Afterword

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