Members' Exclusive Lecture - Breeze Barrington on: Praying in a Protestant Kingdom: Maria of Modena, Catholic Worship, and Sacred Space in Restoration England

In this members' exclusive lecture, drawing on her book Graces, Breeze explores the deeply fraught relationship between Catholic worship and sacred space in late seventeenth-century England through the life of Maria of Modena. As a Catholic duchess, and later queen, living in a resolutely Protestant country, Maria’s religious life was shaped by compromise, concealment, and quiet resistance. 

From praying in makeshift private spaces as Duchess of York to commissioning artworks that subtly ‘Catholicised’ royal chapels once she became queen, this lecture traces how faith was practised, negotiated, and made visible at court. Breeze also considers public access to royal chapels during Catholic mass, pilgrimages to holy wells, and the ways local churches became sites of tension and dissent in the years leading up to 1688. Together, these stories reveal how places of worship could become contested spaces, where religion, politics, and everyday life collided. 

Dr Breeze Barrington is a historian specialising in the artistic cultures of the seventeenth century, with particular focus on women’s history and female artists. She holds a PhD on the literary and artistic cultures of the early Stuart court and has written for outlets including the Financial Times and the TLS. Her first book, The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court (Bloomsbury, 2025), tells the story of Maria of Modena and the community of female learning she cultivated within the Jacobite court. She is a Bye-Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.