LHMP #552 McClain 2008 Love, Friendship, and Power

This article examines the language of affection and romance used in letters from Mary Stuart (Queen Mary II) to a close friend, confidante, and courtier Frances Apsley, placing the language within several contexts relevant to understanding it. (Mary’s sister Anne—Queen Anne I—had similar correspondence with Frances Apsley, but this article focuses on Mary.)

Discussions of the language of passionate friendship between women consider the competing framings of “evidence of homosexual desire,” “mimicking heterosexual relations,” and “conventional literary stylings.” This article touches on all of those.

We have 80+ letters from Mary to Frances, though none from the other direction, covering a period from when Mary was in her early teens well into adulthood. In it, the two women use theatrical code names (taken from a popular play of the day), where Mary takes on a female persona and addresses Frances as a male persona, calling Frances her “husband” and framing herself as an often neglected wife. [Note: It's interesting that Anne also often framed her intimate friendships as involving her being neglected.] This imagery is carried through to the point of Mary calling her (actual) marriage to William of Orange a form of cuckoldry of Frances.

This imagery was hardly unique to Mary’s correspondence. Alan Bray is quoted as discussing similar language among male friends as a form of “homoerotic humor.” That is, in overtly using heterosexual language about a same-sex relationship, the equivalence was both recognized and defused. Although Mary used the language of marriage with Frances, another theme was the political dynamics of kings and their mistresses so prominent in the court of Charles II. Passionate friendships (whether same- or opposite-sex) with monarchs created avenues for political influence and alliance.

Although Mary and Anne spent their childhood on the fringe of the court, as they came closer to an age where marriage alliances needed to be considered, they became central figures, particularly given that their uncle, Charles II, had no legitimate heirs. Mary’s companions were primarily the daughters of her governess, and then later the her step-mother’s ladies in waiting and their daughters. Within the libertine atmosphere of the court, this group of young women were often embroiled in sexual maneuverings for position and influence—frequently a topic of Mary’s correspondence with her companions. Though Mary didn’t participate in any heterosexual intrigues herself, in 1675 she began writing love letters to Frances Apsley, who was 5 years older and the daughter of one of her father’s officers. Both had pseudonyms in these letters taken from contemporary dramas, Mary as “Clorine” and Frances as “Aurelia” (somewhat at odds with Frances being framed as her “husband” unless the theatrical Aurelia was for a male character?).

On the face of it, the language of Mary’s letters to Frances (and we might speculate about Frances’s to Mary) is that of marital love. “Who can imagine that my dear husband can be so lovesick for fear I do not love her?” “For my part, I have more love for you than I can possibly have for all the world.” But how would such language have been understood by their contemporaries in the court?

Frances’s mother encouraged her daughter’s correspondence with the two Stuart girls, seeing it as a way of strengthening family connections to the royal family. Courtiers, both male and female, engaged in highly theatrical heterosexual amours that were both serious (negotiating for alliances and influence) and treated as a game. In the 1670s there was a fashion for “seraphic love”—a very intense emotional connection that was experienced as spiritual—though not everyone sought more than a physical connection. Erotic theatrics included a mock “marriage” arranged by Charles II between his mistress, the countess of Castlemaine, and a woman he was pursuing, that was staged as a public spectacle. In this same context, a young woman on the fringes of the court married another woman who was in male disguise. [See: Amy Poulter and Arabella Hunt] A literary bestseller Portuguese Letters, represented itself as a collection of over-the-top passionate and despairing letters from a Portuguese nun to her seducer who had abandoned her.

All of these could have provided models and inspiration for the style and content of Mary’s correspondence. Her letters often make reference to the content of plays, comparing them to her own situation. Mary had a more direct connection to drama, playing the role of Calisto in a masque based on Ovid’s version of the myth, although the sexual dynamics of the story are sidestepped by making Calisto successfully resist the advances of Jupiter/Diana. [Note: McClain suggests that the depiction of Diana as a seducer (even in the form of a disguised Jupiter) would have been considered scandalizing in earlier versions of the myth, but I find this unconvincing as the entire myth rests on the plausibility of a Diana-Calisto romance.]

Overall, Mary’s on-page language reflects the types of passionate relationships considered “normal” in the later 17th century. She is an active, rather than a passive, participant, pursuing and wooing the older girl, and treating their fictive marriage as an established fact. In some letters she creates a clear separation between Mary, the person, and Clorine, the character. In others, she equates the two framings more strongly.

The romantic correspondence between the two was not secret and was commented on in surviving correspondence by third parties. Nor was this type of marital language unusual for the expressions of devotion and loyalty by courtiers to their royal patrons. Such relationships frequently had an unremarkable physical component. Same-sex  bed-sharing was a sign of trust and intimacy within upper class households. Other correspondence discusses the logistics of maneuvering to have a family member share the bed of her patroness and the expected or actual consequences to the relationship of having done so. Such female homoerotic relationships were not considered transgressive or dangerous, whether on stage or in real life, as they were not expected to disrupt expectations around marriage, but might be considered an expected rite of passage. Suspicion of this type of arrangement only began arising toward the turn of the 18th century.

With all this as background, McClain considers the position of Mary’s correspondence with Frances. Given the depth of feeling and the fact that the correspondence continued after Mary’s marriage (and was, in some ways, set in conflict with it), it doesn’t appear to represent “just a phase.” In fact, Mary’s language toward Frances becomes more sexual after her marriage to William of Orange. Nor does it seem to be modeling a dramatized client-patron relationship (especially given that Mary chose a “wife” role despite being the higher status member of the couple). Some of the former might be explained by Mary’s disappointment in her political marriage. William was not particularly appealing as a husband and seemed to have little interest in pleasing her.

But the marriage did change her relationship with Frances. Mary left for Holland and—being distant from the center of the English court—had less to offer Frances’s family in concrete terms. The letters continued but Mary framed herself as an abandoned mistress and chafed at a shift toward more formality on Frances’s part, as well as diminished candor about details of her personal life. Frances seemed to have refocused her interest on Anne. (Where Mary had positioned Frances as the “husband,” Anne adopted a male persona and positioned Frances as the “wife.”)

Although Frances and her family gained a number of benefits from the two connections, by the time Mary became queen they were no longer close friends, and similarly Anne had moved on to other favorites by the time she came to the throne. Although Frances must have had access to a great deal of highly personal information about the two future queens, she did not reveal the contents of their letters and did not write the sort of “tell all” memoir that others at the court penned.

Although it would be reaching too far to see the correspondence with Frances as evidence of a “lesbian” relationship and it’s unclear whether it ever had a sexual component, their bond was clearly romantic and understood in the imagery of husband and wife, but was “public” in the sense that those in the court were aware of the nature of their bond and did not feel the need to interfere with it. Both Mary and Anne (and presumably Frances) got emotional satisfaction from their relationships and a chance to experience and express strong emotions, both positive and negative. But these relationships were not purely romantic and can be seen in the context of the sexual politics of the Restoration court, where courtiers negotiated their bodies for proximity and influence. This is far clearer in the case of Queen Anne who elevated her female favorites in ways quite similar to how her uncle Charles II had done for his. But during Anne’s tenure, the public acceptance of such relationships received more scrutiny and public criticism, especially when seen to involve political influence. [Note: This wasn’t all that different from the criticism directed at Charles II’s prominent mistresses who wielded similar power and influence through him.]