Frances Nolan, The Jacobite Duchess: Frances Jennings, Duchess of Tyrconnell, c. 1649-1731(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021)

Frances Jennings, the Jacobite Duchess of Tyrconnell, remains a women who resists categorisation. English wife of two Irish noblemen, Catholic convert yet not Irish Catholic, Jacobite sister of Queen Anne’s ‘favourite’ the Duchess of Marlborough, court beauty and continental refugee, the real Frances Jennings has often been obscured, both by her commitment to Jacobitism and this difficulty in comfortably placing her, colouring perspectives of contemporaries and later writers. Frances Nolan, in The Jacobite Duchess: Frances Jennings, Duchess of Tyrconnell, c. 1649-1731, seeks to go beyond these apparent contradictions and re-situate the Duchess of Tyrconnell, lift her out of the architype of ‘difficult woman’ and show her as ‘a complex and undeniably flawed character, who[se] fortunes fluctuated over the course of a long life, a life that spanned a period of significant – and often turbulent – change.’ (19)

Born during the turbulence of the English Civil War in c. 1649, Frances Jennings came from an English gentry family. Although initially supporting the Parliamentarians, her father, an MP for St Albans, drew the line at regicide and hitched the family fortunes to the exiled Charles II. As a result, the young Frances Jennings found a place as lady-in-waiting for the Duchess of York in the restoration court of Charles II, where she was a renowned court beauty.  

She first married the Irish soldier and courtier George Hamilton in 1666, and they spent much of their married life in France, where Hamilton served in the military after the English parliament banned the Catholics from the army. It was at some point in the early 1670s that she converted to Catholicism. Although considered a sincere conversion, it was also a highly pragmatic move as Catholicism was the religion of the French court, and also ‘her new religion aligned her with those Catholics who were compelled to leave England and make Paris their home in the 1670s and 1680s.’ (58)

Widowed in 1676, she married secondly Richard Talbot in 1681, who acted as Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1687-89. They maintained their loyalty to James II, and joined the Jacobite court in exile in France after the success of William and Mary in the War of the Two Kings. Widowed for a second time in 1691, she remained an active supporter of the Jacobite cause and worked to secure her own financial and material interests across multiple countries. 

She has often been overshadowed by younger sister, Sarah Churchill the Duchess of Marlborough, who was famously the ‘favourite’ of Queen Anne. While the paths of these two sisters dramatically diverged, they were similar in many aspects and remained on good terms, and Sarah’s position was a great advantage to her older sister when Frances was living in exile on the continent. This tendency to view Frances Jennings as secondary to another figure has been a common theme in the historiography, as Nolan observes ‘She has appeared as a supporting character in accounts of Restoration England; of Jacobite Ireland and the exiled Jacobite court; in biographies of her famous younger sister… and her brother-in-law….; and in two biographies on her second husband’ (5). 

It is perhaps unsurprising that the Duchess of Tyrconnell’s Jacobitism has coloured views of both her contemporaries and later writers, painting her as a romantic figure as with some proponents of the ‘white milliner’ story – or vilifying her like those who perpetuated the ‘warming pan’ myth around the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart. As Frances Nolan observes the Duchess of Tyrconnell’s ‘life has been handed down as a series of anecdotes, be they true, true-ish or untrue. She has thus endured as an imprecise figure, upon whom memoirists, commentators and polemicists, collectors and disseminators of historical curiosities, religious writers, Victorian moralists, novelists, and dramatists, as well as historians, have imposed meaning and intent.’ (3) Through her extensive research, Frances Nolan attempts to combat this, which is not always an easy task when, like many early modern women, much of the Duchess of Tyrconnell’s papers and correspondence have been lost or destroyed.             

Particularly interesting within Nolan’s work, is the exploration of women’s soft (or not-so-soft) power and of complex transnational familial and friendship networks. Frances Jennings’ material and financial wranglings, managing property and finances across multiple countries and engaging in legal actions to maintain what she considered to be rightfully hers, provide a fascinating insight into women’s power, finances, and property. Like her sister the Duchess of Marlborough, Frances ‘was preoccupied with material wealth as a guarantor of security and power.’ (18)  Nolan explores how this need for financial stability manifested throughout her life, even if, when combined with her pride and strong personality, it resulted in litigation and estrangement from her own children. Through her sister’s position as favourite to Queen Anne, Frances Jennings was in a very privileged position for a Catholic and Jacobite. Especially fascinating is the examination of Duchess of Tyrconnell’s Jacobite activities during her second widowhood. This included potential knowledge of the Franco-Jacobite uprising in Scotland in 1708, as ‘Frances was also perceived to know something’ of the 1708 uprising by spies reporting back to London (156). Although there is no specific proof that Frances Jennings acted as a Jacobite spy, as Nolan explained, ‘the absence of any concrete evidence could be understood to mean that she did her job well.’ (157) Nonetheless, Frances Jennings lived in a very convenient location to be involved in such intrigue, and maintained strong connections to Jacobite court, while also having a line to the heart of the English establishment through her sister and brother-in-law. 

As is the nature of most biographies, The Jacobite Duchess follows a chronological format, taking the reader through Frances Jennings’s life from the early years through both of her marriages and into old age. The author also includes three interesting and useful appendices: a family tree, a list of books in the Duchess of Tyrconnell’s possession, and a cypher she used in her correspondence. Apart from the appeal of Frances Jennings’ fascinating life story, due to her refusal to be easily pigeonholed, this biography will be of interest to a wide readership, covering a broad range of themes, including: familial relationships and networks, women’s power and political involvement, and the exiled Jacobite community on the continent, and adds to a growing scholarship on early modern Irish women’s history.

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Kristina Decker is currently completing a PhD in the School of History at University College Cork, for which she received Irish Research Council funding. Her thesis is entitled ‘Women and Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: the Case of Mary Delany’, which focuses on Mary Delany’s experience of the Enlightenment in Ireland. She was previously awarded the Desmond Guinness Scholarship from the Irish Georgian Society for her work on Delany.