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