Mary Clorine

The Girl at Richmond Palace

Mary Stuart was born in 1662, the eldest daughter of James, Duke of York — brother to King Charles II — and his first wife Anne Hyde. She was raised at Richmond Palace, kept at arm's length from the full glare of court life, educated in the Anglican faith, taught French, music, dancing and drawing. Her mother died when Mary was nine years old.

It was around that age that she began writing letters to Frances Apsley, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a courtier. The letters were smuggled between Richmond and St. James's Palace via the court painter, William Gibson. They would continue for over a decade.

Aurelia and Mary Clorine

Frances became Aurelia. Mary became Mary Clorine. The names were lifted from plays they had read — Restoration drama full of passion, betrayal, seduction and loss. In adopting them, Mary gave herself permission to feel everything the plays described.

She cast herself as wife. Frances as husband. The correspondence that followed was one of the most extraordinary emotional documents of the seventeenth century — over eighty letters of devotion, jealousy, longing and grief, written by a girl who had learned the language of love from borrowed fiction and applied it, with complete sincerity, to another girl.

She wrote of love exceeding anything a man could feel. She wrote of waiting for letters until each hour felt like an age. She wrote of Frances as cruel and beautiful and beloved. She wrote that all the parchment in the world could not contain what she felt.

Frances's letters back were warmer at first, then cooler, then formal. She was a good courtier. She understood the danger of the situation even if Mary did not — or chose not to.

The World They Lived In

This was the Restoration court of Charles II. A world of theatrical performance, sexual intrigue, coded language and elaborate social fiction. Same-sex affection between women existed in a strange tolerance — visible within elite circles, acceptable so long as it remained private and deniable, dangerous the moment it became undeniable.

Mary and Frances were not entirely secret. The court painter carried the letters. Sarah Jenyns knew. The governess knew. Even King Charles himself knew of his niece's passionate friendships — he remarked on them with mild amusement rather than alarm.

But tolerance was not acceptance. And Mary was not just any girl. She was second in line to the throne of England.

The Marriage

In 1677, when Mary was fifteen, the political calculus shifted. Parliament wanted a Protestant alliance. Charles II needed to secure succession. Mary was summoned and told she was to marry her cousin William, Prince of Orange — a Dutch Protestant soldier twelve years her senior, four inches shorter, ravaged by smallpox, and entirely indifferent to romance.

She wept for days. On the night of the wedding ceremony at Whitehall, William dined with friends in the city rather than his new bride. He went to bed in his woollen underwear. When the king suggested he remove them, William replied that his wife would have to get used to his habits.

Mary was shipped to The Hague within weeks. She wrote to Frances from the crossing: the sea would not drown what she felt. She kept the name Mary Clorine. She signed herself Frances's wife still.

Across the Water

From the Netherlands, the letters continued — but the distance was doing its work. Mary wrote with increasing desperation as Frances's replies grew more measured, more formal, more careful. Frances was navigating her own life now, her own political future. Mary was a princess in a foreign court, increasingly untouchable.

The letters became rawer after the marriage. More explicit in their admission of what the feeling actually was. She told Frances she had been cuckolded by the Prince of Orange, that any child Mary carried was a bastard in the eyes of their private fiction. She wrote that though she had played the whore a little, she loved Frances above all things in the world.

Frances eventually married Sir Benjamin Bathurst. She barely told Mary before Mary heard it from someone else. The correspondence, and the intimacy behind it, quietly ended.

Frances stored the letters in a leather box at her country house in Cirencester. Her descendants assumed for centuries that the letters to Mary's “dearest husband” were addressed to William. Not until the early twentieth century did anyone look closely enough to realise the husband was a woman.

Becoming Queen

Mary had entered her marriage as second in line to the throne. Her father James became King in 1685 following the death of Charles II. Mary was now heir presumptive.

Then in 1688, James's Catholic second wife gave birth to a son — suddenly displacing Mary and her Protestant inheritance. The political crisis this triggered, combined with James's increasingly authoritarian rule, led to the Glorious Revolution. William was invited by Parliament to invade. He did.

James fled. William and Mary were declared joint monarchs of England in February 1689. Mary, who had been a girl writing love letters by candlelight in Richmond, was now Queen.

She ruled with considerable ability — governing alone during William's long military campaigns abroad, navigating the aftermath of revolution, maintaining the Protestant settlement. Those who knew her well said she seemed haunted. She had sacrificed herself twice — once to a political marriage, once to the slow withdrawal of the only person she had ever freely chosen.

The Death

Mary II died in December 1694 at Kensington Palace. She was thirty-two years old. The cause was smallpox — the same disease that had disfigured her husband's face on the day she first saw it.

A week before she died she went through her papers. She burned some. She kept the letters to Frances.

William, who had largely ignored her in life, was reportedly devastated. He had not understood what he had until it was gone. Most people don't.