Page:The Queens of England.djvu/535

 MARIA BEATRICE OF MODENA. 485 long years before on terms of "the purest affection, but who had chosen to decline the matrimonial state up to the age of five-and- twenty. The Queen of England had selected a wife for him, and after in vain communicating her pleasure, proceeded to dis- play much bitterness and anger in her correspondence, and threatened to withdraw her powerful support from his duchy and become his enemy. The sound morality of her conduct, however, made a strong impression amidst a court which had learnt to live in abandonment, though she had not, with all her youthful charms of person and mind, waaned the affections of her husband, as yet, from his avowed mistress, Catharine Sed- ley. In the early part of their reign, the queen suffered much unhappiness on this account, but at length, after James had made Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, and bestowed on her some Irish possessions, the wrong was at least publicly at an end. The next event which aroused to hew pangs the sensitive heart of the queen, was the death of her mother at Rome, on July 19, 1687. The duchess had visited Mary more than once since they first quitted Italy together, and an affectionate cor- respondence had been maintained to the last. Casting only a hasty glance at the portentous circumstance that James had just committed the Archbishop of Canterbury and six bishops to the Tower, to show the headlong madness with which he was ruining his own prospects and' those of his wife and the child she then bore, we arrive on the 10th of June, 1688, at the birth of the Prince of Wales, christened James Francis Edward, and best known in history as the Pretender. The partisans of Mary and Anne raised an imputation that this was a spurious child, but the attestations of highly reputable Protestant ladies show it. to have been a malicious calumny which could not have gained credence in less stormy times. This infant was to be the inseparable companion of Mary Beatrice in the calamities which now fell thick and fast upon her. The last mad act of the reign of his parents was, that of accepting the Pope as his godfather. William of Orange effected a land- ing, and James showed an irresolution wholly at variance with his early career. It was with difficulty and only to save the child that Mary Beatrice was persuaded to separate from her husband and fly first to France. She crossed the Thames from Whitehall to Lambeth on a stormy night in an open boat, took coach to Gravesend, and there embarked in the disguise of an Italian washerwoman in a common passage vessel. She carried