The two Marys: gender and power in the revolution of 1688-89

Abstract

Centered around the accounts of two women—Mary Aubry, a French Catholic midwife living in London, who was burned at the stake for murdering her abusive husband, and Queen Mary of Modena, the Italian Catholic wife of James II, who allegedly tried to pass off an imposter child as her legitimate heir in the so-called “warming pan scandal,” this is a study of murder, deceit, betrayal, paranoia, and repression in seventeenth-century England. The stories of the two Marys are both stories of palpable anxiety. Though the two women bear little resemblance at first glance, they were rumored to have conspired to guarantee a male heir for James II by any means necessary. According to the London gossips, these women were willing to betray, and even kill their husbands in the case of Mary Aubry, to protect their secret plot to perpetuate a line of Catholic princes in England. Though there was little evidence to substantiate this rumor and it quickly disappeared in media accounts, these two women continued to inspire vitriolic attacks from the London press that reveal strikingly similar public concerns. Their stories struck chords of fear within audiences in late seventeenth century England that knew their entire world was threatened. Endangered by a king, James II—who appeared determined to reinstitute Catholicism in England, who showed a penchant for absolutist policies, and who seemed to have fallen into the orbit of the domineering Louis XIV—the public’s apprehension and fear was only heightened by these stories. Just as unnerving as the fears about absolutism, Catholicism and foreign domination was the specter of internal collusion that endangered not simply the political and religious spheres of English Protestant society, but also social and familial hierarchies as well. To much of late seventeenth century English society, the two Marys represented all that was wrong with the world. They were traitors to their families, traitors to the nation, and traitors to the divine.