In June 1688, a swathe of the population of these islands became convinced that their
Queen had faked the birth of a son. Mary of Modena was the Italian-born, Catholic wife of James II ; the arrival of a son who would be raised Catholic disinherited James’s two Protestant daughters Mary and Anne Stuart, born to an English mother. Many of James’ subjects wanted to believe that the popular sisters were still the true heirs to the throne. So they imagined into being a world in which that was possible. Contemporary pamphlets bear witness to wild and wonderful theories. According to the most popular, Mary of Modena had commandeered a newborn baby from someone else and smuggled it into her bedchamber using a warming-pan. Twenty-three year old Anne joined in, questioning in her letters whether her stepmother had ever been pregnant at all, but might have worn a false belly for months. These conspiracy theories changed the course of history. Within weeks, Anne’s Protestant brother-in-law William of Orange had been invited to overthrow James on behalf of his wife, the English Mary. When seven leading politicians wrote to William to offer him their support, they caveated that he had lost credibility for formally congratulating James on the birth of a son, “which not one in a thousand here believes to be the Queen’s.” One of the lessons of recent years is that human beings are as irrational as they ever were, especially when collective emotion takes hold. How we laughed at the eighteenth century peasants who rejected Jenner’s advances in vaccination – until Covid reminded us how natural it is to distrust the Government when it asks you to stick a needle in your arm, and how difficult it is to credit a medical process whose impact you can’t immediately see. But historically, no topic incites the madness of crowds more than the opportunity to speculate about royal women. From Mary to Modena to the current Princess of Wales – give us a princess to discuss, and we let collective fantasy take flight. Read Next Why using AI to unblur photos of Kate doesn't prove anything In earlier years, it was not wholly irrational to speculate about monarchy – and specifically, about the bodies of the
Women charged with reproducing our next generation of rulers. Even today, our surveillance of princesses in particular is rooted in a deep historical sense that we all share ownership of them, or a stake in their physical health. The devil’s bargain is as old as the
British monarchy. Marry in, and you’ll be pampered in a palace, but the rest of us will spend years speculating on the state of your womb (and by extension, the state of your marriage). None of us know what medical condition led to the Princess of Wales undergoing a major operation earlier this year. Nor can it be helpful to her recovery to bay for further photographs – edited or unedited . But we do know that no queen or princess in British history has been safe from aggressive questioning about the state of her body. While royal men have endured gossip too, the jump from clucking over someone’s weight to analysing their fertility is harder to make. So it is women, as always, who bear the brunt. Is it any wonder that a long list of royal women – from Empress Sissi of Austria to Diana, Princess of Wales – have developed eating disorders in the public eye? Tudor queens had to put up with ministers demanding reports into the state of the bedsheets to be sure they were still menstruating and therefore fertile. The Spanish King Philip II paid Elizabeth I’s laundress to keep him updated on her bloodstains. The disbelief around Mary of Modena’s successful pregnancy followed years of public updates about her five miscarriages. The difference between these women and Kate, of course, is that Kate is not a member of an absolute monarchy. We’re not living in the17th century; we don’t need to worry that a change of dynamic in the royal household is going to alter the religious leadership of a nation. Yet we still feed on the lives of the royals. As the columnist Tanya Gold once put it: “What is required of the British monarchy? It is a willingness to be consumed.” Hilary Mantel , in her notorious and brilliant lecture on our fascination with royal bodies, described her own experience of seeing the late Queen Elizabeth in the flesh: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. Monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.” Mantel was fascinated by the way we imprison royal women in our gaze – and how their spin doctors collude in doing so. She was widely misrepresented when she famously described the now Princess of Wales as “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished”. But Mantel was writing not about Kate’s reality – she was writing about how princesses are packaged and presented for our consumption. She was only ever trying to warn her. The
Duchess of Sussex refused to be consumed . Like her or loathe her, it’s not hard to see why a modern woman would leave such a set-up. (Like Mary of Modena, Meghan was the subject of unhinged rumours that she had faked a pregnancy with a prosthetic baby bump.) The Princess of Wales does not have a real option to break free. But as a nation, we have the option to leave the psychodrama behind. We can accept that no woman owes us an explanation of the state of her body. We could even break the devil’s bargain we make with every woman in
Windsor Castle. No
Royal Family – no royal intrusion. But without them, who would we consume instead?