Mary of Modena

Mary of Modena, queen consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1685 to 1688, became the focus of one of the most consequential rumors in British dynastic history. She was born Maria Beatrice d'Este in Modena on 5 October 1658, the daughter of Alfonso IV, Duke of Modena, and Laura Martinozzi, a niece of Cardinal Mazarin. Raised a devout Catholic, she was married by proxy in 1673, at the age of fourteen, to James, Duke of York, the widowed brother and heir of Charles II of England.

The marriage of the heir presumptive to an Italian Catholic princess provoked immediate hostility in a country deeply suspicious of Rome, and Mary was attacked in Parliament and the press as an agent of papal interests. Her early years in England were marked by repeated pregnancies that ended in miscarriage or in children who died in infancy. When James succeeded his brother in February 1685, she was crowned alongside him, the first queen consort crowned in England since 1603.

In June 1688, after a long interval without a surviving child, Mary gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward. The prince displaced his adult Protestant half-sisters, Mary and Anne, in the succession and raised the prospect of a continuing Catholic dynasty. Opponents of the king circulated the claim that the queen's child had died or never existed, and that an infant had been smuggled into her bedchamber in a warming pan. The story had no foundation, and James assembled witnesses of the birth before the Privy Council, but it served its political purpose. Within months William of Orange landed in England, and in December 1688 Mary fled to France with her infant son, followed shortly by the king.

She passed the remaining thirty years of her life in exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where Louis XIV provided the deposed court with residence and pension. A daughter, Louisa Maria, was born there in 1692. After James II's death in 1701, Mary acted as guardian of her son, recognized by France as James III and known in Britain as the Old Pretender. She lived to see the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715 and died at Saint-Germain on 7 May 1718, respected in France for her piety. Her son's claim passed to the grandson she never knew, Charles Edward Stuart.