In 1675, a thirteen-year-old Mary Stuart (later Queen Mary II) wrote the first of over eighty passionate letters to a young female courtier, Frances Apsley, in which she played the role of the loving, often neglected, wife. She expressed her intense love and devotion to Frances, her “dearest, dearest, dearest, dearest, dear husband,” writing page after page of endearments.Footnote 1 Her sister Anne (later Queen Anne) also corresponded with Frances, playing the male role of “Ziphares” to Frances's female “Semandra.” Anne and Mary adopted pen names drawn from seventeenth-century dramas and also competed for the affection of the much older Frances. Mary continued the correspondence even after her marriage to William, prince of Orange, in 1677. She told Frances that “though I have played the whore a little, I love you of all things in the world.” She described the child in her womb as a “bastard” and declared Frances to have been cuckolded by the prince.Footnote 2 At the same time, she expressed jealousy of Frances's other friends, including her sister Anne, and feared that time and distance would cause their love to wane.

How do we understand the friendship between Mary and Frances? Between Frances and Anne? On the one hand, the letters could be taken as evidence of female homosexuality at the Restoration court. Anne, later in life, was accused of lesbian tendencies by the duchess of Marlborough, who claimed that she had “no inclination for any but of one's own sex.”Footnote 3 On the other hand, the correspondence might be dismissed as playacting by girls modeling their future relationships with men. Mary and Anne measured their love for Frances by the standards of a woman's love for her husband and a husband's love for a wife. They both became dutiful wives.

The baroque language in which Mary, in particular, expressed her feelings also makes interpretation difficult. As Alan Bray pointed out in The Friend, the language of love is both a language and a convention. It could be heartfelt; it also could be hollow. Among men, the use of terms such as “bedfellow,” “gossip,” and “mistress” could express kinship, a form of friendship that united families. It could also indicate a rough humor, “the humor of homoeroticism,” that supported the patriarchal values of early modern society. He argues that context is crucial to the interpretation of symbolic language and bodily signs of friendship like the kiss, the gesture, and the embrace. Bray encourages scholars to investigate what the language of love “signified in the public context of power and place.”Footnote 4

This article explores the literary and political context in which Mary, in particular, developed an intimate friendship with Frances Apsley. It examines the extent to which her expressions of love and friendship were influenced by the conventions of late seventeenth-century novels, poetry, and theatrical plays. Mary adopted theatrical personalities in her correspondence with Frances and copied the “feminine” literary style promoted by French romantic novels and epistolary tracts. She also was influenced by the libertinism practiced at King Charles II's court. Her correspondence suggests that she understood, and perhaps imitated, the power relationships between monarch and mistress, courtier and king. Finally, the article examines the political consequences of emotional intimacy. Mary's friendships, first with Frances Apsley and later with other women at court, helped her to circumvent the powerful Villiers family and to develop patronage relationships of her own. Anne's friendships, meanwhile, provided her with a channel of communication with privy councilors and powerful male courtiers. For both sisters, passionate friendships shaded into political alliances with no clear-cut dividing line between them.

The essay draws upon two decades of pioneering work on the history of early modern women. In 1998, Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson drew scholars’ attention to the correspondence between Mary Stuart and Frances Apsley that had been published in 1924. They noted the reluctance of male biographers of the Stuart sisters to deal with the question of homosexuality, suggesting that David Green, in his biography Queen Anne, “had difficulty with these ‘charming ridiculous letters’ and invokes ‘a doctor’ to explain that intimacy between women was possible without implying any homosexual basis at all.”Footnote 5 Since then, much work has been done to explore the nature of female sexuality in early modern England. Major studies of female homoeroticism have focused on the question of how to talk about lesbianism before the advent of modern identity categories. Authors who address the issue of the historicity of nomenclature and resolve it in different ways, include Harriette Andreadis, Terry Castle, Emma Donoghue, Valerie Traub, Martha Vicinus, and Elizabeth Susan Wahl.Footnote 6 Recently, scholars have also engaged with Bray's argument that “homoeroticism is part of a networked system of social relations,” although Traub noted that many “have limited their engagement with his thesis primarily to the perception of parallels between a growing stigma regarding female intimacies and the increasing legibility of sodomy.”Footnote 7 A useful article by Laura Gowing shows how Bray's narrative of friendship can be used to understand the close relationships developed among elite women, particularly those at court.Footnote 8 This article extends her analysis by focusing on the love letters of a young woman who, one day, would be queen.

Mary (1662–94) and her sister Anne (1664–1714) were the only surviving children of a royal marriage to a commoner. Their father, James, duke of York, the brother of King Charles II, married Anne Hyde, the daughter of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, in 1660. During the early years of the Restoration, the duke and duchess of York were at the center of court life. They maintained apartments at both St. James's and Whitehall Palace and were said to be “better lodged than the king or queen.”Footnote 9 On summer evenings, when the heat and dust kept courtiers from walking in St. James's Park, the Yorks took barges on the river, listened to music, ate supper, watched fireworks, and talked. During the winter months, the court organized balls, “crammed with fine ladies.”Footnote 10 They danced fast-paced courantes and English country dances such as “Cuckolds All Awry,” an appropriate choice given the sexual mores at the Restoration court.

Mary and her sister were brought up on the fringes of court life. Their nursery was established at Twickenham, an ancient dower-palace of the queens of England, located along the Thames, not far from Richmond. Occasionally, the small children would be brought to St. James's to see their parents. James was particularly fond of Mary for she looked very much like him, with the same complexion, heavy curls, and dark eyes. He held her in his arms even while transacting naval business. Pepys once watched him “with great pleasure play with his little girle—like an ordinary private father of a child.”Footnote 11

Repeated pregnancies took their toll on the duchess of York's health. She indulged a taste for rich foods and sweetmeats, causing one contemporary to describe her as “one of the highest feeders in England.”Footnote 12 She spoiled both girls, feeding them treats and encouraging them to drink chocolate, a fashionable new vice. As a result, Mary's younger sister Anne became as round as a ball.Footnote 13 In 1668, the duchess sent the three-year-old to France to see if doctors there could remedy the child's “defluxion” of the eyes. Mary, meanwhile, was placed under the authority of a governess, Lady Frances Villiers, daughter of the earl of Suffolk and wife to Sir Edward Villiers. She moved from Twickenham to Richmond Palace in Surrey with two young brothers, both of whom subsequently died there.

Lady Frances's four youngest daughters—Elizabeth, Barbara, Anne, and Catherine—became Mary's closest friends. She was particularly fond of Barbara, “poor, dear, distressed Bab,” who infuriated her mother by eloping with Captain John Berkeley.Footnote 14 Later, Mary and Anne also spent time in the company of the four Fortrey sisters, the daughters of Samuel Fortrey of Kew, their close friend Mary Cornwallis, and Anne Trelawney. The girls played cards, gossiped, dressed, read plays, and watched theatrical performances. They took lessons in French, dancing, music, and drawing as well as training in the basic tenets of the Anglican faith. They talked of “mad pranks” and teased their chaplain Dr. John Doughty about his “mistress.”Footnote 15 They also wrote lengthy letters to one another while secreted away in their closets, smuggling them to and from Richmond and St. James's Palace by means of the painter, William Gibson.

In January 1671, the duchess's health, already bad, declined precipitously. A newsletter noted that “Her Royal Highness has for these several weeks past been under an extraordinary distemper of body, at the best keeping her chamber, but most commonly her bed.”Footnote 16 She was unable to attend the balls and masquerades held in honor of the prince of Orange. On 30 March she felt well enough to attend a dinner at the Burlington's house in Picadilly. Shortly after her return, however, she collapsed. She died on 31 March 1671, only thirty-three years old.

After the death of her mother, Mary was drawn into life at court. Although she was still very young, barely nine years old, she understood that her participation in balls, masquerades, revels, and ballets was intended to showcase her desirability as a marriage partner. In February 1672, she was displayed before ambassadors from Sweden and France as a potential wife for either King Charles XI of Sweden or the Dauphin of France. She performed in a court ballet, or masque, in the queen's lodging at Whitehall “to the great satisfaction of their Majesties and Royal Highness there present.”Footnote 17 It was also rumored that the king planned to offer her hand in marriage to his twenty-one-year-old nephew, William, prince of Orange. It was taken for granted that members of the royal family would marry for diplomatic, not personal, reasons. The duke of York had violated that rule when he married Anne Hyde; neither he nor his daughters would be permitted to make the same mistake.

Mary's father also was on the marriage market following the death of the duchess of York. Forty years old, hard-faced, and full of crude sexual energy, he unthinkingly offered his hand to Lady Bellasis. The king refused, however, telling him angrily that he could not play the fool a second time. England needed a diplomatic alliance with either the Spanish or the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg. Finally, he settled on Princess Mary Beatrice of Modena, daughter of Alfonso IV d’Este, duke of Modena.Footnote 18

Mary met her new stepmother in late November 1673, soon after the latter's arrival at Whitehall. Her father told her that he had “provided a playfellow” for her. In fact, the fifteen-year-old duchess of York was only three or four years older than her stepdaughter. Mary may have found it awkward to be presented with evidence of her father's sexuality, particularly when it involved a woman close to her own age. It was generally thought that the duchess had “greater youth than is necessary.”Footnote 19 James, however, seemed to prefer women with slender, even childlike, figures.

The arrival of the new duchess brought many young women to court. Competition for a place in her household was fierce. It was said that “virgins allmost scratched out one an other's eyes to be maides of honour.”Footnote 20 These included Mary Kirk, Isabella Boynton, Eleanor Needham, and Sarah Jenyns (who would later become the duchess of Marlborough). Their function was to “adorn the court,” to help entertain the ladies who came to visit the duchess, to accompany her when she walked or rode out, and to dance at balls and masques. They were young, ranging in age from fourteen to nineteen, pretty, and stylishly dressed. Their families hoped that they would both “learn handsome Fashions, Graceful Behaviour, Noble Entertainments,” and find a suitably rich and well-connected husband.Footnote 21 A “mother of the maids” or governess was employed to protect their honor, but a few girls had no wish to be protected. Instead, they aspired to be mistresses of the duke of York or other prominent courtiers, often with scandalous results. Mary Kirke, for example, had liaisons with the duke of York, the duke of Monmouth, and the earl of Mulgrave. In 1675 she gave birth to a son in the maid's lodgings at St. James's Palace and, soon afterward, retired in disgrace to France. A few weeks later, the duchess of York's secretary learned that the duke of Monmouth, “ever in some amour,” had begun to court Eleanor Needham. “Her Royal Highness has very ill luck with her maids of honour,” he wrote.Footnote 22 Not long after, the mother of Sarah Jenyns threatened to remove her daughter from court on the grounds that “two of the maids [of honor] had had great bellies at court and she would not leave her child there to have the third.”Footnote 23

As the third Anglo-Dutch War drew to a close in 1674, gossip once again linked twelve-year-old Mary with the prince of Orange.Footnote 24 Members of Parliament particularly favored the idea of a Protestant match. By this time, it was clear that Charles II would not produce a legitimate heir. Instead, his brother and his offspring would inherit the throne. The duchess of York might well produce a male heir, but, in the event she did not, Mary would succeed her father. One author saw the marriage as a means by which “future disputes about the Crown will be quieted, as were those bloody controversies between York and Lancaster by the prudent marriage of Henry VII.”Footnote 25 Others considered it to be insurance against a future war with the Dutch. At this point, however, the match existed only in rumor, not in reality. In fact, the king was so little interested in cultivating the prince of Orange that he commissioned a re-enactment of the Dutch defeat at siege of Maastricht that had been taken by Louis XIV the preceding summer.Footnote 26

For her part, Mary paid more attention to the romantic affairs conducted by others than to her own marital future. Tall for her age (she would grow to 5 feet 11 inches), she had self-confidence, imagination, a flair for drama, and a love of conversation. In fact, it later was said that she “grew weary of anybody who would not talk a great deal.”Footnote 27 Her letters from 1674 describe the scandalous behavior of the maids in the York household. She referred to Eleanor Needham as “my poor Juno which name I write with a cipher, oh, sure you might guess, being cipher was named, what has befallen her, poor rogue.” She had become pregnant by the duke of Monmouth and was now “so big that I can [not] tell how she will be able to go any longer on. … The rest of the story I will tell you when I do see you again for, as I was writing of it to you, I bethought myself that it was of so great importance that I durst not trust pen and ink with it.”Footnote 28 Her fascination with dangerous romantic intrigues was shared by most young women at court. Elizabeth Delaval, who served as a maid of the privy chamber to Queen Catherine of Braganza, wrote, “At court our maid's place there chief happiness / in new caught lovers, who flatteries express / in looks and words, nay in their very dress.”Footnote 29

She also began a romantic affair of her own. Around 1675, she began writing love letters to the eighteen-year-old Frances Apsley (born ca. 1668–1727), daughter of the duke of York's treasurer.Footnote 30 She described herself as “your obedient wife, Mary Clorine” or “your wife that love[s] you as my life” or “your obedient, loving, constant wife.” She characterized Frances as “my dear Aurelia” or “dearest husband” or “dear, cruel, loved, blessed husband.”Footnote 31 Their pen names were drawn from contemporary drama. “Clorin” was a character found both in John Dryden's An Evening's Love; or, The Mock Astrologer and in Francis Beaumont's The Faithful Shepherdess. “Aurelia” was a character in Philip Massinger's The Maid of Honour. Mary's letters were filled with expressions of marital love and devotion: “To tell my dearest dear husband how much I love her would be but to make you weary of it, for all the paper books and parchments in the world would not hold half the love I have for you, my dearest, dearest, dearest, dear Aurelia.”Footnote 32

Frances's letters do not survive, but she participated in this drama by playing the role of the husband. Tall and thin, with a horsy face, Frances never attracted the interest of either the duke or the king. Jenyns referred to her unkindly as “the Nag's Head.”Footnote 33 However, her imagination and high spirits endeared her to the duke's young daughters, whom she saw on a daily basis. In her letters, she chided her wife for failing to write more often, offered favors to others as a way of making her jealous, and imagined herself heartbroken when Mary did not promptly return her letters. “Who can imagine that my dear husband can be so lovesick for fear I do not love her?” Mary wrote, “But I have more reason to think she is sick of being weary of me for in two or three years, men are always weary of their wives and look for mistresses as soon as they can get them.” However, she reassured her “again, for my part, I have more love for you than I can possibly have for all the world. Besides, you do not expect from me a letter like your own this morning, for I am sure Mr. Dryden and all the poets in the world put together could not make such another.”Footnote 34

Frances Apsley came from a family with a long history of service to the crown. Her father Sir Allen Apsley (1616–83) served both as the duke of York's treasurer and receiver-general and as his spokesman in the House of Commons. He had fought as a royalist during the Civil War and maintained a regular correspondence with Edward Hyde, a distant relation, afterward. Shortly before the Restoration, he joined the duke of York's household. He also gained the financially rewarding posts of keeper of the King's Hawks and keeper of the North Park of Hampton Court. He maintained close political ties with Clarendon, so much so that the poet Andrew Marvell regarded him as one of the latter's henchmen. A hard-drinking, foul-mouthed courtier, he resembled his more brilliant cousin, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, whom he later served as executor, though he used his intelligence to better ends. He helped his sister, Lucy Hutchinson, to save her husband, the regicide John Hutchinson, from execution. He also reordered York's finances after 1666 and served as the duke's spokesman in the Commons, defending his marriage to Mary of Modena in October 1673. By 1675, he had gained sufficient wealth and standing to build a house in St. James's Square where he and his family moved the following year.Footnote 35

Lady Frances Apsley (1645–98) also played an important role in the York household, serving the first duchess of York until her death in 1671. She secured places for her daughters Isabella and Frances as lady of the bedchamber and maid of honor, respectively, to the second duchess. She knew of the Stuart sisters’ affection for her daughter Frances; in fact, she encouraged Frances to correspond with Mary and Anne as a way of ensuring her family's connection to the royal family after their move to St. James's Square. However, she probably considered these romantic attachments in light of the general theatricality of court life.

Drama, real or imagined, was part of the everyday experience of courtiers living in or around Whitehall and St. James’s. Gentlemen and women occupied their time with the game of love, pursuing secret alliances and intrigues, displaying grand passion and indulging in sordid affairs, ruining the hopes of their rivals and hoping against hope for a “serious amour,” or a “grande tendresse.” A semi-fictional account of court life in 1675, written by Marie Catherine Baronne d’Aulnoy, described the disappointments and triumphs of leading courtiers. In one scene, a discouraged duke of Argyle reminds the duke of Monmouth of “the miseries one suffers even in the happiest of passions through the caprices of our mistresses, through jealousies, through genuine anger. … If one only realised the annoyances to which one exposes oneself when one commences to love, … one would avoid them with more care than one avoids death!” Monmouth, the ardent lover, replies, “I uphold Love; I am unable to deny him. A man who is indifferent never knows real pleasure. Love makes us brave every evil Fortune; Love inspires us to the most noble and exalted sentiments; Love gives us desire to excel—however difficult our way may be, Love makes it easy.”Footnote 36

In the 1670s, the court experienced a brief revival of the fashion for “seraphic love,” an intense emotional relationship that might elevate one to a higher spiritual plane. Courtiers drew on Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life and his Treatise of the Love of God. They also read Robert Boyle's treatise, Some Motives to the Love of God, better known as Seraphick Love. John Evelyn wrote of his friendship with the maid of honor, Margaret Blagge, as “seraphic.” London clergymen engaged in “seraphic discourse” with their female parishioners while courtiers remarked on the king's lack of interest in the “seraphic part” of lovemaking. Gentlemen and women gave one another coterie names. Robert Boyle's sister Lady Warwick and Lord Berkeley addressed one another as “Harmonia” and “Constans” while Boyle called himself “Philaretus,” or “lover of virtue.” Evelyn's female friends were dubbed Cyparissa, Platona, Electra, Alcidonia, and Ornithia. Meanwhile, the poetess Katherine Philips, “the Matchless Orinda,” celebrated her love for Anne Owen, “Lucasia.”Footnote 37

At the same time, same-sex erotic relations provided entertainment at court. In 1663, Samuel Pepys described a mock marriage that King Charles II arranged between his mistress Barbara Palmer, countess of Castlemaine, and a young woman he wished to bed, Frances Stuart, later duchess of Richmond. The courtly game included all the activities associated with weddings. The “bride” put her hair in ribbons, threw the sock, and happily tumbled into bed with the “groom.”Footnote 38 There was even a real marriage between the beautiful eighteen-year-old Arabella Hunt, who had appeared in the court masque Calisto in 1675, and a woman, Amy Poulter, who represented herself as a man.Footnote 39 John Dryden's first success was The Rival Ladies, in which two women spent most of the play disguised as men. According to James Winn, such plays permitted “a more psychological kind of titillation: they allowed the audience to imagine what it would be like to change sex, to play at the kind of game Castlemaine may have organized at court.”Footnote 40

Mary's letters show her to be familiar with the idea of love as a spiritually elevating force but she never refers to Frances as a “Seraph.” Nor does she consider herself to be a model of virtue. In fact, she more often refers to herself as a sinner who had neglected her love and required absolution. “This letter is to make an atonement,” she wrote, “… for all my faults, I confess I have been to blame,” including her “extreme idleness” and failure to write more often.Footnote 41 In another letter, she asks Frances not “to deny me any longer your pardon whilst I can have it or I shall die and not be able to receive it.” She ends, “believe my conversion true, your penitent wife, Mary Clorine.”Footnote 42

Mary more often imitated the epistolary style made popular by Lettres portugaises traduites en françois, an international bestseller.Footnote 43 The work consisted of five passionate letters written by a Portuguese nun, Mariane, to a Frenchman who had seduced and abandoned her. The letters seemed so true to life, so emotionally expressive, that the public believed them to be written by a woman. Not until the twentieth century was the author identified as a man. In the meantime, generations of Europeans came to believe that the literary expression of passion, melancholy, and desire was the sign of a woman in love. In fact, to write “à la portugaise” became “a veritable code for a certain style—written at the height of passion in a moment of disorder and distress.”Footnote 44 The publication of the Lettres must have produced a particular frisson of excitement in the English court given the Portuguese origins of Queen Catherine who, like the nun, had devoted her life to an unfaithful man.

In the Lettres portugaises, Mariane expressed the most intimate feelings of her heart. She wrote to her lover, “Unfortunate love! You were betrayed and you betrayed me with false expectations. A passion that held such sweet promise now brings a mortal despair more cruel than the absence that provokes it.” She described her failure to resist his love: “I was consumed by your assiduities, your exuberance inflamed me, your kindness fascinated me, you won me with your vows, I was seduced by my own violent inclination, and what follows such sweet and joyful beginnings are but tears and sighs, and a grievous death for which I find no remedy.” Still, she could not forbear telling him, “I love you a thousand times more than my life, and a thousand times more than I can think. How you are dear to me and how you are cruel!”Footnote 45

Like the Portuguese nun, Mary wrote of seduction and betrayal, nonreciprocated love and painful longing. She feared that when Frances moved away from court “she will forget her poor wife here at St. James's and find some mistress in her neighborhood.”Footnote 46 She later reproached her friend for failing to take the opportunity of meeting her at church. She described her as “an unkind, hard-hearted, cruel, inhuman, barbarous, fair creature who, first, with all the charms of friendship and pleasing conversation did win my heart. Then, when she had got it sure, she held it fast.”Footnote 47 She described how she had “waited day after day, still wishing for a letter, thought every minute an hour, each hour an age.” She hoped that a letter expressing her anger might provoke Frances to write, “I, in despair, sat down to write this letter hoping my just rage should make me say such things as would provoke you to write something should kill me quite that with my latest breath I might bless the author of my death. If it were daggers, darts or poisoned arrow from you, I could endure them all for one kind word. If I had but one kind look from you, I should die happy.”Footnote 48 She could not bear the thought of Frances's “indifference” and begged her to remember her “vows and protestations” that she had made “when you were in love. … For pity, then for charity, for remembrance of our former kindness and love, let me have a little love.”Footnote 49 She also sought her physical presence, to “have my belly full of discourse with you.”Footnote 50

In some letters, she incorporated pieces of rhymed verse, writing, “I love you with a heart entire, I am for you all one desire, I love you with a flame more lasting than the vestal's fire. Thou art my life, my soul, my all that heaven can give. Death's life with you, without you, death to live.” She continued:

She also made reference to plays enacted on the Restoration stage. After a quarrel with Frances, she accused her friend of having “forsaken me quite” for her sister Anne. She lamented that “my happy sister has the cornelian ring unhappy I should have had. She will write to you now, unkind Aurelia.” Then, she took off in a flight of literary fancy, imagining her sister to be “happier than ever I was for she has triumphed over a rival that once was happy in your love, 'til she with her alluring charms removed unhappy Clorine from your heart.” She imagined Frances and Anne whispering and laughing together, “as if you had said, now we are rid of her, let us be happy, whilst poor, unhappy I sat reading of a play, my heart ready to break, for I read where Masinissa comes first to Sophonisba and thought that scene so like my misery it made me ready to cry.” The play was Nathaniel Lee's Sophonisba; or, Hannibal's Overthrow in which Masinissa, king of Numidia, joined the Roman general Scipio in the Second Punic War to defeat Carthage. In the scene Mary described, Sophonisba, a Carthaginian noblewoman, confronted Masinissa with his betrayal. Mary continued, writing that before her sister, “I would not show my weakness but now with Sophonisba I may cry out. She thinks me false though I have been most true and thinking so what may her fury do.” Here, she reversed gender roles, placing herself in the role of the warrior Masinissa and Frances in the role of the heroine Sophonisba, who ended her life by taking poison. Imagining the death of her beloved, Mary suddenly pulled back: “If I have said any nonsense, pray forgive it for I think I am almost mad.” She ended, “with this prayer I leave you that in your new choice you may be most happy, that she may love you as well as I, for better I am sure she cannot. So with my prayers, I leave you to think sometimes of your unfortunate, Mary Clorine.”Footnote 52

Mary could easily imagine herself as a character in a theatrical for she spent much of her time reading plays and French romances. She read the most popular English playwrights of the age, including John Dryden, Thomas Otway, Nathaniel Lee, William Davenant, William Wycherley, Nahum Tate, and Aphra Behn. She also dipped into the works of a previous generation, including Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess. French works popular among young court women included Magdeleine de Scuderi's Artamenes; or, the Grand Cyrus and Honoré d’Urfé's Astrea, a Romance. Delaval, an avid reader, later described these as “ill chosen books, such as romances are, which serve only to please our fancy not to guide our judgment, and to make our minutes pass away ('tis said by some) less tediously than they would do, were we otherwise employed.”Footnote 53

Mary also performed in the court masque Calisto; or, The Chaste Nimph written by John Crowne. The extravagant production was designed to display the thirteen-year-old Mary's eligibility for marriage before an audience of foreign ambassadors from France, Spain, and the Netherlands. One contemporary wrote, “There is a masque acted at the cockpit one this night wherein is most of the ladies at court actors, my Lady Mary the duke's daughter and all in general of the great ones. … It is said this is practiced against the Prince of Orange comes which is thought will not be long.”Footnote 54 She took the part of the heroine, Calisto, “a chaste and favourite nymph of Diana, beloved by Jupiter.” Anne (just turned ten) took that of Nyphe, Sarah Jennings acted Mercury, while Henrietta Wentworth (later mistress of Monmouth) was Jupiter. Margaret Blagge played the lead, Diana. In fact, all of the leading characters, even Jupiter and Mercury, were played by women. Crowne plundered the tales of Ovid to create an extravagant court production featuring sea gods and tritons, water nymphs and shepherds. The only serious difficulty was that Ovid's tale required forcible seduction of Calisto by Jupiter, a scene impossible to depict even on the Restoration stage. In the end, Crowne removed the rape scene and caused the plot to turn on Calisto's successful resistance to the attempted seduction. However, as Frances Harris notes, “by no conceivable extension of the term could even this much bowdlerized version of the fable be described in words or actions as ‘exactly Modest.’”Footnote 55

Rather than shock the audience by depicting sexual violence, the playwright titillated it by turning the assault on Calisto's chastity into an attempted lesbian seduction. Jupiter transforms himself into the goddess Diana, to whom Calisto owes obedience, then woos her as a lover. The idea of Diana as a seductress would have scandalized audiences of an earlier era. In Elizabethan and early Stuart court masques, Diana always was depicted as the archetype of virgin power and militant chastity. However, after the Restoration, according to Harris, “this high seriousness was rapidly deflated. Court women in masquerade or sitting for their portraits would be decked with the emblems of the virgin goddess, in deliberate appropriation or knowing parody of the myth.”Footnote 56 Jupiter's decision to adopt the guise of Diana must have caused a snort of laughter in the audience: “Disguis’d like her, I’ll kiss, embrace, be free.” Mercury responds, “Yes, and persuade her too, 'tis chastity.” He continued, “The Nymph will all Diana does allow; Nay think she liv’d in some mistake 'til now.”Footnote 57

The rape scene itself was both lengthy and explicit, calling to mind the lesbian component of some male erotica. The cross-dressed Henrietta Wentworth, as Jupiter, returned to her own gender as Diana or, alternately, was replaced on stage by Margaret Blagge as Diana (the stage directions are unclear). In either case, the audience was reminded of the changeable nature of sexual identity. Jupiter, disguised as Diana, reveals to Calisto that “your merits breed / In my lost heart a strange uncommon flame: / A kindness I both fear and blush to name; / Nay, one for which no name I ever knew, / The passion is to me so strange, so new!” Calisto recoils from his/her advances, fearing that her heretofore chaste mistress has been infected by Cupid's “bloody darts” and requires a cure. Jupiter/Diana, however, seeks to persuade the nymph that their love would be a prelude to heterosexual lovemaking, a suggestion that would have been familiar to readers of male erotic literature.Footnote 58 He/she calls on Calisto to “smile, smile upon me sweetly, or I die. / Suppose me now, some beauteous god, or Jove / The King of gods, and think your self in love.” Finally, Calisto's unwavering virtue forced Jupiter to drop his disguise and to confront her, “Your killing beauty is one great offense; / But your chief sin is too much innocence.” As she would not accept his love or his promise of a heavenly throne, he determined to storm her virtue. He caused winds to carry her off and hold her captive to await his pleasure.Footnote 59

In the end, Calisto's reward for virtue was an earthly crown in a world concerned only with the pursuit of “pleasure and love.” Jupiter retracted his promise to turn Calisto and Nyphe into heavenly stars “before they have tasted the pleasures of love.” Instead, he decided to keep them “to grace some fav’rite crown,” a line directed to the ambassadors in the audience. In the spectacular finale, Calisto and Nyphe appeared under a canopy made of yards of multicolored silk, gauze, and tinsel ribbon before a backdrop of gods and goddesses. They were encouraged to follow the advice of the chorus, to chase all pleasure but love from their hearts: “We’ll kindle our selves into stars with embracing: / We’ll every moment our pleasures renew, / Our loves shall be flaming, and lasting and true.”Footnote 60

In her letters, Mary pursued the kind of passionate relationship encouraged by late seventeenth-century writers. She did not behave like the “chaste nymph,” waiting to be seduced by a more sophisticated lover. Instead, she demanded the attention of a much older girl. “I intend to plague you with letters now, dearest, dear Aurelia,” she wrote, “there shall be no end of my letters.” She resolved to make it her study to please “my dearest, dear, dear, dear husband” who could no longer have cause to complain about a “disloyal wife.”Footnote 61 She evoked pastoral imagery, imagining herself as “poor in everything but love, poor but content. … For what greater riches can I desire than love of you and I hope it is repaid by you, for if you did love me as I do you, I could live and be content with a cottage in the country, a cow, a stuff petticoat and waistcoat in summer and cloth in winter, a little garden to live upon the fruits and herbs it yields, or, if I could not have you so to myself, I would go a begging, be poor but content.”Footnote 62

In her early letters, Mary advanced toward, then retreated from, the sexual desire implicit in their correspondence. “Clorine” was, at first, a character that she could put on, then take off, an identity separate from herself. Around 1675 she wrote that “both Lady Mary and Clorine have received kindness alike. I do not know which you have obliged the most but which soever it is, Clorine is so much Aurelia's servant that she shall ever be your obedient wife.” She signs “Mary,” skips a line, then writes “Clorine.”Footnote 63 In another letter, she begged Frances to “think of me as your faithful wife, true to your bed” before realizing the sexual implications of what she had written. She then added, “by all our loves I am, if not as your wife, you will accept me as your affectionate friend.”Footnote 64 Only when pressed did she express herself in a forthright manner. In 1676, she anticipated the consequences of Frances's move from court to St. James's Square: “now I shall very seldom or never see you but in a grave visit with your mother.” She insisted, “I shall never think you my husband if I don’t talk with you as we used to do, for I love Mistress Apsley better than any woman can love a woman, but I love my dear Aurelia as a wife should do a husband, nay, more than is able to be expressed.”Footnote 65

The fact that Mary and Frances measured their love by the standards of a woman's love for a man perhaps made their correspondence acceptable to others at court. Their exchange of letters was not a secret. Sarah Jenyns, a young maid of honor who later would become Anne's intimate friend, knew about it. So did her governess, Lady Villiers, Frances's mother Lady Apsley, and the court painter Gibson. Even the king knew of his nieces’ passionate friendships. According to Sarah, he remarked on Anne's lengthy correspondence with Mary Cornwallis, a Roman Catholic and the daughter of Katherine Cornwallis, the duchess of York's bedchamber woman. Anne had written, “it was believed, above a thousand letters full of the most violent professions of everlasting kindness” over the course of three or four years. Indeed, “K[ing] Charles us’d to say, No man ever loved his Mistress, as his niece Anne did Mrs. Cornwallis.”Footnote 66

It was not uncommon for patrons and courtiers to use elevated language to express loyalty and devotion. In his study of patronage in early modern France, Arthur L. Herman Jr. found that patrons, clients, and créatures used a “language of fidelity” that reflected a Christian vision of a deferential society held together by bonds of love. Examples of such language can be found in the flowery and extravagant rhetoric of dedicatory epistles, in “effusive letters of gratitude from clients to patrons, and the endless complaints and reproaches for ingratitude.”Footnote 67 Linda Levy Peck noted the use of such language by Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, in a letter to Charles Cornwallis, ambassador to Spain in the first decade of James I's reign: “I made election of your worth so faithfully, I affected your own person so sincerely, I drew your love out of the bunch so particularly … I made your interest my own so indifferently … and therefore the condition of the contract standing still in force you need fear no forfeitures.”Footnote 68 Ophelia Field noted the use of endearments by the countess of Sunderland, who wanted to place her daughter in service at court. She wrote to Sarah Churchill in the early 1680s: “I covet very few things more than to have you kind to me, which I shall endeavour to deserve by all the ways within my poor power and persuade you by all the actions of my life that you have none in the world more faithfully and sincerely yours.”Footnote 69

Patronage relationships also could express homoerotic desire. In elite households, physical intimacy was often a sign of favor. Men might share a bed, publicly embrace, eat together, exchange rings or other gifts, and even jokingly refer to one another as their “mistress” without necessarily engaging in sodomy, as Bray pointed out. Similarly, women might sleep with one another without giving rise to scandal. Gowing noted that “political friendship between women involved carefully judged shades of physical closeness.” To sleep in the same bedchamber—or bed—with a woman of higher status could suggest “esteem, kinship and obligation.” In 1605, Anne Clifford regretted missing the opportunity to go with Arbella Stuart to Oxford “and to have slept in her chamber, which she much desired, for I am the more bound to her than can be.” Sharing a bed with the older woman might have brought Clifford “one step closer to her network of friends and allies.” Other bedmates were more intimate friends. Clifford wrote that the night she lay with her cousin, Frances Bourchier, and Mrs. Mary Cary, was “the first beginning of the greatness between us.” Gowing suggested that “this ‘greatness’ meant emotional and physical intimacy, and perhaps sexual contact as well.”Footnote 70

In the early seventeenth century, female intimacy was not likely to be considered dangerous. Elizabeth Wahl noted that many late Renaissance literary and theatrical works “depict homoerotic relations between young women without disrupting patriarchal authority since such desire signalled a necessary stage in a woman's psychosexual development, functioning almost as a rite of puberty that would ‘naturally’ give way to heterosexual ‘maturity’ in marriage.”Footnote 71 However, at some point between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, heterosexual desire began to be defined as “normal” and contrasted with the perverse.Footnote 72 Gowing noted, “By the late seventeenth century, in women's writing, at least, intense female intimacy was not necessarily innocent.”Footnote 73

The depth of feeling, sexual imagery, and emotional intensity expressed by Mary in her letters to Frances suggest that same-sex love was not simply a phase that she passed through on her way to maturity. Nor was it entirely the product of a patron-client relationship. Mary remained Frances's “wife” after her marriage to William, prince of Orange. In fact, she described their relationship in far more explicit sexual terms after her marriage than before.

In November 1677, after years of prevarication and diplomatic intrigue, Mary married William, prince of Orange. Although she had been prepared for marriage, she was surprised by her husband's appearance and his rough, soldier-like character. Twelve years older and four inches shorter than his bride, he had been ravaged by the smallpox virus. He spoke slowly, his words punctuated by a deep, dry cough. She found his manners to be appalling. After the wedding ceremony at Whitehall, the prince decided to dine with friends in the city rather than joining his new bride. The duchess of Orléans later learned that he had “kept the king and the bride, who had been put to bed in the bridal chamber, waiting until after midnight.” When Charles II asked what had kept him so long, “he replied that he had been gambling after supper, threw himself into a chair and had his valet undress him then and there.” To make matters worse, he went to bed in his woolen underwear. The king, joking, suggested that he take them off. But William replied “that since he and his wife would have to live together a long time she would have to get used to his habits; he was accustomed to wearing his woolens, and had no intention of changing now.”Footnote 74

The crudeness of her husband's behavior hit Mary like a blow. The duchess of Orléans remarked, “I am not surprised that the princess is struck dumb at such manners. It reminds me of the comedy of the husband of the shrewish Kate,” referring to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.Footnote 75 William ignored his new wife at the queen's birthday ball though she dressed “very richly with all her jewels.” According to Mary's chaplain, “the court began to whisper the prince's sullenness, or clownishness, that he took no notice of his princess at the play and ball, nor came to see her at St. James’s.”Footnote 76

Mary and Frances parted in the confusion of late night revels at the queen's ball. “You went away so much sooner than I expected that I did not see my dear to take my leave of her,” Mary wrote, “for though I know you did not design to take it publicly yet I hoped you would have had some discourse better than we had that night before for I was then so sleepy.” She begged her to keep her word and “not forget your poor Clorine that loves you better than can be expressed.” She described herself as “your one true wife” who would “die condemned” should she ever forget to write and express her love. She ended with a coquettish plea, “but, of all things, pray be not in the fashion to keep mistresses to break your poor wife's heart. Indeed, I am impatient 'til I hear from you. Pray do not delay but answer my letter by this same messenger and believe me your true wife, humble servant, and most affectionate and loving friend, Mary Clorine.”Footnote 77

Mary “wept grievously all the morning” of her departure from London. She and the prince took a barge from Whitehall, accompanied by the king and queen, the duke of York, the duchess of Monmouth, and other courtiers. When Queen Catherine tried to comfort her with stories of her own experience as a young bride in a foreign country, she replied petulantly, “but, madam, you came into England, but I am going out of England.”Footnote 78

Marriage did not deter Mary from continuing her romance with Frances. In December, she wrote from The Hague: “Do not think my love is so weak that crossing the sea will put it out.” She signed herself “Mary Clorine” and added “you see, though I have another husband, I keep the name of my first.”Footnote 79 Mary knew that she “must be content to live without seeing you, which I once thought I could never have done, but your leaving St. James's House began this parting … still continue writing to me and loving me as long as you and I shall live.”Footnote 80

She also described their relationship in sexual terms, suggesting that Frances had been cuckolded by the prince of Orange. In August 1678, she told her friend that she might be pregnant:

Moreover, her letters continued to reveal conflict, jealousy, ambivalence, all emotions which generally accompany a sexual relationship. She and Frances quarreled over unanswered letters and sharp replies. “What pleasure canst thou have to torment a poor creature thus … ,” she wrote, “pray consider you undo me if you don’t forgive me. You with your anger wound me more than you can imagine.”Footnote 82 They also accused one another of seeking to end the relationship. When Frances behaved “as if I were a cruel mistress instead of a kind wife,” Mary responded with fury: “'Tis I should rather complain that after so long time, you should fear to say anything to me for, sure, you can’t have so ill an opinion of me to believe absence or time can change me in anything, especially after all the assurances I have given that I am still the same Clorine and you still my dear, dear, dear Aurelia and ever shall be.” She added that Frances had “grown inconsistent herself” and, perhaps, “would be glad of a pretense to fall out. … Take heed it do not prove so, for 'tis dangerous to vex a lover and a woman for you know those are two desperate things when they are angry.”Footnote 83

Mary recognized that her status as a married woman—and a princess—had changed the balance of power in her relationship with Frances, although she continued to claim that her feelings had never, and would never, change. When they were younger, Mary had leveled their difference in social status by adopting the subordinate role of wife to Frances's husband. Now, however, her friend could not accept this distinction. Frances continued to talk in a “fine romantic way of your heart,” but it was clear that her letters were becoming more formal.Footnote 84 “You are grown so insupportably formal which, to your wife, is but ill usage,” Mary wrote in 1680, for “it argues coldness.” By contrast, she claimed that “I love even to distraction, do not faintly love so that the seas can drown my passion or the grave swallow it or fire consume it, but what is so strong to outlive all these and even death itself, if it be possible.”Footnote 85 A month later, however, she received another “grave, ceremonial letter from you that, if anything would make me doubt of your love, it would be that. Pray, dear husband, leave off your compliment and write to me with the same freedom we have ever used.”Footnote 86 The only existing draft of a letter written by Frances is remarkably formal, perhaps even ironic:

By 1682, Mary recognized that her friend had grown distant, no longer able to write about intimate feelings. Frances hesitated even to tell Mary about her forthcoming marriage to Sir Benjamin Bathurst. “'Tis very unkindly done that you have not once writ me word of this but that I must hear it from strangers first,” Mary scolded, “I know 'tis a hard thing to say, I am to be married, yet one can always write more than one can say and to a friend one need simply nothing so special, so true a one as you have always found me.”Footnote 88

Mary, for her part, felt both anger and grief. She wrote to Frances, “for God's sake, put me out of my pain and let me know it, if ever you have loved me, if ever you have loved your prince, if ever you have loved or do either father, mother, sister, brother, and, last of all, if you love your dear husband, I conjure you to let me know it, and that quickly, or I shall conclude you never did care for me nor for any I have named.” She instructed her to “make no beginning nor ending, put no name nor no superscription” on the letter but enclose it in a note to her nurse Mrs. Langford “or let my sister herself send it.”Footnote 89 She must not have received the answer she wanted for the tone of her next three letters changed. Instead of writing of her feelings, she formally thanked Aurelia for letting her know of her sister's affairs and hoped “you will continue your good counsels to us both and never flatter neither.”Footnote 90 In another polite note, she thanked Frances for ordering a paper book but explained that she could write little, “indeed, I have not time at present.” However, she added what she must have considered to have been a stinging reminder of their former love: “When the young gentleman kiss you next, think of me.”Footnote 91

She must have suspected that Frances's affection was, to some extent, motivated by political ambition. Once Mary was no longer in England, her value as a source of patronage diminished significantly. Anne remained far more useful to Frances and her new husband. In fact, the two young women corresponded regularly from 1679 until 1683, when Anne became absorbed in her friendship with Sarah, duchess of Marlborough.

Since Mary played the role of France's wife, Anne became Frances's male lover in a peculiar triangulation of gender roles. In her letters, Anne adopted the character “Ziphares,” writing to his mistress, “Semandra,” characters drawn from Nathaniel Lee's Mithridates, King of Pontus (1678), a tragedy dramatizing a particularly lurid moment in Roman history. The character of Ziphares, the king's good and noble son, was based on the earl of Dorset to whom the play was dedicated. The role of Semandra, the chief heroine, in love with and loved by Ziphares, was played by Anne during her stay in Edinburgh in November 1681.Footnote 92

Anne did not have her sister's gift for language, but she also expressed affection for her friend, writing from Brussels in 1679: “Dear Semandra, none deserves more love from everybody than you, nor none has a greater share in my heart than yourself, excepting whom you know I must love better,” perhaps referring to her favorite, Mary Cornwallis. “I am not one of those who can express a great deal and therefore it may be thought I do not love so well,” she added, “but whoever thinks so is much mistaken for though I have not, maybe, so good a way of expressing myself as some people have, yet I assure you I love you as well as those that do and perhaps more than some.”Footnote 93

Mary's jealousy of her sister's friendship with Frances, once strong, began to fade. In 1681, she wrote to Frances, “You have taken away of clearing my doubts, dear husband, which would make me your rival if it were to any but your Prince Ziphares.”Footnote 94 She also relied on Frances to protect her sister's interests and to keep her from “ill company,” in particular, Mary Cornwallis. By 1682, the seventeen-year-old Anne had become absorbed by an intimate relationship with Cornwallis whom Sarah Churchill described as the “first favorite.” According to one source, Sarah ruthlessly displaced her rival by telling the duke of York that Cornwallis had delivered love letters from John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave, to his daughter.Footnote 95 Frances, one of Sarah's friends, wrote to Mary about the episode in December 1682. Mary responded by telling her that she agreed with her assessment of Cornwallis: “and had I known of the friendship at first, I should have done all I could in the world to have broke it off, but I never knew anything in the world 'til such time as she was forbid.” She was “surprised and troubled” to find Anne concerned at the loss of her friend and she asked Frances “to let me know if there be any new ones in hand that I may endeavor to stop it if it be not to her advantage or, at least, do my best, for I think nothing more prejudicial to a young woman than ill company.”Footnote 96

After 1682, Mary turned her considerable energy into her relationship with her husband, only to be rebuffed. A taciturn man, he had little patience with his wife's emotional extravagance. He ignored her and, instead, pursued sexual relationships with other women (and men) in and around the Dutch court. In 1680, the English chaplain, Dr. Thomas Ken, told Henry Sidney that he was “horribly unsatisfied with the Prince, and thinks he is not kind to his wife; he resolved to speak with him, though he kicks him out of doors.”Footnote 97 He and Sir Gabriel Sylvius thought that Princess Mary was “sensible of it, which doth contribute to her illness; they are mightily for her going into England, but they think he will never give his consent.”Footnote 98 In 1681 the prince took “a particular fancy” to a French actor named Brecour, according to the English envoy.Footnote 99 In 1685, he began an affair with Elizabeth Villiers, a maid of honor and Mary's childhood friend, scandalizing the court. Mary, however, allowed herself to be persuaded that rumors of the affair were part of a plot to separate her from her husband. Dr. John Covell wrote that “the Princess's heart is ready to break, and yet she every day with Mrs. Jesson and Madame Zuylestein counterfeit the greatest joy and look upon us as dogged as may be. We dare no more speak to her. The Prince hath infallibly made her his absolute slave, and there is an end of it.”Footnote 100

She endured her husband's infidelity and ill treatment, believing that he loved her. In 1690, she ended her letters with the following pleas: “Do but continue to love me and I can bear all things else with ease”; “Farewell, I will trouble you with no more, but only desire you whatsoever happens to love me as I shall you to death”; “Adieu, think of me, and love me as much I shall you, who I love more than my life”; “I … do flatter myself mightily with the hopes to see you for which I am more impatient than can be expressed, loving you with a passion which cannot but end with my life.”Footnote 101 At the end of 1691, she recalled that she had felt “truly thankful to God” when he returned safely home from campaign, “and must not forget to observe how kind the king is, how much more of his company I have had since he came home this time, than I used to have.”Footnote 102 Her patience with his infidelities surprised no one at court. They described her as “more amiable, to take all well, than any other woman or girl that we know.” Still, those closest to her noticed that she seemed discontented. She was heard to say that “when one marries young, and that at fifteen, one does not know what one does, and before one turns thirty, one and the other tire of each other.” She also noted “that husbands do not love their wives, however beautiful they might be, and that they are accustomed to attach themselves elsewhere.” It was “gathered from that discourse, and a few others applicable to her, that she is not happy, especially since my lord her husband mocks her on account of her corpulence, but also because he lacks of conjugal fidelity.”Footnote 103

Mary did not continue her friendship with Frances Apsley after her accession to the throne of England in 1689. She may well have encountered her in the company of her sister Anne, for Frances's husband, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, served as treasurer and receiver-general of the princess and her husband, Prince George of Denmark. Frances's father, meanwhile, had been appointed Governor of the East India Company (1688). From the point of view of the Apsley family, their daughter's friendships with Mary and Anne had resulted in two very significant political rewards. But their correspondence, and their intimate friendship, ended well before the Revolution of 1688.

Frances was, and perhaps had always been, a good courtier: modest, private, and protective of her mistress's interests. She had kept their letters secret, as Mary had asked her to do. She never wrote memoirs describing her life at the Stuart court nor did she reveal details of her romantic attachment to Queen Mary. She stored their correspondence in a leather box at her country house at Cirencester. Her descendants assumed that the love letters, in particular, were addressed to Mary's husband, William III. Not until the early twentieth century did scholars realize that letters to Mary's “dearest husband” or “dear, cruel, loved, blessed husband” were, in fact, romantic letters to a female friend.Footnote 104

Mary's correspondence with Frances Apsley tells us a great deal about the character of the queen. In particular, it makes sense of her decision to subordinate herself to her husband to create a joint monarchy—William and Mary. From a very early age, she had come to see herself as a “wife,” the weaker half of a marital whole. She idolized Frances, and later her husband, sacrificing her own power to them. She imagined herself as a long-suffering, duty-bound, tragic figure in a romance of her own making. Despite the fact that she was a leading actor in one of the most important episodes in English history—the Revolution of 1688—she persuaded many contemporaries that she lacked “bowels,” as the duchess of Marlborough observed.Footnote 105 As a result, most historians pay little attention to Queen Mary, treating her as simple and unassuming, a model wife with no political aspirations or, it seems, personality of her own.Footnote 106

The letters also provide evidence about the nature of sexuality at the Restoration court. It appears that same-sex relationships between young women were tolerated so long as they remained private matters within elite social circles. As a result, Mary and Anne could pursue romantic affairs with their courtiers, or “mistresses,” gaining not only emotional support but also opportunities for the expression of strong emotions ranging from anger to joy. This may have been particularly important for elite women; they could not choose their husbands but they could choose female (and male) lovers and friends. They could recreate the dramatic possibilities that they saw on stage or read in books. They could also write—in poems, letters, and books—about their own desires. At the same time, same-sex liaisons may have reinforced, rather than undermined, patriarchal values. Mary and Anne watched as the king and their father elevated sexual companions to positions of influence at court. They also saw the scramble for status among gentlewomen eager to trade sexual favors for money, title, and power. The fact that they, too, chose mistresses suggests that they both understood the language of sex, patronage, and politics spoken at court.Footnote 107

In the early eighteenth century, Anne (now Queen Anne) continued the male practice of elevating female favorites to positions of power and influence. The duchess of Marlborough and, later, Abigail Masham served as both courtiers and mistresses of the queen. By this time, however, both political culture and attitudes toward female sexuality had begun to change. Relationships that had been considered unremarkable a generation earlier now became matters of public debate. Ballads and pamphlets, probably penned by Churchill and her secretary, referred to the queen's “unnatural affections” and her “dark Deeds at night.”Footnote 108 Emotional intimacy between women, particularly when it interrupted the flow of political influence, could no longer be viewed as an innocent diversion or the by-product of a patronage relationship. A line was to be drawn between lovers and friends.