Mary of Modena
Maria Beatrice d'Este
Queen of England · Queen of Scotland · Queen of Ireland
1658 – 1718
Biography
Fifteen-year-old Italian princess of the House of Este married to the widowed forty-year-old James, Duke of York, in a match that confirmed Protestant fears of a Catholic succession. The birth of their son James Francis Edward in 1688, after a decade of stillbirths persuaded many Englishmen that the child was a changeling smuggled into the queen's bed in a warming pan, was the immediate trigger for the Glorious Revolution. She fled to France with her infant son in the queen-mother's traditional role of Stuart exile.
Events
An invitation from seven English peers brought William of Orange and a Dutch army ashore at Torbay on 5 November 1688. James II, lacking confidence in his own troops and forces, fled to France within weeks. Parliament declared the throne vacant by James's flight and offered it jointly to his daughter Mary and her husband William, on conditions later codified in the Bill of Rights. The settlement fixed parliamentary supremacy as the operating constitution of England.
Also there: James II and VII, William III, Mary II
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