II. FLASHPOINT...

'Tom' Howard.

But back to 'Tom' Howard. Colonel Howard, not unlike Mary's younger brother, George Villiers, was a fierce duelist. In 1662, he ran through Giles Rawlins, the second of one of his rivals for Lady Shewsbury, the younger Henry Jermyn. So sensational was this case that Howard left England for three months (Sergeant 21; Morrah 403). But powerful men can live above the law; and, after a confidential pardon from the King, Howard returned to Court and to Mary Villiers.

But whatever happiness Lady Mary found with 'Tom' Howard, she experienced devastating losses, such as the premature death of her only son and heir, Esmé Stuart, who died in 1660 at the age of ten, and also the loss of her only daughter, the beautiful Mary, Lady Arran, of the Irish Butler line, who died an invalid in 1668 (D'Aulnoy 68). Mary Villiers's third and last husband, 'Tom' Howard, also predeceased her, after a stroke in 1678.

By 1679, when Female Poems...by Ephelia was released, Lady Mary was fifty-seven years old, a widow for the third time, and well beyond her zenith. In a long and unusual life, she had witnessed three Stuart administrations (that of James I, Charles I, Charles II), the rise of Cromwell and the Interregnum, the Stuart exile (in which she herself was an exile), the Restoration, the Popish Plot, and the Monmouth Rebellion. By turns privileged and deprived, the Duchess lived through more roles than most mortals of her century. She was a daughter, a wife, a mother, thrice a widow, a political exile, a political conduit, a Court intriguer, a royal confidante, a pseudonymous writer, and the grande dame of the Restoration Court. As the bearer of four surnames in sixty-two years, it is not surprising that identity was the theme of her life and her art. Mary's short career in poetry as the famous Ephelia (her most achieved exercise in self-reinvention) places her on an impressive genealogy of literary English families and their writing women (Appendix B).

Mary Villiers Herbert Stuart Howard died in 1685 at the age of sixty-two after a long, unspecified illness (Burnet II: 1662; Burghclere 350). She died a Catholic, having secretly converted to Catholicism most probably in the 1640s. This was the ancient faith of her mother, Lady 'Kate' Manners; her surrogate mother, Queen Henrietta Maria; her third and last husband, 'Tom' Howard; and her best of friends, Charles II, the beloved "Clovis" in her book project of 1679 (Appendix A). Though I wrote about the Port-Royal Catholic community and its publications in the Summer 1999 issue of ANQ, Anne Barbeau Gardinier reminds me that London Catholics during the Restoration had their own underground network and print culture, woefully neglected by scholars. As more research becomes available, perhaps Mary Villiers will be identified as a member of this clandestine community. So much of her life and identity were strategically closeted.