When, on 6 May 1697, Father Francis Saunders, Jesuit confessor to James II, wrote from the Saint-Omer seminary in Flanders to his co-religionist Edward Meredith, then resident at the English College in Rome, he described the situation of those dwelling at James II’s exiled court at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The most repeated adjective was ‘poor’. This was not insignificant, for his correspondent had informed him a few weeks earlier that he had been appointed trustee of a sizeable private bequest which was intended to relieve the needy English Catholics, including those living in or near Paris who had followed James II to the continent to avoid persecution after the Revolution of 1688 and William III and Mary II’s accession to the throne. Thus, in order to start arranging ‘how the charity you design for St. Germain’s might be best employed’, instead of ‘naming particular persons, for that would require a long catalogue, & some so might be left out’, he proposed to Meredith a socio-economic categorisation of the poor sheltered in the court or dependent on it: ‘I divided the necessitous here into 5 classes, viz. the poor orphans, poor widows, poor officers, convents & persons of quality whose losses & wants of conveniences are great’. Each of these groups would be allocated a fixed amount to be distributed among its members, ranging from £400 to £2,000.Footnote 1 Saunders did not realise, however, that this division was too artificial to be carried out. In practice, many of the residents at Saint-Germain could fall into more than one category and, above all, the bequest at stake, that of the English Catholic former diplomat Sir William Godolphin, was a rather inaccessible one.
This article will analyse a single episode which reveals the setbacks that English Catholics faced in obtaining foreign funding. The main panoramic studies published in recent decades on the English court of Saint-Germain and Jacobitism in general by scholars such as Corp, Genet-Rouffiac or Talbott are shot through with allusions to Jacobite poverty.Footnote 2 However, the difficulties encountered by these exiled courtiers in accessing some of the sources of income that were sometimes available to them have been relatively neglected. In the specific case of Lady Sophia Bulkeley, dame of honour to Queen Mary Beatrice d’Este and one of the claimants to Godolphin’s bequest, this issue will be emphasised, together with the strategies she adopted to successfully claim that portion of the deceased diplomat’s estate to which she considered herself the rightful heir. Bulkeley’s example also helps to demonstrate the close link between religion and finance in the English Catholic community. Her success was partly due to the differentiating impact of her confessional situation as a widow of a man who had abjured Catholicism before his death. This circumstance set her apart at the court of Saint-Germain, which was conceived by its inhabitants as a stronghold from which to promote the longed-for restoration of Catholicism in the British Isles.Footnote 3 Finally, what follows provides some insight into the agency of a Jacobite woman and courtier who has not yet been the subject of any detailed study. Aside from a small number of recent publications—including a monograph on Frances Talbot, Countess of Tyrconnell, and an article on Scottish noblewoman Margaret Nairne—women’s political and confessional identities within the Jacobite cause have been overlooked.Footnote 4 This article thus represents a valuable addition to a largely underexplored topic. Bulkeley’s case will be approached by analysing the collection of Edward Meredith’s correspondence held in the archives of the English College in Rome and other documents relating to Godolphin’s legacy, scattered among several English and Spanish institutions and almost ignored by scholars, in order to throw new light on the interrelations between poverty, confessionalism and female agency in the exiled court of James II.Footnote 5
I. Sir William Godolphin’s legacy
On 11 July 1696, Sir William Godolphin, English ambassador to Spain between 1669 and 1678 as representative of King Charles II, died in Madrid.Footnote 6 His conversion to Catholicism in 1671 had eventually led to his dismissal at a moment of increasing aversion to Catholics in England. Charged with high treason by Parliament for having allegedly engaged in the Popish Plot, his credentials were revoked in November 1678, but he chose to remain at the Spanish court.Footnote 7 As he explained towards the end of his life, ‘to continue my residence at this court after having finished the embassy I had there for many years, is not for obligation or any other reason than my own pleasure and inclination, because this sky is good for me and because I find myself very honoured by His Catholic Majesty’.Footnote 8 In Spanish, the language Godolphin was writing in, cielo, translated here as ‘sky’ can also mean ‘heaven’. It is not impossible that his addressees, the Florentine bankers Orazio Montauti and Sinibaldo Corboli, would have picked up a reference to the Catholic Reformation under way in Madrid: in Godolphin’s view, Madrid was becoming a very heaven of revitalised Roman Catholicism. In any case, the warm acceptance he had received in previous years as a result of his conversion had convinced him to keep his residence there, especially after his revocation as ambassador was conceived in heroic terms in courtly circles and by the Spanish King himself. It would be hard to understand otherwise why Charles II of Habsburg, aware that ‘the motive behind this minister’s [Godolphin’s] removal’ had been ‘professing our sacred religion [Catholicism]’, had chosen to maintain the diplomat’s franchises and immunities in the early months of 1679.Footnote 9 He did it with a view more to rewarding Godolphin’s work in promoting Catholicism in the British Isles at a critical political-confessional juncture, than to guaranteeing him financial support that he did not really need.
In later life Godolphin used his capital in a series of financial contracts with both Spanish and foreign brokers. The first two were agreed as early as spring 1679, when he established life ‘censuses’ (censos) with the charterhouses of El Paular in Segovia and Granada, with a total value of 108,768 ducats.Footnote 10 Some years after these had been enacted, in January 1687, he approached Roman banker Giacomo Monthione to arrange the deposit of a considerable amount of money at the Monte di Pietà of St. Peter in Rome. In the course of the year, the money was sent to the Eternal City in twelve batches by way of Vincenzo Cantucci’s Madrid company. Once received, they were exchanged for several patents or luoghi di monte issued by the pope’s Reverenda Camera Apostolica, creating at the end of that period a total of 282 patents and fifty-five parts that were to provide a revenue of three escudos a year for each one in joule (julio) money.Footnote 11 This was only the first step in a diversification of investments that ended up dispersing Godolphin’s capital. Between August 1689 and June 1696, he placed 95,196 ducats at 3% per annum in forty payments in the vaults of the Cecca and the Oglio of Venice, money that remained under the care of local magnate Aurelio Rezzonico.Footnote 12 Between February 1693 and August 1694, also by way of Vincenzo Cantucci’s company—now merged with that of Pietro Antonio Giacomini—he deposited 20,000 florins at 6% per annum in 200 patents in Florence’s monte subsidio vitalicio or vacabile in bills of exchange remitted in several batches to the abovementioned bankers Montauti and Corboli.Footnote 13 Finally, on 28 January 1684 and 8 March 1694, he entrusted Salomon van de Blocquery and Octavio Barbou, Amsterdam-based businessmen, with 20,000 and 10,000 guilders respectively at 3% per annum, as well as another 30,000 at the same interest rate to Jan Biler, also resident in Amsterdam.Footnote 14 Adding the incomes of these deeds to those earned from the Carthusian censuses and from those contracted in 1694 and 1695 with Madrid’s Imperial and Scots Colleges, which were worth 144,818 ducats at the time of his death; and to the 5,984 doubloons in cash he had at home in Madrid and £16,700 in land revenues from England, by the time he died, Godolphin had built up an estimated fortune of £80,000.Footnote 15
A letter dated 20 October 1695, the last one in his own handwriting, addressed to Meredith, his second cousin and former secretary, sheds some light on the reasons that led Godolphin to distribute his assets and what he intended to use them for. The former ambassador, ‘now an old man & feeling every year some new effect and impression of age’, was replying to some proposals ‘relating to benefactions’ that his correspondent had made in previous letters, knowing that his renowned relative’s health was deteriorating.Footnote 16 Only a few months earlier, when alighting from his carriage on the banks of the River Manzanares, Godolphin had suffered a serious fall, ‘which affected and tied up my right hand and arm for many months’ and caused ‘the weakness of my nerves’.Footnote 17 It is not surprising, therefore, that Meredith, who had joined the Society of Jesus in November 1684 while training at the Novitiate College at Watten, took advantage of his cousin’s frail condition to suggest that he should waste no more time in using his liquid capital ‘for the promoting any Catholic design’. Godolphin must have already considered this when he decided in 1687 to deposit those sums of money in the Monte of St. Peter, but he had delayed any decision due to the insecurity caused by the hostility of the English government towards Catholicism and, in general, the continental instability caused by the Nine Years’ War.Footnote 18 Bearing in mind the considerable amounts involved, Godolphin thanked his cousin for his overtures but was at the same time hesitant:
I take very kindly all the insinuations of your last relating to benefactions &ca. & in me being here alone without the help & assistance of any Catholic gentleman or person practical & versed in those establishments, there is not wanting so much a will & desire to put something in a present course & order of being practiced hereafter, as the method & way of doing it, where shall the money be placed & with what security? Who shall be trusted with the management & execution after my death?Footnote 19
He left these questions unanswered. After several years suffering from ‘a swelling in both his legs’, probably caused by dropsy, ‘the humour leaving that part, fell on his nerves, & by degrees deprived him of the use of his arms and legs’. By 30 March 1696 he was bedridden, ‘crippled in his right arm and hand by an accident of palsy’.Footnote 20 In these conditions, he issued a notarial power of attorney naming his soul as the universal heir to all his assets and appointing four executors to administer his last will and testament at his death: Matías de Escolar, his confessor and abbot of the convent of San Basilio; Gerónimo Guerrero S.J., procurator of the Jesuit Imperial College; Baltasar de Cabredo, treasurer of the Royal Chapel, and Antonio de Cendoya, one of the King’s secretaries. They were assisted in this task by Bruno Bernardo de Quirós, steward at El Paular, and Francis Arthur, an Irish businessman active in Madrid and part of an extended family network of Jacobite financiers.Footnote 21 When Alexander Stanhope, then English ambassador to the Spanish court, learned of this document, he warned the ailing diplomat’s nephew, Francis Godolphin of Golden Square, that his uncle had not mentioned him or the rest of his family throughout his long illness. Francis responded by promptly attending his uncle’s bedside in Madrid.Footnote 22 His goal was to remind his uncle not to forget to include himself and his sister, Elizabeth, Godolphin’s niece, in his will. He partly succeeded, for shortly before his death Godolphin declared that his estates in England would revert to his relatives.Footnote 23 On 6 July he suffered a violent stroke and later a series of convulsive seizures which finally led to his death on 11 July, ‘having passed a kind of purgatory in this world’. He left most of his estate overseas without recipients and with a long list of claimants.Footnote 24
II. Lady Sophia Bulkeley’s plea for money: exile and poverty at Saint-Germain
One of those claimants was Jacobite Lady Sophia Bulkeley, who was based at the exiled court of James II at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and who was described by a fellow courtier as ‘a lady I am afraid Sir William Godolphin forgot at his death’.Footnote 25 Born probably in France sometime before 1650, Bulkeley belonged to an ancient Scottish family of Catholic gentry with roots in the main stem of Clan Stewart, and thus distantly related to the reigning dynasty. Her parents, Walter Stewart and Sophia Carew, both held positions in the exiled court as, respectively, physician and maid of honour to Henrietta Maria, widow of the executed Charles I. In 1671 Lady Sophia entered the service of Catherine of Braganza, consort of Charles II, as her lady-in-waiting, a position she held alongside her elder sister Frances, Duchess of Richmond, one of the King’s former mistresses. Richmond retained a well-remunerated and stable position at court and probably had a hand in her sister’s promotion. Somewhat later, around 1673, Sophia Stewart married Henry Bulkeley, a Welshman, also a Catholic and a captain in the Irish army, who would serve as Master of the Royal Household between 1678 and 1688 for Charles II and James II. After the Revolution, he would serve as a Jacobite spy in England, only to be caught and imprisoned in the Tower of London. His wife followed a parallel trajectory, changing patroness in 1685, on the death of Charles II. She began to serve again as lady-in-waiting and, later, dame of honour to the new queen consort, Maria Beatrice d’Este, with whom she would remain in exile and over whom she would exert increasing influence.Footnote 26 While it is true that Bulkeley enjoyed certain advantages over many of the other claimants, in order to allege her legitimate right to Godolphin’s inheritance, she still found it necessary to assert her demands and exploit her allegedly pitiful circumstances before Meredith to secure access to the money.
The main point in Bulkeley’s favour, and the one she was most keen to stress, was her kinship with Godolphin, ‘being his grandfather & my grandmother brother & sister’.Footnote 27 Indeed, her maternal grandmother, Thomasine Godolphin, had been the sister of John Godolphin, the diplomat’s paternal grandfather, a distant blood tie that made them second cousins. To bolster her argument, Bulkeley introduced herself to Meredith as the closest Catholic relative of the late ambassador, a valid but slightly disingenuous statement given that she shared that status with the Jesuit and his sister.Footnote 28 However, it is true that none of the closer relations referred to in the declaration Godolphin made a few days before his death were Catholic, namely his surviving nephew and niece, Francis and Elizabeth Godolphin (offspring of his eldest brother), Charles Godolphin (husband of the latter and Godolphin’s second cousin), and his first cousin Francis Bluet.Footnote 29 The confessional argument was crucial because the execution of wills in Castile had to conform to Castile’s laws, which banned sharing a deceased’s estate among heretical potential legatees unless the testator had thus disposed; and it was even more crucial in this particular case since in the power of attorney of 30 March 1696, Godolphin had appointed his own soul as the ‘universal heir’ of the bulk of his estate.Footnote 30 In short, the money would only benefit Catholic charitable causes and, in this regard, Lady Sophia Bulkeley enjoyed an advantage over most of Godolophin’s relatives.
However, despite her favourable confessional status, the first obstacle to Bulkeley’s assertion of her rights was her absence from the list of legatees in the will, which had been drafted postmortem by the executors. This is not surprising since her relationship with the deceased had been non-existent. Understandably, therefore, she was never mentioned by the diplomat, let alone as a potential heir. Such was her disconnection from the Madrid scene that she did not even know of the existence of Godolphin’s last will until at least September 1697, i.e. ten months after its conclusion on 9 November 1696; even then, she only found out because Meredith, who did appear in it, had sent a copy of the document to Maria Beatrice d’Este, who divulged its contents to Bulkeley as her key confidant.Footnote 31 Bulkeley had no choice but to lament that she had not had ‘the good fortune to have been well known to Sir William Godolphin’, but she was well aware, as already mentioned, of her blood connection with the late ambassador and did not miss the opportunity to reinforce it by assuring her correspondent that she had been addressed on more than one occasion by the diplomat through mutual friends. These were the Staffords: Henry, who was Comptroller of the King’s Household, and Mary, who served as governess of Princess Louise Marie.Footnote 32 That may or may not have been true, but it should be noted that Bulkeley was probably aware that Mary Stafford did appear in Godolphin’s will as beneficiary of some goods and a small sum of money ‘in memory of the friendship he professed with the Earl [sic.] Stafford, father of the said lady, and of the esteem in which he held him’.Footnote 33 It was therefore in Bulkeley’s interest to emphasise a mutual bond between herself and the Staffords and to intimate an indirect relationship with the late diplomat through their mediation when she realised that her main trump card, kinship, had failed to gain her access to the inheritance. If she was to have a chance, she had to diversify her strategy by securing the support of useful and reliable intermediaries like the Staffords and by presenting herself as a person worthy of receiving a share of the legacies – worthy because she was poverty-stricken, but worthy also because she enjoyed a privileged courtly position in the Queen’s entourage.
Meredith was the best candidate to act as mediator, and Bulkeley’s previous links with him were the best guarantee for the success of her claims. He was a privileged liaison between Saint-Germain, where Bulkeley resided; Rome, where a significant portion of the deceased’s estate was held; and Madrid, where the much sought-after bequests were being managed. On the one hand, as Holt has already suggested and as Meredith’s own correspondence with the lady suggests, at least between 1691 and 1693, and probably as late as 1695, Meredith had been based at Saint-Germain, even though the extent of his integration into its courtly circles is unknown.Footnote 34 On the other hand, and perhaps most significantly, Godolphin’s executors had granted Meredith express power to administer those five thousand gold doubloons placed in the deposits of the Monte di Pietà of St. Peter in Rome to be distributed among various Catholic charities connected with the evangelising missions sponsored by the Society of Jesus in the British Isles.Footnote 35 Finally, the ambassador’s former secretary was an even more useful contact because of his constant communication with one of the executors, Francis Arthur, whose English-speaking status had made him, in turn, a convenient go-between with both the British legatees and those petitioning for a share, including Bulkeley.Footnote 36 Given these three favourable conditions, it seems logical that Bulkeley chose Meredith to mediate on her behalf.
All the letters Bulkeley sent to Meredith between September 1697 and September 1698 repeat an argument for her claim based on two points: her right by blood-tie to Godolphin’s inheritance and her alleged straitened financial circumstances. The first point, proven by her unquestionable kinship with the deceased, was established from the very start of the correspondence. As for the second, she never missed the opportunity to insist with morbid prolixity and high doses of pathos on the poverty into which she and, by extension, her family and the court of Saint-Germain had fallen. In this regard, Bulkeley is a good example of the practical value, especially for nobles, of an extensive and up-to-date genealogical knowledge of their kinship networks—however sporadic or even non-existent the contact—for use in matters of emergency.Footnote 37 Thus, resort to consanguinity was merely a means of justifying a demand for relief, which Bulkeley conveyed to Meredith bluntly, leaving no room for argument: he was supposed to ‘do your best to help me & mine with part of the money Sir William Godolphin has left in your power to dispose of to charitable uses’, for ‘without partiality I might flatly say; I do not know anybody wants more than myself’. She claimed to have large personal debts amounting to £21,585 which she considered herself unable to repay to her creditors.Footnote 38
Although Bulkeley endeavoured to press the uniqueness of her case for well-founded reasons, it should not be forgotten that she was not alone in feeling the financial pinch in Saint-Germain: a significant portion of the increasingly overpopulated exiled court were also in dire financial straits. The number of both the courtiers who earned salaries for services rendered above or below stairs to the Crown or Royal family, and the pensioners, i.e. refugees of several sorts outside the court, had been increasing exponentially during the 1690s. On the one hand, from June 1695, once he had reached the age of seven, James Francis Edward, Prince of Wales, had been provided with his own household independent of his mother’s and accordingly managed by a new set of courtiers who had to be assigned new salaries.Footnote 39 On the other hand, William III’s invasion in 1688 had brought with it both the restoration of the Penal Laws and the passing of the Toleration Act of 1689, which stripped Catholics of the freedom of conscience they had enjoyed in the previous years, leading to the arrival in Saint-Germain of a steady trickle of Catholic refugees from the British Isles. The generalised poverty was to intensify from 1696 onwards, when, following the discovery of a plot against the life of William III by the followers of James II, Whitehall confiscated the properties of the courtiers serving at the exiled court.Footnote 40 This was all the more critical for the pensioners, especially the aggrieved Irish Catholics who, in addition to witnessing the systematic removal of their estates since the enactment of the Treaty of Limerick (1691), saw in April 1697 how their Parliament passed a bill suppressing all the communities of regulars based there.Footnote 41 Their hasty arrival in Saint-Germain in the following months was recorded by Bulkeley, who expressed concern about the Queen’s excessive involvement with them:
The Queen can hardly allow herself necessities; that she may be the more able to […] feed the most hungry, which are all in a manner Irish people, who have been all along & now by their being excluded their own by the peace & have not so much as liberty to go into Ireland to beg their bread, are by these means all a heavy burthen on the King & Queen, especially on the Queen, who takes care to clothe 50 & 80 at a time giving them all such necessities as is proper to keep them warm.Footnote 42
By explaining Mary Beatrice d’Este’s lack of means at such a demanding juncture, Bulkeley was most likely responding to the insinuations of Meredith who, although willing to help her, had urged her to turn to the Queen’s purse to alleviate her financial straits. ‘It is true’, she replied in December 1697, ‘that the Queen my gracious mistress is very charitable & gives to many that ask her help’ but ‘I cannot for my life bring myself to beg one farthing of her Majesty & content myself with my salary, of which the 5th part has been retrenched since you were here’.Footnote 43 These words sum up well the narrative that Bulkeley wanted to convey to her correspondent from the start: her mistress could give, but she was not going to ask, even if her distressing financial situation made it advisable. This way of behaving should perhaps be interpreted partly as an attempt in a person of her status to preserve a certain decorum and, at the same time, to express her altruistic attitude towards those, such as the Irish pensioners of lower social rank, whose need might be greater than hers; and such behaviour was in line with contemporary courtly manuals which taught that ‘that pride which leads to a good end cannot be a vice since it is the beginning of a virtue’.Footnote 44 Perhaps it was to avoid denting her pride that Bulkeley chose not to address Meredith directly in the first place, but only in a postscript to a letter of introduction written by her friend Anne Sackville.Footnote 45 However, saving her face at court does not seem to have been a matter of prime concern to her given that her correspondence with Meredith became an increasingly intimate and graphic portrait of her penury.
Anne Sackville did not hesitate to blame Bulkeley’s poverty on her family obligations: ‘having six children, four of them men and women, her husband a younger brother, and all she can get is to maintain her spouse in the Tower for the King, where he was a twelve month, so I leave you to judge how she lives’.Footnote 46 If she was drowning in debt, it was because of her pressing need to meet a series of expenses to care for her dependents, including a husband absent from court. It is true that this factor, in principle, should not be considered a problem, let alone an exception. Indeed, other female courtiers such as the Countesses of Tyrconnell and Almond, also dames of honour with whom Bulkeley compared herself, were similarly bereft of a husband. The former had been widowed some years earlier and the latter, an Italian, had been estranged from her husband since her move to Whitehall as part of Mary Beatrice d’Este’s retinue in late 1673.Footnote 47 However, Bulkeley explained that neither of them was in real need, for in addition to their respective salaries of £4,116 a year, identical to her own for holding the same courtly post, ‘my Lady Tyrconnell has a portion of six hundred pistols a year from the court of France of long standing; & my Lady Almond may be relieved by her husband; so that I am the only one of the ladies that is in such very ill circumstances’.Footnote 48 In other words, they enjoyed or could expect to enjoy a financial supplement that Henry Bulkeley was unable to provide his wife. On the contrary, instead of swelling her salary, he was contributing to its depletion, if Sackville’s account be true that during his imprisonment in the Tower it was his wife who paid for his upkeep.Footnote 49 What is more, Bulkeley was even denied the mere prospect of resorting to Protestant acquaintances to receive the income from the administration of her husband’s estates in Britain—a stratagem employed by other exiled courtiers such as the Earls of Middleton and Perth—because her husband, as a second brother, could benefit from no land revenue whatsoever.Footnote 50 Finally, being obliged to provide for the dowry of four daughters, a charge from which Tyrconnell and Almond were exempt at the time, did not help.Footnote 51 In fact, she had had to ‘settle a thousand livres a year upon [her daughter Charlotte] out of my salary’, to fund the dowry of her marriage in January 1696 to Charles O’Brien, Viscount Clare.Footnote 52 It is not surprising, therefore, that she complained about her salary, not because, unlike that of the Irish pensioners, it had been cut, but because her personal expenses depended entirely on it.Footnote 53
Lady Sophia Bulkeley’s continual lamentations were aimed at making Meredith aware of the exceptionality of her situation. Just as in her first letter of 19 September 1697 she had told him ‘I do not know anybody wants more than myself’, so two and a half months later, on 1 December, she did not hesitate to consider herself ‘as poor as anybody can be’.Footnote 54 By the beginning of the new year 1698, she still came with the same old story—‘I am considerably in debt’—with the added worrying uncertainty about how long she would be able to continue paying her creditors, unless ‘it please God you receive the legacy Sir William Godolphin left you for charities’ for ‘without partiality, I don’t know a greater object than myself at this time’.Footnote 55 Such were her financial constraints that, at the beginning of February, she could not help admitting that ‘I never play nor make any sort of fuss nor wear fine clothes’ and that she only spent ‘but what is just necessary for the support of my family, which are many […], being resolved not to increase my debts’ and ‘it being supposed we [courtiers in general] must live on that salary we receive’.Footnote 56 A few months later, in early June, her situation seemed to be untenable, her perennial debts being ‘never more pressing upon me than now’. Her final plea was her plainest: ‘you may safely set down if you please in your list, that you have given so much to a widow, a near relation of Sir William Godolphin’s, who is left poor, with 6 children & a considerable debt’.Footnote 57 It should be stated that, even though Bulkeley did not make explicit use of her gender as a victimising factor in her pursuit of her share, it remains implicit in much of her narrative, as was customary in female appeals for assistance at the time.Footnote 58
III. Bulkeley’s confessional value as a potential proselytiser
It is quite probable that Bulkeley’s pleas only helped to confirm Meredith in a decision that he had already made. Regardless of the urgency of Bulkeley’s approaches to him, he would already have been well convinced of the convenience of assisting her for his own reasons. It seems reasonable that Meredith was from the outset aware of the potential confessional value of helping Bulkeley and, above all, of not letting her escape. After all, one condition distinguished her case from that of other courtiers at Saint-Germain: the Queen’s dame of honour, self-portrayed from the beginning of their correspondence as a de facto widow in her husband’s absence, soon became a de jure widow and, what is more, of a man who had decided before his death to abjure Catholicism. Whether for reasons of expediency after his imprisonment in the Tower or out of conviction, Henry Bulkeley, who had resided in London at least since his removal there as a Jacobite spy in 1695, had in 1696 subscribed to the Association. The Association was an oath inserted into the Security of the King and Government Act passed the previous year, in which various Whitehall courtiers and prominent figures in English politics confirmed their unconditional support for King William III after the failed plot against his life had been exposed.Footnote 59 When news reached Saint-Germain that Henry Bulkeley had changed political allegiances, his wife began to fear that this switch might be coupled with religious doubts, and so, on learning in January 1698 that he had been suffering ‘a continual pain in his stomach ever since he was in the Tower a prisoner’, she lamented that nothing ‘afflicts me more than the apprehensions he should die out of the true Church’.Footnote 60 Bulkeley’s apprehensions were justified, as her husband abjured Catholicism and converted to Protestantism before his death in May 1698. Although his widow was reluctant to believe the news, ‘it being a Protestant’s letter’ that had reported the event, rumours were soon confirmed, especially when it became known that the deceased’s last wish had been that his son should follow in his footsteps.Footnote 61
As well as representing an individual failure for those, like Meredith, who advocated for the advance of Catholicism in the British Isles, the case of Henry Bulkeley was a problem in so far as it threatened to spread to his immediate family. To forestall the pernicious knock-on effect of the deathbed conversion of the husband of one of the exiled Queen’s main advisers, who was well placed in the court of Saint-Germain and had an increasingly large and distinguished family, would have been a priority for Jesuit Meredith. He sought to engage Bulkeley’s widow as a useful means of advancing Catholicism in the British Isles. As she was well positioned at the court of Saint-Germain, she could serve as an influential promotor of the evangelising missions in Britain to which the bulk of Godolphin’s capital was to be allocated. Bulkeley enjoyed the support of Meredith’s co-religionists Francis Saunders (1648-1710), the King’s confessor, and Ralph Postgate (1648-1718), rector of the English College in Rome, and, of course, Irish Franciscan Anthony Nash, her own confessor and chaplain to the Queen. Bulkeley also had growing close family ties with the leading Jacobite noble families and with the Crown itself. One daughter, Charlotte Bulkeley, had already wed Viscount Clare, a colonel of one of James II’s Irish regiments in France; another, Anne, was to marry James FitzJames, Duke of Berwick, the eldest of the King’s illegitimate offspring, in 1698, therefore bonding her to royal blood.Footnote 62
In any case, it was Bulkeley’s ascendancy over Mary Beatrice d’Este that most interested Meredith. As dame of honour to the Queen, her role was to accompany her at all times, acting on a daily basis as her informal secretary and serving as her confidant. The pre-eminence she enjoyed allowed her to be among the select group of courtiers who witnessed the birth of the Prince of Wales in June 1688. By the late 1690s, their bond strengthened to the extent that the Queen would often delegate to Bulkeley tasks such as writing accounts of courtly events and communicating on her behalf with nearby convents such as the Chaillot abbey of Augustinian Canonesses, near Paris, where Princess Louise Marie lodged for long periods of time. In addition, she appointed Bulkeley’s daughter lady of the bedchamber after her marriage to Berwick, treating her, as Strickland noted, ‘almost as if she had been a daughter of her own’.Footnote 63 This increasingly intimate relationship paid off when Bulkeley sought to claim a portion of Godolphin’s fortune that remained inaccessible to the executors of his will. So it was that, according to the lady herself, in September 1697 the Queen,
upon farther parcels hearing said that she believed that the Great Duke [Grand Duke of Tuscany] had had a confiscation of ten thousand crowns of Sir William Godolphin’s money in a bank at Florence, the Queen was graciously pleased of her own self to send to the Great Duke to give it to me, being Sir William’s relation.Footnote 64
The 20,000 florins of capital that Godolphin had been placing at 3% per annum in Florence’s monte subsidio vitalicio between 1693 and 1694 had been withheld because, according to local bankers Montauti and Corboli, who were responsible for managing it, their contract with the diplomat had expired only forty days before his death and he had not renewed it either on his own behalf or on behalf of another person.Footnote 65 The money was therefore not initially available, but could become so thanks to the mediation of Bulkeley and, ultimately, of the exiled Queen, who undertook to write personally to the Grand Duke of Tuscany to release the capital for the benefit of her needy protégée. Although it is not known whether the sum was eventually collected, it is certain that, following the intervention of Maria Beatrice d’Este, Meredith learned that it was available, since the grand duke had ‘sent word no money in any bank of Florence could be confiscated; for if Sir William had money there, it must go to his next heir in law & not to him’.Footnote 66 Bulkeley had proved to be a useful and well-connected acquaintance, not only to Godolphin’s former secretary, but also to his executors. For this reason, it was worth keeping in touch with her and, when the time came, rewarding her, not so much for her needy condition than for her privileged role and position within the Queen’s entourage at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a position that could make her a potential proselytising force in a difficult context for the advancement of Catholicism in England.
The disruptive force of war in Europe, coupled with a series of setbacks in the administration of Godolphin’s last will, delayed the money’s delivery to Saint-Germain for several years. Since all mail from the French court was routinely intercepted by Whitehall owing to the prevailing war between England and France, prolonged de facto despite the enactment of the Treaty of Rijswijk (30 October 1697), communications between the exiled courtiers of Saint-Germain and their contacts in the British Isles were largely impossible.Footnote 67 So much so that Bulkeley herself noted that if her sister, then living in London, had not resumed contact with her to help her during all these years, it had been because of ‘the terrible fright she has all these war times’.Footnote 68 Moreover, the circulation of money was no less problematic. Back in 1695, Godolphin had already expressed his doubts about the safety of any future funding of the Catholic missions on the Continent, and it was his executor Francis Arthur who, knowingly, advised Meredith to manage the sums allocated to him with the utmost caution, taking care not to mention the name of Saint-Germain in his correspondence.Footnote 69 The administration of the will had to be carried out with a high degree of secrecy, measuring every movement and keeping an eye on those of the other parties involved.
Not surprisingly, all these logistical hurdles were compounded by a double setback: the questionable administration of the deceased’s bequests by the executors, who, according to Charles Godolphin, ‘have consolidated their own interest much more than Sir William’s’ and, above all, the contestation of the will by the diplomat’s nephews, backed by the English government, which in 1698 enacted an act of parliament declaring the instrument null and void.Footnote 70 Fortunately for Meredith and Bulkeley, however, these obstacles served to block the capital deposited in Amsterdam and Venice, but not in Rome.Footnote 71 Thanks to the Pope’s intervention by way of a decree of the Camera Apostolica, which in July 1699 deprived the said nephews of access to the money placed in the Monte of St. Peter, Godolphin’s former secretary was able to dispose of it freely and devote it to his Catholic charitable projects, among which was the relief of Bulkeley.Footnote 72 Although the exact amount and timing are unknown, it appears that the impecunious dame of honour did receive her share of the inheritance, as is evidenced by her inclusion in Meredith’s own will. Suffering from the same health problems that had persuaded him to move from Paris to Rome a few years earlier, sometime in 1698, he decided to relocate to Naples, but not before writing a last will. In it, he made sure that:
A lady of quality, and one who has a place of honour about our Queen at St. Germain, being a near relation to Sir W. G. and much straightened by reason of great debts, having made application to me (though with secrecy) for some succour on the occasion of this charity, I promised her, not only in regard of her wants, which considered her likewise an object of charity, but also for some other good reasons, that she should not be forgotten when the distribution was made, but that what could be in conscience should be done for her relief. Wherefore, my will is that her circumstances may be considered by my trustees and such a dividend be appointed for her as shall seem reasonable: but that it may not be less than a hundred louis d’or.Footnote 73
IV. Conclusions
Bulkeley had achieved her goal or at least had a chance of doing so thanks to her insistent appeal with Meredith, and to a number of factors that rendered her, in the eyes of her correspondent and those of the English Jesuit missionaries in general, a useful beneficiary of Godolphin’s legacy. Her case is a paradigmatic example of female courtly agency in a context of necessity, that of the court of Saint-Germain in a convulsive politico-confessional situation. It has been argued throughout the article that this dame of honour was able to derive monetary benefit from a contested inheritance on the basis of four points: her kinship to the deceased, her double condition of poverty and exile, inherent to most of the Jacobites and, above all, her widowhood, first de facto and later de jure, of a courtier of some prominence who, before dying in England, had converted to Protestantism. It was this peculiar confessional circumstance that finally convinced Meredith, as administrator of the money and as one involved in the missions of the Society of Jesus, not only of the convenience, but even of the necessity of sending her the subsidies she was asking for. Meredith’s motives, as strategic as they were charitable, aimed to boost the proselytising value of a well-positioned courtier, and at the same time to prevent her late husband’s conversion to Protestantism from having its own proselytising effect and undermining the stability of Catholicism at the exiled court and, consequently, the stability of the Jesuit missions and British Catholicism in general.
The case of Lady Sophia Bulkeley strengthens the assumption, which could be extrapolated to other similar cases, that the readiness to provide funding for needy British Catholics, especially if it came from sources related to the Catholic Church, depended on the confessional value of the recipient as measured by his or her capacity to influence the propagation of the faith. In other words, money would have become for the missionaries an instrument to guarantee the dissemination of Catholic doctrine. At the same time, for exiled British courtiers the confessional wavering, provoked by difficult circumstances, would have emerged as a new factor to be stressed and, to a certain extent, exaggerated, alongside their exile and poverty in order to obtain further funding. If Meredith decided to support Bulkeley, it was ultimately because she had taken care to represent to him the confessional relevance of her case as the widow of a Protestant convert and an influential figure within Queen Maria Beatrice d’Este’s entourage. The extent to which the mechanisms governing the missionary activity of the Catholic Church in the British Isles after 1688 were marked by this reciprocal play of interests and the extent to which those involved were aware of it, is difficult to assess in the light of only one particular case. Nevertheless, it does pave the way for further research that might provide a broader and more detailed account of the funding of the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain and its link with the Catholic missions, as well as of female Jacobite agency, which, until recent years, has not sufficiently attracted the attention of historians.
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