This mezzotint expresses grief at the death of Mary II
(1662-1694), Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, aged only 32
years. She had had a difficult life. Born a Stuart princess, she
had to leave London at the age of three to escape the Great Plague,
and went to live in Yorkshire. During her childhood, her mother
suffered from breast cancer from which she died in 1671 when Mary
was nine. Mary grew to 5 foot 11 inches, very tall for a woman of
that time.
At the age of 15 she was married to the Dutch Protestant
Stadhouder William of Orange, who later became King William III of
England: her size and his ugliness led her sister Anne to call the
pair of them 'the Monsters'. When her father, King James II was
deposed for his Catholicism in 1688, his replacement by Mary and
her husband exposed her divided loyalties, at least until her
father tried to have her husband assassinated.
In addition, she experienced migraine-like attacks that impaired
her eyesight; two miscarriages in 1678 and 1679; and chronic guilt
over what was seen as her betrayal of her father. She hated the
drunkenness, coarseness and promiscuity of the court and of English
society, which she tried to reform, with limited success. She
finally experienced a fulminating bout of smallpox that lasted for
ten days at the end of December 1694, from which she died.
On her death, many people realised how much they owed her for
trying to keep the country together despite deep divisions on
almost all political and religious questions. Her funeral
procession to Westminster Abbey took place in a raging snowstorm
and was followed by a ceremony designed by Sir Christopher Wren,
with music by Henry Purcell. The present print, inscribed with a
lament - 'Pastora is no more!' - from Purcell's anthem, serves as a
memento of that moving occasion.