Abstract
Historically, a constitutional English government did eventuate. In 1688, English monarchical supremacy yielded to Parliament and co-monarchs William and Mary came to the throne with no more authority than glorified figureheads. Depictions of William and Mary on coins during their reign continued to illustrate the ways in which accolated iconography operates; the monarchs’ superimposed heads on coins of the realm figure both of the two-bodied legal fictions with which this book has been concerned —the king’s two bodies and marital coverture. These two married first cousins, each with a claim as English sovereign, were brought to the throne by Parliament after the overthrow of the ardent Catholic king, James II. In 1677, William had married James’s daughter, Mary, 15 years old and heir to the English throne. In 1688 William invaded England with his army of Protestants to aid Parliament in the ousting of James, his wife’s father. Before the king’s flight from England, the English people had pinned their hopes on Mary succeeding her aging father alone, so when James unexpectedly and, from Mary’s viewpoint, fraudulently sired a male heir by his second wife, Mary of Modena, the tradition of male primogeniture in England had to be breached to prevent a possible Catholic dynasty.1
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Mary suspected that her father’s long-awaited young son was not, in fact, her half-brother. William made an official inquiry, which indicated that the child was indeed James’s, but according to Maureen Waller, he never let Mary know the outcome. Maureen Waller, Ungrateful Daughters: The Stuart Princesses Who Stole Their Father’s Crown (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002) 266–267.
A group of supporters led by the Earl of Danby lobbied hard to put Mary on the throne alone. Regarded as a foreigner and rumored to be homosexual, William was objectionable to many. Mary purportedly wrote in response to pleas that she take the throne, “that she was the prince’s wife, and never meant to be other than in subjection to him, and that she did not thank anyone for setting up for her an interest divided from that of her husband.” Quoted in W.A. Speck, “Mary II (1662–1694), queen of England, Scotland and Ireland.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
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© 2012 Sid Ray
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Ray, S. (2012). Afterword. In: Mother Queens and Princely Sons. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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