Catherine of Braganza, Queen Dowager of England, 1685–1692: Catholicism and Political Agency

Gregory, Eilish

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-38813-2_3

Eilish Gregory⁵

Part of the book series: Queenship and Power ((QAP))

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Abstract

This chapter assesses Catherine of Braganza’s political exercise of her queen dowagership from her widowhood in 1685 until 1692 when she left England to return to Portugal. Catherine’s new position as queen dowager offered her fresh prospects in her adopted homeland. Her brother-in-law James II was an openly Catholic monarch, and during his brief reign, anti-Catholic penal laws were suspended, and he was determined to push through religious toleration across the kingdoms. Most scholarly attention has focused on James’s style of Catholic profession, while Catherine of Braganza’s role in this narrative has been largely overlooked. Notwithstanding that she was a foreign-born Catholic princess who had no royal offspring, Catherine’s status, as queen dowager and as one of the most senior female ranking royals in the realm, meant that she exercised considerable influence at court, and she did not discontinue her already extensive patronage of British and Irish Catholics established when she was queen consort. This chapter examines the tensions that Catherine and “her family” faced after James fled England in 1688, when Catherine’s household was accused of Jacobite sympathies and conspiracies, and how she dealt with the challenges of rule under William III and Mary II in her final years in England.

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Notes

1.
Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 443; John Miller, Charles II (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), 381. It is speculated that the king experienced a stroke or may have been suffering from chronic glandular kidney disease.
2.
Lillias Campbell Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, Infanta of Portugal, & Queen-Consort of England (London: John Murray, 1908), 372–374. Davidson’s biography continues to be remain one of the best accounts on the queen.
3.
It has recently been noted by Maria Hayward that this ritual was similar to the ceremony performed by queens who received witnesses to the birth of their children in their bedchambers. See Maria Hayward, “‘The Best of Queens, the Most Obedient Wife’: Fashioning a Place for Catherine of Braganza as Consort to Charles II,” in Erin Griffey (ed.), Sartorial Politics Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 237; Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 388; Janet Mackay, Catherine of Braganza (London: John Long Limited, 1937), 252–253.
4.
Edward Corp, “Catherine of Braganza and Cultural Politics,” in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture, and Dynastic Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 65.
5.
See John Miller, James II (New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 2000); idem, “James II and Toleration,” in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), By Force or Default? The Revolution of 1688–1689 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989), 8–27; W. A. Speck, James II (London: Longman, 2002); John Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship, rev. edn (London: Methuen, 1989); Andrew Barclay, “James II’s ‘Catholic’ Court,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 8 (2003), 161–171; Michael A. Mullett, James II and English Politics, 1678–1688 (London: Routledge, 1993); John Spurr, “Religion in Restoration England,” in Lionel K. J. Glassey (ed.), The Reigns of Charles II and James VII and II, 1660–1689 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 90–124; John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972), 16, 32.
6.
Robert Beddard, “James II and the Catholic Challenge,” in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 907–954; Gary S. De Krey, “Reformation and ‘Arbitrary Government’: London Dissenters and James II’s Polity of Toleration, 1687–1688,” in Jason McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 13–31; Mark Knights, “‘Meer Religion’ and the ‘Church-State’ of Restoration England: The Impact and Ideology of James II’s Declarations of Indulgence,” in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds), A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41–70; Mark Goldie, “The Damning of King Monmouth: Pulpit Toryism in the Reign of James II,” in Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688–91 in Their British, Atlantic and European Contexts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), 33–56; William T. Gibson, James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Leo Gooch, “Catholic Officers in the Navy of James II,” Recusant History 14 (1978), 276–280.
7.
John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 203–205.
8.
Eilish Gregory, “Catherine of Braganza’s Relationship with Her Catholic Household,” in Valerie Schutte and Estelle Paranque (eds), Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Political Agency, Myth-Making, and Patronage (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 129–148.
9.
For further information, see Kenyon, The Popish Plot, 109–115; Gregory, “Catherine of Braganza’s Relationship with Her Catholic household,” 135–141. This subject is also covered in my article, “Catherine of Braganza During the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis: Anti-Catholicism in the Houses of Commons and Lords, 1678–81,” Parliamentary History 42 (2023), 195–212.
10.
ODNB, sub “Barnes, Joshua (1654–1712)” (article by Kristine L. Haugen).
11.
Joshua Barnes, The Apotheosis of the Most Serene and Illustrious Monarch Charls [sic] the II. With an humble Address to His Most Sacred Majesty King James the II. And a Poem to the Queen Dowager (London: s. n., 1685), 7.
12.
Aphra Behn, A Poem Humbly Dedicated to the Great Patern [sic] of Piety and Virtue Catherine Queen Dowager. On the Death of Her Dear Lord and Husband King Charles II (London: s. n., 1685), 2.
13.
Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 391, 393.
14.
Mackay, Catherine of Braganza, 257–258.
15.
See Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill (NC): University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Michael C. Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2005); Karen Britland, “Exile or Homecoming? Henrietta Maria in France, 1644–1669,” in Philip Mansel and Torsten Riotte (eds), Monarchy and Exile: The Politics of Legitimacy from Marie de Médicis to Wilhelm II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 120–143; Sara Joy Wolfson, “Aristocratic Women of the Household and Court of Queen Henrietta Maria, 1625–1659” (PhD, Durham University, 2010), chs. 4 and 6. I would like to gratefully thank Dr Wolfson for sharing her doctoral thesis with me.
16.
Corp, “Catherine of Braganza and Cultural Politics”; Peter Leech, “Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of Catherine of Braganza, 1662–92,” Early Music 29 (2001), 570–588; Anna-Marie Linnell, “Greeting the Stuart Queens Consort: Cultural Exchange and the Nuptial Texts for Henrietta Maria of France and Catherine of Braganza, Queens of Britain,” in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Adam Morton (eds), Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics, c. 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 2017), 153–171; Adam Morton, “Sanctity and Suspicion: Catholicism, Conspiracy and the Representation of Henrietta Maria of France and Catherine of Braganza, Queens of Britain,” in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Adam Morton (eds), Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics, 172–201.
17.
“Catherine of Braganza,” in Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500–1800. http://www.marryingcultures.eu/research/catherine-braganza [date accessed 30 April 2022].
18.
Anna Keay, The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (London: Continuum, 2008), 126; Christoph Ketterer, To Meddle with Matters of State: Political Sermons in England, c. 1660–c.1700 (Hamburg: V&R unipress, 2020), 73–78.
19.
Chelsea Reutcke, “Royal Patronage of Illicit Print: Catherine of Braganza and Catholic Books in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” in Nina Lamal, Jamie Cumby and Helmer J. Helmers (eds), Print and Power in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 239–256; Gabriel Glickman, “Christian Reunion, the Anglo-French Alliance and the English Catholic Imagination, 1660–72,” English Historical Review 128 (2013), 268.
20.
Miller, Popery and Politics, 21–22.
21.
Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 390.
22.
Ibid., 394–395.
23.
Erin Griffey, “Restoring Henrietta Maria’s English Household in the 1660s: Continuity, Kinship and Clientage,” The Court Historian 26 (2021), 189–190.
24.
Bodl., Clarendon MS 78, fos 249–254, “An Establishment of Ordinary Wages, Fees allowances and Pentions yearly allowed by us unto our Officers and Servants of our Chamber and others of our Howsehold and Stables and to the Officers and Servants of our Revenue…,” 1662–1663; Robert Anthony Beddard, “Queen Henrietta Maria’s Mission and the Re-opening of the Catholic Chapel Royal in Restoration England,” in Jean-Louis Quantin and Jean-Claude Waquet (eds), Papes, Princes et Savants dans L’Europe Moderne Mélanges a la Mémoire de Bruno Nevu (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 211–212. I am indebted to Professor Kenneth Fincham for this reference and for discussions about the specific role of queen dowager courts and their privy councils after the Restoration.
25.
BL, Add. MS 28721/B, “An establishment of ordinary wages fees allowances and pencions yearely allowed by us unto our officers and servants of our chamber and of our houshold, [sic] and to our officers and servants of our stables…,” 1686–7; TNA, LR 5/86; LR 5/90; I would like to thank Susannah Lyon-Whaley for the TNA references and for further discussions about Catherine’s privy council and court as queen dowager.
26.
Edward Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia: Or, the Present State of England Compleat, Together with Divers Reflections Upon the Ancient State Thereof, 16th edn (London: s. n., 1687), 211–212.
27.
Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia, 146, 152, 166–167, 204–205, 211.
28.
ODNB, sub “Duras, Louis, second Earl of Feversham (1641–1709)” (article by Stuart Handley).
29.
Philip Rambaut, “A Study in Misplaced Loyalty: Louis de Durfort-Duras, Earl of Feversham (1640–1709),” in Matthew Glozier and David Onnekink (eds), War, Religion and Service: Huguenot Soldiering, 1685–1713 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 47–58.
30.
Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 395–396; Hebe Elsna, Catherine of Braganza: Charles II’s Queen (London: Robert Hale, 1967), 292; see esp. Carolyn Harris’s essay in this volume.
31.
Toby Barnard, “Sir Richard Bellings, a Catholic Courtier and Diplomat from Seventeenth-Century Ireland,” in Brian MacCuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland 1550–1700: Colonization and Its Consequences: Essays Presented to Nicholas Canny (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 326–347; Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia, 211.
32.
Barnard, “Sir Richard Bellings,” 329; Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia, 208.
33.
Bodl., Tanner MS 35, fo. 109, “Warrant by Catherine of Braganza for a pension of 100 pounds to Lady Johanna Thornhill,” 18 October 1682; Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia, 210–211.
34.
Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia, 210–212; Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 231.
35.
Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/SR/1/D/9/12, “Appointment by the Queen Dowager of George Marquis of Halifax and others to be her Counsellors,” 2 February 1689.
36.
See Beddard, “James II and the Catholic Challenge,” 907–954; Knights, “‘Meer religion’ and the ‘Church-State’ of Restoration England,” 41–70.
37.
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. [hereafter FSL], V.b. 333 (35), “Decision of the Queen Dowager’s Council regarding Sir Henry Goodricke’s complaint against Mr. Calvert,” 23 November 1685.
38.
TNA, SP 31/3, fo. 151.
39.
ODNB, sub “Killigrew, Sir William (bap. 1606, d. 1695)” (article by J. P. Vander Motten); Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 310–311.
40.
Kresen Kernow [formerly Cornwall Record Office], AR 33/9/113, “The humble petition of Sr William Killigrew your Ma[jes]ties Servant,” c. 1685.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Ibid.
43.
David John Peter Baldwin, “The Politico-Religious Usage of the Queen’s Chapel, 1623–1688” (MLitt, University of Durham, 1999), 30–32, 132–133; Miller, Popery and Politics, 21; A.S. Barnes, “Catholic Chapels Royal Under the Stuarts-III,” Downside Review 20 (1901), 232–241; Leech, “Musicians in the Catholic Chapel,” 570–588.
44.
Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 58.
45.
Ushaw College Library, Durham University, LC/P6/8, “A Request to her Ma[jes]tie uppon the Duke or [sic] Ormonds going in to Ireland,” c. November 1661.
46.
For more information on the situation for Catholics in Restoration Ireland, see Coleman A. Dennehy (ed.), Law and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2020); idem, “The Earl of Arlington and Restoration Ireland,” in Robin Eagles and Coleman A. Dennehy (eds), Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, and His World: Restoration Court, Politics and Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2020), 52–68; Eoin Kinsella, Catholic Survival in Protestant Ireland, 1660–1711: Colonel John Browne, Landownership and the Articles of Limerick (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018); Ted McCormick, “Restoration Politics, 1660–1691,” in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume II, 1550–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 96–119.
47.
TNA, SP 29/76, fo. 110, “Articles of High Treason, propounded by the Earl of Bristol, against Lord Chancellor Clarendon…,” 10 July 1663; Bodl. Carte MS 222, fo. 376, advice sent from Paris to James Butler, duke of Ormond, 3 January 1663.
48.
Bodl., Clarendon MS 84, fos 124–125, Cardinal Decio Azzolino to Cardinal de Retz, 23 April c. 1663. Although no year is given, the discussions of d’Aubigny and getting him a cardinal’s cap would suggest that the year was 1663.
49.
E. K. Timings (ed.), CSPD James II, 1685–1689 (3 vols, London: HMSO, 1960–72), ii, 190, 193, 197.
50.
FSL, L.c. 1648, Newsletter sent to Sir Richard Newdigate, second baronet, 17 April 1686.
51.
Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 185–186; Ketterer, To Meddle with Matters of State, 312–313.
52.
Geoffrey Holt, “Edward Scarisbrick 1639–1709: A Royal Preacher,” Recusant History 23 (1996), 159–160.
53.
Thomas Godden, A Sermon of St Peter, Preach’d before Her Majesty the Queen-Dowager, In Her Chappel at Somerset-House, on the Twenty ninth of June, 1686. Being St. Peter and St. Paul’s Day. Published by Her Majesties Command (London: Henry Hills, 1686); idem, A Sermon of St Peter, Preach’d before Her Majesty the Queen-Dowager, In Her Chappel at Somerset-House, on the Twenty ninth of June, 1686. Being St. Peter and St. Paul’s Day. Published by Her Majesties Command (London: Henry Hills, 1686) Wing/G920; idem, A Sermon of St Peter, Preach’d before Her Majesty the Queen-Dowager, In Her Chappel at Somerset-House, on the Twenty ninth of June, 1686. Being St. Peter and St. Paul’s Day. Published by Her Majesties Command (London: Henry Hills, 1688), Wing/G920A.
54.
William Wake, A Continuation of the Present State of the Controversy, Between the Church of England, and the Church of Rome, being A Full Account of the Books that have been of late Written on Both Sides (London: s. n., 1688); Nicholas Stratford, A Discourse of the Pope’s Supremacy. Part I. In Answer to a Treatise intituled, St. Peter’s Supremacy faithfully Discuss’d, according to Holy Scripture, and Greek and Latin Fathers. And to a Sermon of S. Peter, Preached before her Majesty the Queen Dowager, on St. Peter and St. Paul’s Day, by Thomas Godden, D.D. (London: s. n., 1688).
55.
Chelsea Reutcke, “Catholic Print Networks in Restoration England, 1660–1688” (PhD, University of St Andrews, 2020), Appendix C. I would like to thank Dr Reutcke for generously sharing her research findings with me.
56.
CSPD James II, ii, 359. For further information about both James’s and Catherine’s promotion of Catholicism in her chapels, see Ketterer, To Meddle with Matters of State, esp. 73–78 for Catholic sermons preached in Catherine’s chapels as queen consort, 122–30, ch. 6; and Eilish Gregory, “‘Published by Her Majesties Command’: Sermons Preached before Catherine of Braganza, Queen Dowager, 1685–88,” English Historical Review (forthcoming).
57.
Margery Corbett, “John Michael Wright, An Account of His Excellence Roger Earl of Castlemaine’s Embassy, from His Sacred Majesty James the II^d King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland & to His Holiness Innocent XI,” Antiquities Journal 70 (1990), 117–120; D. F. Allen, “James II and the Court of Rome: John Caryll’s Contribution,” Durham University Journal 84 (1992), 21–27.
58.
Kresen Kernow, AR/33/10/1, Cardinal Philip Howard of Norfolk to Catherine, Queen Dowager, 5 October 1685.
59.
Kresen Kernow, AR 33/10/2, Cardinal Philip Howard of Norfolk to Sir Richard Bellings, 14 August 1688.
60.
CSPD James II, ii, 355.
61.
Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 166.
62.
William L. Sachse, “The Mob and the Revolution of 1688,” Journal of British Studies 4 (1964), 38.
63.
Simon Thurley, Somerset House: The Palace of England’s Queens, 1551–1692 (London: London Topographical Society, 2009), 72.
64.
Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 54–57.
65.
Eveline Cruickshanks, “Attempts to Restore the Stuarts, 1689–96,” in Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp (eds), The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1995), 1–2.
66.
CSPD James II, iii, 381.
67.
Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 423–4; Mackay, Catherine of Braganza, 273–274; Elsna, Catherine of Braganza, 177–178.
68.
Elsna, Catherine of Braganza, 178.
69.
England and Wales, Privy Council, At the Council-Chamber in Whitehall, Monday the 22th. of October, 1688 This Day an Extraordinary Council met…by His Majesties Desire and Appointment… (London: Charles Bill, H. Hills, and Thomas Newcomb, 1688).
70.
TNA, SP 8/7, fos 111–114, Queen Mary II to King William III, 21 June/1 July 1690.
71.
TNA, SP 8/7, fo. 357, Queen Mary II to King William III, 8/18 September 1690.
72.
Lois G. Schwoerer, The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 101; Mackay, Catherine of Braganza, 276.
73.
Cruickshanks, “Attempts to Restore the Stuarts,” 2–3.
74.
TNA, SP 31/4, fo. 214, “An Order of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, Assembled at Westminster, in the House of Lords, December 22. 1688”; CSPD James II, iii, 382.
75.
ODNB, sub “Graham, Richard, first Viscount Preston (1648–1695)” (article by John Callow).
76.
For more information on these debates, see Gregory, “Catherine of Braganza During the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis,” 195–212.
77.
LJ, xiv, 164; CJ, x, 69.
78.
CJ, x, 69.
79.
FSL, L.c.1997, Newsletter received by Richard Newdigate, second baronet, 2 April 1689.
80.
CJ, x, 83–4; LJ, xiv, 171–172.
81.
LJ, xiv, 171–172.
82.
CJ, x, 90.
83.
LJ, xiv, 175.
84.
LJ, xiv, 179; CJ, x, 92–93.
85.
TNA, SP 44/97, fo. 175, Charles Talbot, thirteenth earl of Shrewsbury to Louis de Duras, earl of Feversham, 28 October 1689; Mackay, Catherine of Braganza, 282–283.
86.
TNA, SP 44/97, fo. 242, Charles Talbot, thirteenth earl of Shrewsbury to Louis de Duras, second earl of Feversham, 22 January 1690. For Jenks, see Godfrey Anstruther, The Seminary Priests (4 vols, Ware and Great Wakering, 1968–1977), iii, pp. 114–117.
87.
TNA, SP 8/4, fo. 123, 31 January 1688.
88.
TNA, SP 89/16, fo. 345, Charles Scarborough to Robert Spencer, second earl of Sunderland, 13/23 March 1688.
89.
Elsna, Catherine of Braganza, 179.
90.
CSPD William and Mary, 1689–1702 (11 vols, London: HMSO, 1895–1937), ii, 476; TNA, SP 32/4, fo. 35, R. Yard to Sir Joseph Williamson, 29 March 1692; SP 32/4/40, R. Yard to Sir Joseph Williamson, 5 April 1692; Davidson, Catherine of Bragança, 469–472.
91.
CSPD William and Mary, iii, 223, Louis de Duras, earl of Feversham to Daniel Finch, second earl of Nottingham; TNA, SP 44/98, fo. 423, Daniel Finch, second earl of Nottingham to the Commissioners of the Admiralty, 18 April 1692.
92.
For more information, see Fleur Goldthorpe’s chapter in this volume.

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Gregory, E. (2023). Catherine of Braganza, Queen Dowager of England, 1685–1692: Catholicism and Political Agency. In: Gregory, E., Questier, M.C. (eds) Later Stuart Queens, 1660–1735. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38813-2_3

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