There is no record of Frances Jennings birth or baptism, but she was born sometime in 1648 or 1649, in the shadow of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. She was the third of nine children, five of whom would survive infancy, born to Richard and Frances Jennings of St Albans in Hertfordshire. Richard Jennings was the eldest son of a minor gentry family who owned the manor of Holywell House in St Albans, as well as property in Somerset and Surrey. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1634, long before he turned his thoughts to marriage and fatherhood, and then passed three years in Italy, before returning to England in 1640. Two years later, he succeeded his father as MP for St Albans. In London in December 1643, Richard married the 18-year-old Frances Thornhurst, an heiress who was six years his junior. The young woman represented a good match; her father, Sir Gifford Thorhnhurst, had died when she was still an infant and she had inherited a lease of lives on the manor of Agney in Old Romney, Kent. Her mother, Susanna, was a member of the Temple family of Sussex and older half-sister of the regicide, James Temple, and served as a maid of honour to Anne of Denmark at the court of James I before her first marriage. Susanna was still a young woman when widowed in 1627 and remarried to Sir Martin Lister of Thorpe Arnold in Leicestershire in 1636. This marriage produced a number of children, among them a son who would become the celebrated physician and naturalist, Dr Martin Lister.

The Jennnings’ first daughter, Susanna, was born in Westminster in February 1645, and was followed into the world by a son, John, who was born in Sir Martin and Susanna Lister’s home in Thorpe Arnold and baptised in the village church in October 1647. Frances came next, but the date of her birth can only be approximated as taking place between the summer of 1648 and the end of 1649. No baptismal record exists for the Jennings’s next child, Barbara, either, but it can be said with some certainty that she was born in 1651, as she was described as being ‘ab[ou]t 22’ at the time of her marriage in 1673.

The passage of the act of resumption in 1700 did not create a clear path back to Ireland for the duchess of Tyrconnell and it would be a full two years before she set foot in Dublin. Much occurred in the intervening period, not least the death of the rival kings, James II and William III. James succumbed first, in September 1701 and William died from pneumonia six months later, in March 1702; a complication from a broken collarbone following a fall from his horse. It was the death of another king, however, that would determine the course of European politics for the next fourteen years, rupturing the peace that had been effected by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 and drawing the great powers back into conflict. The War of the Spanish Succession erupted in Europe in 1701, following the death of the childless Charles II of Spain. Diplomatic solutions had been sought in anticipation of Charles’ death, as both Louis XIV and the Emperor Leopold I of Austria had married the Spanish king’s sisters, Maria Teresa and Margaret Teresa, and each could claim the throne for their descendants.

In 1698, France, England and the Dutch Republic signed The Treaty of The Hague, agreeing that the grandson of Leopold I, Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, would inherit Spain. The Bavarian prince died of smallpox in 1699, however, and the French, English and Dutch delegations went back to the drawing board, signing the Treaty of London in 1700, which recognised the claim of Leopold’s younger son, Archduke Charles. Having amended his will in favour of Joseph Ferdinand and then Archduke Charles, the ailing Spanish king came under pressure from pro-French courtiers, led by Cardinal Fernández Portocarerro. Charles II experienced a deathbed change of heart and altered his will to appoint Louis XIV’s grandson, Philippe, duc d’Anjou, as his successor. Louis might have been willing to honour the Treaty of London if he could have relied on the English and Dutch to back him in a territorial dispute with the Holy Roman Emperor, but he found that his co-signatories were not prepared to go to war on his behalf.

T.N.A., C 11/1684/3

Hussey v Berkeley, 1757

Seventeen Tomes of the Lives of Saints in French

Eleven Tomes of the Christian Years in French

four separate Tomes of Scripture with a Commentary in French

The Work of Rable [Rabelais] in French four tomes

An Office of Holy Week in Latin and French

The Works of Plato in French two tomes

The Character of Theofrastis in French three tomes

Two Tomes of the Kingdom of Sion

Four Tomes of the Holy Scripture in French

Two Broken Tomes of the History of Lewis the 13 in French

The History of the Great Mogul in Two Tomes in French

Considerations on the Sundays and Holydays in French one Tome

Consulls History in French one Tome

Two broken Tomes of Treaties of Peace in French

One Tome of the Exercises of Penances in French

The Evangelical Day in French one Tome

a Book of Mecellanies in French

The Moral of the Gospel in French One Tome

Rishletts Letters two Tomes

The Life of Madam Miramiss one Tome

Rabutires Letters in French One Tome

a Receipt Book in French

A Small Office of the Holy Week in French

a Project of Reunion betwixt Protestants and Roman Catholicks in French

The Jesuits upon the Scaffold in French

An Apology for Catholicks in French

a French Catechism

French in Verse

a Treatise of Communion in French under both Species

a little Book of Confraternity in French

Another little Book of the like Sort

The Letters of Paulin and Alexis in French

The History of Lady Grey in Italian

One folio of the Holy Ghost

The History of the Holy Bible in French one folio

Heylin’s Life one folio

As with her reputed life of piety in Dublin, the duchess of Tyrconnell’s death has become a central but erroneous feature of her biography. It appears that it was Horace Walpole who first attributed her death to a fall, in the middle of the night. Walpole described her as being ‘of very low stature and extremely thin’ at the time of her death, remarking that ‘she had not the least trace in her features of having ever been a beauty’. He claimed that on falling, she was too feeble to get back up or to cry out and that she perished, alone. In fact, the 82-year-old Frances died at 1am on 7 March 1731, and in the hours surrounding her death she was attended by a surgeon and a nurse, by some of her family, and by members of the legal profession. All of the extant accounts indicate that, although she was physically feeble, she was alert and lucid in her interactions until her very last hour on earth. The population of her final days reveals much about her interior world: her faith, her material life, and the dynamics at play within her family.

The disputes that arose following the duchess of Tyrconnell’s death were born of the ill-feeling between her and her daughters Dillon and Kingsland, which had bubbled for years and bled through different branches and generations of their family. Consequently, most surviving accounts of Frances’s death come from those who had something material to gain from it, so objectivity is lacking and the facts are often fudged, or at least massaged into a more palatable ‘truth’. As with much of Frances’s later life, the report on her final illness comes from her daughter Dillon, who recounted that her mother ‘fell ill the munday beffore of a violent cold which fell on her Longs & could not spitt, complained of a paine in her side and had a fevour along with it, butt had been very unwell ever since Christmass’. This bout of ill-health prompted her to leave her house in Grafton Street at the beginning of January 1731. Moving to smaller lodgings, she dismissed her servants and sent away her granddaughter, Frances Barnewall, although Lady Dillon believed that this latter action was less about a lack of space and more that ‘her minde was changed’ as to the young woman.

The decline in plague dead by the spring of 1666 promised an upturn in London’s fortunes; as it was, the year became one of the city’s worst. The morbid procession of the plague was followed by the rampant destruction of the Great Fire, which broke out in Pudding Lane just after midnight on 2 September. The fire, described by John Evelyn as ‘a miserable and calamitous spectacle, such as haply the world had not seen since the foundation of it’, raged through the medieval City of London for three days, before dying winds helped to bring it under control. At its height, the clouds of smoke generated by the blaze were fifty miles in length and the sky at night ‘was light as day for ten miles round about’. Upriver, Whitehall and Westminster were threatened, but in the end the king and his court sat far enough from the City to escape the devastation. Among them was Frances Jennings, newly married to George Hamilton, living in a house in Dean’s Yard beside Westminster Abbey, and in the early months of her first pregnancy. Frances likely watched the smoke-filled London sky and heard stories of destruction as the fire spread through the City, ‘leaping’ as Evelyn put it, ‘after a prodigious manner, from house to house and from street to street, at great distances’. She could not have known then that her marriage and the political fallout of the disaster would conspire to change her life irrevocably, taking her away from England and into France.

Frances’s new husband, George Hamilton, was a member of a Scots-Irish family of noble rank. Probably born in Roscrea, County Tipperary in the 1630s, he was the second son of Sir George Hamilton of Donalong, County Tyrone, (who was himself the fourth son of James, earl of Abercorn), and Mary (née Butler). Through his mother he was the nephew of James Butler, duke of Ormond. Marrying just two years after her arrival in London, Frances had adhered to at least part of the maxim attributed to her in the Memoirs: she had entered the court with the advantage of youth and was ‘not [too] old to leave it with a good grace’.

On 9 February 1841 a play entitled The white milliner debuted at the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden. From the pen of the popular dramatist, Douglas Jerrold, the comedy in two acts was set in the year 1707, and told the story of a woman of quality who was alleged to have established herself as a milliner near London’s Strand, on the New Exchange. There, dressed in white and disguised by a mask of the same colour, the lady ‘supported herself till she was known, and otherwise provided for’. In the preface to the playbill, Jerrold revealed the source of the story to be no less a figure than the antiquarian, man of letters and Whig MP, Horace Walpole, who had claimed that the woman in disguise was Frances Talbot (née Jennings), Jacobite duchess of Tyrconnell (c.1649–1731). Jerrold’s play ‘made a favourable impression on the public’ but was not well received by London’s critics, a circumstance that infuriated him, but which he had anticipated. He accused a ‘small faction’ of ‘despicable partisanship’ in their treatment of his work, but the truth of the matter was less conspiratorial, at least where The white milliner was concerned: the play was just not very good. It nevertheless travelled across the Atlantic in 1842, where a production staged at The New Chestnut Theatre in Philadelphia was deemed ‘trite’ by a critic for The dramatic mirror and literary companion. This less partisan reviewer added that it was ‘in no manner … likely to keep possession of the stage for any length of time’.

While Douglas Jerrold’s production was a failure, it was also a product of an enduring fascination in Regency and Victorian Britain and Ireland with Jacobitism and with the woman known as the ‘duchess of Tyrconnell’. The duchess was an undeniably compelling subject: the daughter of Hertfordshire gentry, her second marriage to the Irishman Richard Talbot precipitated a remarkable ascent to power under the Catholic king, James II and VII. Their rise brought with it wealth and power, with Richard taking charge of the Irish army in 1685, before becoming lord deputy of Ireland in 1687; at which point Frances became vicereine.

Appendix C: David Nairne’s ‘Cyffer w[i]th the D[uche]sse of Tyrconnel, 5th August 1702’

The death of George Hamilton on the Saverne on 1 June 1676 was mourned by many, including the French king. On 9 June the official historian to Louis XIV, Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, wrote from the French camp at Néer Hassel that

The Irishman had acquitted himself bravely in his service to the French crown and showed much promise as an officer. No one suffered more in the aftermath of his death than Frances: as Pellisson-Fontanier noted, ‘his wife was spoken of … as reduced by his death to a deplorable condition, and without anything’. Shortly afterwards, the English ambassador to France, Lord Berkeley, reported that Frances was in the house of John Brisbane, secretary to the English embassy in Paris, and was ‘distracted for the loss of her husband’. Berkeley’s remarks suggest that the young woman bore her grief publicly, and this is echoed in the correspondence of Marie Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné. On 1 July 1676 she reported to her daughter, Françoise, comtesse de Grignan, that ‘Madame Hamilton is inconsolable, and ruined beyond redemption; she really is to be pitied’. Less than a week later, de Sévigné commented again on ‘poor madame Hamilton’, who was ‘universally pitied on account of her melancholy situation’.

Accounts of the 27-year-old Frances Hamilton’s grief reveal a woman distraught over what she had lost, and over that which she might never have again: security. Frances had grown up in a family of reduced fortune, but familiarity did not make the prospect of penury any less affecting; if anything, it seems to have made it worse. Her sister Sarah’s ‘insecurity about money’ and ‘terror of debt and bankruptcy’ has been explained as ‘a fear of being beholden to others’, fuelled ‘by her wider sense that her life had been the property of others, that money alone freed her and her family from the vagaries of favour’.

The duchess of Tyrconnell’s return to Dublin in 1708, when she was aged around sixty, occasioned a curious development in accounts of her life, whereby she is consistently presented as a static figure, committed to a life of piety while waiting to die. In Little Jennings, Sergeant describes the last two decades of her life thus:

Sergeant’s remarks on the duchess of Tyrconnell’s old age were based on earlier accounts, including her biography in Anna Brownell Jameson’s nineteenth-century Court Beauties of Charles II. It was a representation of her later life that took root. In a brief article on ‘Fanny Jennings’, published in the 1960s, Leon Ó Broin similarly reflected that ‘so far as can be ascertained, she never left Ireland again in the twenty-odd years of life that remained to her’, adding that ‘Our knowledge of her movements in the period after 1708 is very fragmentary’. Ó Broin’s observation on the fragmentariness of the record is not entirely incorrect; there are periods in which Frances disappears from view. There remains, however, substantive evidence of her life in old age and her death in 1731; this evidence shines a light on her familial relationships and friendships, her religious practice, her mobility, her estate management and financial transactions, and her material world.

The claim that her ‘history practically ceases’ or is ‘very fragmentary’ following her return to Dublin is underpinned by a past tendency among scholars to look away from the archive once all the men of consequence have quit the scene. It is no coincidence that the material facts of Frances’s life ceased to be important once she had done her job for the duke of Marlborough and the exiled Stuarts, and returned to Ireland.

News travelled slowly and unreliably in the seventeenth century, but rumours of Tyrconnell’s death had reached London by early September, when Lady Rosse wrote to her aunt Sarah Churchill, by then countess of Marlborough, and revealed that ‘I was ‘til now in ye greatest grief imaginable at ye news … but I begin to hope it is not soe, though still in some feare’. Any hope was, of course, ill-founded. By mid-month, word of the lord lieutenant’s death circulated at the French court and presumably reached the duchess of Tyrconnell at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. There is no record of Frances’s reaction to the news of her husband’s death, but there is enough evidence of their relationship to infer that she grieved sincerely. Richard Talbot’s devotion to her at the Restoration court was apparently genuine and his pursuit of her in Paris many years later, when both were widowed, resulted in a mutually beneficial marriage. When it happened, the couple’s return to England and then Ireland in 1683/84 marked the beginning of a remarkable ascent to power, one that was founded on mutual respect, trust and a belief in the other’s ability. This was evident in the letter that Frances wrote to Richard in May 1689, but it was borne out more fully by the role she played in his political manoeuvrings. The Sheridan affair demonstrated that his enemies were her enemies and that she was very capable of working to undermine those who opposed her and her husband; the earl of Melfort’s correspondence with James in 1690 sought to disparage the Tyrconnells, but also revealed that they remained united in the face of opposition, even when Frances was accused of fomenting discord. Richard also trusted Frances to advertise Jacobite disarray to the French, in order to secure additional support from Louis XIV; a task of the highest importance.

In mourning, the duchess of Tyrconnell provided 300 livers to the Blue Nuns in Paris, to pay for a mass for her husband’s soul and to defray the expense of any bread and wine used in his annual masses. In August 1692, she arranged a funeral service for him in the convent church, with an oration provided by the Abbé Antoine Anselme.