Join us for a great talk with the historian Breeze Barrington talking about her book: The Graces , which brings the talented women of the Restoration Court gracefully to life.
In this members' exclusive lecture, drawing on her book Graces, Breeze explores the deeply fraught relationship between Catholic worship and sacred space in late seventeenth-century England through the life of Maria of Modena. As a Catholic duchess, and later queen, living in a resolutely Protestant country, Maria’s religious life was shaped by compromise, concealment, and quiet resistance.
From praying in makeshift private spaces as Duchess of York to commissioning artworks that subtly ‘Catholicised’ royal chapels once she became queen, this lecture traces how faith was practised, negotiated, and made visible at court. Breeze also considers public access to royal chapels during Catholic mass, pilgrimages to holy wells, and the ways local churches became sites of tension and dissent in the years leading up to 1688. Together, these stories reveal how places of worship could become contested spaces, where religion, politics, and everyday life collided.
Anne Killigrew, the artist who painted ‘Venus Attired by the Graces’ in the Falmouth Art Gallery collection, was a pioneering painter and poet of the Restoration Court. Killigrew was a great favourite of the future queen, Mary of Modena, who was a patron of her work and encouraged her talent. At a time when few women had access to education, Anne Killigrew began a promising career as one of the foremost artists of her generation.
She came from a family steeped in the court. Her uncle, Thomas, was a renowned playwright, a friend of Charles II and manager of the King’s Theatre, and was one of the key figures in licensing women actors. Her father, Henry, was the Protestant almoner to the Catholic James, Duke of York. Her aunt, Elizabeth, had been one of Charles II’s mistresses in exile and mother of one of his many illegitimate children. They were restoration courtiers in the truest sense of the phrase. Their origins, by contrast, were rather murky, for the Killigrews were an ancient Cornish family, who had ruled the south- western shores of Falmouth as pirates for two centuries.
In this talk, Dr Breeze Barrington will discuss the life and legacy, of this brilliant young woman who, though she died tragically young at just 25 during an outbreak of smallpox, achieved great things.
