendered, a trajectory that begins with David Hume and ends with Thomas Babington Macaulay. Burke, however, was the critical figure. It was he who created the possibility of an almost visceral approach to history, that was taken up by many

12

Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

women writers following him. While modern historians of emotion now fret about how to ‘access emotional states in past times’, women writers during the period under consideration here regarded empathy, or a shared feeling of trauma, as binding women together, regardless of state or religion.45 This sense of shared suffering enabled women to develop historical writing as an empathetic mode, one in which the complex relationship between cognition, emotion and affect was critical to any understanding of the past.46 Affective history following Burke not only represented the ‘new and pervasive desire to “touch” the past’ that has been identified among male Romantic writers, but also conveyed a ‘vivid impression of women’s bodily pain’, as Kucich has argued, that was ‘distinctive of an emergent feminizing approach to historical physicality’.47 It was such feelings of empathy that women writers claimed gave them the authority to write history and to ‘channel’ the feelings of those long since dead. Empathy functioned in their writings as a methodology, somatizing their relationship with place, artefacts and archival materials. Such writers claimed to engage in a form of embodied historical cognition that allowed them to write vivid histories of scenes and events that vibrated with raw emotion. Such heightened feeling presented a stark contrast to the ‘dispassionate objectivity’ that characterized the emergent discipline of history.48 Burke appealed to a female audience because he hooked into the ‘sentimental communities’ that had emerged across England and France since the seventeenth century.49 While literary critics have recognized the significance of this transchannel traffic to the history of the novel, it has never been considered in orthodox accounts of English historiography. Such ‘emotional communities’ were formed by the reading of sentimental novels, secret histories and memoirs, and were bound by ‘sympathy’ and shared trauma. These too were ‘imagined communities’, but they predate those identified by Benedict Anderson as emerging with the rise of ‘print capitalism’ and were catalysed by emotion rather than nation.50 The existence of such communities complicates any sense that enmity with France was a hegemonic construct critical to British national identity.51 Here I will argue that, both before the French Revolution and in its aftermath, women writers (and their readers) resisted antipathy towards France, and the commitment to robust Protestantism (and powerful anti-Catholicism), that Linda Colley has asserted, generated the powerful new entity of Britain.52 Women’s historical writing in this period ‘denationalized’ the patriarchal parameters of English history, by emphasizing England’s European past. Such writers focused on maternal inheritance and the political importance of the queen consort and of dynastic marriages and, in so doing, domesticated the

English Women Writers and the Nation’s Past

13

nation state through an identification with the home and associated the nation with female cultural production. While women writers did not necessarily ascribe to Burke’s masculinist understanding of English history, they were nonetheless attracted to the affective register in which he wrote. The appropriation of Burke’s affective register by women writers was, however, used to contest his sentimental and triumphant account of England’s history. While Burke sought to diminish any sense of feminine influence as political influence in his account of the English past, the women writers in this study made queens their focus and interrogated the idea of feminine influence and the price women paid for political power. In addition, the tendency to depict royal women as objects of pity (rather than figures of aspiration) owes as much to the writings of French women of the eighteenth century as it does to Burke. These female French writers informed English women’s historical writing throughout this period and will be discussed in Chapter 1.

Short-lived queens Once a reviled figure in eighteenth-century England, Marie Antoinette became an archetypal figure in women’s historical writing:  a tragic foreign queen, a state victim, a woman whose life had been sacrificed to a system that privileged political alliance over conjugal love. In the wake of the revolution, the women writers studied here generated highly empathetic portraits of queens in the histories they produced. The emergence of this mode of historical writing suggests that identification with Marie Antoinette, and indeed other ill-fated queens, authorized women writers to insert women into the historical record, while also developing a critique of the patriarchal institutions that oppressed all women. While other scholars have made similar arguments, they have tended to read such histories as ‘women’s history’ and thus have rarely interrogated its place within broader historiographical or political debates. In the work that follows, Chapter 1 traces the evolution of the masculinist model of English historiography from its roots in the seventeenth century to its most eloquent articulation in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. To understand how and why women writers were drawn to the figure of the queen in English history, it is necessary to examine the original political context in which negative ideas about queen consorts and other women at court were formed, and to show how such ideas have come to frame particular

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Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

understandings of England’s path to modernity. While also examining the influence of Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay and David Hume, this chapter will contend that Burke’s depiction of Marie Antoinette played a significant role in the development of English women’s historical writing. A focus on women’s suffering enabled women writers to produce alternate narratives of the English nation. These did not just contest Burke’s particular version of Whig historiography; they challenged the negative representation of women, especially queens, that had characterized historical writing in England since the civil wars and had framed the rise of Whiggish ‘constitutional’ history in the nineteenth century. Chapters  2 and 3 are devoted to the responses to Burke’s Reflections by his contemporaries. Mary Wollstonecraft was Burke’s first and perhaps most notorious respondent. Chapter 2 traces the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on women’s historical writing through the figure of the ‘short-lived queen’. Initially the ‘short-lived queen’ emerged in Wollstonecraft’s work as a critique of Burke’s romanticized image of Marie Antoinette and his celebration of aristocratic gender relations. During the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft used the example of Marie Antoinette to depict all that was corrupt and corrupting about the Ancien Régime and the system of gallantry that characterized sexual and political relations. Coupled with her indictment of Marie Antoinette was a searing critique of bourgeois women’s desire to emulate queens, that is, to themselves become ‘short-lived queens’. I will argue here that Wollstonecraft’s experience of the Revolution’s violent misogyny saw a shift in her feminism around the figure of the ‘short-lived queen’ and, in her later works, she chose to reference them in ways that recalled Burke’s affectivity and theatricality: Carolina Matilda, whose life forms a case study in her most popular work, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), and Mary Stuart, whose presence haunts her last work, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Wollstonecraft provided later women writers with a language in which to critique the misogynist representations of women in English historiography, allowing a distinctive counter-Whig historiography to emerge. The fate of ‘shortlived’ queens animated women’s historical writing for the next sixty years and, while Wollstonecraft has never been considered as a progenitor of such lives, this book will trace her influence in the works of her contemporaries such as Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Benger and Mary Hays. Chapter 3 reads Jane Austen’s satirical The History of England: From the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles I (1791), and her vehement defence of Mary Stuart, as a ‘Jacobite’ response to Burke’s Reflections. Most replies to Burke during the early 1790s were written as Jacobin satire and, in particular, parodied

English Women Writers and the Nation’s Past

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his account of the history of succession to the throne in England. Such replies shared Austen’s irreverent tone and mocked Burke’s suggestion that monarchical succession in England was an orderly and peaceful process. Although Austen’s History of England has been read as anticipating modern feminist critiques of masculinist historiography, it has not been considered as contributing to the debates regarding English history that emerged in the wake of the revolution in France. Austen’s History, however, shared with later female-authored histories an empathetic identification with Mary Stuart and other ill-fated queens. As I shall assert, Austen’s History of England anticipated many of the themes that recur in later women’s writing. While Mary Stuart remained an important symbol of women’s political dispossession, it would be Marie Antoinette who haunted women’s historical writing throughout the nineteenth century. Her spectral presence reminded women of their vulnerability to their male kin and to the patriarchal institutions that governed their lives. I will argue that women writers’ engagement with the history of queens was not necessarily a conservative or an enervating shift in their writing, and that the debates animating Whig politics in the seventeenth century  – and feminist writing in the 1790s  – can be traced in later works focused on royal lives. At particular times of crisis, such as during the Queen Caroline Affair, the narrated royal life became a privileged site of identification with ill-used queens. Chapters  4 and 5 examine the relation between the literary and sexual politics of the Regency and the emergence of new models of historical writing inaugurated by three Dissenting women writers during this fraught period: Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Benger and Mary Hays. During the Regency, the perilous fate of a queen consort was not an abstract notion or a historical fact but rather a constant feature of the tumultuous political landscape of the period. Radicals readily analogized the fate of Anne Boleyn and other short-lived queens with the potential fate of Caroline of Brunswick, erstwhile spouse of the Prince of Wales. Since 1806, the Regent had been attempting to find Caroline guilty of adultery so she might be tried for treason. Adultery as treason was a Tudor precedent and George himself was readily compared to Henry VIII, ‘of wife killing memory’,53 by satirists who made much of their shared appetites, pride, love of ostentation and girth. The fact that Henry had tried to dispose of at least four of his six wives, and that his despotic behaviour had divided England, made for more serious comparisons. The connection Wollstonecraft drew in the 1790s, between domestic tyranny and state tyranny, was revived during the Regency and the Burkean chivalric ideal thoroughly subverted.

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Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

Chapter 4 examines Lucy Aikin’s and Elizabeth Benger’s unique ‘historical’ memoirs, suggesting that their generically innovative studies of Tudor queens were written in response to the particular sexual and literary politics of the Regency. Women writers who co-opted the masculine realm of history were often savaged by reviewers in the newly formed literary journals of the day. I will argue in this chapter that the adaption of the genre of memoir by Aikin and Benger was a deliberate strategy to avoid the charge that they were co-opting the masculinist prerogative of ‘making’ history. I will also suggest that Aikin and Benger evoked historical precedent in their studies of Tudor queens in order to comment covertly on contemporary politics. Chapter  5 will focus on Mary Hays’s invention of the collective royal biography through her last work, Memoirs of Queens: Illustrious and Celebrated (1821). Written in the wake of the crisis in English politics provoked by the trial of Queen Caroline, Hays’ text includes a ‘political biography’ of Caroline that staunchly defends her against the charges laid and a vehement denunciation of George IV. Rather than reading Memoirs of Queens as a precursor to the mostly plagiarized collections of women worthies that became popular in the midnineteenth century – as literary critics have done – this chapter argues that Hays created the genre of collective royal biography to challenge the dubious sexual politics of gallantry that erupted around the trial of Queen Caroline. It will argue that, at a time when England’s queen consort was threatening national stability, Hays’ decision to create a collection examining the lives of queens must be considered a radical act that challenged traditional models of English political history. The final two chapters of the book focus on women historians’ engagement with the historiography of the ‘Stuart century’ during the Victorian period. Chapter 6 explores Agnes Strickland’s response to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s negative portrayal of Mary Beatrice of Modena in his History of England from the Accession of James II (1848). Macaulay was Burke’s true political heir, popularizing his interpretation of history as England’s history, rendering the Stuart century critical to the study of the nation’s past. By exploring the lineaments of this controversy, this chapter will show how Agnes Strickland staked her claim in the vigorously masculine realm of political history with a view to subverting the paradigms of that framed Whig historiography, creating an ‘affective’ history of nation that was Pro-Stuart, Pro-French and Pro-Catholic. Finally, Chapter 7 examines the publication of the letters of Queen Henrietta Maria by Mary Anne Everett Green, the first woman in England to be employed as a professional historian. Henrietta Maria’s correspondence, written to her

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husband during the course of the civil wars, was discovered after the Battle of Naseby and became the source of great controversy. Agnes Strickland had published a sympathetic life of Henrietta Maria a decade before Green and had reignited the controversy surrounding King Charles’s consort. This chapter will contrast the presentation of Henrietta Maria by Green with that of Agnes Strickland. It will argue that while Strickland had created an image of Henrietta Maria as a queen of misfortunes, Green cast her as a woman of great resolution and fortitude. Green’s rigorous engagement with sources and her process of editing the letters allowed her to quash many of the more hostile allegations against Henrietta Maria and thus provide the impetus for revisionist history of this period, while also creating her own empathetic history of the Civil War. Between 1790 and 1860, women writers contested Burke’s understanding of English history at the same time as it was reinforced by male historians. I will argue throughout the book that the particular subjects that women writers tackled, and the genres they used to write about the past, constituted an oppositional discourse that challenged the increasingly hegemonic Whig interpretation of history.54 Their depiction of the lives of foreign queens such as Mary Beatrice of Modena and Henrietta Maria created the possibility of a cosmopolitan history of Britain that refuted the misogyny and homophobia that had characterized the emergence of English historiography since the seventeenth century. The historical production of the women studied here posed a significant site of political and discursive resistance to the Whig historical tradition, creating a feminized history of Britain that openly empathized with France and the Stuarts and identified the cause of female oppression with those institutions celebrated by Burke and the male historians who followed him. In so doing, they resisted the hegemonic discourses that ‘forged Britain’ in the nineteenth century, using the hybrid genres they created to effectively provincialize England and to refuse any unitary notion of the nation itself.

Part One

The Gender of Whig Historiography

1

The Gender of Whig Historiography

Although it has been recognized that a new type of women’s historical writing emerged in England following the French Revolution, neither literary critics nor historians have really explored the relation between women’s interest in history and the politics of the 1790s. It will be argued here, however, that the themes that animated women’s historical writing at this time were very much informed by the politics of ‘Whig’ history both in the past and in the present. Edmund Burke was a pivotal figure here, as his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) generated an understanding of English history that became hegemonic in the nineteenth century. The meanings that Burke attached to the revolution of 1688/1689, and the privileging of this point in constitutional history as the foundational tale of modern England, consolidated the masculinist cast to the national historiography that had been emerging since the late seventeenth century. This historical tradition framed around ‘England’s evolving constitution of crown and Parliament’ subsumed the particular histories of the kingdoms of Scotland and Wales, and in the process rendered them quaint, antiquarian and romantic. Whig historiography, as it emerged in the nineteenth century, was characterized by a gendered understanding of the relationship between Crown and Parliament, while France and other parts of the ‘united’ kingdom were rendered ‘effeminate’.1 Following Burke, whether the historical narrative was written from an Old Whig, New Whig, philosophical, Dissenting or even Tory perspective, masculinist assumptions were made about the nation’s past. This chapter will trace the lineaments of this masculinist model, examining the original political context in which negative ideas about queen consorts and other women at court were formed, and how such polemical ideas hardened into orthodoxy by the end of the eighteenth century. This chapter will also argue that Burke played a significant role in the development of English women’s historical writing during this same period. Burke’s image of Marie Antoinette in extremis presented his readers with a

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Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

powerful symbol of the revolution as female trauma embodied. By allowing women to identify with the sufferings of Marie Antoinette, Burke effectively democraticized her trauma, undercutting his own assertions regarding ‘rank and sex’. This quasi-pornographic depiction of a vulnerable Marie Antoinette, set upon in her own bedchamber by fishwives and hooligans, domesticated and bourgeoisified her suffering, encouraging empathetic identification from his female readers.2 It will be argued throughout this book that such empathetic identification with female suffering was crucial to the development of women’s historical writing. Burke’s depiction of Marie Antoinette’s suffering formed part of the shared trauma of the revolution for women. The treatment of Marie Antoinette and other women during the Terror became a critical component of the gendered politics and history of the revolution. This shared trauma allowed women writers to develop a critique of masculinist politics and institutions and authorized them to rewrite history through a focus on women’s bodily pain and the particular realm of feminine suffering.3 Although it will be argued that Burke has a critical role in the emergence of women’s historical writing in the nineteenth century, the influence of other historians such as Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay and David Hume will also be considered here. Such figures made significant contributions to understanding the role of queen consorts and women at court. Their engagement with ‘sympathy’ as a mode of historical understanding too was an important precursor to Burke’s more affective mode of historical writing.

The liberal descent Burke’s Reflections angered his enemies and confounded his allies, as he used the history of the English Revolution to defend the Hanoverian regime, to plead for support of the establishment in England and to discredit revolutionary activities in France. In the early days of the revolution, radicals and Dissenters had argued that the Revolution of 1688/1689 had enshrined such rights, for example, religious liberty, resisting power when abused and to ‘chuse’ their own governors.4 Such an interpretation of William of Orange’s succession to the throne particularly implied ‘that any British monarch could be deposed for “misconduct” and another installed in his place’.5 Events in France were understood as merely the latest in a succession of revolutions that were connected by a growing acceptance of universal natural rights and an emergent sense of liberty. Such ideas reflected a return to earlier radical and Republican interpretations of 1688 and marked an emphatic rejection of the legitimacy of the Stuarts and an overt attack on

The Gender of Whig Historiography

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absolutism in France, ideas that were eagerly taken up by radicals such as Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. An understanding of the French Revolution as an extension of the English Revolution was formed, and for several decades both supporters and detractors of the French Revolution came to view events in France through the prism of England’s revolutionary past. Burke, too, read the French Revolution through the lens of the English Revolution but posited that what was glorious about the ‘Glorious’ Revolution was the fact that it was no revolution at all.6 Instead, he represented 1688 as part of a slow and dignified programme of reform, signalling an emphatic rebuke to his compatriots, who viewed 1688 as ‘Year One’.7 Burke offered a critical revision of English nationhood, reading the violent upheavals of the past as signs of organic growth, arguing that the ascension of William and Mary to the throne of England marked not a radical and revolutionary moment but rather ‘demonstrated an orderly and historically-grounded rule of succession in a Protestant kingdom, in which the next lineal (male) Protestant claimant inherited the throne without being freely chosen by Parliament, much less “elected” by the “people” ’, as Price had asserted.8 Although he drew on a language of ancient rights and privileges in his discussion of the British Constitution, Burke was actually defending a fairly recent renovation of the constitution. He recast the succession of William of Orange as a ‘small and temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession’ that improved the English constitution through the ‘Declaration of Right’. Ignoring that this Declaration of Right was an innovation, Burke argued that it merely ‘reinforced, explained, improved’ the constitution. He essentially ignored the fact that the revolution of 1688, at least technically, had repudiated the divine right of the eldest male. This repudiation effectively decoupled the ideology of the state from the ideology of the family, undercutting the very basis of primogeniture and patriarchal privilege. Burke disregarded this fact and instead analogized the institutions and liberties of the people of England to the family estate in the patrilineal family, imbuing his history of English liberty with its own glorious paternal inheritance. Burke defined historical progress as guaranteed by paternal patriarchy, good government ensured by primogeniture. The argument he made in Reflections implied that hereditary Protestant succession in the old line was effectively continued, suggesting that the princes who succeeded King James following his ‘abdication’ ‘came in as much by the title of inheritance’ as had James.9 In his discussion of this succession crisis, Burke performed narrative coverture, subsuming Mary into William, as much as any wife under the Common Law. His narrative reflected the sexual politics underpinning the succession of Mary

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Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

and William to the English throne. Burke’s discussion of Hanoverian succession, continuing, via the womb of Sophia, Electress of Palantine, to the House of Hanover, inscribed the ‘generative power of the female body in a fiction of paternity’.10 Thus, with the exception of Marie Antoinette, when queens are mentioned in Reflections, they are reduced to their biological imperative, as vectors of regal succession from one generation of men to the next. While Burke’s Reflections initially polarized opinions in England, by the time of his death in 1797, his principles had been ‘adopted by the majority’.11 The ‘Glorious’ Revolution became the foundational moment of English history, initiating a new phase of Whig historiography in the nineteenth century. This phase reached its apotheosis with Thomas Babington Macaulay, who created a teleological narrative connecting the Whigs of 1688 to those who were framing the Reform Act in 1832. Burke’s interpretation of the revolution settlement inflected English political history well into the twentieth century, forming part of a celebratory nationalist narrative that claimed ‘England’s experience in the seventeenth century was both unique and peculiarly relevant to the modern world’.12 Although Burke was somewhat extreme in his elision of female agency, male historians followed him in eulogizing the English constitution, evoking the soothing myths about English liberty that rendered particular understandings of the seventeenth century, central to the fate of the newly ‘united’ kingdom. The Whig interpretation of history as it emerged in the nineteenth century was thus characterized by commitment to robust Protestantism, powerful antiCatholicism and long-term enmity to France. But it was also a deeply gendered discourse, that distinguished England as robust and masculine, while othering and feminizing those who appeared to impede England’s path to modernity.

Women and the Whig tradition Neither Burke’s Reflections nor the response of women writers to the text can be understood without reference to the gendered nature of seventeenth-century political discourse and its impact on the emergence of Whig historiography. Since the English civil wars, depicting queen consorts as threatening to national stability and good government had become an entrenched feature of English historiography and the political discourse that shaped it.13 Whiggish historians emphatically connected queen consorts with absolutism, Catholicism and the Stuarts, and claimed that these women encouraged their husbands in un-English habits, politics and religion.14 Such accounts

The Gender of Whig Historiography

25

generated a strangely homosocial understanding of kingship, as eighteenthand nineteenth-century historians followed John Milton in condemning the necessity of royal wives.15 Queen consorts appeared in English political history to emphasize the failure of the masculine authority of kings, and as emblems of all that was corrupt about court culture. Such representation gave them an ambiguous relation to political power and authority but ensured that what David Starkey has termed the ‘politics of intimacy’ was seen as a critical, if pernicious, aspect of English history.16 At the heart of the anxiety around the queen consort was a sense articulated in radical Republican and Whig polemics that monarchy and inherited wealth were feminizing influences. Such ideas had been forming since the reign of Henry VIII as the masculinity of the monarchy was threatened with various crises, around the succession of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor to the throne of England. The behaviour of James I  and his courtiers further ‘feminized’ the monarchy.17 During the reign of James I, these anxieties had been figured around his favourites, particularly Robert Carr and the Duke of Buckingham, and as a consequence, antimonarchical sentiment was conflated with transgressive sexuality and sexual scandal.18 During the reign of Charles I, the legacy of these anxieties diminished his masculine authority as king, and his relationship with his consort came to be depicted in opposition to his sovereign duties. The efforts of Charles and Henrietta Maria to reclaim the authority of the monarchy, damaged by James’s proclivities, proved counterproductive as their conjugal harmony was seen to be dependent on his acceptance of her commitment to Catholicism.19 The metonymic relation between the royal family and the royal state became increasingly unstable during the course of Charles’s reign, undermining further the sense of the monarchy as the site of patriarchal authority. During the civil wars, the King’s enemies claimed that his counsels were ‘wholly managed by the Queen’ and that it was she, not the King, who waged war with Parliament.20 As shall be shown throughout this book, the representation of Henrietta Maria in Republican and Whig polemics and later histories informed understandings of the role of Queen Consort, and of women’s role in history more generally, into the modern period. By the end of the seventeenth century, the monarchy had come to be understood as a site of feminine power:  private, cosseted and intimate. Sexual transgression and gender inversion were regarded as the dynamic at the heart of Stuart absolutism.21 Republicans and Parliamentarians thus constructed alternate models of ‘legitimation’ that characterized the masculine public sphere of Parliament in opposition to the feminized private sphere of monarchy.22 Queenly ‘influence’

26

Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860

was then not considered a peripheral or superficial issue but crucial to the politics of the seventeenth century and to the emergence of particular interpretations of English history.23 The influence of the queen had always been recognized as an unofficial form of power, an intercessory mode exercised for the benefit of the realm and its inhabitants. Such power was analogous to the power of the Virgin Mary interceding as Queen of Heaven and implied the queen’s subjection to her husband, the king. During the seventeenth century, however, the relationship between Marian worship and queenly influence was transformed with the rise of anti-Catholicism. Certain Protestant reformers were quick to draw negative connections between Mary, Queen of Heaven and other queens named Mary. The Puritan historian Lucy Hutchinson claimed, ‘some kind of fatality, too, the English imagined to be in the name Marie’.24 Certain Protestant observers viewed the adoration of Mary as ‘Queen of Heaven’ as a ‘dangerous supplement of the Trinity’ in that it allowed ‘the Queen to hold the sceptre’.25 The ‘historical association of the name of Mary with Catholic rule’ fuelled Protestant suspicions.26 Thus, Catholicism came to be understood as a feminized religion that ‘perverted’ heterosexual relations through its subversion of gender norms.27 These ideas influenced the ways in which Henrietta Maria and her daughtersin-law, Catherine of Braganza and Mary Beatrice of Modena, were represented in political propaganda that satirized and sexualized their engagement in the fraught politics of the seventeenth century and carried into their historical representation for several centuries. The harsh focus applied to the domestic life of the Stuarts during the seventeenth century began a course that ultimately desacralized the monarchy. Women associated with the Stuart court have been represented as embodying all the corrupting influences of France. Henrietta Maria and other Stuart women were characterized as secretive and scheming conduits of absolutism from across the Channel. Their political power was described in explicitly erotic terms ensuring that the politics of the bedroom came to define the Stuart monarchy.28 Whig politicians and historians argued that without Parliament, monarchs would be ‘ruled by women, ruled in the bedchamber by them and ruled by them in the state.’29 Political events associated with the Stuarts were depicted in such sources as sexual events.30 The corrupt politics described in these quasipornographic texts were quickly assimilated into more mainstream historical texts. Republican historians such as Paul de Rapin-Thoyras repeated many of the more salacious rumours about the Stuart courts.31 As shall be argued below, these rumours rapidly hardened into ‘fact’ by the mid-eighteenth century, as radicals such as Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay dug through the archives looking for

The Gender of Whig Historiography

27

evidence of Stuart corruption.32 During the early nineteenth century, the ‘Stuart century’ came to be regarded by Whig historians as the most formative period in history. The rise of Parliament and the struggle against Stuart absolutism ‘not only dominated political history, but generated subsidiary interpretations and debates concerning many other aspects of the period’.33 As 1688 became the foundational tale of modern Britain, a new and exclusively masculinist cast to British historiography emerged, ensuring that Stuart women, indeed any women attached to the court, were either traduced or occluded as the Whig interpretation became hegemonic.

Fictions of paternity The ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688 did not end the Stuart dynasty, but it did dramatically alter the relationship between the king and the queen consort and paved the way for a particularly gendered historical understanding of England’s path to modernity. The events of 1688/1689 and their constitutional aftermath throw into stark relief the sexual tensions underlying the dynastic politics that were unique to English history. The succession crisis caused by the pregnancy of Mary Beatrice of Modena in 1688 not only highlighted the imperative of royal women to produce male heirs rendering emphatic the very physical role of the queen consort in the nation’s politics but also the lack of male control around this crucial aspect of sovereignty. The ‘warming pan scandal’ raised questions around legitimacy and illegitimacy and their relation to succession and confirmed the status of childbirth as a political and social event.34 The ensuing discussion around the right of William of Orange to the English throne, the superior claims of his wife and the eventual compromise reached by the convention document the many anxieties not only around hereditary succession expressed during this crisis but also around relations between the king and queen and between men and women/wives more generally. A dual monarchy was accepted in 1689, a constitutional arrangement unique in England’s history.35 This reordering of the monarchy represented a parliamentary construction of royal succession compatible with the dictates of the emergent social contract theory that enshrined new models of fraternal patriarchal privilege.36 As Rachel Weil has observed, the ‘political question of where authority lay within the joint monarchy was also a question about authority in marriage’ more generally.37 The Declaration of Right institutionalized Mary’s subordinate role as wife of William within the ‘dual’

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monarchy. Although a regnant queen, Mary received no substantive regal power and only ever exercised power when she was her husband’s regent, by a specific act of Parliament. That Mary was not made Queen Regnant in her own right, even though she had more hereditary entitlement, was justified in terms that explicitly evoked the anxiety that it was not ‘safe to trust the administration of affairs to a woman’ who might be swayed by the politics of intimacy and ‘capitulate to her father’.38 The concerns regarding Mary’s allegiances went to the anxiety at the very heart of contract theory, as to which male kin women truly owed their allegiance. Gilbert Burnet, the bitter enemy of James II and future Bishop of Salisbury, developed a unique argument to justify the elevation of William alone, claiming that ‘since Mary was William’s wife as a femme covert, it could be said that the crown her property by inheritance, had already been given to her husband’.39 Although this theory, drawn from English Common Law, did not prevail, coverture was effectively achieved through their joint monarchy, as Mary’s regal authority was subsumed into William. In this regard, William and Mary were one, the one being William, as much iconography of their reign suggests.40 Their ‘joint’ monarchy allowed Mary ‘power’ or ‘influence’ only as an instrument of William. Fears regarding queenly influence were thus diffused, as Mary was presented as a ‘domestic caretaker’, ‘a wife executing her husband’s commands’.41 Mary’s acceptance of her lesser majesty and the appearance of her submission to her husband’s will ensured the survival of the revolutionary settlement and has shaped her historical representation as ‘meek, submissive, malleable and docile’ in English historiography until fairly recently.42 The contest for political supremacy between Crown and Parliament in the seventeenth century began a process that saw the masculine authority once embodied by an absolute monarch transferred to an all-male Parliament, that controlled England’s governance and purse. This process accelerated during the reign of George III and reached its apotheosis during the Victorian period.43 By 1837, when Victoria came to the throne, England was in the last stages of a transition to parliamentary democracy and symbolic monarchy. The role of the monarch within such a constitutional system thus became analogous to that of a middle-class wife. Victoria embodied this transfer of monarchical authority, taking on the appearance of bourgeois domesticity. As Margaret Homans has argued, ‘if a married woman had not occupied the throne for most of that century, the monarchy would have needed some other way of associating itself with wifeliness’.44 While Victoria’s ‘wifeliness’ may have stifled concerns around female rule in the nineteenth century, anxieties around feminine and feminized

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authority continued to be expressed in male-authored histories of the Stuart period into the twentieth century.

Republican Virago Complicating any discussion of the gender of Whig historiography in the eighteenth century is the figure of England’s ‘first female historian’, the radical Whig, Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay. Macaulay often pitted herself against Burke, who regarded her as an ‘Amazon’ and a ‘Republican Virago’.45 Macaulay was one of the first respondents to his Reflections, and she mocked Burke’s historical interpretation of that event, as well as his hyperbolic description of those ‘scenes of regal distress’. Macaulay undermined Burke’s credibility by accusing him of an unmanly susceptibility to emotion, connecting his affective response to the Queen of France, with his overblown imagination. The suggestion of sexual guile here and the susceptibility of men such as Burke to ‘the charms of the Queen of France’, associated Marie Antoinette with women of the Stuart court. Macaulay spared little compassion on Marie Antoinette, casting her as an emblem of absolutism, as she had other foreign queens in her History. She drew out similarities between Marie Antoinette and Henrietta Maria and portrayed Louis XVI as a vacillating King in the mould of Charles I. Countering Burke’s dramatic images of the tumultuous scenes of October 1789, Macaulay reported that Louis XVI was carried to Paris, ‘to prevent the execution of a design formed by the court cabal, which had it succeeded, might have deluged the nation with blood, and furnished the fuel of civil discord for years’.46 For contemporary readers, this too connected the French Revolution with the English Civil War, and Marie Antoinette with Henrietta Maria. Macaulay had contributed significantly to the particular understanding of the historical role of queen consorts that was far from at odds with the masculinist Whig tradition. Her voluminous The History of England: From the Ascension of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover (1763–1783) had the potential to generate a distinctly feminist account of the English nation as her political ideas challenged notions of divine authority and absolutism and patriarchal privilege.47 Her particular brand of radical politics, however, complicates her legacy and makes her unlikely to be a forerunner to those women who embraced affective and empathetic modes of historical writing some decades later.48 As J. G. A. Pocock has observed, Macaulay ‘heartily disapproved of most women she described in her Histories, because they were princesses and queens’.49 Such

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an observation, while undoubtedly true, simplifies the gendering of courtly politics that shapes Macaulay’s History. The sexual transgression at the heart of courtly politics during the reign of James I  frames her understanding of the opposition between court and parliament and becomes the template she uses to explain courtly politics throughout the Stuart period. It was, according to Macaulay, the male courtiers of James I  who introduced ‘effeminacy’ into the English court. She thus conflates sexual transgression with courtly corruption, luxury and femininity. Men were ‘feminized’ at James’ court, and as a consequence, this led to political ineptitude, sycophancy and petticoat government.50 During the reign of Charles I, however, it is femininity rather than effeminacy that becomes corrupt and corrupting. The sexual transgression that characterized James’s reign as corrupt is described as gender inversion in later reigns, and as a consequence, the heteronormative familial relations that had previously defined the state were undermined. During the reign of Charles I, Queen Consort Henrietta Maria comes to represent the threat of ‘femininity at the heart of government’ and the secret power of female sexuality corrupts courtly politics, aligning women with treachery and treason.51 Even conjugal affection comes to be regarded as erotic guile, and thus corrupting of politics. Women at court, but especially queen consorts, are thus presented by Macaulay as ‘court-based agents of effeminacy’.52 Unlike the women historians who followed her, Macaulay made particularly harsh judgements upon Stuart queens and princesses. She described Anne of Denmark, the long-suffering wife of James I, as a ‘woman of a vain, haughty and violent temper’ whose vulgarity ‘infected the whole court’.53 She called the illfated Henrietta, Duchess of Orléans, a ‘woman of wit, vivacity, and unbounded intrigue’.54 Most of her scorn, however, was spent on Henrietta Maria, whom she regarded as a corrupting influence on both her husband and her sons. Her image of Henrietta Maria was drawn largely from vitriolic Parliamentary and Puritan sources. Macaulay had spent much time in the archives researching Stuart tyranny, particularly focusing on collections of pamphlets and materials, that were inherently polemic.55 Such polemic readily hardened into orthodoxy in the works of Macaulay, who wove classical Republicanism into anti-French, anti-aristocratic and anti-Catholic discourses.56 Macaulay contributed greatly to the anti-Stuart, anti-Scottish and anti-French polemics of the later eighteenth century, that solidified the image of Charles as an ‘effeminate’ king, held in sway to his wife.57 Even in her Letters on Education (1790), which certain critics regard as a feminist work, the conflation of ‘effeminacy’, femininity and women at court is pronounced. The principal theme of this tract – that the mind has

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no sex – is considerably weakened by Macaulay’s gendered political language and her conflation of ‘effeminacy’ with femininity. For while she argued that ‘history does not set forth more instances of power abused by women, than by men’, she nonetheless maintained that women’s power was essentially corrupting and furnished evidence drawn from her own reading of history, to document a history of women’s ‘foibles and vices’.58 While Macaulay held that women ultimately corrupted courtly politics with their erotic guile, such views would be unpicked in the works of writers such as Agnes Strickland and Maryanne Everett Green who looked to less hostile sources when they wrote of Henrietta Maria and other queen consorts. Macaulay’s perspective on queen consorts, however, was undoubtedly supported by Mary Wollstonecraft as they shared a common politics in the early 1790s. Macaulay, however, failed to influence the next generation of women writers: these were a generation who intensely identified with the suffering of women at court, particularly the women of the Stuart court, partly because their lives had been vilified in the Whig historical tradition.59

Sympathy and history Hume’s History of England written in six volumes, between 1754 and 1762, was the most popular work of history of the eighteenth century, and its influence can be traced in numerous works of history produced by women over the next century.60 A  Humean concern with imagination and sentiment was a critical component of women’s historical writing in the nineteenth century. Part of the key to the popularity of Hume’s History with women readers was his desire that it rise above the ‘faction’ that characterized most political history written since the seventeenth century. Hume set himself the difficult task of trying to tame ‘the crude ideological force’ of his subject matter, while evoking its ‘life and present drama’.61 By avoiding party politics, Hume stood outside the masculinist modes of Whig historiography in this period, thus greatly appealing to women readers (and writers). Moreover, he used sympathy as a way to ‘tame’ the past, tempering the vivid spectacle of olden times, through the art of writing. For Hume, it was the distance of the past that allowed historical representation and made the ‘redescription’ of painful events possible. Proximity to such events, he asserted, created an excess of feeling that prevented the construction of meaning and thwarted the possibility of multiple readings. First-hand accounts, he considered, were partial and unintelligible.62

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Hume sought to balance the imperative to write history that was truthful and impartial, with his desire to promote interest and sympathy in his readers. Inspiring sentimental sympathy for the ‘victims’ of history, including women, was a critical and novel feature of his popular works.63 Underpinning this seemingly contradictory impulse was a sense that Hume was writing his History for ‘two sorts of readers and two qualities of reading’.64 Hume self-consciously gendered his production of history. Thus for men, Hume maintained, history was read to understand ‘abstract notions of justice and reason’, whereas women read history to experience ‘more immediate human emotions’.65 In adopting this approach, Hume set out to achieve a measured assessment of the past, as ‘truth’ was balanced with ‘interest’, ‘impartiality’ with ‘compassion’, ‘justice’ with ‘pity’ and ‘proximity’ with ‘detachment’.66 This balance was critical, as Hume wanted to use history to promote sympathy, not ‘enthusiasm’, ensuring that his reader felt a sensible difference between the facts of the history and the fictions of other literary forms.67 Hume recommended history to women readers because he believed it would be ‘more instructive than novels and romances’, but he nonetheless made a ‘strong case for the passions, including love, as an ingredient essential to history’.68 Women clearly took inspiration from the literary qualities of Hume’s History, and he appealed to their sympathy for the suffering of others.69 Hume’s focus on the individual life (and death) of his subjects pulled the heartstrings of his female readers, who sometimes left compelling evidence that they did indeed shed tears in sympathy with good King Charles.70 The disconcerting show of sympathy for Mary Stuart in Jane Austen’s otherwise comical History of England owes much to Hume’s pathetic evocation of this ‘amiable’ princess. Indeed, Hume’s depiction of royal and aristocratic executions formed the blueprint for many women writers in the next century (and indeed some royal biographers today), who borrowed heavily from his accounts, focusing upon their subject’s high status, personal attractions and awful reversal of fortune.

Literary channel While queen consorts were vilified as the Whig historical tradition formed in England in the eighteenth century, other modes of historical writing celebrated their influence and presented more sympathetic portraits of women such as Henrietta Maria and Mary of Modena. Across the Channel, royal consorts were subject to much more sympathetic treatment by women writers closely

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associated with the throne. Works such as Madame de Motteville’s Memoirs for the History of Anne of Austria (1723) or the comtesse de Lafayette’s La Princess de Clèves (1678) contained highly sympathetic accounts of Stuart women. The circulation of these works was encouraged by the return of exiled Jacobites from France.71 Multiple editions appeared in translation in England during the eighteenth century, and their influence can be traced in the historical works of English women studied here. Such influence indicates an interest in England’s European past not recognized in traditional historiographical accounts or indeed literary histories of the period. Yet, as shall be demonstrated throughout this book, feminized modes of English history and life writing were shaped by this transnational exchange.72 While male-authored Whig historiography promoted the idea of long-term enmity to France, women writers and their readers resisted the patriarchal and nationalist parameters which constrained both British and French history, and in so doing generated cosmopolitan communities catalysed by empathy rather than nation.73 The same years Linda Colley has described as critical to generating British nationalism through hostility to all things French are precisely contemporaneous with the formation of this transnational ‘sentimental community’ between Dover and Calais.74 The existence of such a community represents a significant site of political and discursive resistance to the masculinist English historiographical tradition and consequently to any unitary notion of English nationhood, as women writers openly empathized with France and came to identify the cause of female oppression with those institutions celebrated in the Whig historical tradition. Such French works of memoir were little concerned with the party politics which framed English historiography in this period and instead drew on a different tradition of secret history, one that was more concerned to depict an explicitly feminine perspective on the great events of history.75 Such secret histories were allowed to give voice to the idea that women at court were frequently the playthings of great men, courted, seduced and disposed of, at a whim. While such ‘influence’ was disdained by Whig historians and politicians alike, who depicted this sexual exchange as part of a corrupt court system, writers such as de Motteville and la Fayette spoke of women’s sorrow and abandonment, rarely offering the same cynicism about ‘influence’ found in English sources. They also gave considerable insight into the politics of the bedchamber, including the struggles queens had when their ladies-in-waiting were appointed because they were pleasing to the king. Madame de Motteville’s Memoirs and other such works from the French court were often cited sources in Victorian royal lives

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and gave considerable insight into the ways in which the dynastic plans of men sacrificed women’s happiness and freedom to the imperatives of succession. This was particularly true of the writings of Elisabeth Charlotte, the second wife of ‘Monsieur’ Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, whose letters and memoirs were translated into English in 1788. Elisabeth Charlotte’s letters were full of anecdotes of ill-fated royal women and mistresses, including her predecessor the Princess Henrietta Stuart, who, many believed, was poisoned by her husband, the Duke of Orléans. Elisabeth Charlotte reported in her letters that there were very few queens of France who were happy:  ‘Marie de Medici died in exile, the mother of the King and of the Monsieur mother [i.e., Anne of Austria] was unhappy as long as her husband was alive. Our Queen, Marie Therèse, said upon her deathbed, “that from her time of becoming Queen, she had not had a day of real happiness”.’76 Always forthright in her opinions, she condemned the institution of royal consort in no uncertain terms. Being a queen is not the happiest condition in the world. I wouldn’t have wanted to be one for anything. You suffer the worst restrictions, you have no power whatsoever, you are like an idol: you must put up with everything and somehow be happy regardless.77

Such French sources did more than merely generate sympathy for ill-fated ‘Frenchified’ queens; they generated longing for England’s Catholic past and for the lost culture of the Stuart courts and resisted the xenophobia that characterized male-authored texts. Ill-fated royal women such as Mary Stuart and Henrietta Maria became powerful symbols of female dispossession in an age when women’s access to court and its political power was declining. Mary, Queen of Scots, particularly haunted the public imaginary in Georgian England, holding an ambiguous place in the emergent historiography of the newly united kingdoms.78 While on the one hand, the Scottish queen promoted an emotional consensus among those sympathetic Georgians who wept at the spectacle of her suffering, on the other, she was a reminder of political debates that remained volatile long after the Act of Union, and that were inflamed with each Jacobite rebellion.79 Jacobitism, the Stuart legacy and England’s Catholic past became rich sources for exploration by women writers seeking to articulate the pain of female dispossession and other forms of political and social exclusion.80 Women’s possession of Stuart relics reflected an increasingly affective relation to the past. This feeling for the past was most emphatically connected with the lost dynasty of the Stuarts as they had utilized the use of such reliquary to connect their supporters to the cause and to keep it alive while they were in exile.81 The

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sensual nature of such reliquary became embedded in the text of histories of royal women, and as shall be shown in later chapters, writers such as Jane Austen and Agnes Strickland drew on such sensation to authorize their accounts of the past.

Henrietta Maria, Marie Antoinette and Margaret of Anjou Underpinning much of the sexual slander addressed to Marie Antoinette during the revolutionary period was a sense that, like Henrietta Maria before her, she was engaged in treason, setting her husband against his people, and Austria against France. This claim formed the principal accusation against her when she was executed in 1793. As well as her alleged sexual crimes, Marie Antoinette was also found guilty of making secret contributions to the Austrian Emperor and of counter-revolutionary activities at court. Edmund Burke was well aware of the scandals that had enveloped the queen of France when he wrote Reflections, and his apparent hypocrisy here confounded both friends and foes. Sir Philip Francis, who had read Reflections in manuscript, warned Burke that what he had written in Marie Antoinette’s defence would inevitably damage his reputation. Francis was concerned for Burke’s reputation not only because his presentation of Marie Antoinette was at odds with her image in the political propaganda of the time but also because Burke had previously regarded the French queen as a courtly schemer. Prior to 1790, Burke had been highly critical of ‘petticoat government’ too, when English queen consorts sought to engage in politics. During the Regency crisis of 1788 he had been instrumental in opposing any power or patronage being ceded to Queen Charlotte by Pitt’s Regency Bill. Unlike Marie Antoinette, Queen Charlotte represented the embodiment of virtuous domesticity. Burke, however, argued that if she were regent, such power might prove a ‘temptation’ for even the purest of minds, reviving long-standing Whig conspiracies around women’s propensity to use sexual guile when they had power and fears of ‘backstairs influence’.82 He even hinted that she and Pitt were colluding to usurp the King.83 In private, Burke was reported to have asked,‘Is it to be the house of Hanover, or the House of Strelitz that is to govern the country?’ Sir Philip Francis reminded Burke of this when he asked him pointedly, ‘How long have you felt so desperately disposed to admire the Ladies of Germany?’84 Burke’s enraptured homage to Marie Antoinette mystified Francis. He begged Burke in desperate tones to reconsider his depiction of the queen. He informed

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Burke that his decision to write in support of the queen would be viewed as hypocritical. Let everything you say be grave, direct and serious. In a case so interesting as the errors of a great nation, and the calamities of great individuals, and feeling them so deeply as you profess to do, all manner of insinuation is improper, all jibe and nickname prohibited. In my opinion all that you say of the Queen is pure foppery. If she be a perfect female character you ought to take your ground upon her virtues. If she be the reverse it is ridiculous in any but a Lover, to place personal charms in opposition to her crimes.85

While Burke maintained that all women should be respected, respect for the queen who embodied the privileges of both rank and sex was the ultimate marker of chivalric honour and hence the guarantee of social order. Thus, for Burke, the assault on the queen in her bedroom at Versailles represented the nadir of social order in France. His evocation of Marie Antoinette as the young ‘dauphiness, at Versailles’ certainly recalled the queen at a time of her life when she was untouched by the malicious gossip around her political intrigues. Yet the hyperbolic extravagance with which Burke approached the queen, ‘glittering like the morning star, full of life, splendour and joy’, rendered her other-worldly, almost inhuman. She was presented as simply an ornament to Louis XVI’s reign, but no companion to his majesty, effectively stripping her of any political power and any implication of the ‘petticoat influence’ Burke was so adept at attacking in other women. Burke referenced Hume and drew indirectly on his depiction of Margaret of Anjou, when creating the pathetic image of Marie Antoinette that made his Reflections (in)famous. During the Regency crisis of 1788–1789, Margaret of Anjou had figured in the cultural imaginary as debate about the role of consort was renewed and this was reflected in literary and theatrical productions of the period.86 With this revival of interest came a softening of her presentation on the stage as contemporary playwrights drew on Hume’s History of England, rather than Shakespeare.87 Burke’s depiction of Marie Antoinette recalled a particular episode in Margaret’s eventful life, first related in Hume’s History, then dramatized by the English playwright Edward Jerningham in his Margaret of Anjou, An Historical Interlude in 1778. In Jerningham’s play, as in Hume’s History, Margaret of Anjou is depicted as being threatened by armed ruffians as she tried to escape capture. Burke’s reimagining of this scene, in contemporary France, not only became a founding moment of modern [masculinist] historiography, it also projected the image of a distressed female ruler onto the public historical

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imaginary, rendering it iconic in the process.88 Once celebrated for her Amazonian qualities, Margaret of Anjou was in the 1790s presented as a victim of dynastic politics, a captive separated from her husband and a mother bereft of her son.89 Such dramatizations of Margaret’s life ‘spoke powerfully of the fate of Marie Antoinette’ but also distinguished her from the ‘unsexed females’ and ‘Gallic freaks’ whose martial involvement in the revolution across the Channel had become conflated with ‘sexual and political aberration’.90 Such an image of distressed royalty offered a sharp counterpoint to the image of queens usually presented in Whig historical narratives and was reproduced by women writers who framed their narratives of the nation’s past around the figure of the suffering female subject. Whereas Hume had used the constraints of traditional historical narrative to ensure ‘distance’ in his depiction of scenes of emotional distress, Burke resisted such techniques, incorporating blatant presenting effects into his narrative and making feeling, affect and sensibility matters ‘of national security’.91 What made Burke’s performance of feminized trauma in Reflections so successful was his ‘anxious insistence on the affective power of historical presence’.92 By drawing upon ‘the historically specific conceptions’ of the genre of tragedy ‘to inform the ideological world of Reflections’ Burke resisted any distancing effect, further enhancing the empathetic identification between Marie Antoinette and his (women) readers. His apostrophe to Marie Antoinette became a ‘mode of performance’.93 In doing this, he consciously evoked the ‘weeping effect’ that was so viciously lampooned by radicals such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. By positioning his reader in a situation of spectacle and manipulating their sympathies, Burke had produced an intense emotional effect. As an orator, he had demanded an immediate appeal from his audience, and he employed skills learned from the theatre to inspire empathetic identification. Burke also drew upon gothic novels and novels of sentiment, presenting the pathetic situation of the Queen in a domestic setting so as to highlight the private dimensions of royal distress. He too catalysed a sentimental community, bonding women readers through his tearful performance, encouraging them to identify with Marie Antoinette’s plight.94 In so doing, he humanized the situation of Marie Antoinette, rendering her an emblem of threatened bourgeois virtues, promoting sympathy formed by ‘tender passions’ rather than ‘noble ones’.95 Thomas Paine and others were highly critical of Burke’s ‘theatricality’ and reminded him that he was writing ‘History’, and not ‘plays’.96 Burke, however, was quite forthright in defending ‘the literary resonances’ of his text, ‘insisting that insofar as literature still taught us to lament the fall of princesses, it was

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a far better school of morality than enlightenment philosophy’.97 Burke’s ‘lurid evocation’ of Marie Antoinette’s suffering not only borrowed from tragedies and gothic novels but also influenced these genres during the 1790s, if not throughout the entire Romantic period.98 Certainly, performances of Jerningham’s play after 1793 ‘mirror[ed] the emotive rhetoric’ of Reflections and changed the ‘cultural reception of distressed French queens’.99 Throughout the nineteenth century, women writers appropriated Burke’s affective register to rewrite the history of England, through a focus on ‘distressed French queens’. The plight of persecuted or endangered women, especially queens, animated women’s historical writing for almost a century after the appearance of Burke’s Reflections, challenging Whiggish anxieties around ‘petticoat’ government and reminding readers that English history was littered with the bodies of women who had fallen victim to its the dynastic politics. The ghost of Marie Antoinette haunted women’s production of history in the nineteenth century and ensured a focus on ‘Frenchified’ consorts such as Anne Boleyn and Mary Stuart, and even Stuart queens such as Henrietta Maria and Mary Beatrice of Modena.

2

Marie Antoinette, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Emergence of Empathetic History

The initial reception of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France revealed forcefully the extent to which his representation of queenship unsettled English readers. Both his supporters and his detractors believed that his depiction of Marie Antoinette as an innocent victim of faction marked a decided shift in his politics and raised concerns for his sanity.1 Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay were among the first to mock Burke’s fawning sympathy for the queen and to accuse him of hypocrisy. While sentimental writers such as Frances Burney were greatly moved by Burke’s Reflections, Mary Wollstonecraft identified with the masculinist politics of the radical and Dissenting communities she frequented in London. Wollstonecraft drew upon the Whig tradition to depict Marie Antoinette as embodying all that was corrupt and corrupting about the Ancien Régime. Burke’s affective representation of the French queen framed Wollstonecraft’s notion of ‘short-lived queens’, a phrase she used in her second Vindication to encapsulate the fate of all women in the system of chivalric relations that he espoused.2 Burke posited that ‘chivalry’ and its modern variant ‘gallantry’ were the glue that held society together. Wollstonecraft countered, arguing that it was gallantry that prevented women from aspiring to be ‘rational creatures’. Gallantry, according to Wollstonecraft, was just another word for ‘romance and folly’, and the homage men paid to women on this account ensured that they aspired to be ‘short-lived queens’ rather than virtuous wives and prudent mothers. Wollstonecraft coupled her indictment of Marie Antoinette with a searing critique of bourgeois women’s desire to emulate queens. This was the foible that Wollstonecraft maintained that allowed women to be brutally oppressed by men. ‘The passions of men’, she wrote, had ‘placed women on thrones’. Such ‘empire’ however was inevitably fleeting. As she observed (not without a certain sense of satisfaction), ‘ “And

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woman, either slave or queen/Is quickly scorn’d when not ador’d”. But the adoration comes first, and the scorn is not anticipated.’3 Following Marie Antoinette’s trial and execution, Burke’s sympathy for the queen and Wollstonecraft’s derision of gallantry both seemed prescient. A  truly ‘short-lived queen’, Marie Antoinette’s terrible fate came to stand for the violence all women experienced during the revolution.4 Burke presented Marie Antoinette as an emblem of female suffering in order to defend paternal power and patriarchal institutions, but his decision to depict the French queen in ways that recalled the bourgeois heroines of gothic fiction had unintended consequences. I shall argue here that Burke’s depiction of Marie Antoinette in Reflections allowed women to empathetically identify with the hapless queen of France and authorized them to consider their own historical condition. While Burke’s Reflections may have incited English men to adopt sentimentality and pathos as ‘a momentous national duty’, its effect on women was more contentious.5 Indeed, if we look to the rendering of feminine pain and suffering in women’s historical writing in this period, it seems that Burke’s claim ‘that generous loyalty to rank and sex’ had been a driving and civilizing force in English history was contested by women writers throughout the nineteenth century. While women writers came to empathize and identify with Marie Antoinette, they nonetheless challenged Burke’s chivalric understanding of British history in ways that recalled Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft gave nineteenth-century women writers a language in which to critique the patriarchal institutions that oppressed them, and this enabled them to challenge the misogyny that had characterized contemporary and historical representations of women in English historiography, allowing a distinctive counter-Whig historiography to emerge. The lives of ‘short-lived queens’ became the fodder of much historical writing by women for the next century. Wollstonecraft has not, however, been considered as a progenitor of such lives. This chapter will trace the interest in ill-fated queens to the 1790s, to Wollstonecraft’s response to Burke and to the critiques of courtly behaviour and aristocratic morality throughout the body of her work. While initially Wollstonecraft used the figure of the ‘short-lived queen’ derisively, her experience of the Revolution’s violent misogyny saw the consolidation of her egalitarian feminism around this figure, softening her stance as she too came to empathize with the harsh fate of certain short-lived queens. I will argue that Wollstonecraft came to evince a Burkean affectivity towards short-lived queens, choosing to reference two such women in her later works:  Carolina Matilda, Queen Consort of Denmark, whose life forms a case study in her most popular work Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

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(1796), and Mary Stuart, whose presence haunts her last work Maria:  or The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Wollstonecraft’s vitriolic portrayal of Marie Antoinette in the Vindications and in her An Historical and Moral View of Origin and Progress of the French Revolution gives way in her posthumously published Maria:  or The Wrongs of Woman, suggesting an evolution of her feminism, her engagement with Burke and her historical understanding. Wollstonecraft carefully crafted the presentation of her heroine Maria in a court of law, highlighting the ‘nexus of maternal and sexual identity’ in ways that clearly prompted memories of Marie Antoinette’s infamous trial.6 Contemporary readers would have readily drawn analogies between Maria and the ill-fated Queen of France and recalled Burke’s affective portrayal of her persecution. This evocation of Marie Antoinette (and Mary Stuart and indeed all the other persecuted Marys) in the title reflected Wollstonecraft’s long-standing belief that their sexuality trapped women into submission and her newfound conviction that the history of women demonstrated that all women, regardless of rank, were ‘bastilled for life’, due to the masculinist nature of the law.7

The rights of men Slightly less than a month after Burke’s Reflections appeared in 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft published her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Rights of Men). At that time Wollstonecraft was a little-known novelist eking out a living writing for Joseph Johnson’s recently established Analytical Review. Appearing anonymously, Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication fired a salvo back at Burke, drawing her immediately into the heart of English political culture where she remained until her death six years later. The daughter of a feckless and violent father, Wollstonecraft instinctively questioned Burke’s contention that patriarchal systems of heredity guaranteed civility. Equally convinced as Burke that the family formed the basic unit of society, she critiqued his emphasis on primogeniture and resisted his contention that property guaranteed civilization. She consolidated her radical stance against Burke with the appearance of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Rights of Woman) published in 1792. Although she only directly addressed Burke in her first Vindication, she was engaged in dialogue with him throughout her career, sometimes contesting and sometimes coalescing with his uncompromising vision of the revolutionary France and his understanding of history more generally.

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Wollstonecraft, like many other observers, was bemused by Burke’s paean to Marie Antoinette and had mocked his dramatic response to the queen’s suffering.8 In one of her few mentions of the French queen in the Rights of Men, she ridiculed his theatricality, claiming that only a ‘gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or pity a man’.9 This reference to drapery became a recurring motif in Wollstonecraft’s political writings, as she derided Burke’s claim that a veil of modesty had been rent by the hooligans who had invaded the palace at Versailles. Wollstonecraft chided Burke for insincerity, declaring that ‘Misery, to reach your heart, I perceive, must have its cap and bells’. Most damning, however, was her statement ‘your tears are reserved, very naturally considering your character, for the declamation of the theatre, or for the downfall of queens, whose rank alters the nature of folly, and throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity’.10 Juxtaposing the fate of the queen with the crisis in bourgeois relations engendered by the rise of courtly immorality and political corruption, Wollstonecraft conceded, ‘The queen of France – the great and small vulgar, claim our pity; they have almost insuperable obstacles to surmount in their progress towards true dignity of character.’11 At the time Wollstonecraft wrote her two Vindications, Marie Antoinette was the most hated woman in France, and as a foreign queen consort, she had been subject to similar charges to Catholic queen consorts in the Whig tradition.12 Before the Revolution she was accused of enriching Austria at the expense of France. As the Revolution progressed, however, she was accused of treasonous behaviour for animating the spirit of counter-revolution at court.13 Such ideas provided a ready explanation for the King’s inability to accept revolutionary change. Rumours circulated that an ‘Austrian Committee’, led by Marie Antoinette, had been formed to subvert the revolutionary government and to turn control of France over to Austria.14 As had been the case with Stuart queens in the seventeenth century, Marie Antoinette’s alleged treason and corruption were connected with a perverse sexuality, as the political pornography of the period ‘advanced a remorseless and increasingly lurid attack’ on both her political and sexual morals’.15 Marie Antoinette came to be viewed in the same light as Louis XV’s mistresses Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry.16 These women, it was claimed, ruled France through the bedchamber and such influence was characterized as emasculating, of both the King and the nation. Louis XV, who had always favoured the Stuarts, resembled them in that way too, governed entirely by women. Katherine Binhammer has argued that Burke’s description of the French queen in Reflections  – as an ethereal, almost fairy-like creature  – reflected

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his ambivalence towards the ‘mortal Marie Antoinette’.17 His friends and his enemies were confounded by his apparent about-face on this subject.18 Yet, Burke’s depiction of Marie Antoinette was intended to raise her above the pornographic propaganda that engulfed her. It also diminished any resemblance to those queen consorts in the Whig tradition who, it was claimed, used their sexuality to gain sway over the King and the court. Initially, his vision of Marie Antoinette had almost the opposite effect, as rumours of her debauchery were commonplace in England at the time of the Revolution and widely believed.19 Political satirists gorged upon the rich material Burke provided. Days after the publication of Reflections a ‘frontispiece’ appeared, with Burke dressed as a French courtier, his brain inflamed by a cherub, worshipping at the feet of a celestial Marie Antoinette who, like the Virgin Mary, was draped in blue.20 This reference to the Virgin connected Marie Antoinette with women associated with the Stuart court, particularly Henrietta Maria, whose Marian worship had been the source of much political invective since the civil wars.21 These satirical images had their roots in Whig and radical accounts of seventeenth-century English politics that had personified the courtly influence and corruption in the figure of the queen.22 For months after Reflections appeared, political enemies presented Burke’s worshipful depiction of Marie Antoinette as confirming at once his crypto-Catholicism, his Jesuitical nature and his covert support for aristocratic tyranny. As has been argued in the previous chapter, such anti-queen invective had been popularized in the eighteenth century in the works of Macaulay and others.23 Wollstonecraft’s language in the sections of the Rights of Men that deal with the French queen suggests that she drew on these associations to diminish Burke’s authority. Certain critics have noted that references to Burke’s theatricality alluded to his rumoured homosexuality.24 Historians of eighteenthcentury theatre, however, have connected Burke’s presentation of Marie Antoinette’s fate with the dramatic representation of ill-fated foreign queens in the domesticated tragedies that appeared upon the English stage during this period.25 Certainly, Burke sought the immediacy of the theatre in his apostrophe on Marie Antoinette, attempting to produce in his readers the affective response that tragedy evoked from an audience. Mention of the ‘theatre’ in this context inevitably assigned Burke to the cosseted and feminine realm of monarchy, to ‘effeminacy’, rather than homosexuality. A realm in which theatricality was connected with dissimulation, and dissimulation was connected with sexual and political disorder. The ability to conceal one’s emotions, to act one way in public and another in private, had been one of the charges levelled against

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Henrietta Maria, who was said to have taught King Charles to ‘dissimulate’.26 Enemies of the King had readily connected this tendency to ‘dissimulate’ with the theatricals of the Queen, and as a consequence, ‘theatricality’ came to be associated with Catholicism, foreign, courtly corruption and inverted gender roles.27 Wollstonecraft’s language here too could call to mind the women of the Stuart court whose ‘theatricals’ were regarded as damaging to English politics, morality and religion.28 In her early references to the French queen, Wollstonecraft repeatedly drew an association between the theatre and the queen’s performance of femininity. Wollstonecraft regarded Marie Antoinette’s presence on the ‘political stage, as a beautiful symbol of the Ancient Régime’, as threatening to the progress of the revolution and France’s passage to ‘national sovereignty’.29 This was Burke’s hope too. The charge of ‘effeminacy’ – launched at him throughout the Rights of Men – conflates Burke with Marie Antoinette while also referring back to the sexualization of political corruption associated with royal favourites. Such language had been frequently used to feminize the monarchy and to emphasize its engagement in the politics of artifice in Macaulay and the other Commonwealthmen sources from which Wollstonecraft had derived her historical understanding.30 The particular sexualization of political corruption that characterized these sources is embedded in both her Vindications and inflects Wollstonecraft’s depiction of queens and other aristocratic women in her early works.31 As Lynn Hunt has observed, the symbolic attributes of the queen’s body became a ‘central site of political struggle between the old and the new order’, and both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft fought Burke on this terrain.32 Both women imagined that the Queen of France personified the worst aspects of courtly excesses, literally embodying absolutism. Macaulay’s negative attitude towards queens and her feminization of the corruption of the Stuart court were replicated in Wollstonecraft’s depiction of Marie Antoinette and the court of Louis XVI. These ideas informed her rejection of Burke’s historical account of ‘ancient chivalry’, her attitudes regarding the generality of women and the limitations of the feminine as a political force. Although Wollstonecraft, like Macaulay, chose to describe ‘the court as the true source of political corruption’, her feminization of the despised features of the Ancient Régime – hereditary wealth and privilege, libertine morality, addiction to luxury and superstition – made it virtually impossible to separate women of the court from the court itself.33 What some critics have described as Wollstonecraft’s ‘misogyny’ was largely derived from Macaulay’s own contradictory response to the women at court. For while Macaulay considered the court as the true source of political corruption, she also

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held that it was ‘the intrigues of women’ at court that had filled the world with ‘violence and injury’.34 Wollstonecraft’s attack on Burke’s chivalric account of English history in the Rights of Men suggests that she was as well versed in history as any of his early respondents. Like many of the more satirical responses, Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men began with a series of historical examples that parodied his interpretation of historical change. She went further than most by suggesting that Burke would have been among those calling for the crucifixion of Christ as he was a ‘promulgator of a new doctrine, and the violator of old laws and customs’.35 Wollstonecraft’s intent was more than mere parody, for undergirding her argument in the Rights of Men was a sophisticated critique of Burke’s anachronistic view of historical progress and its enervating effect. Wollstonecraft diagnosed modern manners as the source of society’s ills, finding them warped and archaic.36 Burke, with his ‘real or artificial affection for the English [medieval] constitution’, was accused by Wollstonecraft of being ‘both a defender and a symptom’ of these flawed systems.37 Wollstonecraft charged Burke with a ‘mortal antipathy to reason’, rejecting the parameters that bound his understanding of history. She argued that what history actually demonstrated was that ‘man had been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he was born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedo’s touch’.38 Burke’s definition of English liberty, Wollstonecraft contended, amounted to ‘Security of property!’, and the ancient constitution he so admired was ‘settled in the dark days of ignorance, when men’s minds were shackled by the grossest prejudices and most immoral superstition’.39 The national characteristics so cherished by Burke, ‘sullen resistance to innovation’ and ‘cold sluggishness’,40 for Wollstonecraft were factors that ‘benumbed . . . a capacity for reasoning’ and consequently hindered the path of modernity.41 Influenced by philosophic historians such as John Millar and William Robertson, Wollstonecraft, too, conjectured about ‘the infancy of [our] society’ but argued that the customs Burke celebrated were merely the result of chance and, often, compromise. They were ‘established by the lawless power of an ambitious individual; or a weak prince . . . obliged to comply with every demand of the licentious barbarous insurgents, who disputed his authority with irrefragable arguments at the point of their swords’.42 Wollstonecraft also mocked Burke’s reverence ‘for all things Gothic’ and queried ‘the cultural roots of long-established habits of political submission in Britain’.43 She understood that the relations between the sexes idealized in Enlightenment histories of civilization formed the very paradigm of all other

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forms of submission. ‘Ancient chivalry’ and its modern variant ‘gallantry’ functioned as a complex and contradictory system of gendered class relations, that Burke regarded as the glue that held society together. Wollstonecraft, however, regarded gallantry as a ‘decadent remnant of old-world despotism’ that led to the eroticization of female manners and prerogatives, enfeebling them and diminishing their capacity to act as reasonable human beings.44 ‘[S]uch homage’, she argued, ‘vitiates [women], prevents their endeavouring to obtain solid merit; and, in short, makes those beings vain inconsiderate dolls, who ought to be prudent mothers and useful members of society.’45

Short-lived queens In Reflections, Burke had contended that a queen was the model of femininity par excellence; his system of ‘antient chivalry’ depended upon it. As Claudia L. Johnson has suggested, for Burke chivalric sentimentality was ‘the affective front of ideology, registering dominant values on the body of citizens . . . produc[ing] reverent political subjects disinclined to rape the queen or to lay a violent hand to the endearing frailty of the state’.46 As I  have argued above, Burke’s model of gender relations was complex and contradictory and ensured that men’s sexual dominance over women was thoroughly romanticized. This aspect of the chivalric relation also functioned to eroticize men’s submission to their king. Such submission was, however, always ambivalent, as the oxymoronic terms Burke used to define chivalric sentimentality made clear, ‘that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of exulted freedom’.47 Thus, as Wollstonecraft demonstrated, the ‘generous loyalty to rank and sex’ so celebrated by Burke in Reflections was a system of ambiguous sexualized political relations whereby the king was just a man, and ultimately an impotent man, and women’s sexual power was that which made them most vulnerable.48 In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft returned to the theme of relations between the sexes. As in the Rights of Men, she rejected the ‘specious homage’ men offered to women, as she argued that such homage was merely supporting their own superiority. Although she does not cite Burke, the system of gallantry he had described in Reflections is thoroughly excoriated in her second Vindication. Underpinning her searing indictment of gallantry was a grave concern that the ‘aping’ of aristocratic behaviour by England’s middle classes rendered woman simply ‘the Sex’, ‘a figure stripped of everything but her

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physical charms and “negative virtues” ’.49 According to Wollstonecraft, gallantry allowed women only to be ‘absolute in loveliness’, thus denying them ‘genius and judgment’. ‘[I]t is scarcely possible to divine what remains to characterize intellect’, an angry Wollstonecraft opined.50 She implied the curse of Eve women had inherited was ‘the sovereignty of beauty’. Wollstonecraft believed that women were victims of their own carnality and this is why they lacked the same political rights and subjectivity as men. Maintaining power through beauty forced women to resign ‘the natural rights, which the exercise of reason might have procured them’. Mocking Burke’s sentimentality, she declared that, ‘[e]xalted by their inferiority’, women have ‘chosen rather to be short-lived queens than to labour to obtain the sober pleasures that arise from equality’. She also warned that men who played at gallantry ‘are inclined to tyrannize over, and despise the very weakness that they cherish’.51 Such a system of sexual relations did not make for domestic felicity but rendered husbands ‘voluptuous tyrants’ while wives formed the ‘link which unites man with brutes’.52 For Wollstonecraft, queenliness was not an ideal that women should aspire to and gallantry was a system men should avoid, lest they become domestic despots. Wollstonecraft recognized the speciousness of the argument that women did not need power because they could govern by ‘sweet submission’, yet in her earlier works she asserted that ‘erotic guile’ could and did constitute a form of power nonetheless. As Barbara Taylor has argued, the vice that attracts Wollstonecraft harshest censure is ‘erotic guile’.53 Susan Gubar detects selfloathing in Wollstonecraft’s almost Miltonic imagery in the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s sexualized and scornful description of women’s ‘serpentine wrigglings of cunning’ suggests that a paradoxical misogyny informed her understanding of relations between men and women.54 While Wollstonecraft blamed men for women’s resort to erotic manipulation, claiming that it is men themselves whose passions ‘have placed women on thrones’, she also reproached women for desiring to be placed on thrones.55 Constructing all women as potentially ‘short-lived queens’, Wollstonecraft developed a model of feminism that conflated femininity with queenliness and queenliness with courtly corruption. Informing Wollstonecraft’s politics here was an emphatic identification with an idealized bourgeois male subject that derived from her reading of Macaulay and other eighteenth-century radicals. Macaulay, who was not principally interested in articulating a feminist politics, readily deployed ‘the ancient republican idiom of manly patriotism’ in her works and assumed that women should adopt such models of manliness themselves.56 Wollstonecraft followed

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this logic in both her Vindications, arguing that masculine republicanism offered women strategies for emancipation. For Wollstonecraft, however, manliness was an embodied concept, constructed in opposition to effeminizing customs of hereditary wealth and privilege and, as a consequence, she anticipated that the Revolution would ‘make men and women alike more manly’.57 Pushing her argument further than Macaulay, Wollstonecraft hoped that by de-eroticizing ‘women’s incapacity’ and fostering ‘in them the same sturdiness and selfcontrol recommended for men’, it would be possible to ‘rescue and redignify heterosexual relations’.58 At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s early politics was the image of an idealized heterosexual couple, ‘public-minded and purposive, as citizens and as parents busy about their work’.59 Wollstonecraft envisioned this couple ‘so constituted, that man must necessarily fulfill the duties of a citizen, or be despised and . . . his wife, . . . should equally be intent to manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbours’.60 Here the idea of ‘rational motherhood’ emerges in her oeuvre as Wollstonecraft politicized the domestic duties of woman, an ideal she later embodied in the figure of Carolina Matilda, Queen Consort of Denmark.61

Marie Antoinette as short-lived queen Nowhere are the misogynistic paradoxes of Wollstonecraft’s feminism more evident than in the depiction of Marie Antoinette in her major work of history, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (HMVFR), which was published in 1794. Advertised as the first of several volumes of history Wollstonecraft intended to write on the Revolution, this work covers events in France only up to the removal of the King from Versailles in 1791, conspicuously avoiding any discussion of the Terror. She begins Chapter II of Book I with an account of Marie Antoinette and tells the story of her early life in exceedingly bleak detail.62 In HMVFR Marie Antoinette was depicted by Wollstonecraft as exactly the sort of woman Burke ‘made her to be’ through ‘his chivalrous notions of sexual politics’.63 She becomes the ‘short-lived queen’ par excellence, a debauched coquet addicted to vanity and frivolity.64 Like Catharine Macaulay before her, Wollstonecraft connected the ‘effeminacy’ of court almost exclusively with femininity, thus associating political vice emphatically with women.65 As Barbara Taylor has observed, in the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft described the French nobility as ‘profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy’, while in her HMVFR she condemns

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the ‘entire ancient regime’ as a ‘nation of women’.66 Wollstonecraft’s image of Marie Antoinette in HMVFR was drawn in part from the political pornography of the period, but it also reflected her education in both Commonwealthmen and Whig politics. She associates Marie Antoinette with the ‘voluptuous atmosphere’ of Louis XV’s court and his mistresses, particularly the loathed Madame du Barry.67 She consciously resisted the more hagiographic image of the queen that had emerged since Burke’s Reflections and had flourished after her execution. Wollstonecraft records that Marie Antoinette was jealous of Louis XV’s mistress and this created a power struggle between the two women, allowing her to develop ‘an inclination for court intrigue’.68 This was exactly the sort of education Macaulay had warned against in her Letters on Education, as it allowed Marie Antoinette to observe the ways in which her sexual power over men could translate into political power. In her Letters, Macaulay had argued that the ‘adulation’ of women was a damaging feature of courtly society, particularly ‘hostile to the patriotism of a king’.69 Sexual favouritism and erotic guile ensured that ‘treachery besige[d] the throne’ and caused great suffering throughout history.70 For Wollstonecraft, Marie Antoinette’s character was formed through lessons in courtly licentiousness, which inevitably led her to intrigue and from there to political corruption and counter-revolution.71 For Wollstonecraft, the warped sense of self, generated by the ‘idle debauchery’ of the court, not only hurtled Marie Antoinette towards her tragic fate but also connected her to other short-lived queens in less regal settings.72 Wollstonecraft’s refusal to amend her harsh portrait of the French queen – even after her rigged trial and brutal execution – reflects this connection, making Marie Antoinette just another case study in the failure of gallantry to protect women, in spite of their ‘rank and sex’.73 This failure of the education of ‘princesses’ to prepare them for the rigours of dynastic and courtly politics became a theme in nineteenthcentury royal biographies, as women writers evoked empathy for their hapless charges. While neither Macaulay nor Wollstonecraft spared much sympathy on Marie Antoinette on this account, this reference to the failure of their education influenced the representation of queens and princesses in later women’s writing for the next century.74 Macaulay’s attack on the court was taken up and extended by Wollstonecraft. In HMVFR, Wollstonecraft describes the court as a ‘harlot’ who refuses ‘to neglect her meretricious ornaments, unless she renounces her trade’.75 Such allusions to harlotry and spectacle related back to Burke’s pronouncements on the ‘veil of modesty’ ripped asunder in the Queen’s bedchamber at Versailles. Wollstonecraft subverted this idea, arguing that like the harlot’s finery, the

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pageantry and magnificence of court, and of the queen herself, ‘concealed [royalty’s] deformity’.76 Just as Wollstonecraft condemned Burke’s theatrical morality in her first Vindication, in various depictions of Marie Antoinette she denounced the queen’s ‘performance’ of femininity as ‘theatrical’. She presented Marie Antoinette as a ‘profound dissembler’: a ‘complete actress, and an adept in all the arts of coquetry that debauch the mind, whilst rendering the person alluring’.77 Here too, Wollstonecraft connected her critique of Marie Antoinette to complaints against Stuart women at court made by Puritans and Republicans in the seventeenth century. The theatricality of Stuart queens, but especially Henrietta Maria, was associated with dissimulation, gender inversion and ‘the subversion of civic and religious virtue’.78 In the absence of the religious polemics that had framed such republican propaganda, it is Marie Antoinette’s sexuality rather than her Catholicism that corrupts. For Wollstonecraft it is her beauty, rather than her religion, that made Marie Antoinette powerful enough to subvert even the divine authority of her spouse. Wollstonecraft’s depiction of the relationship between Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette bears out her earlier declaration that gallantry rendered husbands ‘voluptuous tyrants’. Indeed, their relationship, as described by Wollstonecraft, embodies the contradictory sexual politics of submission that Burke had described so effusively in Reflections. The ‘person of the king’, Wollstonecraft reported, was itself ‘very disgusting’, and made ‘more so by gluttony, and a total disregard of delicacy, and even decency’. He possessed a ‘kind of devouring passion’ for the queen, whom ‘he treated . . . with great brutality, till she acquired sufficient finesse to subjugate him’.79 It is Marie Antoinette’s physical beauty that allowed her to gain this ‘ascendency’ over any individual and gave her ‘unbounded sway’ over Louis XVI, who pays, Wollstonecraft claims, ‘a kingly price’ for her favours.80 Far from disempowering the Queen, her beauty, in Wollstonecraft’s account, allowed her quasi-mythical powers which she used to emasculate ‘her circean court’ and to entice ‘bribed ruffians’ to disperse the National Assembly.81 While the ‘specious homage’ of ordinary men allowed ordinary women control through sexual manipulation, Louis XVI prostituted his wife and, as a consequence, lost control of his kingdom. This mention of ‘favours’ calls to mind earlier references to harlotry in the text, further sexualizing the political corruption of the court. Wollstonecraft accuses Marie Antoinette of all the crimes she was charged with at her trial, except the outrageous allegation of incest. Indeed, she borrows from the pornographic propaganda of the period, to describe Maria Antoinette alongside ‘the Julias’ and ‘Messalinas of antiquity’.82

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It is possible that such a hostile response to the Queen of France was shaped by Wollstonecraft’s fear of detection, as some of her compatriots had been arrested in Paris. Yet her description of Marie Antoinette was in keeping with the political stance she had previously taken in her Vindications, and she did not publish any sort of retraction on this point. Her vehemence, however, could disguise a barely contained anxiety on Wollstonecraft’s part that femininity and effeminacy had become indistinguishable and that both were consequently incompatible with the post-revolutionary public sphere.83

‘Poor Matilda’ In January 1796, Mary Wollstonecraft published Letters Written during a Residence in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, the work that was perhaps best known among her contemporaries, and certainly her most beloved. The Letters secured Wollstonecraft’s reputation as a foremother of Romanticism and moved and haunted some of the major writers of the period, including her future husband William Godwin, creating a sentimental community of its own. The book was commissioned by Joseph Johnson, who offered Wollstonecraft an advance to cover her mounting debts and to distract her from the depression caused by the desertion of her American lover, the adventurer Gilbert Imlay. As the war with France deepened, increased censorship in Britain ensured that Johnson could not publish a second volume of the Rights of Woman.84 The political conversation Wollstonecraft holds in these Letters is thus more covert than in her earlier works, but, as many critics have observed, she revisits many themes articulated in the Vindications. The politics of these earlier works, however, had been softened in response to the misogynistic violence she had witnessed in France and by the failure of the Revolution to secure the rights of women. Following her return from France, Wollstonecraft began to articulate a version of feminism that owed little to the Republican tradition that framed her earlier works. The Terror and the explicitly misogynistic violence experienced by French women on all sides of the political conflict, as well as Wollstonecraft herself, ensured that her optimism regarding such politics was difficult to sustain.85 She was now part of an emotional community that identified with the suffering of women in France, which allowed her to develop a more overt critique of patriarchal privilege. In Maria:  or The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft acknowledges the specificity of the female body and how female embodiment

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shaped women’s exclusion from the post-revolutionary public sphere and their lack of equity before the law.86 Such ideas transform her feminist politics in this last work and allow her to identify with the suffering of all women. While her history of the French Revolution had been written in an ungendered voice, Wollstonecraft now adopted an abashedly feminine one, a voice that was unmistakably her own.87 This new voice signalled her rejection of Jacobin politics and a desire to create a distinctive feminine sense of self as she embraced an uncertain future, alone with her child Fanny (her daughter with Gilbert Imlay). Whereas Wollstonecraft had identified herself previously with those extraordinary women ‘who had rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex’, her experiences of the misogynistic violence of the Revolution and as a deserted ‘wife’ seem to have challenged her perception of extraordinary women (herself included) as ‘male spirited’, confined by mistake ‘to a female frame’.88 In her Letters, Wollstonecraft expressed a profound disenchantment with the doctrines that had underpinned her earlier identification with an idealized bourgeois male subject. Ironically, it was the very prosaic feminine experience of being deserted by a lover who ‘has entered so deeply into commerce’ that allowed her to ‘confront the logical extension of the bourgeois energy she celebrated’ in the Rights of Men.89 In her Letters Wollstonecraft followed Burke in borrowing generic features from both gothic and sentimental fiction, allowing her to elicit a profound emotional response from her readers. She had rejected the place of excessive emotion in politics in her Vindications, and in the Letters, she continued to avoid the ‘egregious affectivity’ that had characterized Burke’s Reflections. Instead, Wollstonecraft created a proto-Romantic text, one that merged the epistolary form with travelogue, autobiography and philosophical history, and combined the literature of sensibility with astute political commentary. While Burke had sought to arouse sympathy from his readers for the persecuted queen of France, Wollstonecraft used similar techniques to arouse sympathy for herself and her daughter, and for women more generally. Wollstonecraft’s more restrained tone generated empathy for the ‘small, vulgar’, that Burke for all his hyperbole emphatically lacked. By allowing middle-class women the possibility of identifying with the ill-fated queen as wife and as mother, however, both Burke and Wollstonecraft bourgeoisified and domesticated the monarchy, and this empathetic identification was crucial to the development of the historical representation of queens in later women’s writing. By evoking intense female suffering in such a sensational way, both Burke and Wollstonecraft drew women writers into the fray, making queens a most

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sympathetic subject, while also allowing the possibility of alternative narratives of the nation’s past to emerge. Burke had written the revolution as a gothic tale and cast Marie Antoinette as an unlikely gothic heroine.90 In Letters, Wollstonecraft constructed a radical gothic heroine for her readers to admire, in the figure of Caroline Matilda (1751–1775), the ill-fated Queen Consort of Denmark and Norway. The sister of the English King, George III, Caroline Matilda appeared destined to become a ‘short-lived queen’, and indeed her tragic life and early death had made her the object of considerable sympathy in Britain in the early days of her brother’s reign.91 In Memoirs of an Unfortunate Queen, published shortly after her death, the anonymous author lamented, ‘Had the nativity of this royal infant been cast, no astrologer, ever so ominous, would have foretold that she was to run down from the high prospect of worldly grandeur, into a sea of troubles, and become, in her bloom, the sport of fortune, and the victim of merciless envy.’92 The posthumous child of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his wife Augusta, Caroline Matilda had spent an idyllic childhood at Kew, kept far away from the perils of her grandfather’s court. This pleasant existence came to an abrupt end when, at the age of fifteen, she became a pawn in her brother’s dynastic politics and was married off to her cousin Christian VII of Denmark. The Danish King has been variously described as drunken and debauched, manic, congenitally defective and schizophrenic. He was possibly all of these things and, although initially excited by the prospect of a new bride, he tired of his queen almost as soon as she arrived in Denmark. Although Caroline Matilda had been educated away from the temptations of courtly life, much in the manner advocated by Catharine Macaulay, her youth and lack of experience ensured that when she arrived in Denmark, she was ready prey to the worst sort of court politics. Abandoned by her increasingly insane husband, Caroline Matilda began an affair with Christian’s German physician Johann Friedrich Struensee, who appears to have fathered Carolina Matilda’s second child, Princess Louisa Augusta. For the queen to engage in a relationship with a man ‘whose status hovered uneasily between that of tradesman, professional and priest, and was neither a courtier nor a noble man, nor a Dane’ was enough cause for scandal.93 It was, however, the efforts of Struensee and the Queen to institute radical reform that brought their downfall. In 1772, having tried to transform the political landscape of Denmark, Struensee was arrested and indicted for having breached the Lex Regia of 1665, by severing the monarchy from its people. He was executed by dismemberment in April 1772. While he was not initially charged with criminal association with the Queen, this emerged

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under torture and his confession left little to be imagined about their intimacy. Carolina Matilda was separated from her children and imprisoned in a fortress far removed from the Danish court. Petitions of divorce were sent to England. After initial hesitation, George III acted upon his sister’s behalf and she was allowed to leave Denmark and reside in her brother’s Hanoverian dominions, dying at Celle, in 1775, at the tender age of 24. In ‘Letter XVIII’, where Wollstonecraft describes the fate of Caroline Matilda, it is clear that she identified with the queen, whom she depicts as an enlightened mother and an uncourtly, almost democratic, sovereign. Wollstonecraft reveals the tragic fate of Matilda in a discussion of Danish child-rearing practices. Wollstonecraft recorded that Danish ‘children are spoilt; as they usually are, when left to the care of weak, indulgent mothers, who having no principle of action to regulate their feelings, become the slaves of infants, enfeebling both body and mind by false tenderness’.94 Having been tormented ‘by the presence of unruly children’, Wollstonecraft was also angered by ‘some invectives thrown out against the maternal character of the unfortunate Matilda’, and she records that Carolina Matilda was careful to prevent the heir apparent ‘acquiring haughty airs, and playing the tyrant in leading-strings’.95 In this regard, Wollstonecraft presented Matilda as the very antithesis of Marie Antoinette: first and foremost an ‘industrious mother’ who sought to bring domestic virtue to the Danish court and engaged in child-rearing practices that Wollstonecraft (and Macaulay) would have endorsed. The Danish heir apparent was raised by his mother as a young Emile, in stark contrast to the dauphin whom Marie Antoinette was accused of corrupting with her licentiousness.96 Wollstonecraft reported that Matilda ‘used to bathe him herself every morning; insisted on his being loosely clad’.97 Her desire to suckle the young prince, however, was thwarted by the dowager Queen Juliana Maria, King Christian’s stepmother, through whom Wollstonecraft linked the artifice of court life and the downfall of Matilda. Wollstonecraft’s identification with Carolina Matilda ran deeper than their shared experience of motherhood. The Danish Queen is described in the Letters as a charitable reformer who ‘ran into an error common to innovators, in wishing to do immediately what can only be done by time’ and a tragic political heroine, a victim of both ‘the party she displaced’ and of her own ill-conceived passion.98 While Wollstonecraft had depicted Marie Antoinette in much the same way as the political pornography of the period, she was coy about Carolina Matilda. Although Carolina Matilda was the subject of similar political pornography, Wollstonecraft represented her as a victim of evil courtiers, who first encouraged her attachment to Struensee and then had him brutally murdered when he

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attempted to institute democratic reforms. Wollstonecraft claimed that she did not believe that Matilda’s ‘affection for Struensee’ was ‘carried to the length alleged against her’ (that he was the father of Matilda’s daughter).99 It is difficult to accept that Wollstonecraft truly believed in Matilda’s innocence, although George III had done much to censor the materials containing scandal around his sister. In any case, Wollstonecraft rationalized such behaviour by stating that Matilda ‘certainly was not a woman of gallantry; and if she had an attachment for him, it did not disgrace her heart or understanding’.100 Celebrating the life of a woman much admired by her errant lover Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft perhaps sought to justify her own ill-judged affair of the heart.101 ‘Poor Matilda’ haunted Wollstonecraft, representing as she did the wrongs of woman so emphatically.

The wrongs of woman Wollstonecraft’s depiction of Carolina Matilda anticipated her sympathy for another ill-fated queen, Mary Stuart, whose life she novelized in her last work Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman (1796).102 Since her execution in 1587, Mary Stuart had been an ambivalent, controversial and always distressing figure in English historiography. By the eighteenth century, the Scottish queen had become a popular emblem of sensibility and a powerful symbol of political grief, as shall be further explored in the next chapter. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis has written of Wollstonecraft’s Maria Venables that she ‘is nothing if not a Mary Stuart for the Jacobin era’.103 For male writers, the connection between Marie Antoinette and Mary Stuart meant an increased focus on her more libidinous qualities and the relation between sexual indulgence and abuse of royal privilege.104 Among women writers, however, the trials of Marie Antoinette reanimated sympathy for Mary Stuart. The trauma women experienced during the Revolution determined that Mary, Queen Scots was rendered less a victim of her own carnality and more explicitly a victim of both political and misogynist violence. Such recollection of Mary Stuart at this time rekindled a sense of England’s long connection with France, as women on both sides of the Channel mourned yet another victim of dynastic politics. In Maria Wollstonecraft attempted a truly empathetic history of woman. It was to be her history, but it is also the history of all women. ‘Woman’, as Wollstonecraft observed in the preface, was to be treated homogeneously in this text, as their treatment in patriarchal society rendered them all the same. This homogeneity is played out in the name of not only the heroine, who could

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be identified with Wollstonecraft, but also Marie Antoinette, Mary Stuart, the Virgin Mary or other Marys of Wollstonecraft’s acquaintance (such as Mary Hays or Mary Robinson).105 Thus, the story of each woman in Maria is the story of women’s oppression due to their sex. It is not a unique story but rather the same story of oppression rooted in the sexed body, of the erasure of individuality in different guises. In writing the history of ‘woman’ in such terms, Wollstonecraft subverted the very paradigms of Enlightenment historiography, undermining any confidence in the idea that women form the measure of civilization. As Wollstonecraft’s text makes clear, women were still regarded as chattel under the English Common Law, becoming man’s property upon marriage, ‘as much . . . as his horse or his ass’.106 Women’s chattel status is interrogated in her extended discussion of ‘criminal conversation’ in Maria. Criminal conversation was a legal action permitting a husband to sue his wife’s lover for damages and thus treated adultery in women as a property crime.107 The offense was a violation of the husband’s physical property held in the wife and interference in what the law essentially considered a service relationship.108 In Maria, Wollstonecraft imagines that this chattel status might also enable feminine solidarity. This marked a distinct shift in her political understanding of women’s condition. In her earlier Vindications, Wollstonecraft had assumed that an identification with the masculinized Republican body offered women strategies for emancipation. In Maria, as Claudia L.  Johnson has observed, such confidence is displaced as ‘the female body  – having been insulted, sold, hunted down, imprisoned solely because of its femaleness  – is accepted in all its creatureliness, and is offered as the basis for solidarity with other women, and as the spring of moral sentiment’.109 A recognition of the specificity of the female body and how female embodiment has shaped women’s exclusion from discourses of citizenship and equity before the law emphatically frames Wollstonecraft’s narrative. Maria is not merely the victim of sensibility or philosophy or indeed her own carnality but of ‘matrimonial despotism of heart and conduct’. In Maria Wollstonecraft defines matrimonial despotism as ‘the peculiar Wrongs of Woman’.110 It is man-made and misogynist laws and patriarchal institutions that damage women and limit their potential to achieve political subjectivity. This theme would be revisited by some of her contemporaries during the Queen Caroline Affair two decades later.111 In Maria, Mary Stuart’s fate was considered in relation to ‘the fate of queenship in the post-revolutionary world’, as Lewis suggests, and Wollstonecraft aligned this with the fate of Marie Antoinette, her own fate and indeed the fate of all women up and down the social ladder.112 For all her erotic guile, Marie Antoinette had not succeeded in winning the people over with her ‘honied

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words’ and ‘coquettish smiles’, nor had she been spared her husband’s dire fate. Instead she was subject to a rigged trial on false charges and summarily executed. The ghost of Marie Antoinette haunted Wollstonecraft’s last work and animated women’s historical writings throughout the Romantic period. Her spectral presence reminded women of their vulnerability to their male kin and to the patriarchal institutions that governed their lives. The histories of illfated queens became critical to the ways in which Romantic women writers understood the status of all women in civil society. At particular times of crisis, such as in the period of rabid anti-Jacobinism following Wollstonecraft’s death, or during the political crisis of the Queen Caroline ‘Affair’, the narrated royal life became a site where women writers empathetically identified with queens, using their peculiar circumstances to reflect upon the condition of all women under patriarchy and make suggestions for its amelioration. At the same time, such royal lives also allowed women writers to utilize the ‘distance’ of the past to engage in commentary around contemporary politics at times of crises.

3

Jane Austen, Mary Stuart and the Jacobite History of England

In the autumn of 1791 a 15-year-old Jane Austen produced a comic essay entitled The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, which she dedicated to her sister Cassandra, who provided the images found alongside the text. Claiming to be written by a ‘partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian’,1 Austen’s rampage through the annals of Britain was written in brief monarch-by-monarch sketches not dissimilar to the model adopted by Oliver Goldsmith in his Abridgement.2 In Austen’s History, however, factual detail is scant and speculation privileged over fact. This breezy style belied her obvious engagement in the debates she was satirizing blithely and her not-inconsiderable knowledge on the subject of English history. While she carelessly skewered her chronology (she assured her readers there will be few dates in her History, and few indeed are accurate), and there is a marked tendency in the text towards anachronism, her periodization left little doubt that she was subverting the paradigms that had framed Whig historiography in the eighteenth century  – those paradigms that Edmund Burke had restated forcefully and floridly the year before. This chapter will read Austen’s satirical History of England, and her vehement defence of Mary Stuart, as a ‘Jacobite’ intervention into the politics of the 1790s that followed the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Austen has never been considered as a respondent to Burke, yet most replies to Burke were written as satire and particularly parodied his account of the history of succession to the throne in England.3 Such replies shared Austen’s irreverent tone and mocked Burke’s suggestion that historical progress in England was wrought in gentle increments. While most humorous replies to Burke were framed by Jacobin politics, they also shared with Austen a sense of the ridiculous, particularly as it pertained to Burke’s claims around the efficacy of heredity and the idea that monarchical succession in England was an orderly and peaceful process. Although it is suggested frequently that Jane Austen embraced a particular understanding

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of English history, historians have only just begun analysing exactly what this understanding of history might have been, or how her particular interpretation of English history shaped her oeuvre. Critics have sometimes noted Austen’s empathetic identification with Mary Stuart and have connected this to the history of her maternal family, yet they have rarely considered the politics of this gesture, except to connect it with her nascent feminism.4 This chapter, then, will suggest that Austen’s History celebrated the politics of her mother’s family, recovering aspects of her maternal heritage, while also poking fun at Burke’s rather triumphalist account of the English past. Here, I will read Austen’s History as history – that is, as an intervention into the highly contested historiographical debates that emerged in the 1790s. I will also read the History both as a significant contribution to Austen’s own family history, drawn from the annals of her maternal family, and as an empathetic history, with the young Austen clearly identifying herself with the dispossessed Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Jacobins were not the only group contesting Burke’s interpretation of English history. A  plethora of competing interpretations of 1688/1689 were spawned in response to his Reflections. As has been previously argued, Reflections ensured that observers of the French Revolution in England refracted their understandings of events across the Channel through the lens of English history, a tendency that can be observed in both the radical and conservative responses. Critics such as Marilyn Butler and Brian Southam, who have read Burke’s anti-revolutionary text as influencing Austen, have argued that Reflections marked a shift in Burke’s politics that saw him reject his Whig past to become a ‘Tory thinker’.5 Burke and Austen, such critics maintain, felt an antipathy towards revolutionary politics rooted in a shared sense of the English past. Such a reading is problematic, however, as it assumes that Burke was making an argument about English history that would be acceptable to ‘Tories’ such as Austen. Burke was actually making the case for Protestant succession and was thus essentially defending the rule of Britain by the monarchy and aristocracy of the eighteenth-century Whigs.6 Such a defence was likely to annoy both old-school Jacobites and the newer ‘Tory’ critics of Whig hegemony, and it is possible that Austen had a foot in both these camps.7

The Jacobite past The death of Charles Edward Stuart in 1788 may have ended Jacobitism as a political cause, but it remained a powerful and romantic lost cause. The history

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of this cause can be traced in Austen’s maternal family, particularly her female kin, who remained confirmed Jacobites into the nineteenth century.8 Her Leigh relatives had famously welcomed King Charles in 1642 when he was refused entry into Coventry and had suffered much privation for their continued support of the Royalist cause. Given such connections, Austen was perhaps better situated than most to puncture the arguments Burke was making about the English past with a pro-Jacobite slice of history. Early scholarship suggested that Austen’s History presented an entirely ‘arbitrary slice of national life’ and that her devotion to the Stuarts could only be explained as the ludicrously extravagant partisanship satirically assumed by the ‘ “partial, prejudiced” historian’.9 Yet Austen’s History begins with the reign of Henry IV and ends with the execution of Charles I, a period that came to form the crucible of England’s ‘constitutional history’.10 Austen’s particular focus in her History represented exactly that period of history that Burke had repressed in his Reflections.11 This critical juncture in England’s history was marked by continuous crises of succession caused by incidents of usurpation, imposture and, occasionally, regicide. Indeed, as Christopher Kent has observed, Austen distilled the ‘most violent episodes in English history, between the Wars of the Roses and the execution of Charles I (a period which saw the advent and [usually bloody] demise of four royal dynasties)’.12 While there were certainly male victims of history during this period, Austen draws attention to a series of women who were pawns in the dynastic politics. Thus, it is Mary Stuart, not King Charles, who is the focus of her History.13 By the end of the eighteenth century, the Scottish queen had become an ambivalent and contentious figure within Whig historiography, emblematic of Scotland’s persecution, but also a powerful symbol of subversion, resistance and scandal. Historical novels such as Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–1785), which Austen had read, also made her a heroine of sensibility par excellence.14 She was thus both a romantic celebrity and the embodiment of historiographical and political controversy.15 Following the publication of Reflections, Mary Stuart became an obvious foil to Burke’s Marie Antoinette and an emphatic retort to many of his claims regarding England’s culture of chivalry. While Burke predicted the disastrous fate of Marie Antoinette and evoked the horror of her captivity to convince Protestant England to support Catholic France, women writers resisted his chivalric understanding of English history by referencing the fate of Mary Stuart, another victim of dynastic politics, who simultaneously evoked a sense of England’s deep connection with France. The publication of Marilyn Butler’s monumental Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) comprehensively positioned Austen within the partisan politics

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of the 1790s and paved the way for historians to consider the relation between Austen’s novels and the French Revolution. Butler’s assertion that Jane Austen was ‘a thoroughly orthodox author of a distinctively anti-Jacobin kind’, whose fiction gave ‘flesh to the conservative case as no one else had done except Burke’, has largely shaped the discussion of her politics since then.16 While successive generations of scholars have challenged Butler’s assumption that Austen imbibed Burkean politics as if by osmosis, it has proven difficult to reconcile her youthful interest in Jacobitism with the more overtly feminist and politically astute Austen that emerges in the work of Claudia L. Johnson, Antoinette Burton, Devoney Looser, Clara Tuite, William Galperin and Jocelyn Harris, to name but a few.17 Jane Austen’s affection for Mary Stuart has also puzzled critics. On the rare occasion her pronounced Stuart sympathies are acknowledged, critics have tended to follow Austen’s kin by treating this as the quaint aberration of a maiden aunt. Her nephew (the son of James Austen, Jane’s brother) James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798–1874) was her first biographer and also the first to mention her empathetic identification with Mary Stuart. In his A Memoir of Jane Austen he wrote: Jane Austen when a girl had strong political opinions, especially about the affairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was a vehement defender of Charles I and his grandmother Mary; but I think it was rather from an impulse of feeling than from any enquiry into the evidences by which they must be condemned or acquitted.18

Her niece Caroline Austen (1805–1880) also described Austen’s fierce Stuart partisanship: ‘Of her historical opinions I  am able to record thus much – that she was a most loyal adherent of Charles the 1st and that she always encouraged youthful beleif [sic] in Mary Stuart’s perfect innocence of all the crimes with which History has charged to her memory.’19 Both her niece and nephew observed that such political opinions were in keeping generally with ‘the feeling of moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family’.20 Austen’s Victorian kin were at pains to emphasize the family’s moderation in all things and to suggest that politics was not a significant issue. As Caroline Austen happily admitted, ‘the general politics of the family were Tory – rather taken for granted I suppose, than discussed, as even my Uncles seldom talked about it’.21 This implied reticence to talk about politics in the Austen family encouraged the long-standing belief that ‘dear Aunt Jane’ had ‘absolutely nothing’ to say about the ‘great strifes of war and policy which so disquieted Europe’.22 As Deirdre Lynch has observed, these ideas have led to a tendency among certain critics to stress the ‘sub-historicity’ of her

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novels, that is that she came to know of revolutionary politics only because she had to ‘breathe in the “stormy air of the times” ’.23 Indeed, until 1975 she held a status unique in English literature as the writer ‘least affected by the French Revolution’.24 The history of Austen’s maternal family  – and their unorthodox political allegiances  – was not mentioned by James Edward Austen-Leigh or other Austen ‘family biographers’, although he appears to have corresponded with his aristocratic Leigh kin about familial connections.25 Even when J. E. AustenLeigh’s Memoirs mention men famed for their commitment to Jacobitism – such as Theophilus Leigh (d. 1785), Master of Balliol College, Oxford – there is no discussion of their unconventional politics in the family biographies.26 Indeed, there was no talk of Austen’s Stuart connections at all until 1920 when Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh (daughter of James Edward Austen-Leigh) published her highly derivative Personal Aspects of Jane Austen.27 This edition did not take issue with her father’s work; it simply added details drawn from manuscripts left by Caroline Austen and Anna Lefroy. The source of some detail around Austen’s Stuart connections in Personal Aspects appears to have been the History of the Leigh Family of Adelstrope, written by Austen’s kinswoman Mary Leigh in 1788.28 While Jane Austen and her family received a brief mention in Mary Leigh’s History, we cannot know for certain whether Jane Austen had actually read the copy of that text. She was obviously well enough acquainted with certain familial tales to work them through her juvenilia and possibly into her more mature fiction.29 Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh makes no specific reference to Mary Leigh’s History and does not appear to have cited it directly. The manuscript of Leigh’s History was however regularly consulted by various Leigh family historians at Stoneleigh during the early twentieth century and is now housed in the Leigh family archive in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. It was transcribed by Mabel Leigh at Stoneleigh sometime between 1912 and 1917.30 There is a note in the archival record of this transcript that it was checked in 1920 and that a reference to Jane Austen was added in 1923. The original manuscript of Mary Leigh’s History was also added to during this period. Around the same time, Agnes Leigh added notes to the actual text of Leigh’s History, correcting Caroline Austen’s claim that the Leighs had hoped to shelter the Pretender in 1745, but that he had not reached the Midlands. Such a story was in keeping with Caroline Austen’s version of the family history, serving to deflect interest from the Leighs’ unfashionable commitment to Jacobitism. The Leighs of Stoneleigh however, were more concerned than the Austens to demonstrate what their Royalist heritage might signify. Agnes Leigh appended to History a note stating that there was a family tradition that held that the Pretender actually

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slept in the State bedroom at Stoneleigh and was smuggled out of the Abbey in a wine case or beer barrel. Later she catalogued a painting held in the family’s dining room of a scene depicting the butler and the baker trying to persuade the brewer to drink to the health of the young Pretender.31 Mary Leigh’s History and the interventions made by her female kin into the twentieth century document the family’s interactions with competing royal and political interests in England during Jane Austen’s lifetime and long after. Like Austen’s History, such works were written from the wrong side of history and focus on themes of dispossession, exclusion and historical elision. While the details revealed by Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh have become commonplace in scholarly biographies of Austen, Mary Leigh’s History has rarely been scrutinized by modern scholars who tend to privilege the carefully constructed, maleauthored and patrilineal ‘family biographies’.32 Indeed, modern biographers of Austen have tended to replicate the erosion of female influence so marked in Whig historiography, negating the influence of the feminine networks that may have shaped Austen’s life and oeuvre. Examining Austen’s identification with Mary Stuart and the history of usurpation and dispossession told in her History might allow a better understanding of relationships within Austen’s family and how these may have been reflected in her fiction. Recent scholarship around Burke’s Reflections has also complicated the understanding of any relationship that might be posited between his politics and the works of Jane Austen. Many contemporary commentators believed that Burke’s account of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution proved that he had shifted his allegiance from the Whigs to the Tories. Yet Burke’s description of the English Revolution  – as an emergency measure taken to restore rather than radically revise the constitutional order – was the position the Whigs had come to in the wake of the impeachment trial of the Reverend Henry Sacheverell in 1710.33 Anxious not to encourage more radical principles than they deemed consistent with the Revolution, Whig trial managers, led by Robert Walpole, cautiously affirmed the right of resistance as ‘an emergency measure taken out of dire necessity to restore, rather than to radically revise, the constitutional order’.34 Burke minimized the revolutionary nature of events earlier in the seventeenth century, explaining 1660 and 1688 in similar terms – that is, as regenerations of the constitution ‘when England found itself without a king’.35 J. C. D. Clark has observed that no ‘eighteenth century Tory would have used such a phrase as it implies that the throne was vacant, to be filled anew’.36 Such convoluted reasoning on Burke’s part was meant to correct the claims of radicals and Dissenters that the Glorious Revolution ensured the right of the English to ‘chuse’ their own

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governors. But it also ‘seemed to imply that the only title to a throne was a Whig title’.37 Such a suggestion was equally galling to Jacobites, Jacobins and to the ‘New’ Tories stifled by several generations of Whig hegemony. Perhaps more significantly in this context, Burke’s interpretation of the Revolution rendered women almost completely invisible, and, as shall be argued, Jane Austen’s History of England sought to recover the women occluded in this narrative.

Jane Austen and the ‘feminine past’ While her later works, especially Persuasion, have been read as offering a passionate refusal of masculinist history, the tone of her History of England has ensured that it has generally been treated as one of Austen’s only truly childish productions.38 For the most part, historians have adhered to Christopher Kent’s assessment that the text was a brilliant satire on the terrible schoolbooks Austen was forced to read as a child.39 Antoinette Burton was the first to read Austen’s History as a feminist text and has suggested that it anticipates with ‘precision and prescience the basic themes of late-twentieth century feminist historiography’.40 Burton depicts Austen as revising masculinist versions of the past, particularly as they related to Mary, Queen of Scots. She argues persuasively that Austen’s History should be read within the context of the history of Enlightenment feminism because of its insistence ‘on placing a wronged woman at its centre’.41 Mary Stuart is only one of a number of women in Austen’s text who might be described as a victim of history. As in her more mature works, History ‘exposes and explores those aspects of traditional institutions – marriage, primogeniture, patriarchy – which patently do not serve her heroines well’.42 Austen’s History is a feminist history, argues Burton, because ‘it privileges stories of how institutional oppression (in this case, the operations of monarchical succession and, more specifically, patrilineal heredity, at a particular historical moment) exclude women from political power’.43 At the same time, Austen corrects the masculinist historical record, demonstrating emphatically that England is a place where wife murder and other ‘atrocities’ were regularly practised.44 More recently, Annette Upfal has read the collaboration between Austen and her sister Cassandra, who painted the wicked caricatures of English monarchs at the head of each section of History, as an ‘autobiographical’ history of the Austen family. Upfal has used forensic odontological evidence to compare the watercolour image of Jane painted by Cassandra (circa 1810) with the image of Mary Stuart in History, and to identify Austen family members representing the

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various English monarchs. Upfal has done scholars of Austen a great service by drawing attention to the extraordinary likeness between Cassandra’s image of Mary Stuart and her later pencil and watercolour of her sister. Her suggestion that biographical detail regarding Austen’s immediate family is embedded in the text allows the possibility that Austen’s empathetic identification with Mary Stuart reflected something more than a childish hankering for ‘stern Stuart patriarchs’.45 Critical to her analysis is the idea that the narrative functions as a secret history of Austen’s relationship with her mother. Upfal identifies Jane Austen as the put-upon Mary Stuart and Mrs Austen in the image of Elizabeth Tudor, her cousin and gaoler.46 A more complicated relation to the maternal was almost certainly at play here, as Austen’s History aligns with that of mother’s family, particularly as it was described by Mary Leigh in her History of the Leigh Family, which celebrated her family’s service to the Stuarts and the sacrifices and loss of status that this entailed. Leigh begins her History with the story of their notable kinswoman, Alice Leigh. After having seven daughters, Alice Leigh was deserted by her husband Robert Dudley, who ran off to Italy with another woman, Elizabeth Southwell. In 1644 Charles I made Alice Leigh a duchess in her own right, both as compensation for his part in the sale of her husband’s estate Kenilworth and as reward for her family’s support of the Royalist cause. Leigh’s History placed the wronged woman at the centre of both Leigh family history and Tudor history, subverting the paradigms that had framed English history throughout the eighteenth century. Austen pushed this example to its (il)logical extreme in her own History, as her identification with Mary Stuart allowed her to analogize the fate of the Stuarts with women’s fate. Expressing disgust at the heinous treatment of the Stuarts, but especially Mary, Queen of Scots, formed an acceptable way for her to articulate contempt for the obvious and emphatic injustices that accrued to women because of their sex.

Jane Austen and Whig history Canonical readings of Austen’s History of England have suggested that Oliver Goldsmith was the butt of her humour. Such readings, however, have been firmly grounded in the idea that Austen, like Catherine Morland, the naïve anti-heroine of Northanger Abbey, found history – that is, ‘real solemn history’ – extremely tedious.47 Such accounts contend that Catherine Morland represents the opinion of the ‘immature’ Austen. That is the young Austen who parleyed playfully with

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her brothers on the subject of sentimental fiction and history in their periodical The Loiterer  – the same Austen, critics claimed, who produced her History of England in reaction against ‘the school room history’ (to borrow Christopher Kent’s phrase) she had been forced to endure as a child.48 Certainly, Morland’s description of historical instruction as ‘torment’ seems to reinforce such a conclusion.49 It is, of course, also the same young woman Austen supposedly left behind when she set out to become a serious novelist. It is now generally acknowledged that Austen did not ‘avoid history’, but rather ‘engaged it directly, grappled with it, and refashioned it for her own purposes’.50 Detailed textual analysis of her juvenilia and novels has revealed a great deal about the historians Austen read. Christopher Kent has surmised that Goldsmith was perhaps only one of the school history books that provided fertile ground for Austen’s humour, and he hears Hume in her repeated use of the word ‘amiable’ to describe women such as Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn.51 Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray have suggested that she also drew upon Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III (1768). Walpole had challenged the standard Whig interpretation of Richard, arguing that most historians had followed Shakespeare in depicting him as a stock stage scoundrel.52 Walpole’s suggestion that historians had blackened the reputation of Richard, till ‘Henry by contrast should appear in a kind of amiable light’,53 may have appealed to Austen, who describes Henry VII as ‘as great a Villain as ever lived’  – a king who succeeded to the throne of England after ‘making a great fuss about getting the Crown & having killed the King at the battle of Bosworth’.54 Clara Tuite has observed that Lord Bolingbroke’s Remarks on the History of England (written 1730, published 1743) was also a potential source for Austen’s History.55 The particular periodization that structures Austen’s History suggests that she was very interested in the political and historiographical debates that erupted after the publication of Burke’s Reflections. Far from being a random slice of national history  – as earlier critics have suggested  – the period that Austen depicts in her History is one in which succession to the English throne was especially fraught. This period marked the foundational dynastic struggles of the pre-Tudor and Tudor monarchies, a time when legitimate claims to the throne meant little when met with force. As Brigid Brophy has noted, Austen’s entire History runs from ‘one heinous article, containing the deposition of a king to another’.56 The coming to power of Henry IV, Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII served to reintroduce the ‘uncomfortable right of conquest’, but, more significantly in this context, the series of abrupt and violent changes throughout

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the Wars of the Roses also ‘brought into focus the idea of de facto kingship, the cynical proposition that monarchical right might need to be legitimised by nothing more than success’.57 As Howard Nenner has observed, ‘what the experiences of the fifteenth century seemed therefore to suggest was that the right to be king belonged to whoever was king’.58 Henry IV, the monarch with whom Austen begins her History, claimed that he was never certain of his title to the crown. ‘ “With what right I got it” he was purported to have said, “God only knows’.”59 By the seventeenth century, the way in which earlier succession had been determined became critically important to the Stuart political nation. The history of succession demonstrated that there was a dangerous failure of consensus on a question of fundamental importance:  ‘by what right did the monarch, any monarch, occupy the throne?’60 Sullen resistance to innovation was how Burke had defined the history of England’s evolving constitution, thus he repressed the very history of succession that Austen’s History highlighted. Whereas Burke had pronounced that England’s path to liberty was guaranteed by paternal patriarchal succession, Austen’s History mocks the very idea that paternal succession could be certain. Succession, in Austen’s History, is usually the result of some vile deed. Paternity and heredity are frequently in question, if not rendered absurd, as in her description of Mary Tudor’s accession to the throne: ‘They might have foreseen that as she died without children, she would be succeeded by that disgrace to humanity, that pest of society, Elizabeth.’61 Even when primogeniture has been adhered to, Austen cannot resist the suggestion of illegitimacy. Although Henry V  – being the eldest son of Henry IV  – inherited his father’s throne, she casts doubt on his right to rule:  we only assume Henry IV was married, she suggests, because he had four male offspring. As Antoinette Burton has remarked, Austen may also have ‘wanted to satirize the fact that while Henry’s progeny effectively established the beginnings of the Tudor line, his sons appear from the sources available to her to have been miraculously produced without the benefit of mothers’.62 Often the issue of succession is raised only to cast light on the inferior claims of the monarch who attains the throne: thus, of ‘Henry the 7th’, Austen writes, ‘This monarch soon after his accession married the Princess Elizabeth of York, by which alliance he plainly proved that he thought his own right inferior to hers, tho’ he pretended to the contrary.’63 In a similar vein, she writes of Queen Mary:  ‘This woman had the good luck of being advanced to the throne of England, in spite of the superior pretensions, Merit & Beauty

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of her Cousins Mary Queen of Scotland & Jane Grey.’64 Such inversion of the proper order, resulting in an unworthy heir or pretender attaining the throne of England, is a marked feature of Austen’s History and the source of much of its comedy. Yet Austen’s depiction of the heinous treatment of Mary, indeed of all women in the text except Elizabeth, suggests a particular critique of chivalric masculinity that punctures the defence Burke was making of English history. By placing the wronged woman at its centre, Austen undermines such claims, while simultaneously resisting his egregious affectivity. She also subverts Burke’s authority by identifying empathetically with another ‘French’ queen, whose fate embodied the fallacy of his claims regarding ‘rank and sex’.

Feminist historian Austen’s depiction of the ‘topsy turvey’ world of succession to the English throne casts light on the vulnerability of royal women and their potential to be rendered invisible in the historical record by the political machinations of men. In his Reflections, Burke had described succession through the female line, England’s exceptional acceptance of female rule, in terms that suggested women were merely vectors of male power. He effectively stripped women of political power, denying the possibility that women could act as political agents in their own right. In his description of the female lineage that allowed George I to take the English throne, Burke repeatedly italicizes the word daughter and then the word heirs (as in heirs of her body) so as to emphasize that the production of heirs was the only and imperative duty of royal daughters.65 Austen’s History draws attention to women whose lives are traduced or obscured in Whig history while always contesting this status and the idea that primogeniture was not necessarily the sole or the most common means by which the English throne might be attained. This can be detected clearly in her instinctive suspicions around Henry VII’s motives for marrying Elizabeth of York. Whig historians had justified this break with strict succession by claiming that Henry’s right to the throne was like his common-law right to his wife’s property (an argument that the anti-Jacobite Bishop Gilbert Burnett had also used to promote William of Orange’s succession).66 Recently, it has been suggested that Henry’s succession was not achieved because of his wife’s compliance, as he did not marry Elizabeth of York until after Parliament had ratified his title and the right of his heirs, male and female, to inherit.67 In her

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History, Austen challenged any sense of a culture of ancient chivalry in England’s past, reminding readers that Henry VII’s ascension to the throne was made possible only because he usurped his wife (and his mother), thus anticipating more recent feminist commentary supporting Elizabeth’s superior claims.68 Austen’s description of Margaret of Anjou presents a wonderful example of how she satirizes Whig historical writing while also anticipating this queen’s recovery by later women writers. Her impishly abrupt version of Margaret’s life does not capture the pathos of Hume or indeed her reinvention on the stages of Convent Garden in the wake of Marie Antoinette’s execution.69 She nonetheless presents her as a victimized foreign queen, held hostage to the fortunes of her male kin, while simultaneously mocking Goldsmith’s mealy-mouthed sympathy.70 Later women writers such as Agnes Strickland wrote highly affective histories of Margaret of Anjou, who was dubbed ‘that queen of tears’.71 Austen also references other women whose tragic fates would be determined by battles for the English throne: Elizabeth Woodville, whom Edward IV married ‘while he was engaged to another’ and who ‘was afterwards confined in a convent’, her sons murdered by Richard III; Jane Shore, mistress to Edward IV, later imprisoned by Richard III; Anne Neville, whom Austen does not name but alludes to her murder; the martyred Joan of Arc (‘they should not have burnt her – but they did’) and the enduringly tragic Lady Jane Grey.72 Austen’s History reminded readers, albeit in a humorous fashion, that England’s transition to a modern Protestant state was played out upon the bodies of its queens. This is particularly true of her depiction of the reign of Henry VIII, whose ‘Crimes and Cruelties’ she reports ‘were too numerous to be mentioned’.73 In her description of Henry VIII, Austen draws special attention to the wives he has executed, ‘Anna Bullen’ and Katherine Howard. Cassandra Austen’s watercolour of Henry VIII wearing a Jacobin cap seems to represent something more than amusing anachronism here.74 For the dynastic ambitions of Henry VIII that made Elizabeth’s rule possible, and ensured the death of Mary Stuart, represent the complete antithesis of all that Burke ascribed to ‘ancient chivalry’. Elizabeth came to the throne following claims of incest, adultery, the displacement of faithful wives, the murder of others and the usurpation by a ‘bastard’ of the legitimate heir.75 Burke’s understanding of England’s history was dependent on the erasure of women such as Lady Jane Grey, Mary Stuart and the wives of Henry VIII. Such erasure compounds the violence of their fate, ensuring the symbolic patriarchal order in death, as in life, by rendering them invisible to history.

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Jane Austen as Mary Stuart Since her execution in 1587, Mary Stuart had haunted the English political imaginary and generated historical controversy. After the Act of Union in 1707, she became an important, if ambivalent, figure in Whig historiography, with Scottish historians such as David Hume and William Robertson trying to generate understandings of the past that reconciled the Scots to their place in the newly united kingdom. Both Hume and Robertson had made Mary Stuart’s fate a central motif in their triumphalist accounts of the newly formed ‘nation’. Once a compelling symbol of sedition and the head of the nation’s alternate dynasty, Mary Stuart lost her political potency and was transformed into a sentimental heroine in these works.76 The writing of the tragic fate of the Queen of Scots thus became a ‘mechanism whereby civilizing sentiment could, literally, replace barbarous passions’.77 This sentimentalism ‘laid the ground for the subsequent reinvention of Jacobitism, by Walter Scott and others, as an aesthetic attitude only’.78 Yet even those male writers such as David Hume – who sought to contain the Scottish queen’s subversive appeal by sentimentalizing her  – also understood that she was emblematic of a conflict that was very slow to die.79 Mary Stuart was thus an inherently paradoxical figure, even in the emergent Whig histories of the period. On the one hand, she represented a shared aspect of both nations’ past and a joint object of sympathy, a victim all Britons could mourn. On the other hand, her heinous fate at the hands of her English cousin Elizabeth ensured that any shared feelings this evoked were inherently unstable, if not seditious. It was this subversive quality that Austen captures in her brief History, rendering ridiculous the fictions of sensibility around Mary Stuart that Hume and Robertson had created.80 Indeed, Austen does not mention either Scottish historian in History. The only historian she names is John Whitaker (1735–1808), whom she claims as one of Mary Stuart’s few remaining friends.81 Whitaker, author of the polemical Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated (1787), was entirely fanatical in his belief in the innocence of the Scottish queen and equally as obsessive about the guilt of her cousin. Whitaker shaped his narrative of the crimes against Mary, Queen of Scots, largely as a discourse of illegitimacy, a theme Austen plays out in her History as well.82 The Queen of Scots’ legitimacy and her legitimate claim to succession are the only proof, Whitaker asserted, that is needed to demonstrate her innocence, while the illegitimacy of Elizabeth and of Mary I’s half-brother and betrayer Edward VI are the true proof of their criminality. While Austen

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may well be poking fun at Whitaker’s fervent devotion to Queen Mary, she is equally satirizing the paradoxical, if not hypocritical, treatment of that ‘amiable’ princess in Hume and other more impartial historians. It was Brigid Brophy who first recognized that Austen identified with the Stuarts in her History. She described this identification as an adolescent cry of defiance against a system that educated her for independence of mind, but assumed such independence would be relinquished upon marriage.83 Although Brophy acknowledged that the teenaged Austen identified with the dispossession of Mary, Queen of Scots, because, like her, ‘she was dispossessed also of what she might have expected of her ancestry’, her Freudian analysis ensured that she read such self-identification as ‘straightforward castration symbolism’.84 In keeping with such an analysis, Brophy contended that it is Austen’s engagement with Charles I’s absolutism that is the critical feature of the text.85 It is in History, she argued, where Austen ‘most strongly expresses her infatuation with absolute kings and her infant self ’.86 Underlying this infatuation was a sense of disappointment about the declining fortunes of her family. While marriage would curtail intellectual pursuits, worse could be expected. As Brophy explained, ‘[I]f marriage failed, there was only one other route to independence open to an impoverished but well educated gentlewoman  – and the better she was educated, the more frighteningly open it was  – namely, to become a governess.’87 If Austen’s History implies a threat for Brophy, it is this: ‘If you force me to become a governess, this is what I will teach my pupils – ignorant history, history with few dates, history which so far from teaching the pupil to govern himself, will endorse him in his babyish principle of absolutism.’88 Brophy’s reading of History assumes there is little connection between Austen’s youthful attachment to the Stuarts and themes of dispossession and disinheritance in her later writings. She does not acknowledge that Austen’s focus on Mary Stuart offers a very different lens to English history, notably at odds with accounts centred on her son (James IV and I) and her grandson (Charles I). Brophy contends that, for Austen, History reflects a childish hankering for sombre Stuart patriarchs, yet this is seriously compromised by Austen’s emphatic trivialization of the reigns of the Stuart kings in this text. Austen resists the patrilineal paradigms that framed Whig historiography, positioning both James I and Charles I entirely in relation to their maternal heritage. James I is described as a king who ‘had some faults, among which & as the most principal, was his allowing his Mother’s death’.89 While Austen ‘cannot help liking him’ in spite of such flaws, and ‘because he is a Stuart’, she nonetheless undercuts his manly authority by playfully referring to the sexual proclivities that so disgusted Whig

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historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Making surreptitious reference to James’s scandalous favourite Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, through the genre of ‘sharade’, Austen deftly ‘subverts the category of juvenile ignorance’, as Clara Tuite has astutely observed.90 Even good King Charles is the subject of her wicked wit and is described by Austen as ‘ever steadfast in his own support’.91 As A. S. Byatt has noted, such a comment marks ‘a sharply ironic note, slipped in amongst the girlish enthusiasm’.92 It is Mary Stuart’s claim to succession and her brutal treatment at the hands of Elizabeth that forms the dramatic centrepiece of Austen’s narrative. Beginning the account of Mary Stuart’s fate with a delightful summation of Henry VIII, ‘whose only merit was his not being quite as bad as his daughter Elizabeth’,93 Austen happily subverts the conventions of masculinist historiography here, privileging the significance of the daughter over the father and centring her History of England on the dynastic struggle between these two women. Austen’s choice to make the ‘bewitching princess’ Mary, Queen of Scots, the heroine of her parody of eighteenth-century historiography was perfectly logical, given her intention was to ‘miniaturize’ and ‘domesticate’ English history. Jayne Lewis has observed, ‘Austen ostentatiously succumbs to Mary’s legendary charms and sympathizes lavishly with her exorbitant sufferings.’94 Yet her vehement defence of Mary Stuart shares the hyperbolic tone of Burke’s description of the assault on Marie Antoinette in her bedroom at Versailles. While Burke made the fate of Marie Antoinette central to any understanding of the French Revolution, Austen rendered Mary Stuart’s fate central to the history of England by mentioning her in the reign of every single Tudor monarch. According to Brian Southam, Mary Stuart is mentioned in no less than seven of the thirteen reigns Austen covers in her History.95 In fact, all that Austen holds great about English history relates specifically to the Queen of Scots. While acknowledging that Austen’s interest in both her Stuart connections and her identification with Mary, Queen of Scots, was a way of expressing feelings of dispossession – playing inevitably upon her mind as her father aged and her residence at Steventon became precarious – Brigid Brophy situates History as the point from which Austen ‘abandons her childhood dream of re-inhabiting the gothick and absolutist grandeur of the Leighs or the Stuarts’.96 For Brophy, History is a subversive text only in terms of its nonsense and illogic, which Austen must abandon if she is to become a mature author. Lynne Vallone has suggested that Austen’s juvenile identification with Mary Stuart allowed her to create a ‘personal historiography’. Vallone seems unaware of Brophy’s study of History and does not refer to Austen’s ‘Stuart connections’. Instead, she considers Austen as one of a

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number of young women – including Queen Victoria – who saw Mary Stuart as ‘an alluring figure’, whom they could use to ‘talk back’ to their history textbooks. While Vallone acknowledges that ‘Mary’s status as imprisoned victim may have been particularly attractive for these young women who all lived constrained lives’, she adds that such Mary Stuart ‘fantasies’ might indicate that they believed such ‘containment could perhaps be transcended or at least resisted’.97 Vallone reads such identification as largely to do with the queen as a romantic celebrity. In this context, Mary Stuart functions as an emblem of female empowerment rather than dispossession, allowing young women to create counter-narratives that challenged the image of that queen they had found in Goldsmith and Hume. Such identification with Mary Stuart was commonplace during this period, as she took on the status of romantic celebrity.98 Women dressed as her in masquerade, had their portraits painted as her, performed as her on stage, wore her image as jewellery and collected samples of her needlework and other objects she had owned.99 These activities reflected sympathy for the misfortunes of the queen, who served as an emblem of both distressed feminine virtue and dangerous female sexuality. After Culloden, this secular reliquary vibrated hidden political meaning at a time when English culture was trying to repress both its Catholic and Stuart heritage.100 While ‘Mary’s belated emergence as a Jacobite and Scots icon’ denoted ‘the decisive emasculation of both these causes’, it also reflected the ways in which women were appropriating Jacobitism, the Stuart legacy and England’s Catholic past as spaces where they could articulate narratives of nostalgia, loss and female dispossession.101 These ‘Protestant relics’ took on a quasi-religious significance in light of the arguments around the divine right of the Stuarts to rule England and the specific claims of sainthood made on behalf of martyred monarchs such as Mary and Charles I.102 Such objects bought their owners connection to these revered figures, through a shared sense of their suffering, but also ensured that Jacobitism became ‘increasingly sentimentalized’ and, as a consequence, ‘feminized as irrational or marginal’.103 Later women writers such as Agnes Strickland claimed that ownership of Stuart relics gave her a particular historical authority, as if through such objects they might channel a more authentic feeling for the past. Jane Austen’s maternal kin made much of their ownership of Jacobite heirlooms, publishing various catalogues that documented Jacobite artefacts in their keeping at Stoneleigh Abbey, and in so doing generated their own personalized historiography that ran counter to the Whig tradition.104 Such catalogues provide evidence of a private but enthusiastic interest in the ill-fated Stuarts, among the Leigh women and their community, well into the twentieth century.105

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Vallone offers critical insight into reading Austen’s History as ‘personal historiography’, but her suggestion that it is Elizabeth’s gender that renders her treatment of Mary Stuart such an issue for Austen is difficult to accept, given the treatment of other monarchs in History. In Austen’s eyes, Elizabeth’s real crime is being a Tudor, not being a bad woman; she is merely the worst example of the sort of monarch that usurping dynasties inevitably produce. The Tudors were empathically not Austen’s people, and in her History, as well as other juvenile texts, she implies that the reign of Elizabeth marked a particularly bleak period in both the nation’s past and the history of her own family’s fortunes.106 Although she was clearly no fan of Elizabeth, it is not the Tudor Queen whom Austen blames for Mary Stuart’s death, but her ministers – those ‘vile and abandoned men’ who encouraged Elizabeth in her crimes, Lord Burleigh, Sir Francis Walsingham and ‘the rest of those who filled the chief offices of state’. Such dispersal of guilt onto her ministers reflected the tension between Elizabeth’s femininity and her political authority that eighteenth-century historians tried to negotiate.107 Austen, however, parodies this tendency, directly contradicting Goldsmith’s claim that it was Elizabeth’s ‘good fortune, that her ministers were excellent.’108 Both Antoinette Burton and Brian Southam have noted that Austen’s levity ceases whenever she mentions Mary, Queen of Scots.109 While she rendered the reigns of other monarchs absurd, Austen’s description of the fate of Mary Stuart is one of the more detailed historical accounts. Her description of Mary Stuart’s death  – ‘She was executed in the Great Hall at Fotheringay Castle (sacred Place!) on Wednesday the 8th of February – 1586 – to the everlasting Reproach of Elizabeth, her Ministers, and of England in general’  – is almost accurate. Such sympathetic treatment of Mary Stuart suggests that Austen was concerned with something more than just the parodying of Goldsmith or indeed Burke. If Annette Upfal is correct in proposing that Cassandra Austen painted Jane as Mary Stuart, this suggests an empathetic identification with the Scottish queen. Such an identification may also inform the sense of disempowerment she depicts in her fictional heroines whose life choices too were limited, by the dynastic plans, greed and carelessness of their male kin.

Delicious powerlessness While scholars have done much to interrogate Austen’s class position and politics in recent years, her identification with the dispossessed Mary, Queen of Scots, remains a significant site to explore. Such identification suggests that the

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politics of the Stuart period were as interesting to Jane and Cassandra Austen as they were for their elderly relatives such as Mary Leigh, but it may also hint that Austen hoped to have the care and support of her maternal relatives. Ruth Perry has observed of Austen’s novels, ‘by way of expressing their vulnerability’, that Austen imagines her heroines operating in the maternal branches of families where there was little material advantage to be had from such connections but where they found benevolence and generosity.110 This may also have been true for Austen herself. As late as 1816, one of the Austen sisters, possibly Jane, was seeking a legacy from the estate of the Reverend Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh, whose wife Mary Leigh authored History of the Leigh Family.111 Jane certainly wrote of Thomas Leigh upon his death.112 Mary Stuart was the first of many disempowered and dispossessed women whose lives Austen dissected in her writing. That both Wollstonecraft (in her last work) and Austen (in her first) empathized with the fate of Mary Stuart suggests that, while she was the ‘quintessential sentimental and aristocratic heroine’, the Queen of Scots also embodied the ‘delicious powerlessness’ of all women, regardless of rank or political allegiances.113 While Wollstonecraft struggled to demonstrate that the powerlessness of Mary Stuart was attributable to something other than her beauty and sexuality, Austen’s Mary Stuart is indubitably the victim of masculinist politics and the institutions that authorize men’s power, including the institution of Whig history.

Part Two

The Queen Caroline ‘Affair’

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Caroline of Brunswick as Anne Boleyn: Dissenting Women Writers and Historical ‘Memoir’

During the Regency, two Dissenting women writers, Lucy Aikin and Elizabeth Benger, both members of the famed Aikin–Barbauld circle, produced studies of Tudor queens. In 1818, Lucy Aikin published Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, and in 1821, Elizabeth Benger followed with Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII. Although both of these studies appeared at a time when the sexual politics of Henry VIII’s reign was being analogized with the sexual politics of the Regency, they have never been considered in this context. The ongoing efforts of George, the Prince Regent, to divorce his erstwhile spouse, Caroline of Brunswick, had generated much scandal and political propaganda throughout the early nineteenth century. Such reports garnered great sympathy for Princess Caroline while simultaneously confirming and conflating the Regent’s tendencies towards sexual excess and political tyranny. The Prince’s desire to be rid of his wife threw up obvious points of historical comparison, while also reanimating discussions of chivalry and the relation between domestic tyranny and political tyranny. Referring to historical precedent allowed radicals to draw attention to George’s increasing tendency towards despotic behaviour. Henry VIII’s treatment of his wives was used in political debate, legal argument and the mass of political pornography that erupted around particular instances of Caroline’s persecution, from the time of the ‘Delicate Investigation’ into claims that she had given birth to an illegitimate child in 1806 until her trial for adultery in 1820. The fate of Anne Boleyn, in particular, was used in legal argument and political debate, as well as in the avalanche of porno-propaganda that erupted during the Regency. For, while Henry VIII’s treatment of his other wives was not chivalrous, his treatment of Anne Boleyn was fatal to her and increased the tyranny of his rule. Such a precedent generated both sympathy and fears for

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Caroline’s safety, while highlighting the vulnerability of all women to the whims of domineering men. Aikin’s Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth began with a history of Henry VIII’s fatal attraction to Anne Boleyn and an extensive discussion of damage to his court and to the state wrought by their entanglement. While Benger’s Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn was devoted entirely to the hapless Anne, much of its first volume documents Henry VIII’s despotic treatment of his first wife, the ‘blameless’ Catharine of Aragon. Both these works were extensive historical biographies, a new and hybrid genre for English women writers. Yet, with the exception of minor studies by Greg Kucich, Michelle Levy and Anne Mellor, Aikin’s and Benger’s memoirs have received little scholarly attention.1 This appears to be because the generic model they developed did not ‘conform to earlier or later historical models’.2 This unique status has meant that these memoirs are rarely read as ‘history’ and little attention has been paid either to their generic innovation or to the political context in which they emerged. Although both Aikin and Benger had evinced considerable interest in history prior to producing these particular works, their forays into historical biography marked a generic shift from their previous writerly pursuits. Lucy Aikin was the scion of one of England’s foremost literary families, the daughter of John Aikin (author of major works of collective biography) and the niece of the famed poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Aikin began her writing career at the age of 17. Her first historical work was a translation of J. G. Hess’s Life of Ulrich Zwingli, which, as Anne Laurence observes, was ‘a subject of topical interest because of concern about the fate of Protestantism in Napoleonic France’.3 Aikin published a novel Lorimer in 1814, as well as numerous pedagogical works for children. Before she produced her life of Elizabeth I, she was best known for her poem Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations with Miscellaneous Poems, which she had published in 1810. Like Aikin, Elizabeth Benger’s literary career began at an early age. She achieved literary celebrity as a precocious 13-year-old in 1791 with the publication of an epic poem The Female Geniad. The poem celebrated female genius, depicting classical figures such as Aspasia and Sappho, as well as radical women writers such as Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay and Helen Maria Williams. As an adult, Benger experimented across a variety of genres, writing plays before turning again to poetry to publish the topical ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade’ in 1809. Although she found minor fame for her poetry, she struggled to earn a living. She published two novels anonymously: Marian in 1812 and The Heart and the Fancy, or, Valsinore in 1813. Proficient in German, she turned to translation,

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producing a volume of Klopstock’s letters in 1814. Her remarks on Madame de Staël’s Germany earned her the author’s admiration.4 Settling on historical biography, Benger published her Life of Anne Boleyn in 1821, shortly after the death of Queen Caroline, and produced two other lives of queens before her own death in 1827.5 Her Life of Anne Boleyn was republished in 1827, to which was attached ‘a slender record’ of Benger’s ‘genius and virtues’, written by Lucy Aikin. This chapter argues that both the literary politics and the sexual politics of the Regency shaped the emergence of this new genre of ‘historical memoir’ and its subject matter. Greg Kucich has observed that the works of women writers in this period sought a ‘visceral connection’ with the past. Here, this contention will be extended, suggesting that the reanimation of the record of ‘suffering and feeling’ not only recovered lives long obscured in male-authored histories but also drew attention to analogous suffering in the present.6 Both Aikin and Benger evoked historical precedent to covertly comment on contemporary politics and, in particular, to warn of the dangers inherent in yielding to tyranny. Such resort to historical precedence suggests that Aikin’s and Benger’s desire to create empathy for their Tudor subjects was driven by political as well as the affective and aesthetic concerns Kucich has identified. This experimentation with memoir as history privileged the domestic and familial in its recovery of the nation’s past and, in so doing, resisted the nationalist imperatives that shaped masculinist histories of the period. It will be argued here, too, that the adaption of the genre of memoir by Aikin and Benger was a deliberate strategy to avoid any charge that they were co-opting the masculinist prerogative of ‘making’ history.7 The politics of history were hotly debated in the newly formed literary periodicals of the day. Who could narrate history and in what generic forms it was acceptable were highly contested and deeply gendered concerns at this time.8 Some of the most prominent women writers of the day – Fanny Burney, Lady Morgan and Aikin’s aunt Anna Laetitia Barbauld – were savaged in the newly established literary periodicals for their promiscuous mixing of history with other literary genres. As Dissenters, and as women, Aikin and Benger were perhaps more concerned than most with the hegemonic violence that accompanied the policing of these generic boundaries. It will be argued that writing ‘memoir’, an ostensibly feminine genre, allowed them to ‘camouflage’ their engagement with political history, as well as to smuggle contemporary political critique into these texts. Henry VIII’s political tyranny and his despotic treatment of his wives could be readily analogized by their readers who were used to reading historical precedent as political commentary.

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Such readers may also have expected to find coded feminist arguments in these works. Mary Wollstonecraft’s critique of chivalry and courtly culture and their insidious effects on women can certainly be detected here, particularly her negative view of bourgeois women’s desire to emulate queens. According to Wollstonecraft, this was the desire that allowed women to be sexually subjugated by men.9 More significantly, in this context, Wollstonecraft had argued that the same dubious politics of gallantry that enshrined men’s domestic tyranny was replicated in the political submission of men to state tyrants, such as Henry VIII and Louis XVI, or indeed the Prince Regent. This subtle referencing of Wollstonecraft in Aikin’s and Benger’s texts is important to reading these works as contemporary political commentary. Anne Boleyn’s life, particularly, served as an apposite case study of a ‘short-lived queen’ whose education at court had made her vulnerable to the ambitions of her male kin. Anne Boleyn also functioned as a powerful analogy for a contemporary queen suspected of adultery and allowed for a covert critique of the link between a king’s desire to divorce his wife and his tendency towards despotism more generally.

The politics of history The publication of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s dystopian poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven in 1812 saw the poet, Lucy Aikin’s aunt and mentor, become the subject of one of the most vituperative reviewing campaigns in English literary history.10 Barbauld’s poem had predicted England’s cultural decline as the result of the long-standing war against France. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was written as an ‘occasional poem’, a historical genre conventionally written by great men about great men. Barbauld not only appropriated this genre but also simultaneously subverted its usual subject matter, not revelling in the glories of battle but rather bewailing war’s harsh realities. Barbauld’s bold decision to write in such a manly genre was the subject of immediate and widespread denunciation.11 John Wilson Croker, one of the founding editors of the Quarterly Review and Tory Secretary of the Admiralty, published a scathing assessment of the poem in June 1812 that began an outpouring of hostility towards Barbauld.12 Croker’s review of Barbauld formed part of a longer history of anti-Jacobin misogyny towards women writers, especially Dissenting women, that had begun in the 1790s. Edmund Burke had blamed Dissenters in England for the rise of radicalism and support for the French Revolution. Barbauld was no Jacobin, but she was regarded as such by the Anti-Jacobin and Tory press.

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While she had not been subjected to the physical violence experienced by her co-religionist men such as the Reverend Joseph Priestley, who had his laboratory burned down by an angry mob, she was nonetheless the victim of misogynist and sexualized criticism. Her fellow Dissenter Mary Hays, had been mocked in the Anti-Jacobin press for her pathetic and unrequited ardour. Barbauld, however, was characterized by the same men as an ‘icicle’, her lack of sexual warmth implicated in the suicide of her husband.13 Other reviews of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, in both the liberal and conservative press, ranged from ‘patronizingly negative to outrageously abusive’.14 Even former radicals such as William Godwin amplified Croker’s disdain, dismissing the poem as ‘cowardly, time-serving and Presbyterian’.15 William McCarthy has observed that Croker’s attack reduced her ‘to the contemptible status of a meddlesome, antiquated schoolmarm’.16 While Croker’s reviews of women writers were characterized by an ‘astonishingly gendered ferocity’, it was his review of Barbauld’s poem that unequivocally fused misogyny with his antagonism to Dissent.17 So successful was this mix of misogyny with opposition to non-conformity that Emma Major has described Croker’s assault on Barbauld ‘as the literary equivalent of the defeat of the 1790 attempt to repeal the Corporation and Tests Act’.18 Croker despised Barbauld’s presumption for assuming the masculine prerogative of ‘making history’.19 As James Chandler has observed, it was her faulty sense of history, her failure to understand the significance of dates – ‘their uses and their specificity’  – for which Croker took her to task.20 According to Croker, Barbauld could not predict the future because she was incapable of reading the past.21 He took particular exception to her engagement with contemporary history, advising her to ‘leave both the victims and the heroes of her political prejudices to the respective judgment which the impartiality of posterity will not fail to pronounce’.22 Croker had made a similar critique in his more infamous review of Fanny Burney’s last novel The Wanderer (1814). The Wanderer was Burney’s most historical novel. In the ‘Dedication’, she wrote that no modern novel could delineate ‘any picture of actual human life, without reference to the French Revolution’.23 Contemporary history, Burney asserted, must inform all new works of fiction. Croker despised this tendency to explore contemporary historical events through fiction and attacked Burney for writing compassionately about France. He accused her of sympathy for Napoleon, a claim she must have found particularly galling and one designed to specifically damage the novel’s reception in England.24 Croker critiqued Burney’s novelization of the Revolution, savaging the text’s ‘absurd mysteries . . . extravagant incidents and violent events’. He evinced extreme dislike of any text that used ‘violent

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catastrophes and strange vicissitudes’ to develop lessons on the conduct of life, for, he asserted, they happened so rarely in the ‘history of mankind’.25 Given the historical context of The Wanderer, a period characterized by violent events and catastrophes, such criticism appears seriously wrong-headed. It reflected Croker’s anxiety that women’s emotional incursions into the past would generate meanings at odds with the manly and rational politics that should inform the realms of history. By the time of the Regency, literary periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review (1802) and the Quarterly Review (1809) had become significant vehicles for shaping the taste of middle-class readers.26 The literary criticism offered in such journals was always underpinned by a political agenda and, in the case of women writers, this agenda was often formed by a distinctly misogynist sexual politics. The Quarterly Review fashioned itself as the vehicle of ‘a narrow, predictable interpretation of Tory principle’, and editors such as Croker believed it was their duty not only to savage writers for their purple prose but also to use such criticism as a means of bolstering bourgeois morality and political stability.27 The politics of the Edinburgh Review was more varied. As Jon P. Klancher has observed, it ‘veered unpredictably from right to left, sometimes expounding the conservatism of a balanced constitution, at other times appearing almost radical as it spoke for the more progressive Whigs’.28 Women writers were often savaged in both periodicals, suggesting they shared a misogynist sexual politics, if nothing else. Croker was not alone in jealously guarding what he considered masculine genres and subject matter from the intrusion of women writers. The genres in which women excelled, such as the novel, were trivialized and scorned by male critics at this time as enervated and feminine forms.29 Women on all sides of the political spectrum found themselves the subject of slashing reviews by Croker and his imitators. In spite of their political differences, the editors and reviewers for these journals formed masculinist networks of influence that effectively ‘policed’ the boundaries of literary taste. For women writers, shut out of such networks, this could feel isolating and threatening. Some, such as the intrepid Irish writer Lady Morgan, took this ‘policing’ head on, appending a notice to her 1817 study France, castigating the Quarterly Review as ‘the supposed literary organ of government’, while also sneering at the ‘subalterns scribes’ at Blackwood’s, the Morning Post, the Courier, the Literary Gazette, the Guardian and the Edinburgh Monthly Review. Her pert description of these journals ‘as the whole ministerial press’ gives a sly sense of the fusion of critical and political power that characterized these journals, as well as their capacity for hegemonic violence.30

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Lucy Aikin, however, seemed cowed by the possibility of notice in either the Edinburgh or the Quarterly. Whereas her aunt goaded reviewers in the Tory periodicals with her radical verse, Aikin’s strategy was to avoid their scrutiny. As she wrote to her American friend William Ellery Channing, ‘I have prospered pretty well under the silence of the critics, and it pleased me to have no thanks to give them.’ Aikin believed that such reviews were inevitably polarizing; if she was praised in the Edinburgh, she opined, ‘I should certainly be abused in the Quarterly.’31 Her reticence to be noticed by these journals can almost certainly be traced to her experience of the reception of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. She was outraged by this treatment of her aunt and scathing of Croker, describing him many years later as ‘the hired assassin of reputation shooting from his coward ambush’.32 Aikin recorded in her aunt’s memoir that Croker’s review had effectively ended her career, although this was not entirely true.33 Felicity James has argued that Aikin was concerned to preserve a ‘feminized, unfeminist’ image of Barbauld and had rewritten aspects of her life so as to contain scandalous or subversive elements.34 Such an image not only suppressed any similarities between Barbauld and radical women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays but also conformed to Aikin’s own domestic and maternal ideal of womanly virtue. Aikin’s desire to preserve her aunt’s reputation is significant here, not only because of what it signals about the impact such reviewing might have had on contemporary writers but also because of her concern regarding the potential damage to one’s posthumous reputation. ‘[T]he scorns of the unmanly, the malignant and the base’ did not necessarily cease upon death, as the case of Mary Wollstonecraft had so emphatically illustrated.35 Neither literary critics nor historians have considered it significant that Aikin and Benger inaugurated a new feminized genre of history at a time when women’s writing was under siege. It is possible, however, that this hostile literary environment was the impetus for Aikin to experiment with historical genres. Her containment of her aunt’s legacy reflected an anxiety around authorship that does not seem to have abated throughout her long life.36 By mixing the public and political realms of history with the personal and interior worlds of biography, Aikin avoided the mismatch of gender and genre that created such a negative reaction to her aunt’s poem. This self-protective strategy allowed her to produce a work that engaged in the manly field of historical writing while also using historical example as a form of political critique. The life of a queen, in any case, was a typically feminine subject. The life of Elizabeth Tudor was unlikely to cause much concern among male critics as her ‘queenly power’ had been tempered throughout the eighteenth century in sentimental tales of

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‘romantic connection’ (with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex) or in fictions of queenly rivalry (with Mary Stuart).37 Marlon B. Ross has argued that by using such strategies of self-protection, women writers risked softening their political agenda.38 Aikin, however, aimed her book at a particular audience that was likely to be sympathetic to her religious and political views. Radicals were drawing lessons from history, particularly Tudor history, to comment on Regency politics, so her readers were already familiar with this connection, and likely to understand the political critique implied in such analogizing.

Memoir as Dissenting politics In the preface to her Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, Lucy Aikin stated that she had tried ‘to preserve to her work the genuine character of Memoirs, by avoiding as much as possible all encroachments on the peculiar province of history’.39 She claimed to have borrowed this technique from earlier forms of memoir written by French women close to the throne. French women’s courtly memoirs were written to critique the social and sexual order in France and were thus little concerned with the party politics that dominated English historiography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These works merged the genres of literature with the rigours of history, while eschewing the public and political in favour of the domestic and interior. As the name suggests, ‘memoir’ was a text usually based on personal memory, and the authors of such works were often participant observers in many of the events they recalled. Such texts celebrated the court as a realm of feminine influence and were written as counternarratives, presenting a feminized version of events well known in masculinist historiography.40 Derived from earlier traditions of ‘secret history’, such works depicted that which tended to be hidden from masculinist modes of history, the personal and familial relations that framed dynastic politics. Such secret histories also allowed for ‘duplicitous readings’, and this too may have appealed to Aikin and to her readers who were used to subterfuge and camouflage in such texts.41 French writers such as Madame de Motteville and Madame La Fayette documented the workings of the monarchy from first-hand experience, frequently describing the pain and suffering of women trapped in ‘state marriages’, and, by implication, critiqued the institution of marriage itself. Such authors presented a different image of courtly life to that of Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. French authors focused on women’s pain and victimhood rather than their erotic guile and sought an empathetic response

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from their readers. Male-authored histories of the period focused on England’s exceptionality, whereas French memoirs were cosmopolitan texts that regarded relations between England and France as critical to a broader history of Europe. Royal women and women of their courts were depicted as part of a transnational community, shaped by their commonalities rather than their differences and catalysed by their shared traumas of war and other calamities. Madame de Motteville, for example, dedicated her life of Anne of Austria to Sarah Duchess of Marlborough as they ‘shared the care of queens Anne’, as well as their harrowing experience of war.42 Such texts created a sense of intimacy as well as empathy, as the familiarity they expressed enabled the reader to readily identify with both author and subject, creating emotional communities that transcended national borders and the enmities generated by warfare. Aligning her memoirs with French titles of that name also assured Aikin’s readers that her work bore no resemblance to English memoirs of the period. While in France the term ‘memoir’ had been used by aristocratic women writers, in England it described texts written by courtesans and actresses when they recounted their scandalous lives. Such works examined the transformation of women’s lives after their fall from chastity, interrogating the private as a means to recover the reputation of the memoirist and vindicate her from blame. They also countered the mandate that women ‘hide their shame’ and marked a refusal to conform to the tropes of conversion and self-regulation that characterized earlier genres of confession.43 With the appearance of Madame Roland’s Memoirs (Mémoires de Madame Roland) in 1795, the term was first used in an overtly revolutionary context as the author appropriated the form to cast her life as an exemplary tale of feminine political virtue.44 While writers such as Mary Hays undoubtedly drew on all these genres of memoir in their writings, this was certainly not the case for Aikin, who was more concerned with the potential of memoir for the ‘cultivation of moral judgment’.45 Aikin may also have wanted to distance her ‘memoirs’ from other more disreputable courtly histories of the period, such as Sarah Green’s The Private History of the Court of England (1808). While purporting to be a courtly memoir of Edward IV, Green’s text was actually a secret history of the court of the Prince of Wales, which commented surreptitiously on his fraught marriage to Caroline of Brunswick.46 Although her political commentary was covert, it nonetheless caught the ire of the literary journals of the time, who viewed the text as a ‘sign of great depravity of manners’.47 This was certainly not the sort of attention Aikin sought, although, as previously noted, she may well have spotted the potential for ‘duplicitous readings’ that such allegorizing created.

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Aikin’s ‘memoir’ of Elizabeth I also differed from French ‘memoirs’ in other significant ways. Unlike such French works, which were written ‘from the personal knowledge or experience of the author’, Aikin based her understanding of women’s role on careful use of sources, moving the genre beyond the gossip and particularity which defined French courtly memoirs and towards what she termed ‘domestic history’.48 Aikin eschewed party politics in her history and focused on the family dynamics of dynastic politics.49 French women writers maintained that it was necessary to study the private lives of public figures to understand how the world of emotion shaped history, thus producing highly empathetic portraits of royal women. Aikin moved beyond this sentiment, claiming, ‘It is from the intimate views of private life in various ages and countries that the moral of political history alone can be derived.’50 For Aikin, the genre of memoir allowed ‘political questions to be transmuted into ethical ones’. Her generic innovation here clearly aligned subject, literary field and sex. Yet it also enabled her to create a genre that used historical example to judge ‘individual conduct’ in the past, and as lessons for the present.51

Caroline of Brunswick as Anne Boleyn Contrary to Edmund Burke’s claims about the gallant treatment of women of rank, England’s history was littered with the bodies of queens and princesses who were hapless pawns in dynastic politics. While taking vastly different approaches to this subject, both Wollstonecraft and Austen had mocked his triumphal account of the nation’s past, furnishing numerous examples of ‘shortlived queens’ to ridicule his claims. The Prince Regent’s treatment of Caroline of Brunswick revived certain aspects of the sexual politics of the 1790s, reigniting discussions of chivalry and its relation to both domestic and state tyranny.52 Burke’s claim that the Queen was owed generous loyalty due to her rank and sex was again contested. During the Regency, however, radicals and women petitioners appropriated ‘chivalry’ as weapon to use against the Prince of Wales, effectively subverting Burkean sexual politics in the process. As Linda Colley has observed of the Queen Caroline ‘affair’, ‘the connexion’ Burke had ‘drawn so many years before between the maltreatment of Marie-Antoinette and the rottenness of French politics was now disinterred and levelled with savage effect against Britain’s Tory government and George IV’.53 Henry VIII’s vicious treatment of his queens represented the complete antithesis of all that Burke ascribed to ‘ancient chivalry’. It was exactly this elision of the bloodier eras of the

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nation’s past that Austen had mocked so thoroughly in her History of England (1791). ‘Real solemn history’ written and read by men paid scant attention to the women sacrificed to the dynastic ambitions of Henry VIII or to the violence played out and through women’s bodies in tales of familial and regal succession. As had been the case in the 1790s, radicals looked to historical precedent to make their case but, during the Regency, it was to connect George’s increasingly despotic behaviour with his sexual and moral incontinence and to warn of the risks this posed to the State. Caroline of Brunswick had gone into exile in 1814, worn out by the Prince’s campaign against her. His persecution of the Princess did not cease, however, and, while abroad, she was constantly under surveillance by agents employed by the Regent. Rumours of such activities appeared to confirm the tendency of the Regent towards despotism. The Regent hoped that enough evidence could be acquired from such sources that the Princess might be found guilty of high treason, necessitating a divorce.54 Such a divorce would inevitably generate civil and ecclesiastical strife. In this case, the likelihood of crisis was much greater, given the counter-charges that could be made against the Prince and his considerable unpopularity. The threat that George might bring a charge of high treason against Caroline evoked memories of Anne Boleyn, for whom Henry VIII had invented the concept of matrimonial high treason. Henry had created laws specifically to divest himself of Anne Boleyn by introducing statutes that made it treasonable to slander his marriage, to attempt bodily harm against him and to commit adultery while married to him.55 Even before she had gone into exile, such analogies had been drawn between Caroline and Anne Boleyn. Dubbing himself ‘No Flatterer’, in 1813 one opponent addressed an open letter to George to which was appended a brief history of Anne Boleyn taken directly from Hume. The author had intended to ‘draw a parallel between a part of the reign of Henry VIII and of the present reign’ but instead left it to his ‘sagacious’ readers to discover whether the history of that unfortunate queen ‘contains any . . . resemblance to recent occurrences in England’.56 The author was alluding to the news that a ‘secret investigation’ had been undertaken some years before to examine claims that Caroline had given birth to an illegitimate child. The existence of such a child cast doubt on the succession to the throne and was thus evidence of high treason, a capital offence. This badly misnamed ‘Delicate Investigation’ had been established by the King in 1806 but was managed by Whig ministers friendly to the Prince.57 Given the seriousness of the allegations made regarding Caroline, the ad hoc nature of the ‘investigation’ now seems incredible and speaks to her very real vulnerability

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to arbitrary patriarchal authority. The commission itself was of ambiguous legal status and has been described as a ‘bastard court’.58 The Princess was not aware of any charges laid until the investigation had almost finished, nor was she given any opportunity to defend herself before the report was sent to the King. As Anna Clark points out, the investigation was not a properly constituted legal body, so Caroline’s accusers could not be charged with perjury nor could she sue for defamation. It was found that Caroline had not given birth to an illegitimate child, but she was censured her for ‘improper levity’.59 Although the King established the Commission, many rightly believed that the Prince had orchestrated the proceedings. The ‘Delicate Investigation’ connected the Prince’s capacity for sexual tyranny and hypocrisy to his capacity for political tyranny. At the time of No Flatterer’s letter in 1813, Anne Boleyn’s reputation had not yet been damaged by the hostile historiography that was to emerge around her later in the nineteenth century.60 She was considered an innocent victim of a ghastly conspiracy designed by a tyrannical king who had executed one wife on the same day he married another. By casting the investigation of Caroline in the same light as Henry’s persecution of Anne Boleyn, the No Flatterer pamphlet raised the suggestion that George’s treatment of Caroline was illegal, irrational and despotic. Such a suggestion not only harmed the reputation of George but also garnered much sympathy for Caroline. As further investigations were made into Caroline’s ‘morality’, these comparisons took on considerable political import. They were linked not only to the Prince’s despicable behaviour towards his wife but to the very nature of his rule as Regent and his potential rule as King. The focus of the radical campaign against the Prince of Wales throughout the Regency was the connection drawn between his private life and the public political realm. In relation to the treatment of his wife, both before and during her trial, George’s capacity for sexual tyranny and hypocrisy were readily conflated with his tendency towards despotism. Michelle Levy has argued that Aikin used biographical detail in her works of history to allow ‘her readers to judge individual conduct’, particularly ‘to discern whether individuals had been corrupted by their adherence to certain principles’.61 While Aikin did not draw overt similarities between Henry VIII and George IV, her early chapters explored the relation between domestic tyranny and state tyranny. There are echoes here of Wollstonecraft’s critique of ‘chivalry’, but whereas Wollstonecraft was primarily concerned with the implications of this system on the private sphere, Aikin explored how this relation played out at its source, critiquing long-established habits of political submission in Britain and the implications of this eroticized system of relations in both the public and the private spheres.

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By focusing on Henry VIII’s abuse of sexual power, and connecting it to his unfitness to rule more generally, Aikin anticipated the protests made by women petitioners during the trial of Queen Caroline that linked aristocratic mores with the dissolute state of the nation and issued a warning of the dangers of submitting to tyranny in the home and in the state.62 The first volume of Aikin’s life of Elizabeth I tells the story of the continuous crisis in succession during the Tudor period, driven first by Henry’s desire for a son and then by his growing despotism. The first chapter is entirely devoted to describing the inauspicious circumstances surrounding Elizabeth’s birth, setting the pattern of lack of process and brutality that characterized Henry’s reign, but would also inflect Elizabeth’s sovereignty due to his influence. Henry VIII’s pursuit of Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn is described in ways that clearly conflated his lust with his increasingly despotic behaviour. Analogy is significant here, though not overt. In her discussion of the birth of Elizabeth, Aikin constructs an image of Henry VIII with features that were readily recognizable in the Prince of Wales, particularly the image of the Regent found in radical press. Aikin’s Henry VIII is a man ‘of impetuous temper’ and ‘despotic habits’ intent on repudiating his wife. Aikin made the connection between Henry’s love of pageant and extravagance with his extremes of personality, a link commonly made by radicals regarding the Regent. She also draws attention to the bigamous nature of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, as he marries her before he had his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. Aikin records, ‘With that contempt for decorum which he displayed so remarkably in some former, and many later transactions of his life, he caused his private marriage with Anne Boleyn to precede the sentence of divorce which he had resolved that his clergy should pronounce against Catherine of Arragon [sic].’ The Regent’s ‘secret marriage’ to Mrs Fitzherbert was ample evidence that, like Henry VIII, George IV’s ‘passion and his impatience’ made him ‘capable of bearing down every obstacle’.63 As with many such works of queenly biography, Aikin’s overt purpose was to study the early influences and education of Elizabeth in order to make sense of her reign. Yet this task also lent itself to a covert political agenda, as it enabled a critique of courtly culture and monarchical politics. In the case of Elizabeth, it was also a study of the brutality of her father’s reign and the impression this created upon Elizabeth. As Karen O’Brien has observed, Aikin ‘offered a finessed psychological portrait of Elizabeth as a woman narrowed by her upbringing and hardened by power’.64 As in her earlier Epistles of Women, Aikin’s Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth expressed a repeated distrust of women whose power is achieved or deployed in aggressive or ‘relentless ways’.65 While Aikin

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refused to acknowledge Wollstonecraft’s influence throughout her career, she nonetheless shared her faith that women’s ideal role in society was as rational wives and industrious mothers. Elizabeth Tudor was not a short-lived queen, but neither is she a queen to be emulated. Aikin believes that Elizabeth fails as both a ruler and a woman, as ‘women’s claims to immortality rests upon their relationship to family, in filial or maternal affection’.66 Such themes hearkened back to Wollstonecraft’s critique of Burke in the 1790s and broke down the distinction between the private and the public realms. Analogy allowed Aikin to safeguard herself from hostile reception while permitting her to covertly express views that were politically radical. Aikin thoroughly explored Henry’s abuse of power, including its legacy in his daughters, suggesting that his treatment of family served as a warning of the need to resist tyranny in both the public and private spheres. Writing several years later, Elizabeth Benger used a slightly different strategy, reminding her readers of the distant brutality of the past at a time when the brutality of the past was being visited upon the head of a current consort.

Queen Caroline on trial The true trial of Queen Caroline began in early 1820 when King George III died and she decided to return home to be crowned alongside her husband, now George IV. The Times announced the Queen’s arrival as if she were a conquering hero, comparing her to men who changed the political destiny of the nation. At the same time it noted her vulnerability, implying none too subtly what she risked in returning: WILLIAM the Conqueror came attended by a force which at once subdued the army opposed to him  – HENRY VII and WILLIAM III brought with them, or confidently relied upon finding, a train of armed followers. But this woman comes arrayed only in native courage, and (may we not add) conscious innocence; and presents her bosom, aye, offers her neck, to those who threaten to sever her head from it, if ever they dared to come within their reach.67

On the day after Caroline arrived back in England, the King handed two green evidence bags to both Houses of Parliament; these contained all the materials that had been collected documenting the queen’s alleged adulteries while she was in Europe. These green bags became a powerful ‘symbol of government lies and treachery’ as they represented evidence taken from spies, thieves and

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informants.68 The King wanted both Houses to initiate secret investigations against the queen. While the House of Lords agreed to appoint a secret committee to examine the evidence against her, the King was thwarted in the Commons. As soon as one of the bags had appeared in the Commons, the tyranny of the Tudor king was immediately recalled, as one member asserted, ‘From the time of Henry VIII downwards it had not been the custom of Parliament to interfere with the Queen of England.’69 The next day Henry Brougham, Caroline’s Whig lawyer, argued that such an enquiry must be open to public scrutiny as a secret committee was a departure from the normal practices of law. Against the advice of his ministers, George IV insisted upon the Parliament introducing a Bill of Pain and Penalties to allow him to divorce his wife. The bill was a constitutional device utilized by the King to convict the Queen of treason and ‘avoid recourse to the normal courts of the land by calling into play the high court of Parliament’.70 This measure essentially allowed the Queen to be tried by both houses of Parliament. Such a step was not without precedent. Henry VIII had introduced a similar bill when he sought to divest himself of his fifth wife Katherine Howard, a fact Caroline referred to in a letter she wrote to George IV on 7 August 1820.71 Such bills were generally employed when the Crown preferred ‘to avoid bringing a defendant to trial at common law’ and ‘allowed prosecution when evidence against the accused might be doubtful, when the Crown preferred that it not be made public, or when the offense did not seem to fall within existing treason laws’.72 In Caroline’s case, the bill was used primarily so that counter-charges could not be made against the King. It also allowed the impression that it was the government and not the King who was prosecuting the Queen, although, as Caroline alluded in a letter to George, Whatever may be the precedent as to the Bills of Pains and Penalties, none of them, except those relating to the Queen of Henry Eight, can apply here:  for here your Majesty is the Plaintiff. Here it is intended by the Bill to do what you deem good and to do me great harm. You are therefore a party, and the only complaining party.73

The decision to proceed with the Bill of Pain and Penalties, coming as it did on the heels of the Peterloo Massacre and a series of highly unpopular treason trials, ensured that Caroline’s ‘trial’ provided both an opportunity for the ‘ridicule of constituted authority’ and to challenge the ‘moral authority’ of the Crown.74 Many in England believed that ‘the government would present lies and half-truths in its case, and that the witnesses against the Queen would be government hirelings, cast in the same mold as government spies’. The secrecy surrounding the preparations

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for the presentation of the Bill of Pains and Penalties to the House of Lords was easily represented by radicals as the work of a despotic government.75 Caroline’s persecution became emblematic of all persecutions undertaken by the government. Radicals claimed that in defending the Queen’s liberties, they were merely defending their own. As Thomas W. Laqueur has observed, ‘the effort to create a crime and affix a penalty retroactively, as the House of Lords was doing in the Queen’s case, was seen as another example, of “the absurd claim to omnipotence” by those who sit in the seats which “ought to be filled by the Representatives of the Nation” ’.76 Thus the ‘honor of the Queen’ was linked directly with the constitutional rights of the people, and the King’s tyranny to the treatment of his wife.77

Anne Boleyn as ‘short-lived queen’ Both Aikin and Benger wrote their histories in ways that allowed contemporary readers to draw analogies between the tyrannies of the past and those of the present. Such analogies were referenced by Queen Caroline when she came to trial. On the first day of her trial Caroline assumed a sixteenth-century neckline and veil of mourning, signifying her empathetic identification with murdered queens from the Tudor period.78 While such costuming explicitly connected the medieval romance of chivalry evoked by her supporters with the queens of Henry VIII, particularly Anne Boleyn, it also suggested their possible shared fate. Her lawyer Henry Brougham made allusions to Anne Boleyn’s fate, too, when pleading the Queen’s case. Unconvinced of Caroline’s innocence on the charges of adultery, Brougham instead chose to focus on the dubious nature of the prosecution. The King was effectively utilizing a private law to prosecute a single individual, Brougham argued, which was unknown in the history of English jurisprudence. In Brougham’s opinion, George IV’s prosecution of his wife was even more legally questionable than the laws of matrimonial treason created specifically to try Anne Boleyn. Such laws, according to Brougham, were ‘regular consistent and judicial’ when compared with this Bill of Pains and Penalties. Brougham maintained that Caroline’s trial could readily ‘be compared or assimilated to prosecutions and trials in periods long gone by’, and that the reign of Henry VIII bore in ‘some features, no distant similarity . . . to the present’.79 Whereas Aikin had used memoir as a way to protect herself from any suggestion that she was commenting on contemporary politics, Benger sought explicitly to dissociate the England she was writing about with ‘modern’ England. At a time when the Queen’s defence readily alluded to the similarities

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between the treatment of Queen Caroline and Anne Boleyn, Benger asserted at the beginning of her study that Anne’s life offered an illustration of earlier times, in which we discover rather a foreign than familiar aspect; features strange to our sympathies, and repulsive to our conceptions of the English character. In contemplating this antiquated portraiture of our country, we are admonished, by certain internal feelings, of the immeasurable distance between us.80

Such a statement lent itself to a duplicitous reading, as it was likely addressed to an audience who shared Benger’s beliefs pertaining to the ‘inseparable connection between the interests of morality and the cause of civil and religious freedom’.81 While Benger was clearly here articulating the political agenda of Dissent since at least the failure of the Corporation and Test Acts in the 1790s, she was also signalling to the present crisis and the need to resist tyranny in all its manifestations. For, as she opined, ‘In condemning the hypocrisy and cruelty of the monarch, it is impossible not to stigmatize the corruption and baseness of the people; and if the despotism of Henry provoke execration, the submission of his subjects must equally excite contempt.’82 Modern critics have tended to characterize Elizabeth Benger’s Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn as anticipating the domesticated version of her life by Victorian women writers such as the Strickland sisters, who presented her as a foremother of the English Reformation.83 While Benger claims in her preface that Anne Boleyn ‘was an early and zealous advocate of the Reformation’, she spends very little time on this aspect of Anne’s life.84 Only eighty of Benger’s nine hundred pages of text are spent on Anne’s reign as queen, the rest being devoted to Henry’s struggles with the Church, his treatment of Catherine of Aragon and his increasing despotism. Benger’s portrayal of the unfortunate Catherine is perhaps more sympathetic than her treatment of Anne Boleyn, though she cannot resist criticizing Catherine’s ‘Papist’ ways. Although her harsh fate at the hands of the capricious tyrant Henry VIII rendered Anne a suitable subject for empathetic historians, she was always an equivocal symbol of Protestant domestic virtue. Even as Anne’s marriage to Henry appeared to herald the Reformation, there was always the unpalatable fact that she had supplanted ‘the unhappy and blameless’ Catherine of Aragon and rendered the child of that earlier union a bastard.85 While Benger certainly depicts Anne as engaging with leading Protestant figures during her courtship and marriage to Henry, it would be wrong to say that she presents Anne’s zeal for ‘reform’ as the only catalyst for her relationship with the king.

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Benger regards Anne’s life as emblematic of the perils of being queen and the vanity of ambition, and thus as an apt case study of a ‘short-lived queen’. What Benger foregrounds in her text are not Anne’s religious motives but rather her poor training at court and how this bred pride and ambition, leading her to aspire to be queen. Unlike later writers who assume that such traits were simply aspects of Anne’s flawed personality, Benger shapes her narrative of Anne’s development as a critique of courtly culture, in terms that suggest more than a passing interest in Macaulay and Wollstonecraft. For Benger, Anne’s fate as a ‘short-lived queen’ was not sealed when she returned to England to take up her place as one of Queen Catherine’s ladies, but many years before when she attended Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor, as she embarked on her own short-lived period of queenship as wife of the French King Louis XII. Benger gives a lengthy description of the entourage that followed Mary to France. Anne’s experience as a maid to Mary Tudor at the court of France has been understood to have contributed to both her rise and fall by her contemporaries and by historians since the nineteenth century.86 Benger, however, describes the very process of being admitted into the royal household as not only the source of the ambition and vanity that would see Anne aspire to be queen but also the key to her destruction. In Benger’s critiques of the rituals of Tudor courtliness, there are clear echoes of Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, as she condemns Anne’s parents for allowing their daughter to emulate her royal mistress. Benger describes the girls attending Mary Tudor as seeking to ‘wear out life in a state of parasitical indulgence’, a phrase that would not seem out of place in Wollstonecraft’s reply to Burke and reflected ideas derived from her radical critique of gallantry.87 Benger’s description of the women attached to the Queen was a searing indictment of aristocratic culture and its pernicious effect upon the condition of women more generally. To be a ‘maid of honour’, according to Benger, was a peculiar mode of servitude which caused women to become ‘ornamental’ rather than ‘useful’ contributors to courtly life. These ‘fair ministers of royalty’ were given ‘neither serious charge, nor weighty responsibility’. It was their ‘business’ to be ‘like nymphs, to encircle the queen’ and ‘to shed around her the ineffable charm of grace and beauty’.88 The education Benger described was ‘perniciously opposed to simplicity and nature’, dedicated as it was to imitating the manners and dress of their mistresses. While parents such as the Boleyns worked hard to find their daughters positions at court, and thus educate them and advance the fortunes of the family, Benger implied that such efforts merely infected young girls ‘with the pride, the vanity and folly of their older associates’. The practices of dissimulation, so savaged by Wollstonecraft in her first Vindication (of the

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Rights of Men, 1790), are described by Benger as the principal lessons learned by girls at court, where they were taught to ‘dispense smiles and favours on real or pretended votaries’. The lessons of gallantry, however, did not necessarily bring honour or virtue as might be expected, but rather this emulation of aristocratic womanhood taught girls like Anne to ‘envy the distinctions conferred’ upon their mistresses and ‘to sigh for the sovereignty conceded to peerless beauty’.89 What Wollstonecraft had claimed about the culture of gallantry at court, Benger demonstrated with a historical example that was perfectly suited to illustrate the fate of women who chose the power erotic guile as ‘short-lived queens’ over the quiet dignity of being rational wives and industrious mothers. Anne Boleyn, as described by Benger, is a woman who realized the fantasy of being queen, but for whom this fantasy proved to be fatal. Wollstonecraft had argued that it was the desire to be queens that made women vulnerable to men who treated them as merely sexual beings and vectors for reproducing male heirs. In Benger’s recount of Anne’s life, she reanimated Wollstonecraft’s discussion of the enervating effects of middle-class women seeking to emulate the behaviour of the aristocracy. Anne’s enslavement to beauty and courtliness was what rendered her attractive to the King. But it was also that which ensured she was imprisoned by her own carnality, as she failed in the production of a healthy male heir, that quintessential biological imperative of the queen consort. Anne’s life represented not merely a morality tale of the reversal of fortune as it had done since the sixteenth century, but in Benger’s account of her life, Anne’s fate was sealed by her education at court and her desire to be ‘queen’. Benger connected the critiques of courtly society with concerns raised by women supporters of Queen Caroline who aligned radical protests against the ‘old corruption’ with concerns around ‘the fragility of marriage, and the inequality of men and women before the law’.90 This connection between men’s behaviour towards women and their political behaviour also hearkened back to the politics of the 1790s, when Wollstonecraft explicitly rejected Burke’s defence of chivalry. ‘Gallantry’ was at the core of men’s oppression of women, but Wollstonecraft had also connected this sexual system with a corrupt system of class relations that ultimately functioned to eroticize men’s submission to their king. Whereas Aikin had highlighted Henry’s desire to marry Anne Boleyn, Benger focused on his desire to divorce his first wife. Both portrayals of Henry VIII engaged in an extensive critique of the relation between men’s treatment of women and political tyranny. Both looked to the past to create understanding of contemporary events, drawing a message from history, condemning the wickedness of tyrants and warning of the dangers of acceding to despotism.

5

The ‘Acquittal’ of Queen Caroline: Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Queens as Political Dissent

In mid-1821 Mary Hays, Rational Dissenter and feminist radical, published her last work, Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated. Written in the wake of the crisis in English politics provoked by the trial of Queen Caroline, Hays’s text included a political biography of George IV’s erstwhile bride. Hays’s foray into collective royal memoir has until recently been overlooked by literary critics, who have judged Memoirs of Queens as evidence of her retrograde politics in the final years of her life. Although the Queen Caroline ‘affair’ has been acknowledged as a watershed moment in radical politics in Britain, neither historians of the period nor literary critics have explored this as the context for Hays’s return to the political vanguard. While women participated in protests against the trial and sought to influence the outcome through their petitioning, few defended the Queen publicly, especially in the months following her ‘acquittal’.1 Published in the wake of the Queen’s trial, Hays’s biography of Caroline passionately refuted the charges laid against her and contained a vehement denunciation of George IV.2 Unlike other female petitioners who insisted upon the Queen’s innocence, Hays presented Caroline as a sexually wronged woman and railed against the double standard of morality that was sanctioned by the Crown. Although Memoirs of Queens is arguably her most defiant and explicitly political work, it has rarely been considered in the context of English politics, much less English political history. Hays’s engagement with politics has been largely understood in relation to that of Mary Wollstonecraft’s and William Godwin’s, and this has obscured the distinctiveness and longevity of her radicalism.3 Hays’s experience of the repression of the 1790s was, however, intense and sexualized. In this way it differed from Wollstonecraft’s, who had died in 1796 and had not experienced the virulently misogynistic repression that Hays had been subjected to at the end of the century. Hays was savaged by the anti-Jacobin press and her enemies generated an image of an ignorant and

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sexually starved spinster who preyed upon the young men of her circle, ‘a Thing, ugly and petticoated’, to use Coleridge’s much quoted description.4 The apparent disparity between her sexual politics and her sexual attraction has ensured that, since the 1790s, critics have presented her life as an ‘erotic soap opera’ and Hays as ‘Rousseau’s Julie in burlesque’.5 While this experience may have caused Hays to retreat from public view in the early nineteenth century, it did not silence her but, as shall be argued here, sharpened her critique of the Burkean sexual politics that she had rejected in the 1790s. Most critics have treated the works of history and biography Hays produced after Wollstonecraft’s death as demonstrating a conservative shift in her politics.6 As a consequence, both her Female Biography and Memoirs of Queens have been read as early examples of the mostly plagiarized collections of ‘women worthies’ that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century.7 It has been assumed that both works share the generic quality of Victorian collective biographies of women; their more radical and original features have been ignored.8 In this context, Memoirs of Queens has been read as an early attempt to codify acceptable feminine behaviour through biography rather than as a radical intervention into the sexual politics of the Regency.9 This chapter will offer a contrary view, arguing that Hays’s production of Memoirs of Queens at a time when England’s queen consort was threatening national stability should be considered a serious act of political radicalism. It will also read Memoirs of Queens as a generically innovative text that challenged traditional models of English political history. As has been previously discussed, depicting queen consorts as threatening to national stability and good government was an entrenched feature of English historiography. While presented occasionally as victims to garner sympathy (as in the case of Mary Stuart), for the most part queen consorts were presented as obnoxious foreigners blamed for the introduction of un-English religion and practices and threatening to usurp the masculine authority of the Crown (Henrietta Maria, Mary of Modena, Catherine of Braganza and even the virtuous Queen Charlotte, consort of George III).10 In Whig historical writing and political tracts, the power of queen consorts was presented as ‘petticoat influence’, a concept that trivialized and eroticized their role and denied them serious influence upon matters of state. While Hays acknowledged that queens often had reputations for ‘levity’ or for using their erotic guile to sway politics, she argued that such ideas were not based on fact but rather formed by ‘faction’. Throughout her works, Hays challenged the male-authored historical record, aware from her own experience how easy it was for men to traduce women for being women. Hays accepted

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female rule and influence as politically significant to the nation. This acceptance, indeed celebration, of female power, in and of itself, challenged Whig orthodoxy. Given the impetus to produce this work that came with the tribulations of Queen Caroline, she emphasized the marital difficulties of many of the queens whose lives she recorded in this final work. In Hays’s Memoirs, the suffering of queens gave them dignity and substance, producing a distinctly different image of the role of queen. Such an image was more akin to the sympathetic portraits produced by French women writers in the eighteenth century than those found in Whig political discourse and historiography. Hays drew upon numerous French sources for her lives and, like Aikin, derived her generic innovation from earlier French models. Through her depiction of the trials of Queen Caroline, and other ill-fated queens such as Marie Antoinette, Hays critiqued the patriarchal laws and institutions that oppressed women and shaped their historical representation. In Hays’s text, consorts are treated as objects of exchange in male power plays and frequently the victims of dynastic politics or ‘party rage’. Such ideas were shaped by her experience of anti-Jacobin politics in the 1790s and its revival in the aftermath of Queen Caroline’s aborted trial.

Collective biography as dissent Hays politics were not formed by the rise of bourgeois domesticity that produced Victorian feminism but rather in the crucible of Enlightenment radicalism and religious dissent. It is therefore important to read both Memoirs of Queens and Female Biography through the lens of Hays’s political and religious beliefs rather than as a proto-Victorian text. While she was undoubtedly influenced by the politics of Mary Wollstonecraft, she did not slavishly follow her example and was unafraid to critique her politics. Hays was first and foremost a Rational Dissenter, and both her works of collective biography owed much to earlier models of biographical dictionaries produced by Dissenting pedagogues such as Andrew Kippis, Joseph Towers and John Aikin (father of Aikin Lucy). Such works were a significant element of the intellectual and pedagogical culture of Enlightenment Dissent, drawing on French Protestant traditions established in the seventeenth century by Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697). Bayle’s influence gave these Dissenting collections a radical edge. Following Bayle, Dissenting scholars used their collections as vehicles for exploring tolerance, seeking to ‘rise above narrow prejudices, and to record, with fidelity and freedom, the virtues and vices, the excellencies and defects of

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men of every profession and party’.11 Unlike later models of collective biography that were fairly generic and frequently plagiarized, works such as the Biographia Britannica (1747–1793) and the General Biography (1815) were made up of detailed scholarship. Their authors were committed to the Baylean process of ‘applying facts to valuable purposes’ and inserted nonconforming lives into the national imaginary.12 Through their inclusion of more marginal figures, such volumes contested the dominant Whig paradigms that framed English history in ways that sometimes bothered men of the established Church.13 Men such as Kippis certainly cited Bayle as highly influential, but they nonetheless rejected ‘his skepticism and licentiousness’.14 The desire to present lives worthy of emulation sometimes conflicted with the application of Baylean critical method to the scrutiny of historical sources, creating tensions in the text, and often made the enterprise of producing such monumental collections difficult to sustain.15 Until Hays produced Female Biography in 1803, ‘heterogeneous, women-only biography’ largely consisted ‘of men’s listing of the names of great women who should not be forgotten’.16 George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, published in 1752, was the first major collection to study ‘learned ladies’ and was long regarded as the most significant source of biographical information for women in England for at least two centuries.17 While Ballard’s text was unique in its focus on women’s knowledge, his subjects were nonetheless always virtuous and usually ‘respectable and pious . . . martyrs of the Church or staunch Anglicans’.18 Hays’s collective biographies were markedly different from both earlier and contemporary dictionaries of female biography; they did not focus on the exemplary life but rather upon ‘history and the judgments it involves’.19 Like other Dissenting biographers, Hays claimed to be ‘[U]nconnected with any party’ and was disdainful of ‘every species of bigotry’, including women of many sects and races, in her collection.20 Yet she did not merely imitate the dictionary form but rather developed her own hybrid model; as Harriet Guest reminds us, Hays effectively abandoned the dictionary structure.21 The lives of several queens (Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart and Catherine II of Russia) take up ‘a substantial proportion’ of the six volumes of Female Biography. Imbalance of length and cohesiveness was a feature of the Biographica Britannica too, but this was due to its method of publication via subscription. That project grew increasingly cumbersome as entries were revised and supplemented and then re-supplemented.22 Hays’s extensive entries on queens, however, reflected her long-standing interest in the royal life as a feminist historical subject.23 Hays’s engagement with this genre was perhaps even more radical than that of her male contemporaries. She was certainly less concerned about

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Bayle’s scepticism and licentiousness. As is amply evidenced by the footnotes in Female Biography, she plundered Bayle’s Dictionnaire and imitated his method. Following Bayle, Hays’s compilations involved more than merely ‘copying’ other sources: rather, she used her examination of a life to explore questions pertaining to the ‘sexual distinction’ and to query the male-authored sources she was forced to rely upon. Her method is clearly evidenced in her ‘original’ biographies, the first of which was her life of Mary Wollstonecraft, which she published in the Annual Necrology of 1800.24 While much of Hays’s text was derived from Godwin’s Memoirs, her account differed from his at several key points, reflecting a desire on her part to contest his narrative and to question his authority.25 She was similarly motivated to question masculinist representations of women’s lives in her other works of collective biography. She certainly questioned Bayle’s judgement on particular women, illuminating how masculinist prejudices may have shaped the historical record.26 Unlike male biographers who treated their subjects as extraordinary women endowed with masculine spirit, Hays foregrounded the femininity of her subjects, documenting their rise to prominence while also demonstrating the civil and moral disadvantages that impinged upon their existence. Like other Dissenting writers, Hays used her works of collective biography to explore questions of tolerance. For Hays, however, tolerance did not merely mean religious or political tolerance but also sexual tolerance – that is, that the same standards of morality should apply to both men and women. Here Hays drew on the works of Dissenting French theologians such as Jacques Saurin, whose sermon on ‘[T]he Repentance of the Unchaste Woman’, Gina Luria Walker suggests, influenced Hays’s views on sexual morality. Her familiarity with Saurin’s work, Walker argues, ‘provides some explanation for her early and continued rebellion against the historical commandment that chastity is the pre-eminent virtue for women’.27 Through Saurin, Hays developed her own theological position on female sexuality that connected ‘the moral struggle against intolerance with the constraints imposed on women because of men’s ignorance of female experience’.28 She argued in her private correspondence and in her political writings that the ‘sexual distinction’ respecting chastity was the most ‘fruitful source of the greater part of the infelicity and corruption of society’.29 She used her biographies to explore the lineaments of male prejudice and how the ‘sexual distinction’ constrained and defined women’s lives, always with a view to presenting alternative explanations for women’s unconventional sexual morality.30 That Hays came out of retirement to condemn the sexual double standard during the Queen Caroline ‘affair’ owes much to her expanded notion of ‘universal toleration’.31 Her graphic portrayal of Caroline of Brunswick

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as a sexually wronged woman can be traced to the early influence of Saurin, but it also reflects Hays’s firmly held belief in the right of a woman to an erotic life.32

The Queen’s ‘acquittal’ Until recently, Memoirs of Queens had been read as an even more politically retrograde text than Female Biography. This positioning of the Memoirs fits neatly into the trajectory of Hays’s post-Wollstonecraftian career, devised by early critics who could not imagine that she had developed a radical politics of her own. Such critics view Hays as a mere cypher, characterizing the first phase of her career as committed to ‘revolutionary feminism’ under the spell of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and then by a repudiation of radical politics following Wollstonecraft’s death.33 Until recently, modern scholars have followed this trajectory, reading Hays’s oeuvre as a transition from ‘thinly disguised and ardent autobiography’ to ‘rather generic biographies’.34 In so doing, they have ignored the distinctiveness and the complexity of her engagement with lifewriting and echo the uncritical conflation of Hays’s life with her work by her eighteenth-century critics and enemies. The few critics that have suggested that Hays’s Memoirs recalled ‘the place of women in the Revolution debate inaugurated by Burke’ do not delve into the complicated ways in which Burke’s celebration of the culture of chivalry was reanimated during the Queen Caroline Affair.35 Yet, as has been demonstrated in the previous chapter, the persecution of Queen Caroline by George IV had revived and subverted the Burkean sexual politics of the 1790s. The failure to connect the Memoirs with the post-trial politics of the period reflects the abbreviated history of the Queen Caroline ‘affair’. The brief period between Caroline’s ‘acquittal’ and her sudden death has received little scholarly notice.36 As a consequence, scant attention has been paid to the vicious rearguard action launched by the government and supporters of the King against the Queen. This campaign erupted when her trial was aborted in November 1820, thwarting the King’s attempt at divorce and allowing Caroline to remain queen. The trial of Queen Caroline had taken three months, during which time an ‘overwhelming’ amount of evidence of her unconventional sexual mores was presented to the House of Lords.37 When the final vote in the Lords was taken, the bill passed by a majority of only nine. This was neither the mandate for divorce anticipated by the King nor the resounding determination of her innocence hoped for by the Queen. Fearful of the public reaction to such an equivocal result, Lord Liverpool

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immediately withdrew the bill and it was not forced through the Commons. The Queen had not been acquitted but the proceedings against her had stalled. The accusations against her moral character stood ‘confirmed by a positive if small majority of peers and corroborated . . . by the witnesses she had called in her own defense’.38 She remained the queen, however, much to the chagrin of the King and the despair of his ministers. The campaign to defend the King following the end of the Queen’s trial generated an atmosphere that threw into doubt the respectability of any woman who supported Caroline.39 If radicals had adopted Burke before her trial, he was entirely re-appropriated by the King’s cronies in the days after the Queen’s ‘acquittal’. This evocation of Burke did not ensure the honour or protection of the Queen. Instead, the King’s supporters sifted through the evidence of the trial in order to retry the Queen in the press and to broadcast her guilt in the avalanche of political pornography that flooded London in the months leading up to the coronation.

The King’s chief defender John Wilson Croker’s early reviewing for the Quarterly Review had been characterized by a misogynist approach towards women who dared to write on politics in England or the war with France. This virulent tendency in his reviewing undoubtedly stifled women’s writing and, as has been suggested in the previous chapter, shaped their subversive engagement in the politics of Dissent. During the Queen Caroline ‘affair’, Croker’s hostility towards women found further expression in his campaign to defend the King and to preserve the sexual double standard that characterized aristocratic morality. From the moment Caroline attempted to return to England, Croker became the King’s chief damage controller. It had been Croker who had put forward the argument that allowed that the Queen’s name be struck from the liturgy. While the King’s concerns regarding the liturgy were driven by ‘propriety and expediency’, Croker’s arguments in its favour revealed what was truly at stake. He advised the King that if Caroline ‘was fit to be introduced as Queen to God she was fit to introduce to men . . . if we are to pray for her in Church we may surely bow to her in court’. Praying for Caroline would throw ‘sanctity round her’. Croker accurately predicted that Caroline would become ‘Saint Caroline’ to her supporters and, once sanctified, ‘the good and pious people of this country will never afterwards bear to have [that sanctity] withdrawn’.40 Croker understood that the moral and

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religious implications of praying for the Queen would impact upon any legal case that might be brought against her. He argued that her inclusion in the liturgy would be ‘a final settlement of all questions in her favour’.41 Croker maintained that the King had no option but to take such an action as he had been presented ‘with the existence of a prima facie case, of gross and long continued adultery, alleged to be committed by the Princess of Wales, now de jure the Queen’.42 By insisting upon this most public of humiliations, Croker’s deliberately provocative act signalled the presumption of the Queen’s guilt. By removing her name from the liturgy, it appeared that Queen Caroline had been condemned in advance. Indeed, certain observers claimed that such an action, taken before her trial, was ‘tantamount to ecclesiastical excommunication’.43 The removal of Caroline’s name from the liturgy split the established Church. Many of its members withdrew from its services as they viewed this as an ‘illegal and vindictive mandate’.44 The Queen’s supporters petitioned Parliament in July 1820, claiming that the bill ‘had introduced nothing but confusion in divine service, and excited unbound disgust throughout the country’.45 In many of the tracts they produced in the Queen’s defence, radicals mocked the new King’s hypocrisy on this point. The hypocrisy of the gesture undoubtedly incensed Hays too, who refers to the King’s frequent adulteries throughout her life of Caroline. Dissenters such as Hays were free to act upon their conscience and could offer prayers for the Queen if they believed it was their duty. As a Dissenter, she may also have feared that the trial of the Queen would precipitate a religious and political crisis and again engulf the nation in civil unrest, as it had during the time of Henry VIII. Croker believed it was his duty to restore public sympathy and faith in the Crown. With the authority of George IV, he produced a Letter from the King to His People, a splendid piece of political propaganda that ran through twentyeight editions before the Queen’s death in August 1821.46 In this Letter, Croker penned a revisionary history of England since the 1790s, in which the French Revolution and the rise of radicalism in Britain were cited as the true cause of the problems in the Brunswick–Hanover marriage. Just as Burke had presented Marie Antoinette as an innocent victim of revolutionary politics, Croker painted George IV as the hapless victim of circumstance, a prince pressed into service of a country in crisis and forced into an expedient but loveless marriage.47 The purpose of the Letter, however, was to destroy the evidence of Caroline’s persecution that had circulated since the first days of her marriage. Croker systematically worked through each episode of Caroline’s alleged victimization, always offering ‘proof ’ of her wrongdoing as the instigating factor. This was a

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serious effort to minimize reputational damage on Croker’s part, as the trial of the Queen had also effectively put the King on trial too. The suggestion that the Prince of Wales had ended his marriage to the Princess because of a lack of ‘inclination’ of his part had, since 1796, won Caroline much sympathy and seriously damaged George’s standing.48 Caroline’s marital experience had been depicted in the language and tropes of gothic fiction in the secret histories and political pornography that abounded during the Regency. This found a ready audience among readers already stressed by the social and political upheavals of the period.49 During the campaign leading up to her trial, the Prince’s abandonment of his wife was frequently referenced to demonstrate his complete dereliction of duties, especially as Caroline’s unconventional behaviour on the Continent became widely broadcast. In this context, the failure of George IV ‘to honour his marriage vows’ and establish a harmonious household was not regarded as simply a ‘private failure’.50 Radicals drew a connection between the King’s private affairs and his lack of competence for good government, readily conflating a capacity for sexual tyranny with his support for ministerial oppression. When George became king, such charges had graver implications, especially his inability to ‘husband’ his wife, as it cast ‘doubt on his ability to discharge his public duties, and reflect[ed] poorly on his underlying character’.51 In the Letter, Croker made the ambiguous claim that the ‘virtual dissolution’ of the royal marriage occurred with its consummation.52 Such an assertion did more than simply imply a lack of chastity on the part of Caroline. It an assertion the King to recover his patriarchal privilege and absolved him of all his subsequent adulteries. Croker’s revelations made Caroline’s chief line of defence invalid, negating claims that the King had abandoned her and exposed her to the difficulties and temptations she had faced since their separation. This not only damaged Caroline’s reputation but also effectively weakened all her claims of victimization by making George more sinned against than sinning.53 Focusing his history on the wronged Prince of Wales, rather than the aggrieved Princess, enabled Croker to reverse the concerns of middle-class moralists that the Prince’s dereliction of his duties towards his wife was the cause of any misdeeds on her part. It also allowed him to claim that it was Caroline herself who was responsible for the lax morality of the times. Thus, in Croker’s version, it was the Princess alone who was to blame for the decadence of the period. In his Letter, Croker invoked Burke, asking all men to empathetically identify with the fate of the King of England. Just as Burke had bourgeoisified the monarchy through his depiction of Marie Antoinette in a domestic setting, Croker asked his readers to imagine the King and Queen as any other married couple. He

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asked on the King’s behalf ‘In private life ‘what would the friends of a married couple, so long divided as the Queen and myself have been, think of the conduct of a wife, who would wish to return to her husband, under circumstances such as they have been between us?’54 By casting George IV as victimized husband, not as King, Croker appealed to the men of Britain to maintain the double standard of morality, plaintively pleading, ‘Would any husband in England take back such a wife? If he would not, why should your King? If the female would not so return, why should the Queen?’55

The veil of modesty Edmund Burke had represented the invasion of Marie Antoinette’s boudoir as emblematic of the worst excesses of the French Revolution and eloquently mourned the veil of modesty this had torn away from the monarchy.56 With disturbing prescience he had predicted that the queen, stripped of her majesty, would ‘fall’ quickly from queen to woman, from woman to animal, and then to ‘an animal not of the highest order’.57 Such a prediction reflected Burke’s dubious and contradictory understanding of the relation between femininity and chivalry. Burke was fascinated with the codes, manners, customs and costumes and believed that such apparel guaranteed both femininity and society. Yet, as Tom Furniss has observed, the irony for Burke is that it is exactly such regalia that render femininity and society most vulnerable.58 Exposed figuratively and literally during her trial, Caroline was no longer protected by her rank, if indeed she had ever been. Croker’s first literary efforts had been in the Anti-Jacobin press, so he effectively revived those misogynist tactics in the vicious rearguard action he orchestrated against the Queen.59 Caroline was thus subject to similar pornographic attacks as those experienced by Marie Antoinette and then by women such as Hays during the 1790s, amply demonstrating that women were subject to the same misogynistic representation regardless of their politics. Aware that her ‘acquittal’ could suggest the Queen’s innocence, Croker put together a stable of writers who churned out pamphlets, poems and secret histories with the specific intention of destroying what remained of Caroline’s reputation. These works revisited the frequently comic evidence that had been presented before the Lords, often in quite explicit detail. With the collusion of the government, several collections of these tracts were brought together, to remind the public of the principal allegations against Caroline.60 Following Croker, his cronies refuted point by point every assertion of the Queen’s

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innocence that had been made by her supporters. Due to the fiction of its authorship, and for decorum’s sake, Croker had exercised some discretion in his Letter from the King. His followers, however, left no doubt as to the behaviour to which he alluded. In such materials, the sexual double standard was not merely upheld, it was positively celebrated and the veil of modesty violently rent asunder. Thomas Harral, editor of the Court Journal, suggested that George IV’s considerable experience with women gave him good cause to exit the marital bed after the first night, as he would be aware that the Queen’s ‘coarse, forward, and revoltingly indecorous . . . manner’ was not that to which he was usually accustomed. ‘Under circumstances like these’, Harral surmised, ‘no surprise would be excited at his conception of disgust.’61 The John Bull, a scurrilous rag sponsored by Croker, made similar accusations, claiming that the Queen was ‘hoaxing very early in life, long before her marriage’.62 Due to its enormous readership, the John Bull popularized scandalous rumours about the Queen.63 According to Grantley F. Berkeley, the John Bull ‘did more towards re-establishing a feeling of loyalty in the public mind, than hundreds of Bills of Pains and Penalties could have done’.64 More than any other vehicle, it rendered ridiculous Caroline’s claims of innocence and returned support to the King’s cause. As in the numerous pamphlets written in defence of the King, the John Bull revealed all that could be known of the Queen’s peccadillos.65 The Queen’s reputation was not, however, the only reputation assailed by the John Bull. The paper publicly named the wives of Whig grandees who had visited the Queen, while also besmirching their reputation. Using the pretext that such women had come forward to ‘vouch for the Queen’s purity’, the John Bull announced that it would ‘enquire into the value of their evidence, and the motives which have induced them to distinguish themselves in this marked and indelicate manner from all other women of England’.66 Such an excuse gave the editors license to publish various secrets about such women, including the scandalous claim that the wife of the Queen’s Whig lawyer Henry Brougham had given birth to a baby less than nine months after her marriage. Brougham later recorded that the John Bull’s practice of attacking ‘every woman of rank’ who supported the Queen alarmed her Whig allies so greatly as to ‘influence their votes in both houses’.67 Threatened with such scrutiny, few women continued to brave visits to the Queen, and this further diminished Caroline’s position.68 In the welter of pornographic propaganda that emerged in the wake of the trial, the King’s supporters particularly parodied the Queen’s relationship with her major-domo Bartolomeo Pergami, depicting her in various states of undress with her swarthy Italian lover. Caroline’s habit of corresponding almost daily

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with Pergami was mocked by Croker’s writers who penned numerous satirical epistles in their names, lavishly illustrated and full of double entendre, innuendo and sexual punning.69 In such works, this relationship was dissected and the social and gendered inversion that it entailed openly mocked. Illustrating some of the more scandalous evidence taken from witnesses at the trial, these wicked epistles and satirical poems brought such materials to a broader audience. Much was made of Caroline’s physical shortcomings. Indeed, like her husband, she proved an easy target for caricaturists. Both were mocked for their drunkenness, profligacy and gluttony, although, in Caroline’s case, her lack of desirability was emphasized, further enhancing the theme of gendered inversion that was characteristic of these texts. Radicals had mocked the foreignness of the Italian witnesses at the Queen’s trial, declaring them spies, informers and ‘midnight assassins’.70 Supporters of the King played upon similar concerns, accusing Caroline of converting to Catholicism while in Italy and adopting the dress and habits of the Turks.71 Such accusations played upon long-standing English anxieties around the threat posed by foreign queen consorts. As in earlier political polemicizing around such anxieties, the King’s supporters conflated her sexual laxity with her capacity for treason. If George’s hypocrisy had been highlighted by radicals prior to the trial, Caroline’s hypocrisy was now targeted. Her appearance at St Paul Cathedral, dressed in white to symbolize her innocence, was particularly satirized.72 The association with Catholicism connected Caroline to other hated foreign queens and rendered hypocritical her concerns about being cut out of the Anglican liturgy. It also countered radical charges against the King regarding his morganatic wife, Maria Fitzherbert. If the necessary drapery of life had ever protected Caroline, it was now torn asunder, exposing the monarchy and the aristocracy to further disrepute. The dubious sexual politics of gallantry, so condemned by Wollstonecraft in the 1790s, were thoroughly revived and used to destroy Caroline and her female supporters. If Burke had been invoked by radicals in the days before Caroline’s acquittal, after her trial he was entirely re-appropriated by Croker and his conservative allies in their attack upon the Queen. But this recall of Burke was contradictory as it unsettled his contention that the queen was owed a ‘generous loyalty’ due to her rank and sex. Supporters of the King clearly regarded Queen Caroline as undeserving of the usual honours of rank and sex attendant upon a queen, and they couched their disrespect for her in language they borrowed directly from the Anti-Jacobin press of the 1790s. Paradox characterized proKing pamphlets of the period, as his supporters sought to uphold the majesty of

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the monarchy while simultaneously destroying the character of the Queen.73 In the face of these revelations, the homage Burke insisted was owed all women – but especially queens  – proved false, as Wollstonecraft had contended long before. In her last months the Queen, her reputation indelibly sullied, was left friendless and unprotected until her timely death in August 1821.

The ghost of Marie Antoinette If Marie Antoinette had been a spectral presence in Wollstonecraft’s Maria, her ghost haunted women’s historical writings throughout the Romantic period. Marie Antoinette’s martyred status was a reminder not only of the shared trauma of the revolutionary period but also that all women, even queens, were subject to the harshest strictures of patriarchal institutions and the full force of hegemonic misogynist violence.74 Mary Hays presented a lengthy study of Marie Antoinette in her Memoirs of Queens, and her image was one of the four queens depicted on the frontispiece that surrounded the embattled Caroline. Hays’s emphasis in the Memoirs was to demonstrate with historical example how the ‘sexual distinction’ and the prejudices of men impinged upon the lives of all women, regardless of their rank. As she opined in the preface, ‘[T]he throne itself, with but few exceptions, secures not woman from the peculiar disadvantages that have hitherto attended her sex.’75 Hays’s life of Marie Antoinette presented a highly sympathetic portrait of the French queen based on French sources and contested the image of her found in both Burke and Wollstonecraft. Following Madame de Stäel’s presentation of the Queen in Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (1818), Hays connected the treatment of Marie Antoinette with the misogynistic violence experienced by all women at the hands of men regardless of their politics. For de Stäel, the vilification and murder of the Queen had little to do with any real ‘crimes’. Instead, her treatment at the hands of revolutionary men demonstrated their concern to rid all women entirely from the public sphere – indeed, to ensure that politics was exclusively masculine.76 Hays’s study of Marie Antoinette made a similar argument:  that male revolutionaries scapegoated Marie Antoinette because she was a woman and that her crimes had been manufactured as a means to undercut the manly authority of the Crown. Hays’s Marie Antoinette was a ‘victim of faction’ rather than an agent of courtly corruption, a theme she embellished in her study of Caroline. Hays too had been the victim of male-authored scandal and, like de Stäel, understood how easy it was for men to traduce women’s

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reputations, especially women who ventured into the public sphere. Much of Hays’s life of Marie Antoinette was compiled to directly contradict the image of the French queen that had proliferated in England since the time of the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’. Whereas such sources, including Wollstonecraft, viewed Marie Antoinette in the same light as Louis XV’s mistresses, Hays suggested that she had been chosen as Louis XVI’s consort to counterbalance the baneful influence of Madame du Barry.77 Madame du Barry, as Sara Maza has observed, carried the suggestion of ‘pollution and disorder to the centre of political power’, and the association with her has been traced as the source of many accusations against Marie Antoinette.78 Whereas Burke had made Marie Antoinette a passive victim of the revolution, following de Stäel’s version of the famous scene at Versailles, Hays gave her great agency in her adversity, highlighting her courage and her resilience. Hays’s Marie Antoinette does not cower on her bed passively awaiting rapists and brigands; rather, she stoically faces the crowd. Hays records, ‘[H]er intrepidity extorted admiration, and Vive la reine! Burst spontaneously from the multitude.’79 Hays’s depiction of Marie Antoinette, then, thus differed from both Wollstonecraft’s and Burke’s. She neither accepted that the Queen was responsible for the revolutionary violence that she suffered nor does she regard her as a passive victim of the violation she experienced. Marie Antoinette, Hays records, was ultimately a victim of male violence because she was a woman, ‘for woman is ever attacked on what usages of society have made of her most vulnerable side’.80 Hays sought to promote connection between Marie Antoinette and Queen Caroline, who, like the French queen, had been accused of a ‘dereliction of chastity, of a breach of her marriage vows’ and was being subjected to a trial rigged against her.81 More radically, however, Hays moved beyond the politics of Wollstonecraft to argue that Queen Caroline and Marie Antoinette were both victims of faction, sacrificed to the political whims of men. Indeed, some of Hays’s comments on the politics of representation around Marie Antoinette may signal a subtle dismissal of Wollstonecraft, who had presented an image of the French queen informed by the vitriolic pornographic politics of the period.

Victim of faction Hays’s life of Caroline was one of the longest entries in the Memoirs and the only study of a living queen. It was also the only political biography of Queen Caroline to be produced during her lifetime. Like earlier queen consorts,

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Caroline was the subject of secret histories while she lived and eulogiums upon her death.82 Hays’s study of Caroline was designed not only to counter the image of her that had been generated by the vicious smear campaign launched by Croker but also to contest the stereotypes of queen consorts she had found in the masculinist historical record. History had important lessons to teach on the perils of political power for women and how queens were all too readily the subject of factionalism at court. As she had written of Marie Antoinette, whose heinous fate was still in living memory, ‘[T]he falsehood, the malignity, the bitterness of party rage is well known; to its calumnies women are more peculiarly exposed; and, therefore, by the candid and the liberal, such will always be listened to with a mixture of indignation and doubt.’83 Although she was writing about Marie Antoinette, such a comment could equally apply to Queen Caroline, Mary Wollstonecraft or indeed Hays herself, whose reputation had been regularly savaged whenever she publicly espoused her own radical version of revolutionary feminism. Hays’s life of Caroline was framed by a critique of the sexual double standard that was the ugly underbelly of the Burkean politics of gallantry. She was aware that the campaign against Caroline would undoubtedly shape the judgements that historians made of the Queen in the future. As Hays observed, only ‘the calm award of posterity’ would allow an objective understanding of her situation, for at the time of writing, such ‘questions . . . are necessarily viewed, on all sides, through the exaggerated medium of party politics, and personal interests and affections’.84 Hays proposed to only focus on the ‘undisputed facts’ of her biography of Caroline. She imputed that many of the ‘facts’ currently aired about the Queen were indeed the subject of dispute and may in time be regarded as mistruths or half-truths, as had been the case for Marie Antoinette. Gary Kelly has suggested that Hays placed Caroline ‘as the last in an historical line of corrupted, degraded and wronged queens stretching back to antiquity’, and that this implies ‘that her own perspective and authority are supra-historical’.85 If Hays draws out the similarities between Caroline and other ill-fated queens, it was as a response to the stereotypical ways in which men have judged such women, particularly in English political polemic since the seventeenth century. Caroline’s life resembles that of other queen consorts because she had been presented in much the same way by male commentators:  as an obnoxious foreigner intent on bringing corrupting ‘un-English’ and immoral practices to court. The politics of faction shaped the historical treatment of queens such as Caroline, just as they had shaped their fate in life. Hays was concerned to ensure that her readership understood that Caroline was as much a victim of ‘party

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rage’ as Marie Antoinette and may be viewed differently when such factionalized politics ceased to be important. While most other radical commentators on the trial had declared Caroline innocent, Hays did not shy away from the more scandalous aspects of the Queen’s life. Instead she constructed Caroline’s marriage to the Prince of Wales as tawdry economic exchange, rendering her more a hapless victim of male economic imperative than a pawn in a dynastic union. Bartered off to ensure that the nation would pay George’s massive debts (some £700,000 to be relieved upon his marriage), she became, in Hays’s words, the ‘contract Princess of Wales’.86 Separated from her husband the day after her marriage, pregnant and alone, Caroline’s fate was depicted by Hays in gothic terms that readily evoked empathy from her readers. Yet she was also careful to demonstrate how to Caroline’s domestic sorrows were added the perils of being a woman at court. In Hays’s study, Caroline was not merely the ‘neglected and contemned wife’; she also had the burden of being shunned from court and exposed to the ignominy of ‘apprehended disfavour’.87 It is the culture of court, promoted by the men of court, rather than women’s erotic guile that Hays described as corrosive and corrupting. While she did not shy away from the more scandalous aspects of Caroline’s life, Hays presented her situation as the result of masculine power plays at court. She railed against the sexual double standard enshrined by the King’s supporters in their campaign against the Queen. She revisited arguments made in the 1790s about the insidious effect of the court on gender relations, but she did not blame women for this; instead, Hays held the King and his courtiers to account. She embodied the corruption of court in the figure of George IV, rather than Caroline, and argued that it was his blatant flaunting of his patriarchal privileges, both as husband and King, that precipitated the current crisis. Underpinning her arguments was a rejection of the questionable moralizing that Croker had used in his Letter from the King. Hays explicitly refuted the suggestion made by Croker that the Queen was responsible for the nation’s moral state. As she argued, Incontinence whether in a man or in a woman, is a moral offence and a violation of the most important branch of temperance, but it carries with it no civil disenfranchisement, and its punishment is left to public opinion, to the usages and customs established in social intercourse, – and heavy enough upon woman does this chastisement fall. If higher virtues are to be expected from queens, on account of the eminence of their station, and the greater importance of their example, the same reasoning, the same rule, surely applies to kings.88

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Hays echoed sentiments made by male radicals before her trial: that whatever Caroline’s sins, it was George’s dereliction of his manly duties that was the cause. In so doing, she made explicit what was implicit in the works of Macaulay and Wollstonecraft and, by masculinizing the corruption of the court system, she did not engender the paradoxical misogyny that characterized their depiction of queens. Hays conflated George IV’s treatment of his wife with his tyranny more generally by associating Caroline with Anne Boleyn. For other radicals, the comparison with Anne Boleyn was meant to signal Caroline’s innocence. For Hays it signalled an example of tyranny not dissimilar to the despotism expected of Henry VIII ‘of wife killing memory’.89 Her reference to Anne Boleyn went beyond merely condemning the King, however, and hearkened back to the misogynist violence made possible by the patriarchal nature of institutions such as the law and the Parliament. Not just the King, all men benefitted from such institutions, just as all women were subject to their injustices. While other radicals had used the Bill of Pain and Penalties as evidence of the King’s growing despotism, Hays made an explicitly feminist critique of the process, suggesting that it was not merely the King but the all-male Parliament that made such processes possible, and which ensured the impossibility of women ever receiving a fair trial.90 Why, a new law was to be made, ex post facto after the alleged commission of the crime. And previously to render condemnation more sure, a private and secret tribunal was to try the cause upon the evidence of accusation only; and thus having prejudged the business, and prejudiced the public mind by a declaration of that pre-judgment, these very men, with their minds biased, were to take their place among the judges to whom the final award was to be referred.91

For Hays, however, Caroline’s innocence or guilt was rather beside the point. As she argued, ‘Catherine of Russia made no pretense to chastity, but she was not less a great sovereign. Our own Elizabeth, our virgin queen of glorious memory, has not on this subject left a fame like unsunned snow’ (her emphasis).92 Like other sexually wronged women whose lives she had studied, Hays presented Caroline as more sinned against than sinning, judging her not by the standards set by men such as Croker, but rather deferring to a higher authority, asking as Jesus had, ‘Who dare here stand up and cast the first stone’.93 This was not a conservative position but rather reflected Hays’s unorthodox position on sexual morality and her long-standing belief in a woman’s right to an erotic life.

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Hays’s text served as a vehicle to defend Queen Caroline against the many calumnies that were broadcast after her trial and which she knew would damage her reputation for posterity. At a time when the spectre of Burke was being revived, Hays used the historical example of ill-fated queens to resist the idea that chivalry ensured the honour and protection of women and to demonstrate how ‘party’ and ‘faction’ shaped the historical reputation of women at court. In her life of Caroline, Hays demonstrated how sexual and political tyrannies were intricately bound and how they impinged upon the lives of all women regardless of their status. Hays challenged the stereotypes of foreign queens that had dominated masculinist politics since the seventeenth century and that had been readily drawn upon to vilify both Marie Antoinette and Caroline of Brunswick. Hays’s portrait of Queen Caroline confirmed that sex and rank were no defence for woman, as Wollstonecraft had predicted and as the fate of Marie Antoinette had brutally revealed.

Part Three

Stuart History as Empathetic History

6

Agnes Strickland’s Mary Beatrice of Modena and the Politics of 1688

In 1850, Agnes Strickland published her Historic Scenes and Poetic Fancies, a series of short historical sketches accompanied by poems relating to the factual events described. Historic Scenes marked a shift away from the royal biographies for which Strickland had earned some literary celebrity. Besides allowing her to focus on particularly poignant moments in the lives of her favourite monarchs, the text was an excuse to gather together her poetry, much of which she claimed had been ‘unscrupulously appropriated’.1 Strickland hoped that the work would prove ‘an acceptable offering’ to all her ‘gentle readers’, especially those who were already familiar with her earlier works. Historic Scenes was dedicated to the late Queen Adelaide, consort of William IV and aunt of Queen Victoria. Strickland ‘inscribed’ her work as a tribute ‘to the honoured memory of that amiable and much-lamented princess’, whom she described as ‘a bright example of Christian holiness, and . . . certainly one of the most faultless, of our Queens’.2 It was this mix of obsequious toadying to royalty combined with the celebration of domestic piety that has ensured that the royal lives of Agnes Strickland have received little scholarly attention from historians. During their lifetimes, Agnes Strickland and her sister Elizabeth were among England’s foremost purveyors of royal biography and commercially successful historians.3 Their research on queens continues to be used by cultural historians to this day, but they do not appear in any major studies of English historiography of this period.4 The eldest daughters of Thomas Strickland, a shipping agent, and his second wife, Elizabeth Homer of Kent, Elizabeth and Agnes Strickland were the first authors in a formidable literary dynasty that stretched far across the Empire. Yet, it is their younger sisters Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie who are perhaps better known as pioneers of literature in Canada.5 Literary critics who have studied the Stricklands have associated their ‘royal lives’ with the generic works of collective biography that proliferated in the mid-Victorian period.6 The

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idea that their histories of royal women are part of a broader phenomenon, of ‘biographical accounts of famous women of the past’, conforms to contemporary criticism made by male historians who accused Agnes of being a ‘professional hack’, more concerned with gossip than original scholarship.7 Recently, the Stricklands have attracted some interest as ‘picturesque’ historians of women.8 Such a categorization reflects their tendency towards a more affective mode of historical production. As I shall discuss, the sisters were avid collectors of Stuart relics and other objects of historical interest, and they used these artefacts to claim a particular authority as historians. Such affectivity, however, has contributed to their reputation as ‘amateur’ historians. The sisters produced history that ‘throbbed with vivid description and heightened feeling’, posing a stark contrast to the ‘dispassionate objectivity’ required of the emergent professional man of history.9 As a consequence, both feminist and mainstream historiography has tended to either ignore or patronize the sisters, categorizing their contribution to the nation’s past alongside more florid and less scholarly examples of ‘court histories’. This has also ensured that their political stance has been dismissed as posturing, the ‘touting’ of an ‘Old Regime aristocratic identity’.10 While there may be some truth to that suggestion, it tends to render their engagement external to the politics that shaped English historiography more generally. Yet, as this chapter will show, the sisters sought to use the rigours of historical research to challenge Thomas Babington Macaulay’s politics and in so doing question some of the premises upon which his history of the nation was formed. Critics have largely ignored the Stricklands’ embrace of Jacobitism, although it was an important part of their identity as historians. If politics is ever mentioned in studies of their works, it is the politics of the ‘woman question’.11 This creates the impression that a discourse of women’s rights emerged separately from other modes of political discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also assumes that women were only interested in feminist politics. The Stricklands appear to have been concerned for their reputation, which meant that Agnes, as the named author, resisted any association with the ‘bluestockings’ of an earlier generation and the newer ‘wave’ of feminist reformers. The image she cultivated as ‘a self-effacing spinster, a lover of needlework and weddings’ has contributed to the idea that the Stricklands’ books were best situated alongside works of ‘domestic history’ and those collective biographies of women that really functioned as conduct manuals.12 Agnes, however, made no secret of her commitment to England’s alternate dynasty, and this unfashionable politics complicates the assumption that the twelve volumes of Lives of the Queens of

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England were written solely to inculcate bourgeois virtues. She depicted Mary Beatrice as both an idealized wife and the embodiment of Jacobite resistance in the early eighteenth century. As Rosemary Mitchell has observed, this ‘mixture of submissive and subversive’ elements is ‘confusing and contradictory’.13 Such confusion reflects the underlying paradox framing Whig historiography around foreign consorts: that is, in being good wives, queens such as Mary Beatrice were inevitably going to be sources of faction. Given the way in which scholarship has formed around Agnes Strickland, perhaps it is unsurprising that there has been little interest in her engagement with historiographical controversy. Yet, in her Historic Sketches, in one of the two stories Strickland related about Mary Beatrice of Modena, scion of the d’Este dynasty and consort of James II, Strickland made a spirited attack on the foremost Whig historian of the day: Thomas Babington Macaulay.14 The first two volumes of Macaulay’s seminal work History of England, from the Accession of James II were published in 1848, two years before Strickland’s Historic Sketches.15 Macaulay’s History was extremely popular, rivalling the success of novelists such as Walter Scott and Charles Dickens.16 In chapter 5 of his first volume, Macaulay had accused Mary Beatrice of profiting from the transportation of those who had been spared from execution following the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685. According to Strickland, such a claim was based on a single sentence in a letter from the Earl of Sunderland to the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys in the State Paper Office. She reported that this letter contained but one reference to Mary Beatrice, a rather ‘vague’ sentence:  ‘ “the queen hath asked for a hundred of them” ’.17 Strickland took issue with this ‘very ugly story’ from Macaulay, querying his use and interpretation of sources.18 The Stricklands’ volumes on the Stuarts began to appear in 1844, four years before the first volumes of Macaulay’s History of England. Macaulay’s reference to Mary Beatrice was thus not mentioned in the first edition of Lives of the Queens of England. In later editions, however, Strickland included a reference to her dispute with Macaulay. In the first edition of Lives, she did take issue with a number of other Whig historians, including Bishop Gilbert Burnet, who was the principal source of invective against James II’s unfortunate queen and a major source for Macaulay’s Stuart volumes. Strickland claimed that Burnet was the ‘bitterest’ of the Queen’s ‘unprovoked enemies’. She dismissed him as a ‘vulgar and disgraceful man’ and queried his reliability as a witness to the Queen’s life.19 Burnet was certainly the source, if not the creator, of many of the hostile rumours that had attached themselves to Mary Beatrice.20 Like her mother-inlaw Henrietta Maria, Mary Beatrice had been the subject of political rumour

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and sexual innuendo that clung to her since the time she had been accused of presenting the King with a foundling in a warming pan.21 The accusation that the Queen had profited by the sale of rebels in the West Indies was derived from the politically polemical sources that traduced her in the wake of the Revolution of 1688/1689.22 Macaulay presented the actions of the Queen as unworthy of her rank and sex, conflating sexual and social disorder in his recounting of this event.23 Such a story spoke to certain Victorian anxieties and reflected Macaulay’s own particular triggers.24 His prejudices were assuredly not lost on Agnes Strickland. This chapter will argue that Strickland was not interested in merely querying Macaulay’s sources but rather that her aside in Historic Scenes formed part of a broader project to produce a counter-narrative to Whig historiography. While Strickland idealized particular queens, especially those connected to the House of Stuart, she did not regard the role of consort romantically, instead referring to it in bleak terms such as royal slavery and state victimhood. The sacrifice of women to the dynastic plans of men was a frequent theme of her work and she shared with earlier women writers a sense that, in spite of their regal status, queens were all too frequently the victims of patriarchal institutions. The Lives reflected the idea, first articulated by Elizabeth Benger, that the history of queens was a ‘mournful school of suffering’.25 The Stricklands’ studies of queens were not unlike the works of Benger, Aikin and Hays but were shaped by the politics of Jacobite lament rather than the radicalism of Dissent. The Strickland sisters regarded themselves as historians of England and, as Agnes’s commentary on Macaulay suggests, they did not shy away from historiographical controversy. A critical component of their Lives of the Queens of England was the exposure of the polemic and propaganda in Whig accounts of England’s history that had shaped the depiction of royal consorts, particularly those of the Stuart dynasty. The Stricklands asserted that such a record was skewed by political expediency and was thus a faulty account of the nation’s past. Focusing on Strickland’s life of Mary Beatrice of Modena, this chapter will consider how such a text might alter our understanding of the Stuart heritage in Victorian Britain and the role of women historians in contesting the dominant Whig narrative. Strickland’s text provided a detailed history of the Jacobean court in exile, resisting the xenophobia that characterized male-authored histories of the nation produced in the wake of the French Revolution. This chapter will argue that Strickland’s cosmopolitan life of Mary Beatrice created an alternate version of this period in English history that was sympathetic to the Stuarts, to Catholicism and to France. She contested the Whig polemic that had shaped

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her image in orthodox English histories and, as a consequence, was condemned in contemporary periodicals and from the pulpit. Writing such a history was possible because the Stricklands were supported by a newly emancipated and flourishing Catholic community who were keen to contest the dominant discourse and have their ancestors restored to their rightful place in England’s history. Their Catholic and Jacobite connections undoubtedly contributed to Macaulay’s scornful assessment of Strickland – whom he regarded as a ‘vulgar, mendacious, malignant scribbler’ – and that of his peers, who used their influence to ensure that her reputation as a historian had been damaged for posterity.26

Facts, not opinions Agnes Strickland had sought literary fame as a poet. Her first published work was a ‘Monody upon the Death of the Princess Charlotte of Wales’, celebrating the great virtues of that much-lamented daughter of George IV and Caroline of Brunswick.27 While such a work may have anticipated her interest in the often tragic fate of royal women, she could not support herself as a poet and like many women of her generation made a living writing works of instruction for children. She published several works of historical fiction such as The Pilgrims of Walsingham (1835) and How Will It End? (1865), but these were neither critically nor commercially successful. According to her sister Jane Margaret Strickland, this failure convinced Agnes ‘that imaginative literature was not her forte’, so she decided to abandon ‘light literature for that higher walk for which her education fitted her’.28 Elizabeth Strickland worked as an editor for the notorious publisher Henry Colburn and in 1830 took charge of his Court Journal. Colburn, who fashioned himself as the illegitimate son of the Duke of York, had made his fortune publishing scandalous memoirs and ‘silver fork’ romance novels. Known for his shrewd marketing techniques and excessive adulation of royalty, Colburn recognized the commercial potential of works that gave glimpses into the private lives of royals. He published many works of royal memoirs emerging from Europe, such as the Private Life of Marie Antoinette (1823) by her lady-inwaiting Madame Campan and the Memoirs of the Empress Josephine (1828) by Madame Ducrest.29 He bullied Agnes into ‘rushing out the abysmal potboiler’ Queen Victoria from Birth to Bridal for the royal wedding in 1840.30 This book distressed the young Queen and was removed from sale.31 It did not, however, prevent the sisters from embarking on further publishing projects with Colburn, although their working relationship continued to be fraught and exploitative.

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The Stricklands may have benefited from Colburn’s enterprising spirit, but their reputation as serious scholars of history was compromised by this association. While the Strickland sisters are sometimes compared unfavourably to Mary Anne Everett Green, the first woman to be employed by the Public Records Office (see Chapter 7), their research on original manuscripts was pioneering and intensive. Agnes Strickland set out to be judged as a historian and was committed to creating a text characterized by fidelity to archival sources. ‘ “Facts, not opinions,” ’ she wrote, ‘should be the motto of every candid historian.’32 The Stricklands struggled to find a language to describe their methodology, but they refused nonetheless to make arguments that privileged ‘feminine ways of knowing’, instead insisting upon their professional skills, and made claims to objectivity based on these skills.33 At this time, for example, State papers were not calendared – that is, ordered, edited and excerpted – and as Agnes complained, were in a pretty poor state: ‘unclassified bundles covered with the candle grease of former scholars’.34 Her work in such conditions was damaging to her health, as she admitted in the preface to a later edition of Lives of the Queens of England: ‘Documentary historians alone can appreciate the difficulties, the expense, the injury to health, to say nothing of the sacrifice of more profitable literary pursuits, that have been involved in this undertaking.’35 In this regard, the sisters were not unlike their male counterparts who often succumbed to ‘archive fever’.36 Their engagement with primary research has ensured that Lives of the Queens of England has remained an authoritative secondary source for modern biographies of queens, especially queens such as Mary Beatrice of Modena, who have remained largely unstudied.37 This commitment to archival research was grounded in the Stricklands’ concern for authenticity, but it also allowed the sisters to critique the polemic and propaganda that had shaped the depiction of foreign consorts in Whig historiography since the seventeenth century. This pre-Rankean empiricism set the sisters apart from their contemporaries who used biography solely as a means to present ‘conventional views’ on the proper sphere of women. In her life of Mary Beatrice, the interrogation of primary sources functioned as a critique of the politics of 1688 and of the historical interpretations of the Revolution that had since evolved. The hostile sources that had maligned the queen in order to popularize the idea of a suppositious birth in June 1688 were the same sources used in Whig histories to depict the life of Mary Beatrice. Although the myth of the warming pan had been written out of official accounts of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution, it had been resurrected with each Jacobite uprising and remained politically expedient to supporters of the Hanoverian succession until the death of the last Stuart ‘pretender’.38 Agnes Strickland maintained that such sources

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were produced ‘to fit the exigencies of a political crisis’ and as a consequence warped ‘the web of truth’.39 While the interrogation of these sources was critical to the sympathetic image of the queen Agnes Strickland was determined to create, it also allowed for the suggestion that the outcome of the events of 1688 was not providentially ordained or necessarily inevitable. Such a suggestion undermined the teleological narrative of English nationhood that had framed Whig history since the publication of Burke’s Reflections, which Macaulay had made hegemonic in his speeches in the House of Commons preceding the passing of the Reform Act of 1832.40 Perhaps more than any other nineteenthcentury historian, Macaulay was political heir to Burke. He believed that English history followed an inevitable historical trajectory that connected the Whigs of 1688  ‘who had legislated for their own times’ to the present generation of reformers in Parliament, himself included.41 When his History was published in 1848, it reanimated many of the long-standing myths that had informed Whig historiography since the seventeenth century, including those formed from the vituperative pen of Bishop Burnet and other enemies of James II and his queen.42 The sisters claimed, rather disingenuously, that their rigour in the archives produced a lack of political bias in their work. While they declared they were of ‘no party’, the Stricklands had imbibed since early childhood ‘the principles of their ancestors’ who had staunchly supported Stuart claims to the throne. This commitment to Jacobitism was formed in spite of their filial devotion to their father, who ‘was a great admirer of William III, and of the revolution he had effected’.43 In this regard, they were not unlike Jane Austen, whose family’s politics was also divided along gendered lines.44 Agnes Strickland was, however, no less polemical than the Whig historians whose interpretation of ‘facts’ she queried. While she would undoubtedly have refused the term ‘political history’ when describing her work, she frequently referenced her commitment to a Jacobite view of the past, and it was this quality which defined her oeuvre among Victorian historians. Strickland’s rehabilitation of the reputation of queen consorts who were vilified in the seventeenth century and later in the Whig historical traditions became a source of some controversy in the mid-nineteenth century due to her ‘extreme theories of ecclesiastical government and the royal prerogative’.45

Catholic and Jacobite connections Daniel R. Woolf has observed that an interest in genealogical pursuits was typical of women historians of the early modern period as it allowed them to build ‘a

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personal historical domain by applying imagination and feeling to documentary and material evidence’.46 The Strickland sisters did this on a grand scale, moving beyond the traditional female role as custodians of family history, to establish authority through their familial connections and create for themselves the role of the repositories of an alternate feminine version of the nation’s past. The Strickland connections to the Stuart court, while somewhat tenuous, allowed them to assert a special conviction as historians, a claim to have ‘a quite special understanding of dead queens’.47 In a ‘long autobiographical letter’ Agnes had claimed, ‘[T]hrough a female progenitor, Edith Nevill of Thornton Briggs, who married Thomas Strickland of Sizergh Castle, I derive descent from John, Duke of Lancaster fourth son of Edward III and eight of the early queens of whom I  have written.’48 While such a claim might be read as a feminizing gesture, allowing the sisters to carve out a particular niche in the national historical imaginary, it was also informed by a connection with place, typical of romantic historians, Macaulay included. The sisters especially revelled in their connection to Sizergh Castle, the ancestral home of those Stricklands who had followed the Stuarts into exile. Sizergh was a Stuart shrine, housing many significant documents as well as portraits of the exiled Stuarts, which had been gifted to the family, and relics of James II, Mary of Modena, the Chevalier St George and the Cardinal of York. Besides providing a form of remuneration from their Stuart patrons, such portraits were designed to promote a particular understanding of England’s history, highlighting the genealogical connections between the Stuarts and other English dynasties and connecting religion with their cause.49 Agnes felt particularly attached to Sizergh, as the castle was also associated with Katherine Parr, her favourite Tudor queen, and held certain objects made by Parr’s own hand.50 While later biographers have suggested that the sisters’ connection to the Sizergh Stricklands ‘was remote or left-handed’, Agnes and Elizabeth were convinced that they were ‘honorably descended’ from the main branch of that family. Agnes ‘claimed kinship with Stricklands everywhere, a claim that was in her day readily admitted’.51 It was through such ties, real or imagined, that the Stricklands professed an affective mode of historical authority. As her biographer Una Pope-Hennessy asserted, the connection to Sizergh ‘nerved’ Agnes Strickland ‘to work as if she was an appointed interpreter of the past’.52 The travel writer Louise Costello was envious of the sisters’ connection to Sizergh Castle, suggesting that such a bond gave them an advantage over her, whose own ancestors had left no trace.53 Agnes Strickland created her own private ‘archive’ of relics and memorabilia connected with her favourite queens. For example, when she began to write

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a life of Mary Stuart, she accumulated documents and objects associated with the Scottish queen, curating her own ‘album’.54 The intimacy created by such activities was claimed as a mode of empathetic recovery by Strickland.55 Many of the women who shared their miniatures and other pieces of Stuart memorabilia with the Stricklands treated them as sacred heirlooms, the material embodiment of nostalgia and lament.56 Such items – jewellery, scraps of tartan, wisps of hair, wills and funeral sermons – were often the only traces of women’s lives otherwise obscured or subsumed into that of their male kin. The histories connected with such objects focused upon women’s suffering, the fleetingness of life and the fragility of memory, rendering them deeply moving and sometimes even morbid. Although such collecting was regarded as antiquarian by the Victorians, when coupled with the ‘taint of Jacobitism’, interest in such objects remained ‘politically charged, if not actually subversive’.57 The willingness of women to share these objects and to relate their own histories to the sisters suggests the existence of a covert, yet not insignificant, community of readers sympathetic to their pro-Catholic, proJacobite version of the past. Anne Laurence has suggested that ‘the romance of contact with historical materials  .  .  .  and the opportunities for mixing with peers and their families in great houses fired [Agnes’] imagination’.58 While Agnes clearly loved the celebrity treatment she received from her aristocratic friends, such ‘mixing’ also gave the sisters significant and useful connections that they exploited when necessary to ensure that they could continue their work on the lives of queens. Such an occasion to use these contacts arose when they were refused entry by Sir John Russell to the State Paper Office in London. The sisters applied for assistance through their Catholic and Jacobite networks in order that they might procure admission. Henry Howard and Sir George Strickland used their influence with Lord Normanby to grant the sisters orders of admission to use the archives whenever they required.59 The sisters also used such connections to access privately held archives, and many of the papers the sisters acquired came to them ‘through the influence of private friendship’.60 Through these ‘connections’, the Stricklands gained entry to archives housed in the libraries of the Catholic aristocrats such as the Duke of Norfolk and the Howards of Corby. Emboldened by the recent Emancipation Act, Catholic families were keen to share their archives with the sisters. This access to previously unseen documents gave unique insight into the lives of royal women such as the ill-fated Katherine Howard, whose life the sisters rendered in deeply poignant tones. These connections also led to allegations that Agnes had converted to Catholicism

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and meant that the Stricklands’ Tudor and Stuart volumes were eagerly read for sectarian bias. Modern critics have complained that Agnes’s gothic sensibilities have rendered the sisters’ Lives of the Queens of England sentimental and extravagant, but it was exactly these qualities that attracted readers at the time. In their letters and albums, the sisters reflected on the power of their imagination to bring back to life figures long dead. This affective mode of historical understanding created a sense of intimacy and connection for their readers, whose feelings were engaged by the materials of the past. The sisters’ attention to detail included ‘visiting the actual scenes of their heroines’ lives’. Their concern with the ‘genius of place’ ensured the authenticity of the topography they described and their preservation of local traditions.61 It was this need for authenticity that provoked the Stricklands to visit France ‘to consult French archives and steep themselves for a while in Continental life’.62 This trip included immersion in the remnants of Jacobite culture in Paris and visiting numerous Catholic sites, ‘acting out’ the experience of the past by evoking nostalgic associations wherever they went.

French connections For their lives of the Stuart queens, the Stricklands took the unprecedented step of corresponding with the major French historians of the day. Not only were the sisters well received by these men when they visited France, but their Catholic and Jacobite connections ensured that they had greater access to documents in French archives than those in Britain.63 The French Premier Francois Guizot, himself a historian of the English civil wars, treated them as honoured guests and gave the sisters permission to study in the Archives du Royaume, the Archives Etrangères and the Bibliothéque des Rois. His second wife, Eliza Dillon, ‘had been of a leading Jacobite family’, and Guizot proved very helpful to the sisters in their quest to find Mary Beatrice’s letters.64 His introduction allowed them to trace much of the history of the Stuart court in exile and gave them the freedom to roam around many sites of Stuart memorial, such as the chapel at Saint-Germain and the Institute Chevalier at the Scots College in Paris. Enabled by Guizot, their access to ‘secret’ state archives and other Jacobite correspondence threw light on the Stuart court in exile that was then unknown in England.65 Through other Jacobite connections the sisters were able to call upon Jules Michelet, the ‘father of French History’, at the Hôtel de Soubise. Michelet gave the sisters documents pertaining to both Henrietta Maria and Mary of Modena, including a ‘draft of

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the Queen’s will and “the most precious narrative” of her escape from England in which the name of Lady Strickland is mentioned’.66 Auguste Mignet, a historian of the French Revolution, also put his ‘great knowledge of the epoch’ at the sister’s disposal.67 Guizot’s intervention gained the Stricklands access to many State archives and enabled them to visit the convent of Sainte Marie de Chaillot, where Mary Beatrice’s correspondence with her friend Françoise Angelique Priolo was transcribed for them. The sisters located many of the Queen’s papers at Chaillot, where she had spent some of her last years in exile. Access to the Queen’s private correspondence enabled them to present an intimate and interior understanding of their subject, replicating the immediacy of earlier French-authored memoirs, such as those by Madame de Motteville, whose work they also used to great effect. Such memoirs offered sympathetic accounts of the Stuart queens in exile and were untainted by the Whig factionalism and polemic that characterized English depictions of Stuart queens.68 Drawing upon these sources gave the Stricklands great insight into the private realm of royal women, while also offering considerable critique of the institution of royal marriages. Unlike State papers and other official documents, the diaries and letters left by royal women blurred the line between the public and the private. Agnes manipulated her readers’ sympathy in this space, claiming that her admission into this private world evoked deep emotion that allowed an empathetic identification with her subject. This process was not merely literary but affective and sensual, as she imbued the archival materials she used with the emotions of the past. As she wrote about the Queen’s letters she found at Chaillot, It is impossible to read her unaffected descriptions of her feelings without emotion. Some of the letters have been literally steeped in the tears of the royal writer, especially those she wrote after the battle of la Hogue, during the absence of King James, when she was in hourly expectation of the birth of her youngest child, and, finally, in her last utter desolation.69

Not only did such narration challenge the image of Mary Beatrice found in hostile Whig sources, it also promoted empathy towards the Queen and longing for the Stuart past. Through this sympathetic recovery, Agnes Strickland engaged her readers, winning great popular acclaim. The sisters attributed the success of their Stuart volumes to their heart-rending depiction of the sufferings of James II’s ‘saintly queen’.70 The power of this nostalgia and their effectiveness in generating empathy for the exiled queen was undoubtedly a factor that contributed to

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the hostile reception of these volumes by male reviewers at the time and has continued to shape their scholarly reception.

Queen of tears Until the Stricklands published their ninth volume of Lives of the Queens of England, no biographical study of Mary Beatrice of Modena existed. Mary Beatrice’s confessor Père Galliard produced a memoir of her life, but it was never circulated publicly, even while she was alive.71 She had been the subject of pornographic tracts and other political propaganda since the time of the ‘warming pan’ scandal, although never to the same extent as Henrietta Maria or the Duchess of Portsmouth.72 Because of her lengthy time in exile, her letters and other documents were scattered throughout Europe, some in official collections and others held in private hands. Many were destroyed during the French Revolution and later during the Commune in 1870.73 Such an absence of primary source material ensured that until Agnes Strickland produced her life of Mary Beatrice, she was viewed largely through the lens of hostile sources such as Bishop Burnet and depicted, at best, as a ‘bit-player’ in the tumultuous world of Stuart politics.74 Even today, she has not received the same sort of attention as her mother-in-law Henrietta Maria, who invited considerable interest in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and has been recovered by modern historians who write on the culture as well as the politics of the Carolinian court.75 The Stricklands were very aware of the ways in which the lives of Stuart queens had been shaped by the imperatives of British politics in the century after 1688, and they regarded their vilification as the result of party expediency rather than exhaustive historical research. In the case of Mary Beatrice, they were particularly attuned to the ways in which Whig historiography had required the complete abnegation of the Queen and her children, as a way of ensuring the survival and success of England as a modern state. As Agnes opined in her preface to the life of Mary Beatrice, The life of every queen of England whose name has been involved with the conflicting parties and passions excited by revolutions, or differences of religious opinions, has always been a task of extreme difficulty. With regard to the consort of James II it has been peculiarly so, since, for upwards of a century after the revolution of 1688, it was considered a test of loyalty to the reigning family, and attachment to the church of England, to revile the sovereigns of the house of

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Stuart, root and branch, and to consign them, their wives, and children, their friends and servants, and all those who would not unite in desecrating their tombs, to the reprobation of all posterity.76

Throughout Strickland’s text, frequent criticisms are made of the sources that have been used to vilify Mary Beatrice. The women of the House of Stuart, Strickland believed, were particularly susceptible to the malignity of men whose opinions were formed by faction, rather than fact. This was particularly marked in regard to the unfortunate wife of James II, whose unpopularity had been subsumed into that of his consort. Thus many of the faults attributed to Mary Beatrice, Strickland held, were due simply to her association with her husband.77 This was also true of her association with her mother-in-law Henrietta Maria. Some of the negative reactions to Mary Beatrice when she became queen were virtually identical to depictions of Henrietta Maria, reflecting the English tradition of anti-Catholicism that had formed around her. Agnes Strickland recognized that the historical understanding put forward by hostile Whig sources was relational, for, as she observed: The slight mention of her that appears on the surface of English history, has been penned by chroniclers . . . whose hearts were either hardened by strong political and polemic animosities, or who, as a matter of business or expediency, did their utmost to defame her, because she was the wife of James II, and mother of his unfortunate son.78

Mary Beatrice of Modena was a favourite of Agnes Strickland, and she sought to recover the queen’s life from the great shadow cast over it by her king and the scandals that forced them into exile. Strickland’s partiality has been read by some observers to indicate that her history of Mary Beatrice conforms to the style of other collective biographers, those who sought to turn eminent and formidable queens into indistinguishable paragons of domestic virtue. Agnes regarded Mary Beatrice to be ‘a discovery of her own’, and her life was certainly her most original production.79 Yet, it was her commitment to archival research that was critical to the saintly image of Mary Beatrice that she produced. The papers from the monastery of Chaillot documented the queen’s ‘real piety and Christian stoicism’ but offered little in the way of demonstrating her political acumen.80 While the Chaillot papers undoubtedly shaped Strickland’s image of Mary Beatrice, she nonetheless hunted down other French sources to assist in her presentation of the Stuart court in exile, allowing for a more optimistic view of the court at Saint-Germain than later sources have allowed.81

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Much of Mary Beatrice of Modena’s appeal to Agnes Strickland lay in the irony of her fate; that is, in providing James with a male heir, her husband lost his throne. Such a tragic reversal of fortune undoubtedly fascinated Agnes, for whom ‘pathos’ was said to be her forte.82 In Strickland’s hands, Mary Beatrice of Modena’s life was depicted as a domestic tragedy of the Stuart period, but it also served as a counter-history of nationhood, one that drew attention to the dubious politics of the warming pan, the Stuart court in exile and the very tenuous nature of the Act of Settlement of 1701 and the subsequent Hanoverian succession. While Strickland undoubtedly romanticized the life of Mary Beatrice and celebrated her domestic virtues, this in itself challenged certain Whig assumptions about the role of the queen consort. Royal marriages were invariably politicized, a fact that shaped the Stricklands’ depiction of queens in their Lives of the Queens of England. The marriages of the Stuart queens Henrietta Maria, Mary Beatrice and Catherine of Braganza represented the last of England’s truly ‘dynastic unions’ and were consequently perhaps the most politicized royal marriages in England’s history. These women were also the last Catholic consorts to be married to English kings and, for this reason too, were frequently depicted in hostile terms in histories written by the Stricklands’ male contemporaries. In the case of Mary Beatrice, claiming for her a certain ‘saintly’ status in exile did not necessarily domesticate her but rather rendered her a quietly subversive figure. While Strickland described her in the language of bourgeois domesticity, as a ministering angel and pious saint, Mary Beatrice’s acts of self-deprivation and self-denial functioned to sustain the Stuart court in exile and maintain the hopes of a future restoration. Strickland’s focus on Mary Beatrice’s saintliness threw into doubt the providential interpretation of 1688 popular among Whig politicians and historians since the Revolution. In her narrative of Mary Beatrice, Strickland depicted the expedient politics of the ‘warming pan’ story as ridiculous, even citing noted Whig historians such as Sir James Mackintosh to substantiate her interpretation.83 She refuted the pornographic images of Mary Beatrice that had become historical orthodoxy in the eighteenth century and highlighted her continuing significance as the mother of England’s future heir to the throne by presenting her as the embodiment of maternal affection. For Strickland, Mary Beatrice was the matriarch of England’s alternate dynasty and the force that held the Jacobite cause together in exile, but she also depicted her as a cosmopolitan queen whose ties with the courts of Europe, especially the French court, were critical for the support of the Stuart cause. Strickland’s searches in the French archives revealed the Queen’s role as a significant political

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intermediary between James II and Louis XIV and as an important vector of correspondence between major figures in William’s court (Lord Godolphin, the Duke of Malborough and the Princess Anne) and the court at Saint Germain. ‘A great deal of correspondence was carried on through the queen’, Strickland slyly recorded, damaging any sense that William reigned in England with unqualified support.84 By removing the doubts around succession, Strickland presented events in 1688 as a family squabble between the Stuarts, rather than a watershed in constitutional or parliamentary history. Reading Mary Beatrice’s life as family tragedy allowed Strickland to probe the motives of her stepdaughters, undermining their legitimacy. Mary and Anne were presented as ungrateful daughters who effectively subverted the patriarchal order usurping their father’s throne. Strickland’s depiction of Mary Beatrice’s maternity cast into sharp relief the childlessness of her stepdaughters, who had failed in their chief imperative as queens to produce legitimate heirs. More critically, by treating the ‘Glorious’ Revolution as a dynastic crisis, Strickland effectively diminished the role of Parliament in these events. This allowed her to focus on William of Orange and what she considered as his propensity to despotism. By drawing attention to actions such as William’s attempt to include Mary Beatrice of Modena’s name on a Bill of Attainder directed towards her son, Strickland depicted him as a petty tyrant, further undermining his credibility and consequently casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Revolution of 1688 and the Hanoverian succession in 1714.85 Much of Strickland’s life of Mary Beatrice focuses on the Stuart court in exile, an aspect of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ ignored or occluded in male-authored histories of the period. Indeed, the court at Saint-Germain had been generally treated in such sources as a ‘phantom court’ in order to refuse any suggestion of its legitimacy or popularity.86 Such ideas were invariably formed from hostile sources and offered little insight into the working of the court. Strickland’s detailed history challenged the idea that the court was made up of a small group of hardened Jacobites and displaced Catholics, instead demonstrating the significance of Saint-Germain as a social and cultural centre for the many supporters of James II. As recent scholarship has confirmed, the court at SaintGermain, while constrained financially and politically, was nonetheless home to many artists, musicians and writers who drew inspiration from the tragic plight of James II and his queen.87 Strickland was also able to demonstrate the cosmopolitan nature of the court and how the poetry and art produced there helped sustain the Jacobite cause. She documented how it functioned as a retreat

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for soldiers and their families displaced by the ongoing conflicts in Scotland and Ireland and repeated tales of the brutalities of those wars. In so doing, she queried the celebrated notion of a ‘bloodless revolution’, a particularly Anglocentric view of 1688, that has been much critiqued in modern scholarship.88

Sectarian controversies In April 1849, Strickland was subject to a twenty-eight-page review of their Stuart volumes in the Edinburgh Review. This was the most hostile review of their career and the sisters believed that Thomas Babington Macaulay was its author. It obviously rankled in the Strickland camp.89 A century later, Una PopeHennessy observed in her biography of Agnes, The style is that of Macaulay and so are the sentiments, but the beginning and the end of the article are written by the editor in the usual Edinburgh way and are designed to put the readers off the scent. There can be little doubt that the writer of the article was the great Panjarandrum himself. It is delivered from Olympian heights and the style is highly characteristic.90

Macaulay had been asked to review Lives of Queens for the Edinburgh Review but had declined. In a journal entry for November 1848, he noted that he had written to the editor William Empson, excusing myself from assisting with the castigation of Miss Strickland. She is a vulgar, mendacious, malignant scribbler as ever lived. But I abstained, partly for respect for myself and partly from respect for her petticoats from exposing her in the notes to my book and it goes against me to do it under the cover of another’s name.91

The Edinburgh Review focused on Strickland’s partisan approach, which the reviewer blamed on ‘unreasoning and unreasonable asperity . . . more natural, and therefore less blameable, in a female  .  .  .  It is a failing  .  .  .  of a sensitive, enthusiastic, and imperfectly disciplined temperament’.92 He goes on to observe that ‘her warm feeling, her womanly feeling, for her subject would not be out of place, were it a mother’s feelings for her son’. But when the ‘objects of her sympathies and antipathies are political principles, parties and characters’, such ‘amiable weakness’ is not to be suffered by this critic or his peers. ‘Ladies’, he commands, ‘who assume masculine functions must learn to assume masculine gravity and impartiality.’93 The Edinburgh reviewer did not challenge Strickland’s

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historical interpretation but rather the ‘tone’ of her ‘observations upon individual character’, particularly her sympathy for certain figures such as Henrietta Maria and James II.94 It was Henrietta Maria who is singled out for particular scorn in this review and ‘Miss Strickland’ bitterly berated for her ‘attempt to depict the French queen, as an attached and faithful wife’.95 What is most notable about this review was its precise gendering of history, particularly the relation between gender and political understanding. As Pope-Hennessy observed, having made some ‘truly astonishing’ claims on ‘behalf of masculine impartiality the most biased of male historians’ goes onto make some incredibly partial remarks regarding the Stuarts.96 While Macaulay denied having a hand in writing this review, its dubious conflation of masculine impartiality with a Whiggish historical perspective was certainly in keeping with the tone and structure of his own History of England.97 Yet, in this regard he was scarcely unique among male historians of the period. By focusing on queens and the politics of courtly life, the Stricklands conceived of their Lives as a counter-narrative to Whig historiography. This was markedly different from the works of other authors who used the genre of collective biography to inculcate their female readers in bourgeois notions of femininity. The Stricklands’ interest in queens was not superficial or apolitical but rather allowed them a vehicle to work through the various traumas and exclusions that shaped their lives.98 The Stricklands had been sidelined from histories of the nation, not merely as women, but as Jacobites who had come down on the wrong side of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution. Their depiction of the lives of foreign queens such as Mary Beatrice constituted a significant site for resisting the Whig interpretation of history. By accessing female-authored French sources, they created a transnational history of Britain, refuting the xenophobia and misogyny that had characterized contemporary and historical representations of the Stuarts since the seventeenth century. They did not merely dehomogenize the Protestant Whig tradition; they resisted the hegemonic discourses that forged Britain in the nineteenth century, creating a history that was sympathetic to France and Catholicism and the Stuarts. While this may not have changed the way in which the ‘Stuart century’ was conceived in the nineteenth century, it began a process of recovery for women such as Henrietta Maria and allowed for the emergence of alternate ‘feminine’ histories of the period to emerge.99

7

Calendaring as Empathetic History: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Letters of Henrietta Maria

In 1857, Mary Anne Everett Green published an edition of the letters of Henrietta Maria, queen consort of Charles I. Green’s decision to publish these letters was a bold one. From the time of her arrival in England in 1625, Henrietta Maria had been a polarizing figure. Controversy around her had erupted again in 1848, when the Stricklands published the Stuart volume of their Lives of the Queens of England. As has been discussed in the previous chapter, the critic in the Edinburgh Review singled out the life of Henrietta Maria as evidence of Agnes Strickland’s poor judgement of character and her unsuitability as a ‘public instructor’.1 In the review, he reaffirmed the ancient claim that it was Henrietta Maria’s ‘insane and unprincipled political counsels’ that contributed ‘fatally’ to the ‘ruin of her husband’.2 Such charges against Henrietta have reverberated through Whig polemic and historiography from the seventeenth century into the modern period.3 Fears regarding the influence of Henrietta Maria began with her marriage to Charles and grew considerably during the period of his personal rule.4 Following the death of George Villiers, the notorious Duke of Buckingham, Henrietta Maria had held a singular position in the Caroline court, as both wife and favourite. This meant that complaints against her were grounded not only in her religion, nationality or gender, but also ‘because she occupied a role – the prominent adviser to an apparently irresolute monarch’. Such a position ‘customarily invited opposition’ and, when conflated with her wifely role, ensured that the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria was destined to generate faction.5 Fears regarding Henrietta Maria’s influence became a critical component of the politics of the English Civil War when the letters she had written to the King were captured at the Battle of Naseby in 1645. This battle was a decisive

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loss for Royalist forces with over a thousand of the king’s troops killed, two thousand horses lost and four thousand men taken prisoners. The true disaster for Charles, however, was the loss of his cabinet and the letters that were held in it. The captured letters were brought to Parliament, where they were read and then displayed in Westminster to prove their authenticity. They were also printed in a widely circulated official tract entitled The King’s Cabinet Opened.6 The publication of the correspondence between the King and Queen was unprecedented. It was the first collection of State letters ever published in England and the ‘first substantial collection of personal letters published without the writer’s consent while he was still alive’.7 The publication of intercepted letters was not a new phenomenon but had become ‘ubiquitous’ during the civil wars and functioned as a primitive means of propaganda.8 The publication of the King’s letters was the most infamous example of this strategy and effectively turned the tide of opinion against the Royalist cause. Mary Anne Everett Green’s interest in royal correspondence reflected the increasing professionalization of the discipline of history and a new focus on archival materials at a time when England was making serious efforts to preserve and make accessible primary sources in newly formed institutions, such as the Public Record Office (PRO). The daughter of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Reverend Robert Wood, and his wife Sarah, Green spent her childhood in various provincial towns where her father served his congregations. It was from her father, who was committed to progressive and engaging pedagogical techniques, that Green developed her linguistic and historical skills. In 1841, the family moved to London where Green’s father was assigned to a congregation in Islington.9 Like the Stricklands, Green had begun her career engaged in ‘amateur’ historical projects for Henry Colburn, who published her Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain in 1846 and Lives of the Princesses from the Norman Conquest in 1849. Her first forays into archival research at the British Museum, Lambeth Palace Library, Tower Records Office and in the collections of notable antiquarians such as Sir Thomas Phillips and Dawson Turner were undertaken in pursuit of these publications. Her detailed archival research gained the attention of men such as Francis Palgrave, then Deputy Keeper of Her Majesty’s Records, who appreciated her ‘unique’ skills with languages and palaeography and her incredible attention to detail.10 He recommended Green to John Romilly, Master of the Rolls, who appointed her as the first of four historians to work on the Calendaring project in the PRO in 1854.11 This project began as an exercise in editing and ordering State papers, but Green’s involvement ensured that calendaring became a more historical enterprise and

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that these volumes became ‘authoritative sources’ for the period.12 Green worked at the PRO from 1855 until her death in 1895. The roots of professional history in England, as Philippa Levine had argued, were in institutions such as the PRO, where the methods of ‘scientific’ history were promulgated earlier than in the universities.13 Such a process called for new standards of palaeography, translation and interpretation.14 These empirical methods were generally associated with the professionalization of historical writing and were critical to both the scholarly and financial success of the Calendaring project.15 Because of their controversial nature, the letters between Henrietta Maria and her husband Charles were a collection ripe for rescue, and throughout the nineteenth century, ‘new’ letters between the pair resurfaced, as collectors purchased archival materials from the Continent and from private collections in England. Such discoveries were reported in the newly established journals of the discipline and at meetings of historical and antiquarian societies such as the Camden Society, which published a series of Charles’s letters, edited by Green’s colleague John Bruce, in 1856. Yet, Green’s intervention into this contested field of Stuart historiography has not received any scholarly attention. While Green occupies an almost unique status in the history of the discipline – as the first woman to work in the PRO  – she has been largely overlooked in accounts of both British historiography and women’s historiography.16 This is because she sits awkwardly as neither quite an ‘amateur’ historian of women nor an entirely ‘professional’ historian attached to a university. Christine L. Krueger has suggested that while giving Green some status in the professionalization of the discipline, her experience in the PRO also sits outside the usual narratives focused on the rise of the male historian in the university.17 This final chapter will suggest that Green extended her work as a calendarer with publication of the letters of Henrietta Maria, creating an archive of all the Queen’s correspondence that she could locate in various State and foreign archives and private collections. As with the documents she calendared at the PRO, and through skilled reading of primary source materials, Green placed the letters of Henrietta Maria in chronological order, introduced them and drew readers’ attention to things of note. While the Stricklands had created an image of Henrietta Maria as ‘La Reine Malheureuse’, an unfortunate queen, Green’s presentation of the letters produced a different image, of Henrietta Maria foregrounding her resolution and fortitude. Green celebrated the ‘strength and firmness of mind’ of the ‘daughter of Henri Quatre’, claiming that it was the King’s vacillation, rather than advice of the Queen, that was the true cause of his demise.18 Green’s rigorous examination of the available evidence quashed many of the more vitriolic claims

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regarding Henrietta Maria’s conduct towards her husband and used the tools of ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ archival research to generate great empathy for the French queen. In so doing, Green challenged the image of Henrietta Maria that had been carefully curated in Parliamentary and Puritan sources. Green’s process of editing the letters not only revealed new materials that softened the image of Henrietta Maria, but her presentation of these letters also challenged the teleological narratives that had framed her role in the civil wars, allowing for a revisionist history of the ‘Stuart century’ to emerge.

The King’s Cabinet Opened Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I  and mother of Charles II and James II, confounds many of the assumptions that are made about the representation of queen consorts depicted in writings by Victorian women. Central to most accounts of the civil wars, she complicates any attempt to separate wifely influence from political influence. Unlike queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine or Philippa of Hainault, who can be said to represent exemplary bad or good queens, Henrietta Maria eludes such easy categorization, being both a model of wifely virtue and a dangerous political liability.19 All those things that the Victorians used to signify wifely virtue were held against Henrietta Maria and were instead seen as tools she used to manipulate her weak and vacillating husband. Even her fecundity was treated as suspect, a cunning means of delivering Catholic heirs to the throne.20 She was treated ambivalently in Royalist sources too and, as a consequence, had rarely been viewed impartially by male historians of all persuasions. Whig historians represented women associated with the Stuart court as embodying all the corrupting influences of absolutism and France, while repressing any sense of their real political power.21 Such judgements hearkened back to earlier Protestant prejudices regarding superstitious and plotting ‘Frenchified’ queens. Such views had not only been in play since the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, but also reflected the widely held belief that Catholics were secretive and scheming. Opinions regarding women associated with the Stuart court also reflected the habit of depicting Catholic women in seventeenth-century England as removed from politics. “ ‘Papist” queens and mistresses, Catholic women in general, were said to distract men from political action, rather than participating in it more fully and legitimately themselves.’22 Such trends continued into the nineteenth century; when women associated with the Stuarts were acknowledged by male historians, it was largely as conduits for absolutism across the Channel. Thus,

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Henrietta Maria was treated in a paradoxical manner by her own contemporaries and later by historians who regarded her as confirming the already confirmed absolutist monarch Charles in his absolutism.23 Stuart women had rarely received serious scholarly attention before they were recovered by the Strickland sisters. Occasionally, their lives were the subject of eulogium, such as those texts dutifully produced following the Restoration or on the death of Henrietta Maria.24 More often, however, they had been represented scandalously in the ‘secret histories’ and political polemic that proliferated throughout the seventeenth century. For Henrietta Maria, this process began when her letters to her husband Charles were captured at Naseby and then published, with various annotations, as The King’s Cabinet Opened shortly afterwards. The revelations of this intimate correspondence gravely damaged the Royalist cause. The most damaging charge made by the King’s enemies and appended to the letters was the suggestion that Charles’s ‘counsels’ were ‘wholly managed by the Queen’.25 The charge of uxoriousness on the part of Charles represented an ‘inverse coverture at work’ and fed into suspicions that it was Henrietta Maria who was truly at war with Parliament.26 The ‘intermixing of ejaculations of love and affection with matters of policy and affairs of state’ found in the letters between Charles and Henrietta Maria fuelled concerns that the King placed his love for the Queen above his concerns for ‘publikes affaires’ and his ‘affection . . . [for] his people’.27 Such concerns functioned not merely in ‘belittling the King’s manhood’, writes Derek Hirst, but ‘to deny it’ and, as a consequence, challenge his legitimacy to rule.28 So successful were such claims that Diane Purkiss has asserted, ‘[I]t is not too much to say that the English Republic was grounded in the insistence that Charles was unfit to rule because he was himself ruled by his wife.’29 Henrietta Maria was accused of being an ‘Amazon’, entirely disdainful of English law and custom,30 while Charles appeared as the ‘Sonnetting’ King seduced away from his people by a foreign (and Catholic) consort.31 The charge that although Henrietta Maria ‘be of the weaker sex, born an alien, bred up in a contrary Religion, yet nothing great or small is transacted without her privity and consent’ has defined her image in male-authored histories of the civil wars into the twentieth century.32

La Reine Malheureuse The Stricklands were famous for their devotion to the Stuart dynasty, publishing the first biography of Henrietta Maria since the Restoration.33 Agnes Strickland’s

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life of Henrietta Maria had been drawn from eulogistic sources such as Bousset’s funeral oration for Henrietta Maria, the Memoirs for the History of Anne of Austria by Madame de Motteville, from Stuart papers in the secret archives of France and a private history of the Queen from the library of George Strickland, whose ancestors had gone into exile with the Stuarts in 1689. Such sources were highly partisan, and her reliance on these materials was treated as self-serving by reviewers such as Phillips.34 Strickland did not shy away from mentioning events or actions that other historians had seen as contentious or criminal on the part of Henrietta Maria but rather documented the many difficulties that inevitably arose when an English Protestant king marries a French Catholic princess. Strickland highlighted the snares laid for foreign queens at the English court in considerable detail, drawing from sources such as de Motteville. Readers were reminded that Henrietta Maria was only 16 when the ‘crimes’ she perpetrated upon coming to England were allegedly committed. Strickland had understood that Henrietta Maria was in an invidious position, torn between her faith and her role as consort and, moreover, that her faith ensured that she would be subject to opposition regardless of her behaviour. She records that even when Henrietta Maria was performing that most critical queenly duty – producing a male heir – she was the subject of ‘party rage in a violent degree’ when political pamphlets were published full of reviling epithets against her.35 Henrietta Maria was a highly polarizing figure, not least because men of all political persuasions – in both the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries – regarded her as the cause of the English Civil War. During the French Revolution, her fate had animated discussion of Marie Antoinette’s role in the Revolution on both sides of the Channel. Marie Antoinette had understood herself to be a foreign queen and also, like Henrietta Maria, despised and possibly disposable.36 Burke’s enthusiastic embrace of Marie Antoinette  – the vicious treatment she received, the mistreatment of her children and her unlawful trial – radically changed perceptions of the French queen in England. News of her execution was followed by an outpouring of sympathy in Britain. Her death ‘conjured public empathy’ as Marie Antoinette was depicted as a tragic wife and mother in many of the elegiac accounts of her last days.37 By the time Strickland was writing about Henrietta Maria, Marie Antoinette was regarded as the archetypal innocent martyr of the French Revolution. Strickland followed Burke in employing elements of tragedy to heighten the emotions evoked by Henrietta Maria’s wretched fate in order to overcome long-held prejudices against this French queen and to ensure that her readers could empathize with her plight.38

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The most remarkable feature of Strickland’s life of Henrietta Maria was, however, its refusal to in any way engage with the scandal generated by the capture of their correspondence after the Battle of Naseby. While Strickland mentioned the capture of the royal correspondence in passing, and some letters from this source are referenced in the text, she did not mention any of the hostile commentary appended to these letters by Parliament. Instead, she quotes at length from a letter written by the King regarding the publication of his correspondence. Although Strickland did not suggest directly that this letter might be evidence of Charles’s poor judgement and self-delusion, it is difficult to view this source in any other light given the aftermath of the publication.39 Strickland’s refusal to engage with the commentary made by Parliamentarians regarding Henrietta Maria was clearly deliberate as it allowed her to use the letters as proof of the Queen’s valour and love for her husband. Strickland only reproduced letters that highlight this aspect of the royal correspondence and confirm that the Queen’s advice on certain matters was largely ignored by the King.40 In so doing, she began the process of reframing Henrietta Maria’s correspondence that Green completed with her publication of all the letters between the pair. The most emphatic rejection Strickland made of the masculinist Anglohistorical tradition came shortly after their description of Henrietta Maria’s flight into exile. Male contemporaries and modern historians had represented Henrietta Maria’s departure from Oxford as her final betrayal of her beloved spouse. Contrary to Phillips’s suggestion in the Edinburgh Review  – that Strickland merely ‘passes over in entire silence her selfish and obdurate refusal to share in his peril at Oxford’ – she rather demonstrated the impossible choices facing the queen. Where Phillips casts Henrietta Maria as ‘a queen insulting and defying the fond husband whose fortunes she has ruined, and whose reputation she has sullied’, Strickland presented her as heavily pregnant and seriously ill, fleeing into danger to give birth and to continue to support the King in exile.41 Strickland followed this discussion with brief exegesis on the nature of history by Madame de Motteville, who declared, ‘The cabinets of kings are theatres, where are continually played pieces which occupy the attention of the whole world. Some of these are entirely comic; there are also tragedies, whose greatest events are almost always caused by trifles.’42 This marked an emphatic rejection of the tradition first articulated by Parliamentarians in The King’s Cabinet Opened that, since her arrival in England, Henrietta Maria had sown the seeds of the civil strife that afflicted England in the 1640s. ‘Chance’, Strickland wrote, ‘governs the conduct of such royal personages. Great tragedies spring from trifling caprices.’43

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To suggest that the fate of the Stuarts was merely the result of ‘chance’ was to undermine the providential confidence that framed the teleological narratives of English nationhood and endorsed the cultural supremacy of Whig politics and historiography since the civil wars.44 While Mary Anne Everett Green refrained from making such grand claims about the nature of history, the processes she followed in editing the letters of Henrietta Maria ensured that she ‘did not subsume the materials into a hierarchicalizing narrative’, and, therefore, she too resisted the teleological narratives that framed Whig history in the nineteenth century and allowed for revisionism in various forms to emerge.45

Opening the Queen’s Cabinet Much of the vitriol spent on Henrietta Maria in the Whig historical tradition has been based upon the six of her letters to King Charles published by Parliament in the 1645 pamphlet The King’s Cabinet Opened. These were not the first of her letters to be published by Parliament. A letter to the Queen from Lord Digby, a ‘banished adherent’ of the King, had been intercepted as early as February 1642. Mary Anne Everett Green published this letter in her collection, followed by another letter alleged to be from the Queen to Digby, which she identified as a forgery. 46 In the notes appended to this letter Green wryly observed, The ingenuity of parliamentary wit cannot have been very severely taxed in the concoction of the following letter, evidently forged, and professing to be a reply to the above. Henrietta Maria was not thus in the habit of echoing parrot-like, the very works of her correspondents.47

Green’s mention of this forgery is significant because, unlike Strickland and others who had written on Henrietta Maria, she did not take at face value the authenticity or meanings that had been attributed to documents formed during the polemical campaign against the Queen. Royalists such as the Earl of Clarendon had observed at the time that the presentation of the letters had been manipulated in order ‘to improve the prejudice they had raised against [the King and Queen], and concealed other parts which would have vindicated them from the many particulars with which they had aspersed them’.48 Yet, even modern historians and literary scholars who have studied these letters have tended to uncritically echo an understanding of this text put forward as Parliamentary propaganda.49 Until Green published her collection of Henrietta Maria’s letters, the Queen’s correspondence was principally known only through the King’s Cabinet pamphlet.

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John Bruce, Green’s colleague at the PRO, had published six of Henrietta Maria’s letters in his own collection of Charles’s letters in 1856. Bruce’s compilation functioned as an addendum to The King’s Cabinet pamphlet, as it focused on the correspondence of King Charles to Henrietta Maria in the year following the Battle of Naseby. The letters had come to light through the publication of a short article written by Joseph Conway Witton in the newly established scholarly journal Notes and Queries. Witton had purchased the collection in 1855 from a dealer in pictures and curiosities in Bath. In his role as Director of the Camden Society, John Bruce had asked to see the letters with a view to publishing them for the society, ‘as the proper medium for conveying such documents to the world’.50 Having determined that the letters were ‘unquestionably genuine’, Bruce edited them and wrote a lengthy introduction to the collection. The ‘found’ letters were not written in the hand of the king but appear to have been drafts of letters that had been transcribed and copied into a small quarto parchment-covered volume for ‘convenience of reference’ in 1646 or later.51 The drafting was necessary as the royal correspondence had been written in cipher to ensure privacy, should the letters be captured. This process, however, had further enhanced the notion – put forward by hostile sources – that the letters represented ‘an illegitimate attempt to close off matters of state from public scrutiny’. The cipher itself became ‘a code for monarchical illegitimacy’ and was used by the King’s enemies as evidence of ‘secret intrigues even when none existed’.52 Because of the nature of Witton’s manuscript, the letters were only those of the King to the Queen. Bruce, however, appended six letters of Henrietta Maria to his own publication. These letters were drawn from the Clarendon State Papers which had been archived at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Bruce reported that these letters were published ‘as they stand in the Clarendon State Papers’ and he offered very little commentary on the letters in the appendix.53 Several of the letters were published in French without translation. Bruce’s purpose in publishing her letters was made clear in the introduction where he suggested that the correspondence he published demonstrated the ‘fatal influence’ which Henrietta possessed, ‘and the uncivil way in which it was too often exercised’.54 Although Bruce was presenting new evidence regarding Henrietta Maria and Charles to the public, he essentially followed the narrative created by the Parliamentary editors of The King’s Cabinet, often simply repeating the allegations that they had made regarding Henrietta Maria drawn from letters of an earlier period.55 His depiction of Charles also presented long-held views, formed during the civil wars, that he was entirely governed by his queen.

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Although Mary Anne Everett Green thanked Bruce for his assistance with her editing project, she made no other reference to his publication of Charles’s letters or to his commentary on Henrietta Maria. Whereas Bruce had used his introduction to rake over the historiography of the civil wars, Green’s introduction made it clear that her book was not itself a ‘history’ but rather furnished ‘the materials of history’. The ‘contents of the letters touching upon the agitated points of the stormiest period of English history’, she explained, ‘would require, for their complete elucidation, a much fuller investigation into the politics of the times than I have either the leisure to undertake, or the ability to conduct successfully.’56 While such a statement could be read as typical feminine self-depreciation, I  would suggest that it signalled a form of resistance to the well-worn narratives that had framed the materials she was editing. Green was at pains to demonstrate that her decision to publish these letters was not the result of ‘any pre-concerted design . . . to illustrate [Henrietta Maria’s] changeful personal history’.57 Here Green validated her own identity as a ‘calendarer’, as she asserted that she had edited and published these letters for their intrinsic ‘historical value’.58 Green did not refer to any historiographical controversy surrounding Henrietta Maria, nor did she make special mention of the letters that were published following the Battle of Naseby. She did, however, publish all the correspondence between the King and Queen that had been captured by Parliamentary forces and placed them in chronological order. Her process of not speculating beyond the evidence allowed her to ‘reframe’ their previous presentation in The King’s Cabinet pamphlet and, in so doing, she offered a subtle rebuke to men such as John Bruce who had accepted uncritically an image of Henrietta Maria that had been carefully ‘constructed’ from hostile and partisan sources.

‘Calendaring’ as empathetic history Calendaring has received little attention in modern studies of English historiography, yet during the nineteenth century, it was regarded as ‘an original and influential genre of historical writing’.59 The claim that calendaring was a unique mode of ‘historical literature’ reflects the process of introducing, abstracting and excerpting from the documents, a method that Green both initiated and perfected during her long working life at the PRO.60 The historians employed by the PRO were commissioned initially to write a brief precis of their contents that would be printed in each volume available for sale.61 While negotiating her terms of employment, Green insisted that she should write

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‘an historical introduction to each volume’ that would give context to the documents published and to the reign in which they were produced. Although Romilly initially rejected this suggestion as too costly, he eventually consented to Green producing introductions, and they became a defining feature of the Calendars. Green was responsible for the creation of at least one-third of the volumes produced by the PRO during her lifetime.62 The introductions to the forty-one volumes of Calendars that she produced over the forty years she worked at the PRO totalled over 700 pages and constituted ‘a veritable history of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’.63 Because of her speed, accuracy and engaging style of excerpting, Green’s practices came to define the Calendar project and she has come to be regarded as the most efficient, prolific, innovative and respected of the editors involved in this massive government project.64 Green maintained that historians ‘had an ethical obligation to adhere to original documents, even more so when they represented figures who were rarely afforded the opportunity to speak for themselves’.65 Whereas the Stricklands sought an affective connection with the women they wrote about, through artefacts as much as through the sensual experience of the archive, Green ‘stressed her reliance on original documents’ and her ‘commitment to speak accurately on behalf of women, who had been neglected by other historians’.66 Yet, Green’s practice of interpreting the original documents she edited was not so different from Stricklands’ in terms of its impact. As Krueger has observed, Green’s efforts encouraged ‘the historical imagination necessary to revivify the desires of the dead’, generating affectivity and empathy for those who had previously been denied historical agency.67 Green published around 200 original letters of Henrietta Maria. Unlike Bruce, who had published a lengthy introduction to his collection of Charles’s letters, Green only briefly introduced the letters, discussing their provenance and their condition. As had been her practice since the beginning of her career, Green was committed to making sure that the voices of the past were transmitted with accuracy and care. As she wrote of her method in her first collection of letters, No liberty whatever has been taken with any of the letters, except in translating those in foreign languages into English, and modernising the ancient orthography . . . But it should be observed that the original phraseology has in every instance been retained, and the strictest attention paid to fidelity in the transcripts and to correctness in the translations. Not a word has been purposely omitted, inserted, or altered, and, where a supplemental word was necessary to make up the sense, it has been placed within a parenthesis. In those instances where the originals had sustained injury from fire, damp, or other casualty,

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the words supposed to have been effaced have occasionally been conjecturally supplied within brackets.68

The letters of Henrietta Maria presented particular challenges for an editor, as Green opined in her introduction, as the ‘greater part of the correspondence’ had been written ‘in cipher, with deciphering sometimes interlined, and sometimes partially or totally omitted’.69 The poor quality of previous translations and transcriptions also hampered her efforts and, due perhaps to Henrietta Maria’s imperfect grasp of English, spelling mistakes abounded. Green provided context and appended explanation to many of the letters and extracted anecdote and other detail to highlight their significance. Such techniques ensured the reader of the authenticity of the documents that were before them and also functioned to generate empathy for the author of this correspondence. The letters Green edited documented each stage of Henrietta Maria’s life: from her infancy in the French court, her early days as a young queen, her fraught time in exile and her return to England with the Restoration. The vast bulk of the letters, however, are from the period of the civil wars, when Henrietta Maria’s absence from court and in exile necessitated correspondence with King Charles. While she also wrote letters to significant Royalist figures – such as Earl of Newcastle, Prince Rupert and numerous foreign dignitaries seeking support for her husband – around 100 of the letters in Green’s collection were written to Charles, a far greater sample of their correspondence than had been published then or since. Henrietta Maria was not really a marginalized figure in history, but her voice, nonetheless, had been stifled and made shrill by the framing of her letters by the Parliamentary editors who published them. Of the fifty-seven letters captured at Naseby, only thirty-nine were published in The King’s Cabinet Opened pamphlet and, as Laura Lunger Knoppers has observed, these published letters had been ‘reshaped – sometimes considerably’. Those not published dealt with ‘domestic subjects – the queen’s ill health and the king’s anxious queries, as well as the strains, misunderstandings and expressions of affection between the separated husband and wife’, that is, anything ‘that might have evoked readers’ understanding or sympathy’ for the royal couple.70 As Knoppers argues, these letters underwent an extensive and ‘far from transparent process’ of deciphering, ordering, selection and omission before they were published. This ‘ “framing” in all of its powerful senses’ presented Henrietta Maria in the worst possible light and was critical to shaping public opinion, particularly the idea that there was a gendered inversion at the heart of the royal marriage, and that it was Henrietta Maria, not Charles, who was truly at war with Parliament.71 Thus,

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while Henrietta Maria was not exactly silenced, her voice had been appropriated by the Parliamentary editors and manipulated to suit the narrative that they were producing.72 Many of the letters Green published from Henrietta Maria’s early life enhance the image that Agnes Strickland had created a decade before. Where original source material was not available, Green resorted to citing Strickland’s translations of documents, such as Henrietta Maria’s letters to her governess Madame de Montglat which had been sourced from the Imperial Library of St Petersburg.73 In one such letter the infant Henrietta Maria apologized to her governess for a fit of pique.74 Like Strickland, Green did not ignore Henrietta Maria’s imperious nature, but she documented how it was cultivated from infancy as part of her education at court. Hostile sources had focused only upon evidence demonstrating such perceived character flaws; by documenting what could be known of the Queen’s early life, Green presented a more rounded image, providing evidence of her spontaneity, her sense of fun and her youth. These letters provided evidence that Henrietta Maria was not always the dour and haughty queen found in hostile Whig sources, although this is left up to the reader to determine. Many of the letters published in the early part of the collection allude to her domestic situation, the arrangements for her accouchement, her births and miscarriages, as well as concern for her infants and her family abroad – topics that were likely to produce empathy in a reader.75 The letters Green published on these subjects may appear to be of a trivial nature, but the hostile image of Henrietta Maria that had shaped historical understandings of the civil wars had begun with the reporting of a small number of specific instances of her high-handedness upon her arrival in England. These instances were generally reported by adverse commentators at court and were then reproduced endlessly in the polemic against the queen. Such incidents had come to form a ‘canon’ that was drawn upon to demonstrate the inevitability of Henrietta Maria’s ‘fatal’ role in the civil wars.76 Green took a more explicit stance than had Strickland, presenting Henrietta Maria as a victim of dynastic politics and, by excerpting from various letters, provided evidence that her position as a Catholic consort of a Protestant monarch in England was an impossible one. Strickland, for example, had published a lengthy letter from Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de' Medici, on the occasion of her daughter’s marriage to Charles. Strickland cited this as evidence of ‘maternal tenderness, and even sublime moral truths’.77 Green’s focus, however, was on the politics of the marriage settlement and the conflicting agendas at play between the men who negotiated its terms. She drew attention particularly to the

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role Pope Urban played in this settlement and the call to duty he imposed upon the young princess. Whereas Strickland had accepted that Henrietta Maria was bigoted and that this intolerance was ‘injurious to the King’,78 Green produced a lengthy excerpt from a letter Henrietta Maria sent to her brother, Louis XIII, that outlined the context of her marriage settlement and the instructions she had been given by the Pope. Green records, [The] Pope expressly tells her that had it not been for the hope afforded by her character, that she, as queen in a heretic country, would be the guardian angel and safeguard of her oppressed fellow-religionists, he should never had granted the dispensation for her marriage. He encourages her to become the Esther of her oppressed people, the Clothilde who subdued to Christ her victorious husband, the Aldiberga whose nuptials bought religion into Britain; for that the eyes of the whole world, and of the spiritual world too, are turned upon her.79

By presenting her as a victim of dynastic politics, Green not only strayed from the canon of anti-Henrietta Maria polemic, she also suggested that weakness in the terms of Henrietta Maria’s marriage settlement encouraged her ‘strenuous adherence to that which she firmly believed to be right’.80 Her commentary here signalled the importance of understanding the Queen’s letter to her brother as it showed the motivation and context for her later support of Catholics in England, while not creating ‘imagined words or selves’.81 Without resorting to heightened emotion favoured by the Stricklands, Green’s excerpting of the Pope’s letter generated great empathy for Henrietta Maria by conveying the tragedy of her predicament, caught as she was in a web of dynastic politics over which she had no control and left unprotected by her male kin. Henrietta Maria’s marriage settlement ensured that she would be surrounded by Catholics to assist in the raising of any children of the marriage, establishing a cause for faction even before she had even arrived in England. While Green did not push the point to its obvious conclusion, she made clear that as a foreign queen, Henrietta Maria had multiple and conflicting allegiances; she was a pawn in the religious politics of the period, played off between the Pope, her brother Louis XIII and her future husband. Charles and Henrietta Maria had been the first royal couple in history to actively glorify their relationship as husband and wife:  ‘Royal wedded love was there held out insistently’ throughout their reign ‘as both the essence of and model for earthly harmony’.82 While the royal couple attempted to project an unquestionably patriarchal image of their relationship through the paintings, plays and poetry that celebrated their union, such efforts became

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counterproductive.83 As Henrietta Maria became more entangled with matters of State during Charles’s period of personal rule, this domestic harmony ‘proved explosive’ when set against the fear of popery.84 Their conjugal concord became the source of much Puritan invective during the period, as writers such as John Milton and Lucy Hutchinson connected it with Marian worship and idolatry.85 Henrietta Maria thus came to embody the ‘threat of personal rule’, while the notion that the King had ceased to represent or act in the public interest was ‘displaced onto Charles’ indulgence of the queen’.86 Parliamentary propaganda used such ideas to demonstrate a lack of manly authority on Charles’s part, rendering him unfit to govern the nation.87 Since the civil wars, historians had generally accepted this partisan view of their relationship; they echoed Milton in condemning the necessity of royal wives and generated a strangely homosocial understanding of kingship in the process.88 The careful editing and framing of the letters published in The King’s Cabinet Opened had proven critical in consolidating the image of Charles being in thrall to Henrietta Maria. The Queen’s letters had been published out of chronological order and in a sequence that emphasized ‘certain threatening aspects’ of her correspondence, particularly the image of Henrietta Maria as a ‘martial queen’.89 The first and last letters show the Queen as head of an army, an action foregrounded in the Parliamentary Articles of Treason against her in January 1644. Green resisted this framing, presenting all the letters between the pair in chronological order. This allowed her to document evidence of their conjugal happiness and present it in a positive light, not formed by the usual providential or teleological narratives of the civil wars. While Henrietta Maria emerged as a devoted wife and mother  – an image in keeping with Victorian bourgeois notions of domesticity  – this challenged her representation as a war-like and menacing foreign enemy and subtly undermined the credibility of much Whig historiography of the period. Crucial to the success of The King’s Cabinet as propaganda had been the theme of ‘discovery’ and the evocation of ‘mystery’ used by its Parliamentary editors. These were used to suggest that, rather than publishing the private correspondence between a man and his wife, the editors were in the act of uncovering the secrets of State.90 The editors of the text used numerous strategies to manipulate their readers, framing the letters to emphasize their most incriminating passages to effect a partial and partisan reading.91 Green makes no mention of such strategies, but her careful editing and excerpting indicates that she may have noticed them nonetheless. In any case, her commitment to the processes she had developed as a calendarer refused such strategies. By

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publishing all the letters between the King and Queen captured at the Battle of Naseby in chronological order, Green subverted the teleological narrative that had structured the reading of these documents since 1645.92 While she did note that some of these letters had been published by Parliament, she did not discuss the pamphlet, merely referring to and sometimes excerpting the materials that had been appended to the letters by those earlier editors. She also removed any of the italicization and typographical anomalies which had been used by Parliament to emphasize particularly incriminating passages. Indeed, no words are italicized in any of The King’s Cabinet letters that Green published, which was in keeping with her practice to only replicate italics or other typographical symbols she found in the originals. Henrietta Maria’s flight from Oxford had become standard evidence of her perfidy and unwomanly demeanour. As noted by the critic in the Edinburgh Review when savaging Agnes Strickland on this subject, A more lamentable scene of unwomanly cruelty and unprincely meanness was surely never recorded. Imagine a queen insulting and defying the fond husband whose fortunes she had ruined, and whose reputation she had sullied; and all because she was herself determined to escape by flight from the danger which he was compelled to confront!93

By publishing the letters between the King and Queen that were omitted in The King’s Cabinet pamphlet, Green allowed readers to form a powerful impression of the vulnerability of the Queen and resisted the distancing effects produced by those earlier editors (and indeed by later historians committed to such methods). In her letters, Henrietta Maria voiced the impossibility of her situation, caught between her wish to support her husband and her need to safely birth her child. The only letter in The King’s Cabinet Opened that refers to Henrietta Maria’s ill health is one she wrote from Bath on 21 April 1644.94 Knoppers has surmised that it was ‘included because of a damning reference to concessions for Irish Catholics’.95 No other letters in the pamphlet mentioned the Queen’s confinement, the difficult period following the birth of her youngest child – the ill-fated Henriette Anne – or her dangerous flight into exile.96 Here Green draws attention to the Parliamentary italicization of ‘underhand dealing with the Irish’ in a footnote, suggesting that she too may have come to a similar conclusion to Knoppers.97 She also signals the context of the letter, that is, that Henrietta Maria’s ill health relates to her ‘delicate situation’, a fact generally ignored in the King’s Cabinet and by later Whig commentators and historians.98 The letters not

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published by Parliament account for a period between April 1644 and January 1645. The omitted correspondence for this period not only referred to her ‘period of accouchement’ but also demonstrated how assiduously Henrietta Maria continued to work on behalf of the King.99 While Green does not offer much commentary of her own, she provides considerable evidence drawn from contemporary sources regarding the Queen’s perilous condition during this time. The detail Green provided of the circumstances that accompanied the birth of the Princess gives great insight into the truly strange politics of the civil wars and provide a very real sense of the difficulties facing a heavily pregnant queen who had been charged with treason.100 By carefully paraphrasing excerpts of letters from the King, newspapers of the period, diaries and other contemporary primary sources, Green offered a different image of Henrietta to the marital vision that had been promulgated by Parliament. By filling in the missing details of Henrietta Maria’s horrendous sufferings during this period, Green overcame the ‘spacing’ strategies that had been used by editors to heighten ‘the sense of Charles’ uxoriousness’. Charles’s anxious queries had been made to look weak and pitiful, in the absence of evidence that he truly feared for his wife’s (and child’s) life.101 The way in which Green presented the ‘recorded words of the dead’ enhanced the ‘effects of objectivity and authority’ for herself as the third-person narrator, anticipating the use of such ‘scientific methods’ by later historians, while also generating great empathy for a truly unfortunate queen.102

Gendering history In 1889, Catholic reviewer Jean M.  Stone complained in the Dublin Review that facts about Henrietta Maria ‘have been persistently misrepresented, and the Puritan vituperation of her own day continues to stand for history’.103 While Stone’s comments were far from inaccurate, they perhaps miss the mark where women writers are concerned. The Stricklands’ depiction of the lives of foreign queens such as Henrietta Maria may not have created a groundswell of opinion change, but it did constitute a significant site for resisting the Whig interpretation of history. By accessing female-authored French sources, the Stricklands had refuted the misogyny that had characterized contemporary and historical representations of the Stuarts since the seventeenth century. They did not merely ‘dehomogenize’ the Protestant Whig tradition; they had resisted the hegemonic discourses that forged Britain in the nineteenth century, creating a history that generated empathy for the Stuarts, an alternate feminine history

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of the nation that did not repress England’s French connections or its Catholic past. A decade after the publication of the Stricklands’ life of Henrietta Maria, Mary Anne Everett Green went further than the Stricklands in her defence of Henrietta Maria, celebrating the ‘strength and firmness of mind’ of this ‘daughter of Henri Quatre’.104 Green even had the temerity to suggest that it was the King’s vacillation, rather than advice of the Queen, that was the cause of his demise. More significantly, however, through her careful collection of primary source materials that documented all stages of Henrietta Maria’s life, not just evidence of her imperious nature as Whig historians had done since she had arrived in England, Green allowed for the possibility of a more sympathetic image of the Queen to emerge. While a hostile image of Henrietta Maria can still be found in twentiethcentury histories of the seventeenth century, Green’s efforts appear to have begun to soften her image even among prominent male historians of the civil wars. In 1883, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Director of the Camden Society, noted when editing Madame de Motteville’s Memoirs for their Miscellany, If Henrietta Maria’s conduct was disastrous to herself and her husband it could hardly have been expected to be otherwise. It is hard for us now to conceive what were the difficulties of a foreign Queen in the seventeenth century . . . In the seventeenth century a French woman differed from an English woman on almost every conceivable point on which governmental difficulties were likely to arise. It was absolutely impossible that a French woman could enter into the ecclesiastical or parliamentary constitution of England, or that her advice should be otherwise than bad. To blame Henrietta Maria for leading her husband astray is simply to blame her for being his wife, and as she was only fifteen years old at the time of her marriage, this is only to transfer the blame to the politicians who overlooked the real objections to the arrangement which they regarded with satisfaction.105

While Gardiner did not cite Green, his rather mealy-mouthed sympathy for Henrietta Maria undoubtedly reflected her influence and signalled the possibilities of the emergence in the twentieth century of a history of England less wrought by the gendered politics of the seventeenth century.

Conclusion

When I  began this book, I  thought of it as a set of case studies of women historians in the nineteenth century. Now, however, I have come to think of the book as documenting that which had been lost in the transition from Hume to Hallam, or from Macaulay to Maitland. Women’s voices obviously have been lost, but also the shared history of capital ‘H’ history and earlier genres of historical writing. The loss of this shared history not only has ensured an almost entirely masculinist understanding of both English history and historiography but, perhaps more significantly, has also suppressed alternate versions of English history – histories that were sympathetic to Catholics and to France, histories told from the peripheries, histories that were pro-Stuart and histories that did not regard English history as ‘exceptional’ but rather as intimately connected with the Continent. Inserting such histories into mainstream historiography alters its parameters, suggesting that dominant accounts of English nationhood are inevitably partial and hence flawed. Thus, in reading the historical works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Benger, the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, I have sought not only to recover such works but also to argue that they offered alternate feminine narratives of nation. These narratives resisted the hegemonic discourses that ‘forged Britain’ in the nineteenth century as well as the misogyny and homophobia that shaped the Whig version of the past. In so doing, such writers did not merely produce counter-histories; they experimented with genre in order to emotionally appeal to a broad readership and to form communities bound by an empathetic connection to each other and to a particular version of the past. As the nature of truth is constantly debated, it is timely to consider what has been lost in the process that saw fact and fiction rendered oppositional. Studying the appeal of these women writers and their emotional connection with their subjects and their readers not only gives us a greater understanding of the ways in which women and men consumed history in the nineteenth century but also shows us

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how they understood its value and gave it meaning. Reconsidering the relation between history and historical fiction and, indeed, other genres of historical writing offers an important lesson for modern historians to consider the forms and genres in which we produce capital ‘H’ history in the age when most people read history written by novelists such as Hilary Mantel or Philippa Gregory.

Notes Introduction: Empathetic Histories: English Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860 1 I use the term ‘English’ historiography throughout the book to reflect the evolution of a hegemonic Anglo-British historiography following the Act of Union. As Marinell Ash has observed, the particular pasts of Scotland (and Wales too) were abandoned as meaningful history after 1707, as the English ‘ “nationalism” of whiggish constitutional history’ was embraced. This co-option was particularly marked in Scotland, as titles such as Ash’s own monograph suggest: The Strange Death of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Ramsey Head Press, 1980), 49. See also Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4–5. 2 No major study of English nineteenth-century historiography makes mention of any of the women studied in this book. See: Thomas Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760–1830 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933); Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); J. R. Hale, ed., The Evolution of British Historiography: From Bacon to Namier (London: Macmillan, 1964); J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983); A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1985). Only Philippa Levine’s The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838– 1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) mentions Mary Anne Everett Green’s work as a calenderer (on pages 15, 111, 112), and that Agnes Strickland signed the petition to urge the government to establish a Historical Manuscripts Commission (page 120). 3 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1931). Colin Kidd has elaborated upon Butterfield’s original definition of ‘Whig’ history, making it applicable to nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography: ‘[P]ride in the special role in history of the English church;

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7 8

9

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belief in an “ancient constitution” in the distant past and the subsequent unbroken continuity of limited monarchy, parliament and the rule of common law throughout England’s history; and the consequent belief in a providential missionary role for the English in world history whether as exporters of protestantism or parliamentary democracy . . . [and] an updated Gothicism, which attributes to northwestern Europe, and particularly to England, the long historic possession of the customs and manners requisite for sustained economic growth – “a culture of capitalism.” ’ Like Kidd, I treat Whig history in its non-partisan sense and use it to refer to all male-authored histories concerned to demonstrate the history of ‘English’ liberty that has been advanced since the eighteenth century. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 6. Gregory Claeys, ed., Political Writings of the 1790s (London: William Pickering, 1997), 3:16. Timothy Lang, The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. William Lecky wrote in 1892: ‘We are Cavaliers or Roundheads before we are Conservatives or Liberals.’ See W. E. H. Lecky, The Political Value of History (London: Edward Arnold, 1892), 19. This is cited in Burrow, Liberal Descent, 14; Levine, Amateur and the Professional, 77. Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6–7. Feminist interventions into British historiography of the early twentieth century have already done much to demonstrate women’s critical role in the formation of these sub-genres, particularly social history, art history and local history. See, for instance, Maxine Berg, ‘ The First Women Economic Historians’, Economic History Review 45, no. 2 (1992): 308–13; Rosemary Ann Mitchell, ‘“The Busy Daughters of Clio”: Women Writers of History from 1820–1880’, Women’s History Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 107–34; and Jane Lewis, ‘Women Lost and Found: The Impact of Feminism on History’, in Men’s Studies Modified: The Impact of Feminism on the Academic Disciplines, ed. Dale Spender (Oxford: Pergamum Press, 1980), 55–72; Joan Thirsk, ‘Foreword’, in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 1–21; Joan Thirsk, ‘ The History Women’, in Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society, ed. Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1995), 1–11; and Joan Thirsk, ‘Women Local and Family Historians’, in Oxford Companion to Family and Local History, ed. David Hey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 498–504. Levine, Amateur and the Professional, 30; Lynette Felber, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Clio’s Daughter: British Women Making History, 1790–1899 (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 15.

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10 Felber, ‘Introduction’, 15. 11 Excellent studies exist for the period 1500–1800, such as Daniel R. Woolf ’s ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500– 1800’, American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997): 645–79; Devoney Looser’s groundbreaking British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 12 Although some survey studies of women’s historiography touch on the Victorian period, most focus on the twentieth century. Thirsk, for instance, focuses mainly on the emergence of women historians of social and economic history coming out of the London School of Economics and the suffrage movement, ‘Foreword’, 1–21. June Purvis’s survey follows Thirsk, referencing the Stricklands and Mary Anne Everett Green briefly, but largely focuses on women’s history in the later twentieth century. See: June Purvis, ed., ‘From “Women Worthies” to Poststructuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, in Women’s History: Britain 1850–1945: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–23. 13 Billie Melman, ‘Gender, History and Memory: The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, History and Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 5, no. 1 (1993): 5–41; Mitchell, ‘“Busy Daughters of Clio”’, 107–34. 14 Melman, ‘Gender, History and Memory’, 7. 15 Mitchell, ‘“Busy Daughters of Clio”’, 107. 16 Melman, ‘Gender, History and Memory’, 15–16. 17 Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 18 Rosemary Ann Mitchell’s Picturing the Past devotes several pages on the Stricklands as ‘picturesque’ historians and makes an important argument pertaining to their joint authorship, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 144–60. I have published on the Stricklands’ Sturt volumes: Mary Spongberg, ‘La Reine Malheureuse: Stuart History, Sympathetic History and the Strickland’s history of Henrietta Maria’, Women’s History Review 20, no. 5 (2011): 745–64. See also Miriam Elizabeth Burstein’s ‘The Reduced Pretensions of the Historic Muse: Agnes Strickland and the Commerce of Women’s History’, Journal of Narrative Technique 28, no. 3 (1998): 219–42. Burstein deals with Strickland’s reception as a commercially successful author, suggesting that she ‘invented’ the genre of ‘Lives of Queens’. Christine L. Krueger has published three important articles on Mary Anne Everett Green’s work as a calenderer at the Public Records Office (PRO). While Krueger argues that Green’s excerpting and introduction of the calendars she edited were an important form of historical writing, she has not written about Green’s Lives of the Princesses of England, from the Norman Conquest (London: Henry Colburn, 1849). See: Christine L. Krueger’s

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20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30

Notes articles: ‘Why She Lived at the PRO: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Profession of History’, Journal of British Studies 42, no. 1 (2003): 70; ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendars of State Papers as a Genre of Historical Writing’, Clio 36, no. 1 (2006): 1–21; and ‘Order in the Archives: The Victorian Art of Legal History’, Critical Analysis of Law 2, no. 2 (2015): 484–95. In the Stricklands’ case, however, mentions are sometimes slightly grudging. Joan Thirsk, for instance, names Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland ‘as the first in this line of nineteenth-century women historians’ but dismisses their contribution fairly brusquely: ‘Exhilaration and a zestful excitement in the re-creation of past events were more in evidence in their work than a broadly conceived, calm, and objective judgment; and Agnes’s uncritical admiration and championship of Mary Queen of Scots in her later life deprived her of much of the sympathy and respect which she enjoyed earlier in her literary career.’ Thirsk, ‘Foreword’, 3. Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 217–18. Bonnie G. Smith ‘looks precisely at naïve tales of queens and famous ladies in order to chart the superficial, literary, trivial, and “feminine” side of amateurism’. Smith, Gender of History, 6. O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 218. See, for instance, Greg Kucich’s three articles: ‘Romanticism and Feminist Historiography’, Wordsworth Circle 24, no. 3 (1993): 133–40; ‘Romanticism and the Re-Engendering of Historical Memory’, in Memory and Memorials, 1789– 1914: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth (London: Routledge, 2000), 15–29; and ‘Women’s Historiography and the (Dis)embodiment of Law: Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Benger’, Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 1 (2002): 3–7. Kucich, ‘Romanticism and Feminist Historiography’, 137. Kucich, ‘Romanticism and the Re-Engendering of Historical Memory’, 20. Ibid. Greg Kucich, ‘“This Horrid Theatre of Human Suffering”: Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley’, in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 450. Kucich, ‘Romanticism and Feminist Historiography’, 137. Rohan A. Maitzen, Gender, Genre and Victorian Historical Writing (New York: Garland, 1998). Such studies would include: Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Narrating Women’s History in Britain 1770–1902 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and Lisa Kasmer, Novel Histories: British

Notes

31

32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46

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Women Writing History, 1760–1830 (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012). Rohan A. Maitzen, ‘“This Feminine Preserve”: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies 38, no. 3 (1995): 371. Only Burstein makes an argument to suggest that the royal lives produced by the Stricklands and Mary Anne Everett Green were distinctive. She suggests that the Stricklands ‘invented’ ‘Lives of Queens’ as a sub-genre of ‘a much larger field that included lives of Biblical women, sectarian lives, and lives of “women of letters” ’, while also acknowledging that their model, ‘built on the “Court histories” popularized [by the writer] . . . Lucy Aikin’. Burstein, ‘Reduced Pretensions’, 222–3. Booth, How to Make It as a Woman. While it is sometimes acknowledged that these pioneering women historians contributed to an understanding of Britishness or Englishness in this period, only Billie Melman and Rosemary Mitchell have suggested that sought to challenge the Whig-Protestant version of the past. Melman, ‘Gender, History and Memory’, 15–16; Mitchell, Picturing the Past, 160–9. Burstein separates Agnes Strickland and Mary Anne Everett Green from the ‘professional hacks’ that produced collective biographies of women, as historians of women, due to their extensive archival research. Burstein, ‘Reduced Pretensions’, 220. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation of History, v. Peardon, Transition in English Historical Writing, 164. Gerard Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), 145. Peardon, Transition in English Historical Writing, 166. Hedva Ben-Israel, English Historians on the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 3. Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s – Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 1. See also Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 222–5. Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 82. AHR Conversation: ‘The Historical Study of Emotions’, American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1488. Smith, Gender of History, 39, 50–69.

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47 Kucich, ‘Women’s Historiography and the (Dis)embodiment of Law’, 3. 48 Bonnie G. Smith has suggested that women were the ‘quintessential’ amateur historians, who made ‘their living by writing for the marketplace, outside the more exclusive professional institutions of history. See: Smith’s Gender of History, 7. 49 April Alliston, ‘Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 133–48. 50 Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds, ‘Introduction’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 10. See also Cohen’s essay in this collection ‘Sentimental Communities’, 106–32; Alliston, ‘Transnational Sympathies’, 133–48. 51 Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, 136. 52 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 53 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated (London: T. and J. Allman, 1821), 130. 54 There has been considerable critique of Butterfield’s premise that Whig historiography was hegemonic in the nineteenth century, but such criticism tends to understand the ‘Whiggish’ history in a fairly narrow sense. For an excellent survey of Butterfield criticism, see: Keith C. Sewell, ‘The Herbert Butterfield Problem and Its Resolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 4 (2003): 599–618.

1 The Gender of Whig Historiography 1 Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1. 2 Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s – Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2–3. See also Ronald Paulson, ‘Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution’, English Literary History 48, no. 3 (1981): 532–53. 3 Greg Kucich, ‘Women’s Historiography and the (Dis)embodiment of Law: Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Benger’, Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 1 (2002): 3. 4 Gregory Claeys, ed., Political Writings of the 1790s: The French Revolution Debate in Britain (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), 3:16. 5 Gregory Claeys, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Political Writings of the 1790s: Radicalism and Reform Responses to Burke 1790–1791 (London: William Pickering, 1995), xxiv. 6 J. C. D. Clark, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

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7 Gerald Strika, ‘Sixteen Eighty-Eight as Year One: Eighteenth-Century Attitudes towards the Glorious Revolution’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 1 (1971): 143–67. 8 Claeys, Political Writings of the 1790s, 1:xxv. 9 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 15. 10 Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 79. See also 183n52. 11 Claeys, Political Writings of the 1790s, 1:xxx. 12 Robert Malcolm Smuts, ed., ‘Introduction’, in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4. 13 This is particularly true of Stuart queens but also applies to a stock set of consorts such as Elizabeth Woodville and Marguerite of Anjou many of whom feature in Jane Austen’s History of England (see Chapter 3). 14 See, for instance, the description of Charles I in Samuel R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (London: Longmans, Green, 1893), 2:202–3. ‘Born of a Scottish father and a Danish mother, with a grandmother who was half French by birth and altogether French by breeding, with a French wife, with German nephews and a Dutch son-in-law, Charles had nothing in him in touch with that English national feeling . . . which no ruler of England can afford to despise.’ 15 In his The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, Milton argued ‘that the one problem with kings is that they come with queens’. See: Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 123n100; Don M. Wolfe’ sedition of the Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 225. 16 David Starkey, ed., ‘Introduction’, in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987), 13. 17 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 98–9. 18 Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1669 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 114; Michael B. Young, James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 113. 19 Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37. 20 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 126. 21 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 484. 22 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics of the Civil War, 72.

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23 Doran, Whores of Babylon, 95–156. 24 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson: Governor of Nottingham Castle and Town. . . . , ed. Julius Hutchinson (London: Henry Bohn, 1846), 89. 25 Corrinne Harol, ‘Misconceiving the Heir: Mind and Matter in the Warming Pan Propaganda’, in Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death, ed. Helen Deutsche and Mary Terrall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 139. 26 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 101. 27 Ibid. 28 See: Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician’, in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. Robert Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 247. 29 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics of the Civil War, 77. 30 Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter Is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 140. 31 In his History of England, writes of Charles II, ‘The king finding himself freed from the cares of war, and the uneasiness caused by Parliament abandoned himself to a soft, indolent and effeminate life . . . In a word, not to dwell on what passed at a court so corrupted as that of Charles II, I shall only say, that the king’s mistresses had ingrossed the whole credit of the court, and he could refuse them nothing’ (414). The only significant mention Thoyras makes of Charles’s wife, the longsuffering Catherine of Braganza, was that she had miscarried, thus proving she was not barren, a sharp reminder of the biological imperative that shaped the queen’s existence (281). Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, The History of England [1732], trans. N. Tindal (London: Knapton, 1757), Vol. 11. 32 Although the Stricklands claimed Lucy Hutchinson was sympathetic to the queen, she is the source of much of Macaulay’s invective around Henrietta Maria. See especially her comments in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, 67 and 70. See also McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 485–7. 33 Smuts, ‘Introduction’, 4. 34 Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 87. 35 Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Images of Queen Mary II, 1689–95’, Renaissance Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1989): 717–48. 36 Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problem of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 102. 37 Weil, Political Passions, 105.

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38 Howard Nenner, ‘Pretense and Pragmatism: The Response to Uncertainty in the Succession Crisis of 1689’, in The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 93. 39 Beem, Lioness Roared, 119. 40 Ibid. and Melinda L. Zook, ‘History’s Mary: The Propagation of Queen Mary II, 1689–94’, in Women and Sovereignty, ed. Louise O. Fradenburg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 173. 41 Zook, ‘History’s Mary’, 176. 42 Melinda S. Zook, Protestantism, Politics and Women in Britain, 1660–1714 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 126. 43 Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture 1837– 1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2. 44 Ibid. 45 Phillip Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History and Republicanism in Georgian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 41, no. 2 (2002): 172. 46 Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (London: C. Dilly, 1790), 25. 47 Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Time of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 52–77; ‘Reinterpreting the “Glorious Revolution”: Catharine Macaulay and the Radical Response’, in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. Gerard MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 267–85; and Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 162–9. 48 Kucich, for instance, argues that there is a direct trajectory between Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay and women historians during the Romantic period. Kucich sees in Macaulay’s History of England a ‘recurrent foregrounding of gender conflict and opposition in almost every aspect of [her] life and writing’ and suggests that she is the foremother of ‘sympathetic history’ in the nineteenth century. He argues that the ‘furor’ she experienced as a ‘female historian’ allowed her to resist the tendency to ‘efface’ women, to domesticate history and revise male codes of knowledge. See: ‘“This Horrid Theatre of Human Suffering”: Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley’, in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 448–66. I would argue, along similar lines to Kate Davies, that Macaulay’s sympathies were not necessarily gendered but rather reflected her politics ‘as a republican woman’ who mourned ‘first and foremost encroachments on and loss of liberty’. See: Kate Davies, Catherine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 115.

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49 John Greville Agard Pocock, ‘Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 252. Kucich has observed that Macaulay was the first historian to generate ‘sympathy’. Her sympathy, however, is largely spent on Republican heroes of the civil wars and occasionally their wives, such as Lady Russell. See: ‘“This Horrid Theatre of Human Suffering”, 448–66. 50 Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects [1790], ed. Gina W. Luria (New York: Garland, 1974), chapter on Education of Princes. 51 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics of the Civil War, 28. 52 Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War’, 180. 53 Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, The History of England: From the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line (London: J. Nourse, R. and J. Dodsley, and W. Johnston, 1763), 1:152–3. 54 Ibid. (1781), 6:295. 55 Lucy Hutchinson’s history of her regicide husband’s life, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, for example, is a trusted source of Macaulay’s. See: Hill, Republican Virago, 140. 56 Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War’, 179. 57 Ibid. 58 Macaulay, Letters on Education, 206. 59 This is particularly true of Wollstonecraft’s depiction of Marie Antoinette in her An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (HMVFR) published shortly after the French queen’s death as shall be discussed in the next chapter. 60 Hume’s influence can be traced in Austen, Wollstonecraft, Hays, Aikin, Benger, Strickland and Green. 61 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 61. 62 Adam Phillips, ‘Close-Ups’, in Rethinking Historical Distance, ed. Mark S. Phillips, Barbara Caine and Julia A. Thomas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 90–1. 63 Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 60. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. See also Peter Burke, ‘A Short History of Distance’, in Rethinking Historical Distance, ed. Mark S. Phillips, Barbara Caine and Julia A. Thomas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 24. 67 Timothy M. Costelloe, ‘Fact and Fiction: Memory and Imagination in Hume’s Approach to History and Literature’, in David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer, ed. Mark G. Spencer (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 193.

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68 Daniel R. Woolf, ‘Jane Austen and History Revisited: The Past, Gender and Memory from the Restoration to Persuasion’, Persuasions 26 (2004): 217. 69 As Daniel Woolf has observed, Eleanor Tilney in Northanger Abbey evinces a ‘thoroughly Humean’ perspective on history, in contrast to both Catherine Morland, who famously critiqued ‘real solemn history’ and her brother Henry Tilney, who clearly reads history for instruction rather than pleasure. See: ‘Jane Austen and History Revisited’, 227–8. 70 See: Mark Towsey, ‘“The Book Seemed to Sink into Oblivion”: Reading Hume’s History in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer, ed. Mark G. Spencer (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 93. 71 Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, ed., ‘Introduction’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 14. 72 Ibid., 2. 73 Greg Kucich, ‘Romanticism and the Re-Engendering of Historical Memory’, in Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth (London: Routledge, 2000), 19. 74 Cohen and Dever, ‘Introduction’, 12. See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 75 Faith E. Beasley, ‘Memoir’, in Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, ed. Mary Spongberg, Barbara Caine and Ann Curthoys (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 330–9. 76 The poisoning of queens and princesses to make way for others is a theme of many of the letters written by Elisabeth Charlotte, who seems to have quite a way with describing such activities: Of Marie Therese of Spain, she writes: ‘The first Dauphine died quietly, being quite resigned. She was as surely sent into the next world as if a pistol had been fired at her.’ See: Secret Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV and of the Regency, Extracted from the German Correspondence of the Duchess of Orleans, Mother of the Regent; Preceded by a Notice on This Princess and Accompanied with Notes (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1824), 230. 77 Elisabeth Charlotte cited in Chantal Thomas in The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 29. 78 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, ‘“Mary Stuart’s Fatal Box”: Sentimental History and the Revival of the Casket Letters Controversy’, Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 7 (1996): 427–73. 79 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), 104. 80 Lewis, ‘“Mary Stuart’s Fatal Box”’, 447.

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81 Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 116. 82 Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 114. 83 F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume II: 1784–1797 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 260. 84 Ibid. 85 Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1958), 6:85–7. 86 David Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2013), 198. 87 Ibid., 193–4. 88 According to Worrall, Jerningham’s play was revised and returned to the stage after the execution of Marie Antoinette in May 1794. Reviews of the period note the ‘resemblance of the sorrows of Margaret to those of the late QUEEN OF FRANCE’, Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception, 185. 89 In their Lives of the Queens of England, the Stricklands presented Mary Beatrice of Modena in a positive light in comparison to Margaret of Anjou, particularly when describing the injustice of the Bill of Attainder declared by William of Orange: ‘ The attainder of Margaret of Anjou and her infant son, Edward, Prince of Wales, by the victorious Yorkists in 1461, was a case somewhat in point, as regarding the position of the exiled queen, and the irresponsible age of the prince; but it has always been regarded as one of the revolting barbarisms of the darkest epoch of our history. It took place, moreover, during the excitement of the most ferocious civil wars that had ever raged in England . . . Queen Margaret had introduced foreign troops into the Kingdom, and had caused much blood to be spilt, not only in the field but on the scaffold. Mary Beatrice had done none of these things; she had shed tears, but not blood; she had led no hostile armies to the field to contest the throne with William for her son; her weapons were not those of carnal warfare. She had not so much as recriminated the railings of her foes, or expressed herself in anger of those who had driven her into exile, stripped her of her queenly title and appanages, and not only violated the faith of solemn treaties and unrepealed acts of Parliament.’ Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest (London: Henry Colburn, 1847), 10:7. 90 Sarah Burdett, ‘“Weeping Mothers Shall Applaud”: Sarah Yates as Margaret of Anjou on the London Stage, 1797’, Comparative Drama 49, no. 4 (2015): 419–44. 91 Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 6. 92 Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 243. It should be noted, however, that Louis XIV prepared himself for execution by reading Hume’s account of the death of Charles I.

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97 98 99

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See: Mark Salber Phillips, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Historical Distance’, in Rethinking Historical Distance, ed. Mark S. Phillips, Barbara Caine and Julia A. Thomas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5; Laurence Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); and Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 3. Christopher Reid, ‘Burke’s Tragic Muse: Sarah Siddons and the “Feminization” of the Reflections’, in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Steven Blakemore (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 4. Margaret Cohen, ‘Sentimental Communities’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 112. Reid, ‘Burke’s Tragic Muse’, 4. Frans de Bruyn, ‘Theater and Countertheater in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Steven Blackmore (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 31. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 3. Ibid. Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception, 200.

2 Marie Antoinette, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Emergence of Empathetic History 1 Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 387–467. 2 Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Baker (London: William Pickering, 1989), 5:124. 3 Ibid., 125. 4 Katherine Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”: British Accounts of the Martyred Wicked Queen’, Eighteenth-Century 44, nos. 2–3 (2003): 233–55. 5 Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s – Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3. 6 Lisa Plummer Crafton, Transgressive Theatricality, Romanticism, and Mary Wollstonecraft (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 75. 7 Elaine Jordan, ‘Criminal Conversation: Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman’, Women’s Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 221–34. 8 Gregory Claeys, ed., The Political Writings of the 1790s: The French Revolution Debate in Britain (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995), 1:xxix.

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9 Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men [1790]’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Baker (London: William Pickering, 1989), 5:15; original emphasis. 10 Ibid. 11 Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Men’, 30. 12 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, NC: University of California Press, 1992), 89. 13 Ibid., 91. 14 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Burke’s friend Sir Philip Francis accused Burke of hypocrisy on the issue of petticoat government. On the Diamond Necklace Affair, see: Iain McCalman, ‘Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, Journal of British Studies 35, no. 3 (1996): 363. See also, Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”’, 233; Sara Maza, ‘The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785–1786): The Case of the Missing Queen’, in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 63–89. 15 McCalman, ‘Mad Lord George’, 362. 16 Maza, ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’, 63–89. 17 Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”’, 236. 18 O’Brien, Great Melody, 408. 19 Binhammer argues that because such political propaganda ‘lost some of its political force’ in England, this left ‘the sex – and the libidinal materializing of the female body – as carrying more of the hermeneutic weight’. Marie Antoinette’s crimes could be matter-of-factly reported in everyday interchanges. For instance, the Bluestocking Hester Thrale recorded in diary on 1 April 1789, ‘One hears of Things now, fit for the Pens of Petronius only, or Juvenal to record and satirise: The Queen of France is at the Head of a set of Monsters call’d by each other Sapphists, who boast her Example; and deserve to be thrown with the Demons that haunt each other likewise, into Mount Versuvius.’ See: Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”’, 237, 259n10. 20 ‘“Frontispiece to Reflections on the French Revolution” by William Holland, 2 November 1790’, in Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 142. 21 Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 95–156. 22 Robinson, Edmund Burke, 140–5. 23 G. J. Baker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman’, Journal of History of Ideas 50, no. 1 (1989): 98. BarkerBenfield identifies James Burgh as a source of such ideas. Both Burgh and Macaulay associated aristocracy with luxury, sexual inversion, ‘enervating vices’, artifice and dissimulation.

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24 Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 268n40. 25 See, for instance, Christopher Reid, ‘Burke’s Tragic Muse: Sarah Siddons and the “Feminization” of the Reflections’, in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Steven Blakemore (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 1–27; David Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2013), 183–200. 26 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 482; Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 71–97. Marie Antoinette was also accused of teaching Louis XVI to dissimulate. See also Hunt, Family Romance, 96–8. 27 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 99–101. 28 Phillip Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History and Republicanism in Georgian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 41, no. 2 (2002): 179. 29 Michelle Callander, ‘“The Grand Theatre of Political Change”: Marie Antoinette, the Republic and the Politics of Spectacle in Mary Wollstonecraft’s An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’, European Romantic Review 11, no. 4 (2000): 376. 30 Baker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, 95–115. 31 Ibid., 43. In later works, Wollstonecraft would claim that the French people had an ‘effeminate character’ and connected this to their ‘theatrical nature’. Steven Blakemore observes that, in her history of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft argues that the French are ‘vain, capricious, superficial and emotional’ as an explanation of why ‘enlightened ideas are not sustained’. See: Blakemore’s Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 95–7. 32 Hunt, Family Romance, 89–123. 33 Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War’, 175. 34 See: Susan Gubar, ‘Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of “It Takes One to Know One”’, Feminist Studies 20, no. 3 (1994): 452–73; Barbara Taylor, ‘Misogyny and Feminism: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft’, in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France 1750–1820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berekeley, NC: University of California Press, 2002), 203–17; and Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects [1790], ed. Gina W. Luria (New York: Garland, 1974), 213. 35 Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Men’, 5:14. For a more detailed discussion of these satirical replies, see: Mary Spongberg, ‘Jane Austen and the History of England’, Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 1 (2011): 56–80.

172 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59

60 61 62

Notes O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 181. Ibid. Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Men’, 10. Ibid., 10, 13. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 73. Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Men’, 10. Ibid., 11. O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 181. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 161–3. Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Men’, 25. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 6. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 65. Ibid. Barbara Taylor, ‘Feminists versus Gallants: Sexual Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain’, in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 44. Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, 5:121. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 104, 215. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 13. Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, 245. Ibid., 125. Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War’, 174–5. See: Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 47–72; as well as Claudia L. Johnson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity’, in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science and Literature 1650–1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 161. Johnson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Radical Maternity’, 161; Taylor, ‘Feminists versus Gallants’, 45. Johnson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Radical Maternity’, 161. See also Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 129–38; Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 79–80. Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, 216. Lucinda Cole, ‘(Anti)Feminist Sentiments: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More’, English Literary History 58, no. 1 (1991): 127. Wollstonecraft begins this chapter with a reference to the disaster that occurred on the couples’ wedding march from Austria into Paris, where the populace flocked to

Notes

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65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

173

see them ‘and in their eagerness to pay homage, or gratify affectionate curiosity, an immense number were killed’, which implies that Marie Antoinette was somehow to blame for this accident. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Jane Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering, 1989), 6:29. Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”’, 247. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (London: Johnson, 1794), 74. Taylor, ‘Misogyny and Feminism’, 208. Ibid., 208–9. Wollstonecraft, HMVFR, 29. See also Wollstonecraft’s review of the ‘Letters of Mme du Barry’, Analytical Review 12 (January 1792): 102. Wollstonecraft, HMVFR, 29. Macaulay, Letters on Education, 230. Ibid. Lori J. Marso, ‘Defending the Queen: Wollstonecraft and Staël on the Politics of Sensibility and Feminine Difference’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42, no. 1 (2002): 49. O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 180. Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”’, 248. One might even argue that it still resonates in works such as Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). The Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006) make similar claims. Wollstonecraft, HMVFR, 30. Ibid. Ibid., 73–4. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 99; Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War’, 179. Wollstonecraft, HMVFR, 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 73, 84. Ibid., 73. At her trial, the notorious public prosecutor Antoine-Quentin FouquierTinville listed Marie Antoinette among previous queens of France ‘whose names, forever odious, will not be effaced from the annals of history’ such as MessalinasBrunhildes, Fredegund and Médicis’ See: Hunt, Family Romance, 92. See: Maza, ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’, 82. Marilyn Butler, ‘General Introduction’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet M. Todd (London: William Pickering, 1989), 1:20. Harriet Devine Jump, ‘“The Cool Eye of Observation”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution’, in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the

174

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87 88 89 90 91

92

93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100

Notes French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 105. Wollstonecraft was clearly shaken by the violence of the Terror. In a letter home to Joseph Johnson in December 1792 she wrote, ‘I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made tears flow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed . . . Not the distant sound of a footstep can I hear . . . I wish I had even kept the cat with me! – I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. – I am going to bed – and for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.’ Letters to Imlay (London: Kegan Paul, 1879), see xxxiv. Mary Spongberg, ‘Remembering Wollstonecraft: Feminine Friendship, Female Subjectivity and the “invention” of the Feminist Heroine’, in Women’s Life Writing 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship, ed. Daniel Cook and Amy Culley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 176–7. See also, Jordan, ‘Criminal Conversation’. Ashley Tauchert, ‘Maternity, Castration and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’, Women’s Writing 4, no. 2 (1997), 175. Wollstonecraft, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, 103; original emphasis. Poovey, Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 93. Ronald Paulson, ‘Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution’, English Literary History 48, no. 3 (1981): 532–44. Stella Tillyard reports a lengthy lament from the ‘Blue-Stocking’ Elizabeth Carter on the occasion of Caroline Matilda’s departure for Denmark and that many women openly wept in sympathy with the young queen who cried bitterly as she walked to her carriage. A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 86. Anon., Memoirs of an Unfortunate Queen, Interspersed with Letters (Written by Herself) to Several of her Illustrious Relations and Friends, on Various Subjects and Occasions (London: J. Bew, 1776), 1–2. Tillyard, Royal Affair, 127. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [1796]’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Jane Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering, 1989), 6:321. Ibid. Hunt, Family Romance, 89–123. Wollstonecraft, ‘Letters Written during a Short Residence’, 321. Ibid., 322. Ibid. Ibid.

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101 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 368. 102 Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), 209. 103 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), 151–3. 104 Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 209. 105 Ibid. See also Mary Spongberg, ‘The Ghost of Marie Antoinette: A Prehistory of Victorian Royal Biography’, in Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, ed. Lynette Felber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 81. 106 Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria [1798]’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering, 1989), 1:149. 107 Jordan, ‘Criminal Conversation’, 223. 108 Adam Komisurak, ‘The Privatisation of Pleasure: “Crim. Con.” in Wollstonecraft’s Maria’, Law & Literature 16, no. 1 (2004): 34. 109 Johnson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Radical Maternity’, 162. 110 Wollstonecraft, Author’s Preface to ‘Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria’, 84. 111 In an unpublished critique of Maria, Godwin complained to Wollstonecraft that the text was damaged by her ‘womanly indulgence of a feeling about nothing’ and warned her that if she did not construct her plot along more rational lines, she risked producing ‘a common-place story of a brutal insensible husband’. See: Mitzi Myers, ‘Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft’s Maria’, Wordsworth Circle 11, no. 2 (1980): 110. See also her letter to George Dyson, 15 May 1797, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 391–2. 112 Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 151.

3 Jane Austen, Mary Stuart and the Jacobite History of England 1 Jane Austen, ‘History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st’, in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 176. 2 Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England in four volumes (1764) was owned by the Austen family, with marginal comments on the third and fourth volumes made in a hand presumed to be Austen’s. Her History of England is usually read as an abridgement of Goldsmith’s own abridged History of England. See Brian Southam, ‘Grandison’, in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz and

176

3 4

5

6 7 8

9 10

11 12

Notes Brian C. Southam (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 188. Austen also owned David Hume’s History of England, although she does not appear to have acquired this until 1797 according to the inscription. See David Gilson, ‘Jane Austen’s Books’, Book Collector 23 (1974): 27–39. See also Peter Sabor’s notes in the Cambridge edition of Austen’s Juvenilia, 455–68. For a discussion of these satirical responses, see: Mary Spongberg, ‘Jane Austen and the History of England’, Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 1 (2011): 56–80. Brigid Brophy, ‘Jane Austen and the Stuarts’, in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. Brian C. Southam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 21–38; Antoinette Burton, ‘“Invention Is What Delights Me”: Jane Austen’s Remaking of “English History”’, in Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, ed. Devoney Looser (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 35–50. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); B. C. Southam, ‘“An Easy Step to Silence”: Jane Austen and the Political Context’, Women’s Writing 5, no. 1 (1998): 9. Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 286. D. J. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the Peerage’, PMLA 68, no. 5 (1953): 1017–31. For instance, Mary Leigh, the Mistress of Stoneleigh, who died in 1806, never worshipped in the village church as she did not wish to pray for the Hanoverian usurpers. See: Clive Aslet, ‘Stoneleigh Abbey: Warwickshire, I, II: The Seat of Lord Leigh’, Country Life 176, no. 4557 (1984): 1934–7; SBT DR87.2 29.8. For more detail on the Leighs, see also: Mairi Macdonald, ‘“Not Unmarked by Some Eccentricities”: The Leigh Family of Stoneleigh Abbey’, in Stoneleigh Abbey: The House, Its Owners, Its Lands, ed. Robert Bearman (Warwickshire: Stoneleigh Abbey, 2004), 131–62; Victoria Huxley, Jane Austen and Adlestrop: Her Other Family: A New Perspective on Jane Austen and Her Novels (Adlestrop: Windrush, 2013). Brophy, ‘Jane Austen and the Stuarts’. William Stubbs, the great nineteenth-century ‘Whig’ historian, argued that Henry IV initiated the ‘Lancastrian constitutional experiment’ that saw the king share power with his subjects: ‘he reigned as a constitutional king, he governed by the help of his Parliament . . . ’, Constitutional History of England, 4th edn (Oxford, Clarenden Press, 1890), 3:73–4. See also Christine Carpenter, The War of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England c.1437–1509 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7. Spongberg, ‘Jane Austen and the History of England’, 56–80. Christopher Kent, ‘Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen’, in Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan, ed. J. David Grey (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1989), 60.

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13 Burton, ‘“Invention Is What Delights Me”’, 42. 14 See April Alliston’s ‘Introduction’ in her edited edition of Sophia Lee’s The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), xx–xxi. Alliston suggests that Austen may be poking fun at The Recess by humorously exaggerating Lee’s sympathy for Mary at the expense of Elizabeth (xxi). See also Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), 136–46. 15 Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 99–170. 16 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 228. 17 Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women Politics and the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988); Burton, ‘“Invention Is What Delights Me”’; Devoney Looser, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 1–18 and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 178–203 and ‘Dealing in Notions and Facts: Jane Austen and History Writing’, in A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 216–25; Clara Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); William H. Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007). 18 J. E. Austen-Leigh, ‘A Memoir of Jane Austen [1871]’, in A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 71. 19 Caroline Austen, ‘My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir [1867]’, in A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 173. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Richard Simpson, ‘Richard Simpson on Jane Austen’, in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, ed. Brian C. Southam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 1:241–65. 23 Deirdre Lynch, ‘Clueless: About History’, in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2003), 72. 24 Mary Spongberg, ‘Jane Austen, the 1790s and the French Revolution’, in A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 272. 25 SBT DR762/273, Papers relating to the history of Stoneleigh Abbey.

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26 John Jones, Balliol College: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 155–73. 27 Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen (London: John Murray, 1920). 28 Mary Leigh (1731–1797), wife of Thomas Leigh of Adelstrope and daughter of Theophilius Leigh. Mary Leigh died before her husband inherited Stoneleigh Abbey, from the other Mary Leigh, d.1806, of Stoneleigh. 29 The story of Alice Leigh (1579–1669), Duchess of Dudley, which forms a major part of Leigh’s History, works itself into Austen’s Catherine, or The Bower. Tuite, Romantic Austen, 43. See also Gaye King’s discussion of the roots of Persuasion in the story of Elizabeth Wentworth, whose portrait was hung at Stoneleigh and to whom Mary Leigh devoted several pages of her History. Gaye King, ‘The Jane Austen Connection’, in Stoneleigh Abbey: The House, Its Owners, Its Lands, ed. Robert Bearman (Warwickshire: Stoneleigh Abbey, 2004), 174–5. See also Mary Leigh, History of the Leigh Family, 58 and 63–4, SBT DR671/77. 30 Typescript of notes by Mabel Gordon Leigh, including a continuation of the History of the Leigh Family of Adlestrop, with other MS and typescript notes, SBT DR671/476. 31 Agnes Leigh, Stoneleigh Abbey Pictures (1919), 31. SBT DR671/493. 32 Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 55–118; SBT DR87.2 29.2. See also Leigh, Stoneleigh Abbey Pictures. 33 J. C. D. Clark, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 39–40. 34 Ward, Politics of Liberty, 286. 35 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 19. 36 Clark, ‘Introduction’, 34. 37 Ibid. 38 Brophy, ‘Jane Austen and the Stuarts’; Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Jane Austen, That Disconcerting Child’, in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101; Greg Kucich, ‘Romanticism and the Re-Engendering of Historical Memory’, in Memory and Memorials 1789–1914: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth (London: Routledge, 2000), 19–21. 39 Kent, ‘Learning History’, 66–7. 40 Burton, ‘“Invention Is What Delights Me”’, 35. 41 Ibid., 43. 42 Johnson, Jane Austen, xxiv. 43 Burton, ‘“Invention Is What Delights Me”’, 43.

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44 This was a correction to Henry Tilney’s assumptions about England’s history in Northanger Abbey. See Diane Hoeveler, ‘Vindicating Northanger Abbey: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and Gothic Feminism’, in Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, ed. Devoney Looser (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 132–3. 45 Scholars have always allowed that Austen refers to family matters in History, for instance, she predicts (correctly) naval glory for her brother Frank, ‘Yet great as he [Sir Francis Drake] was, and justly celebrated as a Sailor, I cannot help forseeing that he will be equalled in this or the next century by one who tho’ now but young.’ ‘History of England’, 185. 46 Annette Upfal, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Austen’s History of England and Cassandra’s Portraits, ed. Annette Upfal and Christine Alexander (Sydney : Juvenilia Press, 2009), xl–xlii. 47 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: An Annotated Edition, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014), 182. 48 Kent, ‘Learning History’, 59. 49 Daniel R. Woolf, ‘Jane Austen and History Revisited: The Past, Gender, and Memory from the Restoration to Persuasion’, Persuasions 26 (2005), 225. 50 Looser, British Women Writers, 180. Lynch has written, ‘The old myth of Austen’s detachment from history has made it difficult to acknowledge that her writing career coincides with a far-reaching transformation in the protocols of historical representation with, for instance, a turning point in history’s writing relationship with a set of formal precedents and protocols of politeness formulated in the ancient world, and shaped by that world’s rigid demarcation of public from private; with a moment when historians sought to enlarge the traditional province of historiography.’ ‘Clueless: About History’, 73. 51 See also Kent, ‘Learning History’, 59–72. 52 Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray, eds, Jane Austen’s, Catharine and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 328–9, note to page 134. 53 Horace Walpole, ‘Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard the Third’, The Monthly Review, Or, Literary Journal 38 (1768): 116. 54 Austen, ‘History of England’, 179. 55 Tuite, Romantic Austen, 45. 56 Brophy, ‘Jane Austen and the Stuarts’, 26. 57 Austen makes direct reference to the ‘Henry’ plays written by Shakespeare in her discussion of Henry IV (‘History of England’, 177). In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare refers at least four times to Henry as a usurper, with Hotspur recounting the tale of Henry’s usurpation twice (I.3.158–184 and IV.3.54–92), Henry telling his own story once (III.2.39–84), and Worcester confessing his part in the usurpation and Henry’s later perfidy (V.1.32–71). Austen, however, is referring to speeches made in Henry IV, Part Two (IV.3.221–266 and II). See also the Doody and Murray edition of Catharine, 329, notes to pages 134–5.

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58 Howard Nenner, The Right to Be King: The Succession of the Crown of England 1603–1714 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 2. 59 Ibid., 1. 60 Nenner, Right to Be King, 1. 61 Austen, ‘History of England’, 179. 62 Burton, ‘“Invention Is What Delights Me”’, 40. 63 Austen, ‘History of England’, 179. 64 Ibid., 183. 65 Burke, Reflections, 21–2. I owe this observation to Judith Barbour, with thanks. 66 Nenner, Right to Be King, 50. 67 Charles Beem, Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 68. 68 See, for instance, Arlene Naylor Okerlund, Elizabeth of York (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); J. L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–1503 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 36–59. 69 David Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2013), 182–200. 70 Goldsmith had written of Margaret of Anjou, ‘This extraordinary woman, after having sustained the cause of her husband in twelve battles, after having survived her friends, fortunes, and children, died a few years after in privacy in France, very miserable indeed; but with few other claims to our pity, except her courage and her distresses.’ The History of England: From the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (London: T. Davies, Beckett and De Hondt, and T. Cadell, 1771), 2:244. 71 Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 8:1. 72 Austen, ‘History of England’, 178. 73 Ibid., 181. 74 Lynch, ‘Clueless: About History’, 87. 75 Howard Nenner, ‘Pretense and Pragmatism: The Response to Uncertainty in the Succession Crisis of 1689’, in The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 87. According to Nenner, ‘Henry VIII tampered with the succession on more than one occasion during the last twenty years of his reign. The result was a statute, his third Act of Succession, that did nothing to reverse either of his daughters’ legislated illegitimacy, but made both eligible to take the crown.’ When Mary Tudor became Queen Regnant she had Parliament restore her to legitimacy, while Elizabeth ‘never bothered’. 76 Karen O’Brien, ‘Historiography’, in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, ed. David Womersley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 531.

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77 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, ‘“Mary Stuart’s Fatal Box”: Sentimental History and the Revival of the Casket Letters Controversy’, Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 7 (1996): 427. 78 O’Brien, ‘Historiography’, 531. 79 Lewis, ‘“Mary Stuart’s Fatal Box”’, 427. 80 Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 123. 81 Austen names Whitaker, herself and her neighbours Mrs Knight and Mrs Lefroy as Mary Stuart’s only friends. Austen, ‘History of England’, 184. 82 John Whitaker, Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated (London: John Murray, 1787), see especially page 35. In her own History (188–9), Austen argues that King Charles cannot possibly be guilty of ‘arbitrary and tyrannical government’ because ‘he was a Stuart’ (emphasis in original). 83 Brophy, ‘Jane Austen and the Stuarts’, 34. 84 Ibid., 27. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 32. 87 Ibid., 35. 88 Ibid. 89 Austen, ‘History of England’, 186. 90 Tuite, Romantic Austen, 48. 91 Austen, ‘History of England’, 188. 92 A. S. Byatt, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Austen’s, The History of England: From the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1993), viii. 93 Austen, ‘History of England’, 180 (emphasis in original). 94 Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 123. 95 Southam, ‘“An Easy Step to Silence”’, 13. 96 Brophy, ‘Jane Austen and the Stuarts’, 36. 97 Lynne Vallone, ‘History Girls: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Historiography and the Case of Mary, Queen of Scots’, Children’s Literature 36, no. 1 (2008): 2–3. 98 Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 124–31. 99 Ibid. See also: Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 116. 100 Murray Pittock, Material Culture and Sedition, 1680–1760 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 73. 101 Lewis, ‘“Mary Stuart’s Fatal Box”’, 447. 102 Guthrie, Material Culture of the Jacobites, 116. 103 Pittock, Material Culture and Sedition, 73.

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104 Mary Spongberg, ‘Jane Austen and the Jacobite Past’, Sensibilities: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of Australia 51 (2015): 39–61. See, for instance, Leigh, Stoneleigh Abbey Pictures and Notes on Furniture and other Contents in Stoneleigh Abbey, SBT DR87.2 29.2. 105 Agnes Leigh, author of several catalogues of heirlooms housed at Stoneleigh wrote of a painting gifted by the Pretender to the Leighs, ‘[T]here is a similar picture at Badderley Cinton, and (I have heard) in other Royalist houses’. This reference to one of England’s most famous recusant houses, and the rumour of others, suggests that even in the twentieth century Jacobite networks were remembered, even if no longer active. See Leigh, Stoneleigh Abbey Pictures, SBT DR87.2 29.2. 106 For a discussion of Austen’s treatment of the Tudors in other pieces of Austen’s juvenilia, see Tuite, Romantic Austen, 39–49. 107 Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 79–115. 108 Goldsmith, History of England, 3:152. 109 Burton, ‘“Invention Is What Delights Me”’, 42; Southam, ‘“An Easy Step to Silence”’, 13. 110 Ruth Perry, ‘Family Matters’, in The Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 324. Austen’s wealthy relatives were for the most part on her maternal side, and when most financially and socially vulnerable, the Austen women looked to their Leigh relatives for support. 111 Thomas Leigh, Letters and Papers (1816), SBT 18/17/42/23. 112 In a letter to her brother Frank, dated 3 July 1813, Austen wrote, ‘the respectable, worthy, clever, agreeable Mr Thomas Leigh, . . . has just closed a good life at the age of 79, & must have died the possessor of more worthless nieces and nephews than any other private Man in the united Kingdoms’. Jane Austen, Selected Letters, ed. Vivien Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144. 113 I borrow this term from Janet Todd’s Gender, Art and Death (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 143.

4 Caroline of Brunswick as Anne Boleyn: Dissenting Women Writers and Historical ‘Memoir’ 1 Greg Kucich mentions Aikin briefly in his article ‘Romanticism and Feminist Historiography’, Wordsworth Circle 24, no. 3 (1993): 133–40. Benger is one of the subjects of his article ‘Women’s Historiography and the (Dis)embodiment of Law: Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Benger’, Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 1 (2002): 3–7. Aikin’s memoirs are the subject of Michelle Levy’s chapter

Notes

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5

6 7 8 9

10 11

12

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‘“The Different Genius of Women”: Lucy Aikin’s Historiography’, in Religious Dissent and the Aikin–Barbauld Circle 1740–1860, ed. Felicity James and Ian Inkster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 156–82. Anne K. Mellor and Michelle Levy also mention Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth in their introduction to Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women and Other Works (Ontario: Broadview, 2011), 13–44. She is one of the four historians studied in Anne Laurence’s ‘Women’s Historians and Documentary Research: Lucy Aikin, Agnes Strickland, Mary Anne Everett Green and Lucy Toulmin Smith’, in Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790–1900, ed. Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence and Gill Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 125–41. She is also mentioned briefly by Bonnie G. Smith, although she only refers to Aikin’s Epistles on Women. See Smith’s The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 19. Levy, ‘“Different Genius of Women”’, 158. Laurence, ‘Women’s Historians’, 135. Madame de Staël described Benger as ‘the most interesting woman she had seen during her visit to England’. See Lucy Aikin’s ‘Memoir of Elizabeth Benger’, appended to the 3rd edition of Elizabeth Benger’s Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), x–xi. Elizabeth Benger also published Memoirs of the Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1823) and Memoirs of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia Daughter of King James the First (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825). Kucich, ‘Women’s Historiography’, 3. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 114–20. Ibid., 114–29; Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering, 1989), 5:125. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem (London: J. Johnson, 1812). Marlon B. Ross, ‘Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writer and the Tradition of Dissent’, in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol S. Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 95. [John Wilson Croker], ‘Review of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, Quarterly Review 7 (June 1812): 309–13. Since the publication of

184

13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

Notes William Keach’s article ‘A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld’s Career’, scholars have debated the impact of this review on Barbauld’s career. Studies in Romanticism 33 (Winter 1994): 569–77. See, for instance, Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England 1780–1830 (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 2000), 148n2; Olivia Murphy, ‘Riddling Sibyl, Uncanny Cassandra: Barbauld’s Recent Critical Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 277–98. Also see Emma J. Clery’s recently published and magisterial Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protests and Economic Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Although, as E. J. Clery has argued, this reference to coldness could also have a ‘philosophical and political dimension’. See: ‘Stoic Patriotism in Barbauld’s Political Poems’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. Willliam McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 189. Anna Latetitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 160. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: J. M. Dent, 1938), 1:63–4. While Crabb Robinson was not necessarily a reliable witness to Godwin’s outburst, his own response to the poem is also revealing as he sought to distance himself from the politics of the 1790s. William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 477. Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 25. Emma Major, Madam Britannia: Women, Church and Nation 1712–1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 299. See also Julie Ellison, ‘The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility’, in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol S. Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 241. Chandler, England in 1819, 114. Ibid., 115. Although Barbauld would not respond to Croker in print, Chandler (England in 1819, 115) has suggested that she seems to reply to Croker in her posthumously published Legacy for Young Ladies. In this work Barbauld commented at length on the artificiality of dates. As she observes, ‘the world had existed for a long course of centuries before men were aware of its use and necessity. When is a relative term; the most natural application of it is, how long ago, reckoning backwards from the present moment.’ Anna Latetitia Barbauld, A Legacy for Young Ladies, Consisting

Notes

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

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of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826), 148 (original emphasis). [John Wilson Croker], ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. A Poem. By Anna Letitia Barbauld’, Quarterly Review 7 (June 1812): 313. Fanny Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 1:xiii. Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Introduction’, in Frances Burney, The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), xxxiii. [John Wilson Croker], ‘The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties, by Madame D’Arblay’, Quarterly Review 11 (April 1814): 128. Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (London: Leicester University Press, 1989). Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 69. Ibid. Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority, 1. See also Harris, Revolution Almost beyond Expression, 1–35. Although Lady Morgan was regularly subject to hostile Tory commentary in the Quarterly Review, she was treated equally badly by the Whigs at the Edinburgh Review who described her as the ‘ci-duvant’, the ‘producer of monstrous literary abortions’, a ‘blunderer and reviler’ and an ‘Irish she-wolf ’. See Robert Portsmouth, John Wilson Croker: Irish Ideas and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1800– 1835 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 35. Anna Letitia Le Breton, ed., Correspondence of William Ellery Channing D.D., and Lucy Aikin from 1826–1842 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1874), 176–7. Lucy Aikin, ed., ‘Memoir’, in The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 1:1–1i. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 148n2. Felicity James, ‘Lucy Aikin and the Legacies of Dissent’, in Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle, 1740–1860, ed. Felicity James and Ian Inkster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 198–201. Aikin, ‘Memoir’, lii. Clery, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 10. Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 88. Ross, ‘Configurations of Feminine Reform, 96. Lucy Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (London: Longman, Hurst, Reece, Orme and Brown, 1818), 1:vii–viii.

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40 Faith E. Beasley, ‘Memoir’, in Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, ed. Mary Spongberg, Barbara Caine and Ann Curthoys (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 330, 333. 41 Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144. 42 The dedication reads, ‘For, to whom, Madame, can the Memoirs of ANNE OF AUSTRIA, written by a Lady her almost inseparable Companion and Confident, be dedicated to properly as to that Illustrious Personage, who was in like manner the Companion and Confident of ANNE of ENGLAND, tho’ with the considerable Difference betwixt the Two Queens and their Servants, that whereas our Author was daily condoling Her Mistress upon the Misfortunes of a Civil War, Your GRACE had the continual Pleasure of Congratulating Your’s upon the GLORIES of a Foreign one? – I should revive Your Grief, by mentioning the AUTHOR of those GLORIES; but this would not become.’ While appearing to highlight a difference of experience, the mention of grief here signals the idea that all wars, whether won or lost, create sadness and hardship for women. Madame de Motteville, Memoirs for the History of Anne of Austria: Wife of Louis XIII of France . . . (London: John Darby et al., 1726), 2–3. 43 Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 180. 44 Cohen has suggested that the first imagined communities were not national communities but rather transnational ones catalysed by sensibility. ‘Sentimental fiction was the privileged cross-Channel site for examining the complexities of the relation of national to trans and subnational communities, along with the abuses and uses of the nation as the unit of collective identification.’ See Margaret Cohen, ‘Sentimental Communities’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 107; April Alliston’s ‘Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 133–48. 45 Levy, ‘“Different Genius of Women”’, 161. 46 Fiona Price, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Green’s The Private History of the Court of England (1808) (New York: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), xii. 47 Ibid., vii. 48 Philip Hemery Le Breton recorded that his aunt’s plan for this work ‘comprehended the private life of the queen, and the domestic history of the period’. See his Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin; Including Those Addressed to the Rev. Dr. Channing from 1826 to 1842 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), xix.

Notes 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56

57

58 59 60

61 62

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Mellor and Levy, ‘Introduction’, Epistles on Women, 19. Le Breton, Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, 79 (original emphasis). Levy, ‘“Different Genius of Women”’, 161. See, for instance, Charles Dunne, The Mystery of the Royal Separation Developed for the Future Historian of the House of Brunswick. Addressed to the Illustrious Visitors at the Court of Great Britain (London: Burkett and Plumpton, 1816), 32. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 268. Flora Fraser, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline (London: John Murray, 1996), 152–7, 167–71. John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 37–8. When seeking to rid himself of Katherine Howard, Henry introduced another statute making it ‘treason for his subjects to fail to reveal any knowledge they might have of “lightness of body” of any woman the king might intend to marry’. Karen Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 40. No Flatterer, A Letter to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent on Recent Domestic Occurrences: To Which Has Been Added a Sketch of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Second Queen of Henry VIII (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1813), 3. Fraser has written, for example, the fact that Lord Moira attended the Commission and ‘suggested various lines of questioning . . . would seem to damn the Delicate Investigation as ex parte’. See Unruly Queen, 173–4. Ibid., 73. Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 180. By the end of the nineteenth century, Anne Boleyn had become the subject of considerable hostile revisionism, as historians such as Paul Friedmann mined the correspondence of the Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys’s and Nicholas Sanders’s histories of the Reformation. Such sources invariably portrayed Catherine of Aragon in highly sympathetic terms, as a skilled and intelligent politician as well as an ill-used queen. During the Regency, both queens were viewed principally as victims of the great lust of Henry VIII and his burning ambition to create a dynasty. See Retha Warnicke, ‘Anne Boleyn in History, Drama and Film’, 239–56 and Georgianna Ziegler, ‘Re-imagining a Renaissance Queen: Catherine of Aragon among the Victorians’, 203–21; both in High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, ed. Carole Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves and Jo Eldridge Carney (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Levy, ‘“Different Genius of Women”’, 161. Anna Clark, ‘Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820’, Representations 31 (Summer 1990), 48.

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63 Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, Vol. 1, 2. 64 Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 218–19. 65 James, ‘Lucy Aikin and the Legacies of Dissent’, 193. 66 Ibid., 194. 67 Quoted in E. A. Smith, A Queen on Trial: The Affair of Queen Caroline (London: A. Sutton, 1993), 30. 68 Tamara L. Hunt, ‘Morality and the Monarchy in the Queen Caroline Affair’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 23, no. 4 (1991): 703. It was claimed that burglars were used to steal materials locked in Caroline’s ‘private cabinet’. See also Thomas Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History 54, no. 3 (1982): 436. 69 Jane Robins, Rebel Queen: How the Trial of Caroline Brought England to the Brink of Revolution (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 132. 70 Kenneth Baker, George IV: A Life in Caricature (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 162. 71 The Bill of Pain and Penalties was akin to a Bill of Attainder, except that it did not result in execution. 72 Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals, 159n4. See also Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason, 41. 73 Royal Letters (London: J. Marshall, 1820), 8. This pamphlet published embarrassing correspondence between the King and Queen, with her apparent connivance, including his original letter demanding a separation in 1796. 74 Laqueur, ‘Queen Caroline Affair’, 424. 75 Hunt, ‘Morality and the Monarchy’, 703. 76 Laqueur, ‘Queen Caroline Affair’, 438. 77 Ibid., 434. 78 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), 147. Lewis suggests that Mary Stuart was an obvious role model for Caroline of Brunswick, but it was Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard who had been mentioned by Caroline and her supporters in their protests against her persecution. 79 Speeches of Mr Brougham, Mr Denham and Mr Lushington Containing the Defence of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Thomas Masters, 1820), 16. 80 Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, 1:1. 81 Ibid., 3. 82 Ibid., 4. On the same page she continues in language that could also call to mind George IV, suggesting that his popularity as a monarch was owed ‘to a certain chivalrous gallantry of carriage, unbounded magnificence, measureless prodigality, and ostentatious affability; above all, perhaps to the address which, like a skillful

Notes

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86

87 88 89 90

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actor, he rendered his own vanity and egotism subservient to the gratification of taste’. While George IV was never a well-loved monarch, he was experiencing a rare upsurge in popularity following the trial of Queen Caroline when Benger published this book. O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 220–1. Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, iiv. As Mary Hays points out in her Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated published around the same time (London: T. and J. Allman, 1821), 79. See Chapter 5 in this volume also. See, for instance, discussion of Anne’s ‘French’ manners as depicted in the recent BBC drama The Tudors. John Dugdale, ‘What the Tudors Has Taught Us’, The Guardian, 1 April 2011. Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, 1:94. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 129. Laqueur, ‘Queen Caroline Affair’, 442.

5 The ‘Acquittal’ of Queen Caroline: Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Queens as Political Dissent 1 Thomas Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History 54, no. 3 (1982): 417–68. 2 Hays was one of two women who, under their own names, defended the Queen after her ‘acquittal’. Matilda Betham, who had published a collection of female biography in 1804 (a year after Hays’s Female Biography), also produced two strident pamphlets in Caroline’s defence in 1821: Challenge to Women, Being an Intended Address from Ladies of Different Parts of the Kingdom, Collectively to Caroline, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Moses) and Remarks on the Coronation as It Respects the Queen; and on Recent Cases Called Suicides (London: n.p.). Betham’s fate, incarcerated by her family in a private madhouse after these publications, draws attention to Hays’s own courage and persistent radicalism. See: Elaine Bailey, ‘“This Most Noble of Disorders”: Matilda Betham on the Reformation of the Mad House’, in Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 29–39. Betham’s defence of Queen Caroline suggests that something more radical than early critics have observed might be happening with collective biography. 3 Notable exceptions are: Marilyn L. Brooks, The Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist (New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 2004); Gina

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Notes Luria Walker, The Growth of a Woman’s Mind: Mary Hays (1759–1843) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and Miriam Wallace, ‘Writing Lives and Gendering History in Mary Hays’s Female Biography (1803)’, in Romantic Autobiography in England, ed. Eugene Stelzig (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 63–78. For a recent discussion of Hays’s persecution by men such as Coleridge, see: Walker, Growth of a Woman’s Mind, 198–201. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 188. In addition to Female Biography (1803) and Memoirs of Queens (1821), Mary Hays also produced the third volume of Charlotte Smith’s The History of England, From the Earliest Records to the Peace of Amiens: In a Series of Letters to a Young Lady at School (London: Richard Phillips, 1806); Historical Dialogues for Young Persons, 3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1806–08); and the novel Family Annals; Or, the Sisters (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1817), a pedagogical work for children inspired by Maria Edgeworth. Gary Kelly suggests that with Memoirs Hays is ‘less the rational civic’ feminist of her earlier revolutionary writings and ‘more the national nurse, conscience and cultural repository’. Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 59. Others who also see these works as marking a conservative shift in her politics include: Eleanor Ty, ‘Mary Hays’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 142, Eighteenth Century British Literary Biographers, ed. Steven Serafin (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1994), 152–61; Cynthia Richards, ‘Revising History, “Dumbing Down” and Imposing Silence’, Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work and Culture 3 (2003): 265–94. Maitzen, for instance, includes Hays among ‘Victorian’ writers of collective biography and only cites Hays’s later collection Memoirs of Queens. See: Rohan Amanda Maitzen, ‘“This Feminine Preserve”: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies 38, no. 3 (1995): 371–93. Alison Booth also situates Hays as anticipating Victorian female prosopographies; see her How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), 19. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein includes Hays’s Female Biography in her catalogue of ‘Early Histories of Women’ held in the Huntington Library Collections. Burstein defines these works largely as ‘Plutarchan biographies – a series of biographical sketches, with each sketch supposedly illustrating some national trait, moral virtue, spiritual characteristic, or the like.’ ‘“Unstoried in History?”: Early Histories of Women (1652–1902) in the Huntington Library Collection’, Huntington Library Quarterly 64, nos. 3–4 (2001): 470. Jeanne Wood categorizes Female Biography as a biographical dictionary and reads it alongside other works by Dissenting scholars such as the Biographia Britannica and General Biography. See: Wood’s ‘“Alphabetically Arranged”: Mary Hays’s Female Biography and the Biographical Dictionary’, Genre 31, no. 2 (1998): 117–42.

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8 Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ‘From Good Looks to Good Thoughts: Popular Women’s History and the Invention of Modernity, ca. 1830–1870’, Modern Philology 97, no. 1 (1997): 48. 9 Wood argues that Hays evokes exemplary biography when she states her desire ‘to excite a worthier emulation’ and she appears to concede to the expectation of biography’s proper reputation when she excludes Mary Wollstonecraft. Wood, however, also suggests that Hays’s inclusion of a number of controversial women ensured ‘that some of the instructive narrations . . . directly challenge the kinds of intellectual and creative pursuits conventionally prescribed to women’, ‘“Alphabetically Arranged”’, 127–8. 10 As noted in Chapter 1, Burke had accused Queen Charlotte of seeking to usurp the King during the 1788 Regency crisis. During the early 1790s, she was subject to similar pornographic attacks as Marie Antoinette, but by no means on the same scale. Such attacks conflated her ‘love of power’ with her alleged love for William Pitt. See: Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 118. 11 Andrew Kippis, Biographia Britannica: Or, The Lives of the Most Eminent Persons . . . (London: W. and A. Strahan, 1778), 1:xxi. 12 Ibid. 13 Donald W. Nichol, ‘Biographia Britannica’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 142, Eighteenth-Century British Literary Biographers, ed. Steven Serafin (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1994), 290; Isabel Rivers, ed., ‘Biographical Dictionaries and Their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers’, in Books and Their Readers in EighteenthCentury England (London: Continuum, 2001), 158. 14 Kippis, Biographia Britannica, 1:xxi. 15 Rivers, ‘Biographical Dictionaries’, 153–4. 16 Sybil Oldfield, Collective Biography of Women in Britain 1550–1900: A Select Annotated Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1999), xiii. 17 Ruth Perry, ed., ‘Introduction’, in George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1985), 12. 18 Ibid. 19 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning and Patriotism 1750–1810 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 171. 20 Hays, Female Biography, 1:v. 21 Guest, Small Change, 170–1. 22 Nichol, ‘Biographia Britannica’, 293. 23 See, for instance, the argument Mary Hays makes regarding the excellence of women in rulers in An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (London: J. Johnson and J. Bell, 1798), 34–6. 24 Mary Spongberg, ‘Remembering Wollstonecraft: Feminine Friendship, Female Subjectivity and the “Invention” of the Feminist Heroine’, in Women’s Life Writing,

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

36

Notes 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship, ed. Daniel Cook and Amy Culley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 165–80. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina L. Walker (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001). Mary Spongberg, ‘Appendix 2: The Sources of Female Biography’, in Memoirs of Women Writers: Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries [1803], ed. Gina L. Walker, Vol. 10 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). Gina Luria Walker, ed., The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006), 41. Ibid. Brooks, Correspondence, 399: a letter to Godwin dated 1 October 1795 and an article in the Monthly Magazine, 1797. Walker, Growth of a Woman’s Mind, 41. For a discussion of the impact of Robert Robinson on Mary Hays, see: Walker’s Growth of a Woman’s Mind, 33–60. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 188. M. Ray Adams, ‘Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin’, PMLA 55, no. 2 (1940): 472. Adams claimed that Hays formed part of a ‘philosophic seraglio’ around Godwin. Early biographers of Godwin such as Ford K. Brown reported that Hays proposed marriage to Godwin ‘in 1795 or early 1796’, an unsubstantiated claim implying that Hays was in love simultaneously with William Frend and William Godwin. See: Ford K. Brown’s The Life of William Godwin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1926), 109. Throughout William St Clair’s account of the Godwin– Hays–Wollstonecraft relationship, there is a sneering dismissal of Hays, whom he describes as enjoying the ‘small fame given to those who come second’, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 141–56. Richards, ‘Revising History’, 270. Gary Kelly was the first critic to notice this, but his reading of the text suggests that Hays is merely revisiting the debates of the 1790s. See: Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 258–63. Gina Luria Walker is the other critic to have written on the Memoirs of Queens. She regards Hays’s text as extending the feminism she shared with Wollstonecraft but does not connect the Memoirs to the vicious anti-Queen campaign that erupted after Caroline’s trial was aborted. See: Walker, Growth of a Woman’s Mind, 232–4. Seminal studies of the period tend to focus on the radical campaign in support of the Queen. See: Laqueur’s ‘Queen Caroline Affair’ and Anna Clark’s ‘Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820’, Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 47–68. Even Flora Fraser’s definitive biography

Notes

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40

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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Unruly Queen: The Life of Caroline (London: John Murray, 1996) only spends two pages (450–1) on the government campaign attacking the Queen that followed her acquittal. E. A. Smith, George IV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 181. Ibid., 182. Myron F. Brightfield, John Wilson Croker (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1940), 174–5; Fraser, Unruly Queen, 450–1. See also Mary Spongberg, ‘The Gender of Censorship: John Wilson Croker, Mary Hays and the Aftermath of the Queen Caroline Affair’, in Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View, ed. Nicole Moore (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 49–64. John Wilson Croker, The Croker Papers: Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830, ed. Louis J. Jennings (London: John Murray, 1884), 1:159. Ibid., 159. [John Wilson Croker], A Letter from the King to His People (London: William Sams, 1821), 22. George Best, The Queen, Rise and Progress on the Unprecedented Investigation into the Conduct and Private Concerns of Her Majesty, The Queen; Comprising a Concise Statement of the Queen’s Case, with Questions and Observations Thereon in a Letter to a Friend (Chelmsford: I. Marsden, 1820), 11. James Bennett, The History of Dissenters, during the Last Thirty Years, from 1808 to 1838 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1839), 247. S. M. Waddams, Law, Politics and the Church of England: The Career of Stephen Lushington, 1782–1873 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 150. Robert Portsmouth, John Wilson Croker: Irish Ideas and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1800–1835 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 44. [Croker], Letter from the King to His People, 3. Fraser, Unruly Queen, 92–116. Iain McCalman, Radical Underground: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 163–77. John Tosh, ‘The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850’, in English Masculinities 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michelle Cohen (Harlow : Longman, 1999), 223. Louise Carter, ‘British Masculinities on Trial in the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820’, Gender and History 20, no. 2 (2008): 251. [Croker], Letter from the King to His People, 5. Ibid., 5. ‘Of the causes which led to this immediate separation, which however was for a time concealed, I trust, from no ungenerous feeling on my part, it does not belong to me to detail the explanation. But who besides ourselves was interested in it? Surely the family of the illustrious female in question! Did they complain?

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69

Notes Did they remonstrate? Did they demand a restitution of conjugal rights between us? . . . Never. By their silence, then, was I justified in requiring at the proper moment, a more openly avowed separation. The first wrong was done to me.’ [My emphasis]. [Croker], Letter from the King to His People, 31. Ibid. Tom Furniss, ‘Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (London: Open University Press, 1991), 77. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 66. Furniss, ‘Gender in Revolution’, 77. Portsmouth, John Wilson Croker, 7. Fraser, Unruly Queen, 450. Thomas Harral, Anne Boleyn and Caroline of Brunswick Compared: In an Address to the People of England (London: William Wright, 1820), 6. John Bull, no. 1 (Sunday, 17 December 1820), 10. While Croker claimed he had no association with the John Bull, it now seems certain that he was intimately connected with its editor and its production. Myron F. Brightfield, Croker’s first biographer, claimed that Croker did not write for the John Bull although he offers considerable evidence that his contemporaries believed that he did. See: Brightfield, John Wilson Croker, 172–7. Robert Portsmouth’s recent study of Croker demonstrates, however, that Croker and Hook were well acquainted and that Croker and other Tory ministers fed Hook much of the scandal that found its way into the pages of the John Bull. See: Portsmouth, John Wilson Croker, 44–53. Grantley F. Berkeley, My Life and Recollections, (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1866), 4:160. Portsmouth, John Wilson Croker, 47. Cited in William F. Newton Dunn, The Man Who Was John Bull: Biography of Theodore Edward Hook 1778–1841 (London: Allendale, 1996), 124. Myron F. Brightfield, Theodore Hook and His Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 133. Dunn, Man Who Was John Bull, 129. Fraser, Unruly Queen, 448. Confidential couriers Luigi Camera and Carlo Fortis went back and forth between London and Italy at great expense. See, for instance, Anon., Love Above-Board; Or, An Heroic Epistle from Sancta Carolina to Sancto Bartolomeo (London: William Wright, 1821); Anon., Bartolomeo to Caroline: An Heroic Epistle, translated from Italian into English (London: William Wright, 1821).

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70 See, for instance, Anon., The Magic Lantern; or Green Bag Plot Laid Open: A Poem, by a Wild Irish Woman (London: S. W. Fores, 1820); Anon., The Old Black Cock and His Dunghill Advisers in Jeopardy; Or, The Palace That Jack Built (London: Effingham Wilson, 1820); Anon., Kouli Khan; Or the Progress of Error (London: William Benbow, 1820); Anon., A Spy Upon Spies; Or the Milan Chambermaid! Developing Certain Particulars of the Mysterious Contents of the Green Bag, By One of the Principal Spies (London: John Fairburn, 1820); Anon., Green Bag of Oddities; Or, Give the Devil His Due (London: William Benbow, 1820); and Anon., Italian Liars, Witnesses Against Our Queen (London: John Fairburn, 1820). 71 Croker mentions the Queen’s ‘probable conversion to the Roman Catholic faith’ in his Letter from the King to His People, 23. See also Anon., Love Above-Board and Extracts from the Pilgrimage of St Caroline: With Notes by an Englishwoman (London: William Wright, 1821). 72 Fraser, Unruly Queen, 455–61. This event seemed to mark the last occasion when the Queen received the support of the people. By the time of the King’s coronation the crowds that once greeted her warmly had turned against her and she was prevented from entering Westminster Abbey. 73 See, for instance, Thomas Harral, Anne Boleyn and Caroline of Brunswick Compared: In an Address to the People of England (London: n.p., 1821), 1–3. 74 Katherine Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”: British Accounts of the Martyred Wicked Queen’, Eighteenth-Century 44, nos. 2–3 (2003): 233–55. 75 Hays, Memoirs of Queens, vi. 76 Lori J. Marso, ‘Defending the Queen: Wollstonecraft and Stäel on the Politics of Sensibility and Feminine Difference’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42, no. 1 (2002): 43–60. 77 Pierre Saint-Amand suggests that ‘Marie Antoinette had to compensate for a long Bourbon line of mistresses who had usurped the queen of France’s position’. See his ‘Terrorizing Marie Antoinette’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 3 (1994): 389. 78 Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 386. See also Sara Maza, ‘The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785–1786): The Case of the Missing Queen’, in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 79. 79 Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 390–1. 80 Ibid., 400. 81 Ibid. 82 A memoir of Caroline, entitled Royal Exile; Or, Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Her Majesty, Caroline, Queen Consort of Great Britain (London: Jones, 1821), attributed to the English barrister John Adolphus appeared in 1821, and in 1822 another work from the same hand appeared entitled The Last Days, Death, Funeral

196

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93

Notes Obsequies, etc. of her Late Majesty Caroline, Queen Consort of Great Britain. This work claimed that Caroline died of grief at her treatment. Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 388. Ibid., 94. Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 261. Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 98. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 129, emphasis in original. Ibid. The Bill of Pain and Penalties was a measure that allowed Queen Caroline to be tried by both Houses of Parliament. Such measures had been employed by the Crown during the Tudor period to avoid bringing a defendant to trial at common law and allowed prosecution when evidence against the accused might be doubtful, when the Crown preferred that it not be made public or when the offense did not seem to fall within existing treason laws. See: John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 41. In Caroline’s case it seems that bill was used to avoid embarrassing countercharges being made against the King. R. A. Melikan, ‘Pains and Penalties Procedure: How the House of Lords “Tried” Queen Caroline’, Parliamentary History 20, no. 3 (2001): 311–32. Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 130. Ibid. Ibid., 131.

6 Agnes Strickland’s Mary Beatrice of Modena and the Politics of 1688 1 Agnes Strickland, Historic Scenes and Poetic Fancies (London: Henry Colburn, 1850), v. 2 Ibid., v–vi. 3 Mary Delorme, ‘Facts, Not Opinions: Agnes Strickland’, History Today 38, no. 2 (1988): 45–50; Rosemary Ann Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 140–69. 4 Only Philippa Levine mentions Agnes Strickland, stating that she was among the signatories of a paper delivered to the Treasury urging the government to investigate the ‘great number of ancient and other original manuscripts and documents’ in private collections. See: Levine’s The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 120.

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5 Catharine Parr Traill, née Strickland (1802–1899), was a writer and gifted botanist, best known for her work on life in Canadian wilderness, The Backwoods of Canada (1836). Susanna Moodie, née Strickland (1803–1885), was the youngest of the sisters and a less conservative figure. She was an abolitionist, who was involved in the transcription of slave narratives such as The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831) and Negro Slavery Described by a Negro (1831). It is as author of Roughing It in the Bush (1852) that she became a ‘legendary figure’ in Canadian literature. Her journals were edited by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood in 1970, with Moodie’s Life in the Clearing (1853) informing Atwood’s own work of historical fiction Alias Grace (1996). Another sibling, Jane Margaret Strickland (1800–1888), published a history of Ancient Rome, Rome, Regal and Republican (1854), as well as a biography of her sister, Life of Agnes Strickland (1887). 6 For more on this, see: Rohan A. Maitzen, ‘“This Feminine Preserve”: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies 38, no. 3 (1995): 371–93; Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ‘The Reduced Pretensions of the Historic Muse: Agnes Strickland and the Commerce of Women’s History’, Journal of Narrative Technique 28, no. 3 (1998): 219–39; and Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 32. 7 Maitzen, ‘This Feminine Preserve’, 371; Burstein, ‘Reduced Pretensions of the Historic Muse’, 219–39. Burstein’s is by far the most historicized of these accounts, as she traces the evolution of royal lives from Lucy Aikin’s ‘Court Histories’ and Hays’s Memoirs of Queens, to the appearance of Anna Jameson’s Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (London: Henry Colburn, 1831); and Hannah Lawrance’s Historical Memoirs of the Queens of England (London: Edward Moxon, 1838). 8 Mitchell, Picturing the Past, 140–69. 9 Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7. 10 Ibid., 51. 11 Mitchell, Picturing the Past, 144–5. 12 Ibid., 145. 13 Ibid., 143. 14 Strickland, Historic Scenes, 178–84. Burstein touches on this incident in her ‘Reduced Pretensions’, mentioning that Strickland asserted that Macaulay handled evidence ‘with as much ingenuity as an improvisatore displays in dilating on a chance word furnished for the foundation of an extempore romance’, 227. The spat with Macaulay is also mentioned in Rosemary Mitchell’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry ‘Strickland, Agnes (1796–1874)’ (2004). Available online: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26663 (accessed 19 December 2017).

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15 Macaulay’s History appeared in five volumes: the third and fourth in 1855 and the fifth volume, completed by his sister after his death in 1859, was published in 1861. 16 Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: The Architect of Imperial Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 259. 17 Strickland, Historic Scenes, 181. Strickland argues that this sentence could equally mean that ‘the queen had interceded for a hundred prisoners under the sentence of transportation’. Modern sources all cite the same reference; for instance, W. MacDonald Wigfield’s compilation of documents from the Monmouth Rebellion cites the letter from the Earl of Sunderland to Justice Jeffreys ‘outlining his instructions: 200 were to be given to Sir Phillip Howard, Gov of Barbados, to Sir Jerome Nipho, the queen’s Italian Secretary, to Sir William Stapleton, Gov of the Leewards Islands, and to Sir Christopher Musgrave’. He adds, ‘these grantees, and later the Queen herself and William Bridgeman, were to be responsible for taking the prisoners from custody within ten days to “some of his Majesties southern plantations . . . ” and to keep them there for ten years’. While he does not cite further authority regarding the queen, his exhaustive list of rebels sold following the rebellion does indicate the queen’s involvement in this scheme. W. MacDonald Wigfield, The Monmouth Rebels, 1685 (Taunton: Somerset Record Society, 1985), viii. See also Richard Locke, The Western Rebellion [1888] (Taunton: Wessex Press, 1912). 18 It is possible that Macaulay was making a veiled attack on Strickland with this reference to Mary Beatrice in his History. Strickland has made this queen’s misfortunes the theme of her recently published life. Macaulay writes of Mary Beatrice, ‘The misfortunes which she endured have made her an object of some interest; but that interest would not be a little heightened if it could be shown that, in the season of her greatness, she saved, or even tried to save one single victim of the most frightful proscription that England has ever seen. Unhappily the only request that she is known to have preferred touching the rebels was that a hundred of those who were sentenced to transportation were given to her . . . We cannot wonder that her attendants should have imitated her unprincely greediness and her unwomanly cruelty.’ Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1898), 1:496–7. 19 Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest (London: Henry Colburn, 1840), 1:180. 20 Burnet, for instance, collated all the materials regarding the ‘suppositious’ birth of Mary Beatrice’s son, James Edward. Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 92. 21 See, for instance, [Anon.] A Woman of Quality, a Late Confidant to Queen Messalina, The Amours of Messalina, Late Queen of Albion . . . (London: John Lyford, 1689); [Anon.] Remarks upon the Dream of the Late Abdicated Queen of

Notes

22

23 24

25

26

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England . . . (London: Thomas Salisbury, 1690); [Anon.] A Woman of Quality, a Late Confidant to Queen Messalina, The Royal Wanton . . . (London: n.p., 1690); [William Fuller], A Plain Proof of the True Father and Mother of the Pretended Prince of Wales (London: William Fuller, 1700); and William Fuller, Twenty-Six Depositions of Persons of Quality and Worth . . . Proving the Whole Management of the Supposititious Birth of the Pretended Prince of Wales (London: William Fuller, 1702). Melinda L. Zook, ‘“The Bloody Assizes”: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 27, no. 3 (1995): 280n26; 292; 378n20. Hall, Macaulay and Son, 301. Hall notes that Mary Beatrice is characterized by ‘her “unprincely greediness” and her “unwomanly cruelty” ’. Edwards has noted that Macaulay’s obstinate refusal to acknowledge his mistake in this chapter – that is, confusing George Penn with the Quaker William Penn – relates to his ‘memory of the forces’ that blackened his father Zachary’s name, that is, ‘pious sentiment, court favour and slave traffic’. See: Owen Dudley Edwards, Macaulay (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988), 149. For an extended discussion of the controversy around Macaulay’s treatment of William Penn, see: Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Lord Macaulay: Introduction’, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England (abridged), ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (London: Penguin, 1979), 32–5. Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 1:34. See also Greg Kucich, ‘Women’s Historiography and the (Dis)embodiment of Law: Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Benger’, Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 1 (2002): 3–5. Thomas Babington Macaulay, entry for Friday, 24 November 1848, The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. William Thomas (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 2:6. Jane Margaret Strickland, The Life of Agnes Strickland (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1887), 8. Una Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the Queens of England 1796– 1874 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940), 39. John Sutherland, ‘Henry Colburn, Publisher’, Publishing History 19 (1986): 59. Ibid. Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 74–8. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, Preface to 1st edn, 1:x. Antonia Fraser, ‘Introduction’, in Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England, introduced and selected by Antonia Fraser (London: Continuum, 2011), 6. Ibid. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 4th edn (London: William Blackwood, 1854), 1:xii. Smith, Gender of History, 116–29.

200 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

Notes Fraser, ‘Introduction’, 6. Weil, Political Passions, 87–93. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (1845), 8:ix. Trevor-Roper, ‘Lord Macaulay: Introduction’, 7–42; John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 16. Kenyon, History Men, 16. As Lord Acton observed, Macaulay’s historical essays were ‘a key to half the prejudices of the age’. See: Kenyon, History Men, 38. Strickland, Life of Agnes Strickland, 5. B. C. Southam, ‘“An Easy Step to Silence”: Jane Austen and the Political Context’, Women’s Writing 5, no. 1 (1998): 7–30. Samuel R. Gardiner and J. Bass Mullinger, Introduction to the Study of English History (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 228. Daniel R. Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997): 653. The sisters, for instance, mention that they had in their possession an heirloom, a small bracelet clasp, pledged to an ancestor by Henrietta Maria for some service to the royal cause during the civil wars. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (1845), 8:101. Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 7–8. Ibid., 7. Daniel Scott, The Stricklands of Sizergh Castle: The Records of Twenty-Five Generations of a Westmorland Family (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1908), 254. Ibid., 256. Scott mentions that among the family’s most prized possessions were a ‘jealously guarded counterpane and a toilet cover worked by Lady Katherine Parr’. Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 7. Ibid., 7–8. Ibid., 93. Anne Laurence, ‘Women’s Historians and Documentary Research: Lucy Aikin, Agnes Strickland, Mary Anne Everett Green and Lucy Toulmin Smith’, in Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790–1900, ed. Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence and Gill Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 125–41; Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 114. Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 113. Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 143–4. Ibid., 144. See also Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), 124–46. Laurence, ‘Women’s Historians and Documentary Research’, 130.

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59 Strickland, Life of Agnes Strickland, 26. 60 Delorme, ‘Facts, Not Opinions’, 46. 61 Fraser, ‘Introduction’, 6. See also Laurence, ‘Women’s Historians and Documentary Research’, 130. On Mary Beatrice, see: Andrew Barclay, ‘Mary Beatrice of Modena: The “Second Bless’d of Woman-Kind”?’, in Queenship in Britain 1660– 1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Clarissa C. Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 77. Michelle Anne White writes of Strickland’s Lives, ‘Though a very old secondary source Strickland’s biography [of Henrietta Maria] remains quite valuable. Her sources are accurate and her observations are both insightful and reliable.’ White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 21n45. 62 Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 126. For instance, the sisters stayed in an ‘old Jacobite hotel’ in Saint-Germain. 63 Rosemary Ann Mitchell, ‘“The Busy Daughters of Clio”: Women Writers of History from 1820 to 1880’, Women’s History Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 116. 64 Carola Oman, Mary of Modena (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962), xii. 65 Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 163. 66 Ibid., 140. 67 Ibid., 163. 68 Exiled Britons in France, of course, were critical to the processes of cultural exchange between England and the Continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as indeed were Huguenot refugees and émigrés escaping from the Revolution. See: Joan DeJean, ‘Transnationalism and the Origins of the (French?) Novel’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 37–49. 69 Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, Preface to 1st edn, viii. 70 Strickland, Life of Agnes Strickland, 144; Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 178–9. 71 Oman, Mary of Modena, xii. 72 Weil, Political Passions, 86–104. 73 Oman, Mary of Modena, xvi. 74 Barclay, ‘Mary Beatrice of Modena’, 74–93. Barclay writes that Strickland’s life of Mary Beatrice ‘still has a strong claim to be the best study of her life’, 77. 75 Apart from Andrew Barclay’s two articles on Mary Beatrice’s court, there have been few modern studies of her life. Barclay has argued that earlier studies, by Marie [Martin] Hallé, Mary Hopkirk and Carola Oman, have followed ‘the lines already laid down by Strickland’. See: ‘Mary Beatrice of Modena’, 78. 76 Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (1846), 9:ix. 77 Barclay, ‘Mary Beatrice of Modena’, 77–8. 78 Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (1846), 9:x.

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79 Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 163. 80 Janet Southorn, Royal Stuart Papers XL: Mary of Modena Queen Consort of James II and VII (Huntington, OH: Royal Stuart Society, 1992), 1. 81 Edward Corp, for instance, has suggested that most studies of the Stuart court in exile focus on the last years of its existence, when it was clearly in decline. This is largely due to issues with source materials. ‘The documentary evidence for the period of prosperity was mainly destroyed in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. By contrast, the voluminous correspondence sent to Avignon and Italy describing the growing difficulties at Saint-Germain after 1716, was carefully preserved with the Stuart papers in Rome. It is this more than anything else, which has produced so much misunderstanding about the exiled court in France.’ See: ‘The Court of Queen Mary at Saint-Germain, 1712–1718’, in A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 315–16. 82 Strickland, Life of Agnes Strickland, 50. 83 Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 9:240. Strickland quotes Sir James Macintosh: ‘The charge respecting a spurious heir . . . was one of the most flagrant wrongs ever done to a sovereign or a father. The son of James II was, perhaps, the only prince of Europe, of whose blood there could be no rational doubt, considering the verification of his birth, and the unimpeachable life of his mother.’ 84 Ibid., 317. 85 See: Strickland’s lengthy discussion of the Bill of Attainder which William III brought to the House of Lords. Lives of the Queens of England, 10:7–9. On his attempt to include Mary Beatrice of Modena’s name on this Bill, Strickland wrote, ‘This illegal attempt on the part of William’s house of lords, to introduce the name of the royal widow, par parenthesis, into the bill for attainting her son, by the insulting designations of “the pretended Prince of Wales, and Mary, his pretended mother,” is an instance of gratuitous baseness, unparalleled even in the annals of that reign in which they sought for a precedent [i.e. Henry VIII].’ 86 Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp, eds, ‘Introduction’, in The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), xii. 87 Ibid., viii–xxiv. 88 See: particularly, Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685–1720 (London: Allen Lane, 2006). 89 Ibid., 180–1. 90 Pope-Hennessy dates this review July 1847 but is citing the same review Rosemary Ann Mitchell has identified as written by C. M. S. Phillips, which was published in the Edinburgh Review in April 1849. Later, in her biography, Pope-Hennessy [198–9] mentions a review of Historic Scenes by Sylvanus Urban in the Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1850, that refers to Strickland’s spat with Macaulay. The review suggests that if Macaulay does not respond to Strickland ‘he will be set

Notes

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

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down as “a done historian” . . . After such an exposure nobody will buy his vols III and IV unless he vindicates himself. What with the Quakers and Miss Agnes the great historian himself is really in a pitiable plight’. While undoubtedly written with tongue in cheek, the review nonetheless evidences the potential damage of Strickland’s assertions, as Macaulay’s failures where the Quakers were concerned undoubtedly harmed his reputation. On his treatment of William Penn, see: John Paget, An Inquiry into the Evidence Relating to the Charges Brought by Lord Macaulay against William Penn (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1858); Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England (London: Macmillan, 1938); Trevor-Roper, ‘Lord Macaulay: Introduction’, 32–5; and Robert E. Sullivan, Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 320. Macaulay, Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay 2:6–7. [C. S. M. Phillips], ‘Review: Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest… Series of the Stuarts’, Edinburgh Review 89, no. 180 (April 1849), 435. Ibid., 436. Ibid., 438. Ibid., 440. Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland, 180. Hall, Macaulay and Son, 297–304. Smith, Gender of History, 37–69. See, for instance, Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Caroline Hibbard, ‘ The Role of a Queen Consort: The Household and Court of Henrietta Maria 1625–42’, in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c.1450–1650, ed. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 393–414; Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Erin Griffey, ed. Henrietta Maria: Politics, Piety and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Rebecca A. Bailey, Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625–1642 (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2009); and Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Henrietta Maria and Marie Antoinette (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016).

7 Calendaring as Empathetic History: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Letters of Henrietta Maria 1 [C. S. M. Phillips], ‘Review: Lives of the Queens of England’, 436. 2 Ibid., 439.

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3 In the nineteenth century, commitment to this idea is best exemplified in Samuel Rawson Gardiner’s History of the Great Civil War 1642–1649 (London: Longman, 1886), 83–4. Such ideas persisted into the twentieth century. Christopher Hill writes, ‘Much stupider than his father or eldest son, Charles was governed first by the incompetent and disastrously vain Buckingham, and then by the disastrously popish and arbitrary Henrietta Maria.’ See: Hill’s Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1961), 74–5. 4 Frances Elizabeth Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 123. 5 Michelle Anne White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 58n150. 6 The King’s Cabinet Opened, or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters and Papers Written with the King’s Own Hand (London: Robert Bostock, 1645). 7 Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 251. 8 Ibid., 215–16. 9 Christine L. Krueger, ‘Green [née Wood], Mary Anne Everett (1818–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (24 May 2008). Available online: https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11395 (accessed 23 January 2018). 10 Christina L. Krueger, ‘Why She Lived at the PRO: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Profession of History’, Journal of British Studies 42, no. 1 (2003): 70. 11 Christina L. Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendars of State Papers as a Genre of Historical Writing’, Clio 36, no. 1 (2006): 6. 12 Krueger, ‘Why She Lived at the PRO’. 13 Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2. Certainly there were a number of prominent men who held university posts in England during the nineteenth century who wrote political histories based on published rather than archival sources, as Levine has noted (ibid., 23, 30). 14 Ibid., 2. 15 John Cantwell, The Public Records Office 1838–1958 (London: HMSO, 1991), 38. 16 I have only been able to locate three scholarly studies of Green, all by Christine L. Krueger: ‘Why She Lived at the PRO’; ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring of State Papers’; and ‘Order in the Archives’. 17 Krueger, ‘Why She Lived at the PRO’, 65–6. 18 Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, including Her Private Correspondence with Charles I, Collected from the Public and Private Libraries of France and England (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), 49.

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19 See: Rosemary Mitchell, ‘The Red Queen and the White Queen: The Exemplification of Medieval Queens in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, ed. Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 157–7. 20 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 133. 21 It is generally held that the French court offered women considerably more scope as political subjects. See: Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician’, in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 247. 22 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 130. 23 See, for instance, the discussion of Charles’s personality in John Bruce, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Charles I. in 1646: Letters of King Charles the First to Queen Henrietta Maria (London: Camden Society, 1856), v–xxviii. 24 See, for instance, John Dauncey, The History of the Thrice Illustrious Princess, Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, Queen of England (London: Philip Chetwind, 1660); Anon., The Life and Death of Henrietta Maria, de Bourbon etc., (London: Dorman Newman, 1685). 25 Kings Cabinet, 45. 26 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 126. 27 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 485. 28 Derek Hirst, ‘Reading the Royal Romance, Or, Intimacy in a King’s Cabinet’, Seventeenth Century 18, no. 2 (2003): 216. 29 Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72. 30 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 126; McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 484–6. 31 The term is used by John Milton in his Eikonoklastes. See: Complete Prose Works of John Milton 1648–1649, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 3:421. 32 Such charges can be found in numerous Parliamentary sources, but the publication of The King’s Cabinet Opened pamphlet began a ‘media blitz’ which saw inflammatory charges regarding the Queen read publicly to large crowds and pamphlets excerpting the letters circulated throughout the kingdom. See: White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars, 165–70. Such charges have been repeated in contemporary and modern histories of the civil wars into the twentieth century. See note 3.  33 These works were also the first detailed studies of these queens written in English and remained the standard for much of the nineteenth century. 34 [Phillips], ‘Review: Lives of the Queens of England’, 438. 35 Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 8:58.

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36 Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution, 1. 37 Katherine Binhammer, ‘Marie Antoinette Was “One of Us”: British Accounts of the Martyred Wicked Queen’, The Eighteenth-Century 44, nos. 2–3 (2003): 239. 38 Henrietta Maria is first compared with Margaret of Anjou, who had also become an archetypal tragic foreign queen and was dubbed by the Stricklands ‘that queen of tears’. The mention of Margaret of Anjou not only hinted at the affecting tale ahead but also reminded readers of an unfortunate precedent, the often calamitous fate of foreign queens. Such a precedent called to mind the fate of other foreign queens of recent memory such as Queen Matilda of Denmark, hapless sister of George III as well as Queen Caroline, the ill-used wife of George IV. 39 Strickland writes: ‘Charles I very truly anticipated that the publication of the letters and papers which his rebels captured at Naseby, in his private cabinet, would raise his character in the estimation of the world. He thus mentions the subject in a letter to his secretary Sir Edward Nicholas, “My rebels, I thank them, have published my private letters in print, and though I could have wished their pains had been spared, yet I will neither deny that those things were mine which they have set out in my name (only some words here and there are mistaken, and some commas misplaced . . . ); nor will I, as a good protestant or honest man, blush for any of those papers. Indeed, as a discreet man, I will not justify myself; yet I would fain know him who would be willing that all his private letters should be seen, as mine have now been. However, so that but one clause be rightly understood, I care not much so that the others take their fortune. It is concerning the mongrel parliament: the truth is, that Sussex’s factiousness, at the time, put me out of patience, which made me freely vent my displeasure against those of his party to my wife.’ Lives of the Queens of England, 9:129–130. 40 See, for instance, ‘In the course of her correspondence, the queen most earnestly strove to dissuade her husband from his fatal determination of trusting himself in the hands of the prevalent political party in Scotland . . . Charles I, however, took the disastrous step against which his queen had vainly warned him.’ Ibid., 130. 41 [Phillips], ‘Review: Lives of the Queens of England’, 436. 42 Strickland, Lives of the Queens, 9:122. 43 Ibid., 122. 44 Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley and Arthur F. Morotti, eds, ‘Introduction’, in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 2. 45 Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendars’, 3. 46 Green, Letters of Henrietta Maria, 46. 47 Ibid., 48. 48 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (Basil: J. J. Tourneisen, 1798), 8:58.

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49 Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 43. 50 Bruce, Charles I in 1646, xxii. 51 Ibid., xxiii 52 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics, 75. 53 Bruce, Charles I in 1646, xxiii. 54 Ibid., xxi. 55 Ibid., xxvi. Bruce writes, ‘The letters now printed prove the accuracy of these allegations in the instance of Henrietta Maria. Un-English in her tastes and notions, separated from the people by her religion, and never able to form the slightest idea of the depth and fervour of their opinions, it is clear from the letters before us that the fortunes of England were laid with the most abject humility at the feet of this imperious lady’ (xxvi). 56 Green, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, xi (original emphasis). 57 Ibid., v. 58 Ibid., x. 59 Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring’, 1. 60 Krueger, ‘She Lived at the PRO’, 67. 61 Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring’, 6. 62 Cantwell, The Public Record Office, 334. 63 Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring’, 7–8. 64 Ibid., 3, 8; Krueger, ‘Green [née Wood]’, n.p. 65 Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring’, 14. 66 Ibid., 7. 67 Ibid., 15. 68 Mary Anne Everett Green, Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain, from the Commencement of the Twelfth Century to the Close of the Reign of Queen Mary (London: Henry Colburn, 1846), vi–vii. 69 Green, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, vii. Michelle Anne White has observed that Green ‘presumed to correct the queen’s many grammatical errors by inserting applicable accents and punctuation marks. Additionally, she often omitted key words and phrases, which sometimes dramatically altered the tone and implication of the queen’s letters.’ White does not indicate in what way these omissions changed the implication of the letters. White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars, 62–3n10. 70 Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 43. 71 Ibid. 72 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics, 72. 73 Green, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, 2–3. 74 Ibid., 4.

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75 And which had been carefully edited out of the Kings Cabinet pamphlet, see Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 43. 76 For instance, the Parliamentary editors of the letters captured at Naseby inserted a letter from King Charles to Marie de Medici written in 1626 into The King’s Cabinet Opened, 34–6. The letter recounted Henrietta Maria’s shortcomings in order that Charles might justify his failure to submit to the marriage settlement, that is, his dismissal of her French retinue. The letter shows the queen as a spoilt and wilful papist, just after the revelations of her own letters and just before some more letters from a seemingly doting king. See: Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 55. 77 Strickland, Lives of the Queens, 8:23. 78 Ibid., 35. 79 Green, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, 7. 80 Ibid., 7. 81 Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring’, 14. 82 Hirst, ‘Reading the Royal Romance’, 215. 83 On the imagery of Charles’s rule, see Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 1992), 224. 84 Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 37. 85 Dolan, Whores of Babylon. 86 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics, 74. 87 For instance, see John Milton’s rebuttal of Charles’s passionate defence of his queen in his Eikon Basilike. Eikonoklastes in Complete Prose Works, 420–1. 88 In his The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, Milton argued ‘that the one problem with kings is that they come with queens’. See: Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 123n100; and Complete Prose Works, 225. 89 Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 52. 90 Ibid., 43. 91 Ibid., 46. 92 Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring’, 3. 93 [Phillips], ‘Review: Lives of the Queens of England’, 439. 94 King’s Cabinet, 29, ‘My deare heart, Fred Cornwallis will have told you all our voyage as far as Adburie, and the state of my health coming hither, I finde myself so ill, as well as in ill rest, as in the increase of my Rhume.’ 95 Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 53. 96 Born in June 1644, Henriette Anne (known as Minette) was the last child of Henrietta Maria and Charles I and escaped England with her governess three years after her mother had fled into exile. Henriette Anne married Philip, the Duke of Orléans and brother of King Louis XIV. Philip was himself the subject of several sexual scandals and was later rumoured to have had his wife poisoned. Following the Restoration, Henriette Anne returned to England to assist in the

Notes

97 98 99 100

101

102 103 104 105

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negotiation of the ‘secret’ Treaty of Dover. Her role in this negotiation ensured that she was the subject of the usual pornographic propaganda that generally accompanied the participation of Stuart women in politics. See: Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter Is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 140. Green, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, 240–1 f.n. Ibid., 239. Ibid., 242. Ibid. Green’s annotation reads, ‘The queen was now approaching the period of her accouchement. The parliament had granted her the courtesy of permitting her trousseau, with several attendants, to pass to her from London, but they declined a request for some further provision . . . The Perfect Diurnal writes . . . “that late wicked plot against Parliament and the city, is too fresh in our memories to admit of a new plot in the city, under the pretence of giving safe-conduct to these she-Oxonians”.’ Green, for instance, makes reference to a diary entry in a footnote: ‘Mayerne also received from the king, a brief but empathetic note: – “Mayerne, for the love of me, go to my wife.” ’ Green observes, ‘When the queen left England a few weeks later, Mayerne plainly expressed his belief that “her days would not be many”.’ Ibid., 243. On the spacing of the letters by Parliament, see Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 56. Krueger, ‘Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendaring of State Papers’, 13–14. Jean M. Stone, ‘Henrietta Maria: Queen Consort of England’, Dublin Review 23, no. 104 (April 1889): 321. Green, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, 49. Camden Miscellany, Vol. 8 (London: Camden Society, 1883).

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Index Adams, M. Ray 192 n.33 Aikin, Lucy 4, 6, 9, 14, 15–16, 79–82, 85–6, 94, 97, 122, 155 Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1888) 79–80, 86–8, 90–2 Alliston, April 177 n.14 archives use by C. S. Macauley 26–7, 30 use by Green 139, 147 use by Strickland sisters 124–9, 132, 142, 147 Austen, Caroline 62, 63 Austen, Cassanda 59, 65–6, 70, 75, 76 Austen, Jane 4, 6, 7, 155, 179 n.45 History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles I (1791) 14–15, Chap. 3 passim, 88–9, 163 n.13, 175–6 n.2, 177 n.14, 179 n.57 Juvenilia 63, 67 Leigh family 61–4, 66, 73, 74, 76, 125, 178 n.29, 182 n.110, 182 n.112 Northanger Abbey 66, 167 n.69, 179 n.44 personalized historiography 73–5, 179 n.50 response to Burke 14–15, 59–62, 64, 67–70, 73, 75, 88–9 Ash, Marinell 157 n.1 Austen-Leigh, James Edward 62, 63 Austen-Leigh, Mary Augusta 63, 64 Barker-Benfield, G. J. 170 n.23 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 80, 81, 82, 85, 183–4 n.12 Quarterly Review on 82–4, 184 n.21 Bayle, Pierre 101–3 Benger, Elizabeth 4, 6, 9, 14–16, 79–82, 85, 92, 94–7, 122, 155, 166 n.60, 182 n.1, 183 n.4, 183 n.5, 188–9 n.82 Betham, Matilda 189 n.2 Binhammer, Katherine 42–3, 170 n.19

biography 3, 8, 16, 52, 80–1, 85, 91, 99, 100, 101–4, 112, 113, 119, 124, 134–5, 141, 189 n.2, 190 n.7, 191 n.9, 201 n.61 Boleyn, Anne 15, 38, 67, 115, 187 n.60 parallels to the Queen Caroline Affair 79–91, 188 n.78 as a short-lived queen 94–7 Booth, Alison 8, 190 n.7 bourgeoisified histories 8, 11, 14, 22, 28, 37, 39–40, 42, 47, 52, 82, 84, 101, 107–8, 121, 132, 135, 151 Brightfield, Myron F. 194 n.63 Brophy, Brigid 67–8, 72, 73 Brougham, Henry (see also Caroline of Brunswick) 93, 94, 109 Brown, Ford K. 192 n.33 Bruce, John 139, 145–6, 147, 207 n.55 Burke, Edmund influence on women’s history writing 10–13, 22–3, 37–8, 39–40, 52–3, 61–2 Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) 1–2, 21, 23–4, 46, 60, 64–5 and Whig historiography 9–10, 17, Chap. 1 passim see also Marie Antoinette; Austen, Jane; Macaulay, C. S.; Wollstonecraft Burnet, Gilbert and the Declaration of Right 28, 69 opposition to Mary Beatrice of Modena 121, 130, 198 n.20 Whig Historiography 125 Burney, Fanny 39, 81 review by Croker 83–4 Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth 8, 159 n.18, 161 nn.31 and 34, 190 n.7, 197 n.7, 197 n.14 Burton, Antoinette 62, 65, 68, 75 Butler, Marilyn 60, 61–2 Butterfield, Herbert 9, 157–8 n.3, 162 n.54 Byatt, A. S. 73

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Caroline of Brunswick 15–16, 56–7, 188–9 n.82, 189 n.2 Bill of Pain and Penalties 92–4, 196 n.90 Queen Caroline Affair Chaps 4 & 5 passim see also Croker; John Bull; George IV Caroline Matilda 52–4, 174 n.91 Charles I 1–3, 17, 25, 29–30, 32, 44, 61–2, 66, 72–4, 137–9, 141–6, 148–51, 153, 163 n.14, 168–70 n.92, 204 n.3, 205 n.23, 206 n.39, 206 n.40, 208 n.76, 208 n.83, 208 n.87 see also Henrietta Maria; King’s Cabinet Opened Clark, Anna 90 Clark, J. C. D. 64 Clery, E. J. 184 n.13 Cohen, Margaret 186 n.44 Colburn, Henry, publisher 123–4, 138 Colley, Linda 12, 33, 88 Corp, Edward 202 n.81 Croker, John Wilson 10 Misogyny as reviewer 82–5 Role in Queen Caroline Affair 105–11, 114 see also Aiken; Barbauld; Burney ; Caroline of Brunswick; John Bull; Quarterly Review Davies, Kate 165 n.48 Dissenting women writers 15, 21, 39, Chap. 4 passim., 101–4 Doody, Margaret Anne 67 domestic sphere 6, 8, 12–13, 15, 22, 26, 28–9, 35, 37, 43, 47–8, 52, 54, 73, 79, 81–2, 85–6, 88, 95, 101, 107–8, 114, 119–20, 131–2, 148–9, 151 Edinburgh Review 84–5, 185 n.30 review of Strickland 134–5, 137, 143, 152, 202 n.90 Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans 34, 167 n.76 empathetic history Introduction passim., 29, 37, 40, 52, 55–7, 60, 62, 66, 69, 75, 86–7, 88, 94, 95, 127, 129, 155 place of relics and heirlooms in 34–5, 74, 120, 126–7, 182 n.105, 200 n.46

Elizabeth I 66, 69, 71, 73, 75, 85, 88, 102, 115, 180 n.75 see also Aikin Elizabeth of York 68–9 Francis, Sir Philip 35–6, 170 n.14 French Revolution 1–2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 23, 29, 51–2, 55, 60, 61–2, 62–3, 83–4, 106, 108, 122, 173–4 n.85 see also Burke; Louis XVI; Marie Antoinette; Wollstonecraft. ‘Frenchified’ queens 34, 38, 140 Furniss, Tom 108 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson. 204 n.3 On Charles I 163 n.14 On Henrietta Maria 154 George III 3, 28, 53–5, 92, 100, 206 n.38 George IV 3, 16, 88, 90–4, 99, 104, 106–8, 109, 114, 115, 123, 188–9 n.82, 206 n.38 see also Caroline of Brunswick; Croker Glorious Revolution 1–2, 9–10, 21–4, 27, 60, 64–5, 122, 124–5, 133–5 Godwin, William 51, 83, 99, 103, 104, 175 n.111, 184 n.15, 192 n.33 Goldsmith, Oliver, and The History of England 66, 67, 70, 74, 75, 175 n.2, 180 n.70 Green, Mary Anne Everett 4, 6, 8–9, 16–17, 31, 124, Chap. 7 passim. Calendaring 138–9, 146–7, 151, 159–60 n.18 see also King’s Cabinet Opened Grey, Lady Jane 67, 69, 70 Harral, Thomas, editor 109 Hays, Mary, Chap. 5 passim. 4, 6, 9, 14, 15, 16, 83, 85, 87, 122 Female Biography [1803] 100–4 Memoirs of Queens [1821] 16, Chap. 5 passim see also Caroline of Brunswick; Wollstonecraft Henrietta Maria 3, 16–17, 25, 26, 29–31, 34, 35, 38, 43–4, 50, 100, 121, 128–9, 130–2, 135 Calendaring by Green Chap. 7 passim. 204 n.3, 206 n.38, 207 n.55, 208 n.76 see also Strickland, Agnes

Index Henry VIII 15, 25, 70, 73, 79–82, 88–91, 93–7, 106, 115, 180 n.75, 187 n.60, 202 n.85 Hill, Christopher 204 n.3 Hirst, Derek 141 historical memoir, Chap. 4 passim. 3, 12, 16, 33–4, 99, 123, 129 historiography English 55, 100, 119–20, 146, 155, 157 n.1 gendered 40, 65, 73, 86, 90, 120, 135, 139, 158 n.8, 159 n.12 ‘personalized’ 73–5, 179 n.50 Whigg 59, 61, 64, 71, 72, 101, 120, 122, 124–5, 130, 137, 144, 151, 157–8 n.3, 162 n.54 see also Butterfield, Herbert; and Burnet, Gilbert Homans, Margaret 28 Hume, David 11, 14, 22, 67, 70–2, 74, 89, 155, 166 n.60, 167 n.69, 168 n.92 History of England 31–2, 36–7, 175–6 n.2 Hunt, Lynn 44 Hutchinson, Lucy 26, 151, 164 n.32, 166 n.55 Jacobitism Chap. 3 passim. Chap. 6 passim. 3, 14–15, 33, 34, 52, 55, 57, 82–83, 99–100, 101, 108, 110 f James I 2, 25, 30, 72 James II 28, 121, 125–6, 130–5, 202 n.83 John Bull 109, 194 n.63 Johnson, Claudia L. 11, 46, 56, 62 Johnson, Joseph, publisher 41, 51, 173–4 n.85 Kelly, Gary 113, 190 n.6, 192 n.35 Kent, Christopher 61, 65, 67 Kidd, Colin 157–8 n.3 King’s Cabinet Opened 138, 140–53, 205 n.32, 208 n.75 Kippis, Andrew 101–2 Klancher, Jon P. 84 Knoppers, Laura Lunger 148, 152 Krueger, Christine L. 139, 147, 159–60 n.18 Kucich, Greg 7–8, 12, 80, 81, 165 n.48, 166 n.49, 182 n.1

233

Laqueur, Thomas W. 94 Laurence, Anne 127, 182–3 n.1 Le Breton, Philip Hemery 186 n.48 Leigh, Alice 66, 178 n.29 Leigh, Agnes 63–4, 182 n.105 Leigh, Mary, and History of the Leigh Family 63–4, 66 Letter from the King to His People see Croker; Caroline of Brunswick Levine, Philippa 139, 157 n.2, 196 n.4, 204 n.13 Levy, Michelle 80, 90, 182–3 n.1 Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth 55, 56, 73, 188 n.78 Looser, Devoney 8, 62 Louis XVI 29, 36, 44, 50, 82, 112 Lynch, Deirdre 62–63, 179 n.50 Macaulay, Catharine Sawbridge 6, 14, 22–3, 26–27, 47–8, 80, 86, 96, 115, 165 n.48, 166 n.49 History of England from the Accession of James I [1863–1883] 5, 29–30 Letters on Education [1790] 30–1, 49 Response to Burke 29, 39, 44–5 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 10–11, 16, 24, 120–1, 134, 198 n.18, 199 n.24 Maitzen, Rohan A. 8, 190 n.7 Marie Antoinette 15, 70, 73, 101, 111, 142 Burke’s depiction of 10–11, 14, 21–2, 24, 29, 35–41, 61, 88, 106–8 Hays on 111–14, 116 as a short-lived queen 13, 48–9 Wollstonecraft on Chap. 2 passim. 14, 172 n.62 Margaret of Anjou 36–7, 70, 163 n.13, 168 n.89, 180 n.70, 206 n.38 Mary I 25, 66, 68–9 Mary II and William of Orange 22–4, 27, 69, 133 political position of 27–8 Mary Beatrice of Modena 16–17, 26–7, 38, Chap. 6 passim, 168 n.89, 198 n.18, 199 n.23, 202 n.85 Mary, Queen of Scots 3, 14–15, 34, 38, 41, 100, 102, 140, 160 n.19 Austen on 32, Chap. 2 passim Strickland on 126–7 Wollstonecraft on 55–6 Maza, Sara 112

234

Index

Melman, Billie 5, 161 n.33 Mellor, Anne 80, 182–3 n.1 Milton, John 25, 47, 151, 163 n.15, 208 n.87, 208 n.88 Mitchell, Rosemary Ann 5, 121, 159 n.18, 161 n.33, 197 n.14, 202 n.90 Moodie, Susanna (nee Strickland) 119, 197 n.5 Morgan, Lady 81, 84, 185 n.30 de Motteville, Madame. 33, 86–7, 129, 142, 143, 154, 186 n.42 Nenner, Howard 68, 180 n.75 No Flatterer 89–90 O’Brien, Karen 6, 7, 91 Phillips, C. S. M., reviews of 142–3, 202–3 n.90 Pocock, J. G. A. 29 Pope-Hennessey 126, 134–5, 202 n.90 Portsmouth, Robert 194 n.63 Purvis, June 159 n.12 Quarterly Review 82, 84–5, 105, 185 n.30 see also Barbauld, Burney ; Croker Queen Consorts Chap. 1 passim. 2–3, 7, 12–13, 13–14, 15, 16, 101, 110, 113–14, 121, 122, 125, 132 and Catholicism 3, 24–6, 42, 50, 110, 131–2, 140–2, 149–50, 153–4 and petticoat government 30, 35, 36, 38, 100, 170 n.14 see also Boleyn, Anne; Caroline of Brunswick; Caroline Matilda; Henrietta Maria; Marie Antoinette; Margaret of Anjou; Mary Beatrice of Modena Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de. 26 religion Catholicism 1, 12, 16, 30, 34, 44, 61, 74, 122–3, 135, 155 Protestantism 1, 3, 12, 23, 26, 61, 70, 80, 95, 101, 142, 149 Republicanism 22–3, 25–6, 29, 30, 47–8, 50, 51, 56, 141, 166 n.49 Whigs and Protestantism 2, 6, 9, 24, 60, 135, 140, 153, 157–8 n.3, 161 n.33

Saint-Amand, Pierre 195 n.77 short-lived queens 13–17, 39–40, 46–9, 53, 82, 94–7 see also Boleyn, Anne; Marie Antoinette Smith, Bonnie G. 6, 160 n.21, 162 n.48, 182–3 n.1 Southam, Brian 60, 73, 75 Starkey, David 25 Stone, Jean M. 153 Strickland, Agnes [and Elizabeth] 4, 6, 8–9, 16–17, 31, 35, 70, 74, 95, 137–9, 147, 152–4, 155, 160 n.19, 161 n.31, 161 n.34 Henrietta Maria 141–4, 149–50, 152–4 Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest [1840–1848] 121, 122, 124, 128, 130, 132, 137, 168 n.89, 202 n.85 Mary Beatrice of Modena Chap. 6 passim see also Edinburgh Review Strickland, Jane Margaret. 123, 197 n.5 Taylor, Barbara 47, 48 Thirsk, Joan 159 n.12, 160 n.19 Traill, Catherine Parr (nee Strickland) 119, 197 n.5 Tudor queens 16, 25, 66, 68, 75, 79, 85–6, 91, 92, 94–7, 126, 180 n.75, 187 n.55 see also Boleyn, Anne; Elizabeth I, Mary I Tuite, Clara 62, 67, 73 Upfal, Annette 65–6, 75 Vallone, Lynne 73–5 Victoria 4, 28, 74, 119, 123 Victorian era 2, 6, 8, 16, 28–9, 33–4, 95, 100, 101, 119, 122, 125, 127, 140, 151, 159 n 12 Walker, Gina Luria 103, 192 n.35 Whitaker, John 71–2 White, Michelle Anne 201 n.61, 207 n.69 William of Orange see Mary II Wood, Jeanne 190 n.7, 191 n.9 Woolf, Daniel R. 125, 167 n.69 Wollstonecraft, Mary 4, 6, 14, 15, 22–3, 31, 76, 82, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91–2, 96–7, 155, 175 n.111

Index and Mary Hayes 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 112, 113, 115, 191 n.9 Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution [1794], 41, 48–50, 166 n.59 Gilbert Imlay 51, 52, 55 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [1796] 14, 40–1, 51–5

235 Response to Burke 37, Chap. 2 passim., 97, 110–11 Vindication of the Rights of Men [1790] 41–6, 48, 97 Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792] 41, 46–47, 51 Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria [1798] 14, 41, 52, 55–7 see also Marie Antoinette; Mary, Queen of Scots; Short-lived Queens