ABSTRACT
Many women were indeed attracted to Whig party politics. Restoration scholars know the most about exceptional women like Lady Rachel Russell and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, both active in the arena of high politics.4 Women intellectuals, such as Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, who came to the defence of John Locke’s philosophy, have also received treatment.5 Further, the wives and daughters of printers and booksellers, such as Jane Curtis, who specialized in producing Whig propaganda, have earned some attention.6 But much less is known about those women who actively supported the Whig cause while trying very hard to escape official detection. This essay centres on a group of women active in the Whig effort to bar the ‘popish successor’, James, Duke of York, and aid the would-be Protestant heir, the Duke of Monmouth: Whig women, or as they were referred to by the men they aided, ‘nurses’ or ‘nursing mothers’. These women actively supported seditious politics. These women served the Protestant cause in the early 1680s as couriers of messages and money. They were correspondents and agents in an underground network of Whigs and dissenters. They sheltered fugitives and transported them between London and Holland. They risked all and sometimes they lost all. Recovering their lives and stories restores the female contribution to the Exclusion movement in the 1680s, casting new light on gender and party politics in the late Stuart era. What did Whig politics offer women? What was the attraction?
