William without Mary: Mourning Sensibly in the Public Sphere

Her sudden death produced a vast outpouring of grief. In death as in life, she remained the focus of intense media scrutiny. After months' worth of flowery condolences had heaped up at her home in Kensington Palace, the procession and funeral at Westminster Abbey included members of both houses of Parliament1 and featured the work of famous musicians who wrote and rewrote songs in her memory.2 Grieving subjects consoled themselves with images of her in wax,3 prints,4 medals,5 and other media, not least of which were verbal texts: newspaper accounts,6 speeches,7 biographies,8 over 110 elegies and funeral sermons,9 and even three self-help books for those in mourning.10 The media thereby provided grandstanding politicians and divines the chance to gain personally and politically from her demise, debating what it meant and who was ultimately to blame.The fact that her death also called forth a treatise on smallpox11 should make it clear that the woman in question is Queen Mary II, who died unexpectedly of the disease on 28 December 1694. She left behind a swooning, almost inconsolable husband, unable to attend to business for weeks. Not only did the Court enter into a mourning that lasted two years,12 but the country was deeply affected, coming in droves to view her body as it lay crowned on a bed of state at Whitehall and to attend the grandest funeral in living memory. Dr Johnson would later say that Mary's death 'produced a subject for all the writers; no funeral was ever so poetically attended'.13 At the time, one Gloucester gentleman wrote that while 'the sorrow was begun' in London, it 'doth not dwell there; it spreads apace, and these remoter parts equally feel the loss'. 'The throne', he insisted, 'never was nor ever will be filled with so much virtue . . . She seemed not only born to rule but to reform a corrupted age; some murmured at her life, but all suffer on her death'.14This essay will examine the contours of that suffering in the mass of often undistinguished poetry produced in the year after her death.15 In elegies, pindarics, pastorals, epicedia, advice-to-a-painter poems, and other genres, young poets such as Congreve, Steele, Prior, and Cibber joined more established ones such as Tate and Dennis, as well as two anonymous women, in celebrating Mary's virtues, lamenting her loss, and throwing their support behind the grieving William.16 Their verses functioned as works of both mourning and propaganda, a main audience for which was the middle sort:17 a group given new importance by the financial arrangements necessary to pursue William's war with France; a group whose women readers constituted a growing segment of the print market and perhaps 13% of the government's creditors in the years 1693-94.18 In all of its self-conscious and at times meta-literary sentiment, the literature on the death of Mary departs from earlier royal mournings and carves a place for itself in the history of the public sphere and the discourse of sensibility that anticipates the mourning for Princess Charlotte in 1817 and Princess Diana in 1997.19While some of the Marian elegies describe the Queen as a martyr resting within the sublime precincts of Heaven20 or make grand comparisons to redoubtable women from the Bible, myth, and history, such as Deborah, the Virgin Mary, Juno, Athena, Diana, Astraea, and Elizabeth,21 many others draw a humbler picture, ascribing to the Queen a set of middle-sort virtues that locate them and her within the emerging discourse of sensibility, a source of many of the emotive gestures to be discussed here. In a number of ways, Mary had resembled many citizens of this newly polite and commercial nation, sewing, reading improving tracts, giving alms to the poor, managing her husband's concerns in his absence, and in general working hard at her job. Having spent a decade as a mere princess in bourgeois Holland, she undoubtedly possessed middling virtues such as frugality, efficiency, punctuality, discretion, prudence, temperance, sobriety, politeness, humility, piety, and charity. …