Conclusion Stuart Women and Political Culture

Abstract

Let us consider the following event. Sometime in 1694, Archbishop Tillotson presented Bridget Bendish to Queen Mary II. Bendish was granted a pension, presumably for circulating pro-Williamite propaganda prior to the Prince’s invasion in 1688, thereby supporting the Revolution.¹ Bendish seems to have had contacts in the Netherlands among the large Whig and Dissenting refugee communities there. Perhaps she was another “nursing mother.” But Bendish was also special for another reason; one that might have prevented her meeting with the Stuart queen, but did not. Bridget Bendish was the granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell and from all accounts, his spitting image. Still further, her father was Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s close associate as well as a leading parliamentary officer and regicide. Her exchange of pleasantries with the Queen, whose grandfather, Charles I, Bendish’s father and grandfather had brought to the scaffold, provides us with an intriguing, even poignant, image. It certainly has much to say about Mary II, much that John Tillotson already knew. First, that the presence of this living image of Cromwell, she whose ancestors were rebels and regicides, would not unsettle the Queen; and secondly, that the presence of this Dissenting woman, who worshipped with Independents and practiced the kind of enthusiastic religiosity that moderates like Mary and Tillotson found troubling, would not faze her.