Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/371

Mary II Marlborough (Account of Conduct, p. 25) pretends that she soon grew weary of anybody who would not talk a great deal. At court a saying circulated according to which the queen talked as much as the king thought and the princess ate (, iv. 397). Miss Strickland insinuates that in the last respect both of Anne Hyde's daughters resembled their mother. The defects of Mary's education had, more especially in the quiet Dutch days during Hooper's chaplaincy, been supplemented by reading, and she never gave up the habit. She was well-informed, not only in controversial divinity, but in history, and took up the study of English constitutional history as late as 1691 (Memoirs ap., p. 44). According to Burnet (Memorial, p. 80) she was very exact in geography, and had a taste for other sciences. She wrote with ease and fluency in both French and English, and could put together a letter in Dutch (ap., iii. 87). Her weak eyesight, however, at times obliged her to resort to female handiwork in her desire to avoid idleness (, Own Time, iii. 134; Memorial, pp. 81-2). At Hampton Court many evidences of her horticultural taste are still extant, and three catalogues of her botanical collections are in the British Museum (Sloane MSS. 2928, 2370-1, 3343; see, Hampton Court, iii. 30-42).

A large number of portraits remain from the successive periods of Mary's short life. In youth an elegant dancer, and slight in figure, she afterwards grew more, but never excessively, full in person, and was always a good walker (ap., pp. 102-3).

The earliest portrait of her is probably Necksher's, taken at about two years of age. Wissing's was painted in duplicate between 1685 and 1687. There is another Dutch portrait, belonging to Lord Braybrooke, of 1688. The latest is Vandervaast's, of 1692.

 MARY of (1658–1718), queen of James II of England, was born at Modena 5 Oct. 1658. Her additional baptismal names were Beatrice Anne Margaret Isabel; the name of Eleanor, by which she was familiarly known in her youth, and which reappears in her official burial certificate, was not among them (, Les Derniers Stuarts, i. 51 n.; Introduction, p. 83 and note). She was the only daughter of Alfonso IV of Modena, of the house of Este, who succeeded as duke a few days after her birth. On the death of Alfonso (July 1662), the government of the duchy was, on behalf of Francis II, his sister's junior by two years, carried on by the widowed Duchess Laura, a descendant of the Roman house of Martinozzi, and cousin of Mnzarin (, Geschichte der italien. Staaten, 1832, v. 656; cf., i. 33 note). She brought up her children both religiously and strictly (cf.