Lady Clarendon

Frances Hyde (1617- 1667) Countess of Clarendon died shortly before her husband was sent into exile by Charles II.

She was grandmother of Mary II and Anne!

Cimbrio asked on the windsors thread if she was murdered. Was she?

I haven't heard this before. Cimbrio said he got it off thepeerage.com, which is a work in progress and contains some errors. Anyone know any more about this?

According to what I've read, Frances Hyde died from natural causes.  She had been in failing health for some time, exacerbated by her husband's fall from power and disgrace.  Some of her contemporaries said that she died from grief when she realized that her husband was going to be sent into exile.    

Anne Hyde also lost her two sons in May and June 1667, which must have been shattering.

After the Glorious Revolution, Jacobites started rumors that Lady Clarendon had been a washerwoman before her marriage to Edward Hyde, in an effort to embarrass Mary and Anne.  The stories circulated for years, but they seem to have been without foundation.

There were rumours, weren't there, that Lady Clarendon had been a 'tub woman' i.e the woman who refilled barrels of ale in pubs.

I think those rumors went around too; the Jacobites seem to have claimed that Lady Clarendon had practised almost every low-class profession that there was.  I believe that the Jacobites even wrote songs about Mary and Anne's descent from a "tub woman".  

Neither Mary nor Anne answered the slanders against their grandmother.  However, once she became Queen, Anne turned the tables on the Jacobites by taking pride in the fact that she was "entirely English".

that was a leaf out of the book of elizabeth who had also boasted about her pure english origin.

this is her Dad:



Sir Thomas Aylesbury Bt 1576-1657. He was a close associate of the Duke of Buckingham and was made Master of the Mint in 1627. He left England after the Civil War and died in exile in Breda.

Maybe Frances did some bartending work during this troubled time?

Edward Hyde was the chief counsellor of Charles II during the Interregnum, and he made certain that he always got a share of whatever money the king had, which was not much, but was more than most of the exiled Cavaliers had.  

Frances Hyde seems to have spent a great deal of the Interregnum at The Hague, mooching off of Mary of Orange.  To the best of my knowledge, Frances never had a job of any kind.  Thanks to her husband's favored position and Mary's generosity, I think its unlikely that Frances had to go without servants, do her own washing, or work as a barmaid.

The Jacobites probably started the tub story just to stress the fact that the ancestry of the Old Pretender was better than that of his half-sisters.  

Mary and Anne were not pure English, their paternal grandparents were Scottish and French.

Yes, I know what Ilyala meant though!

Elizabeth wasn't pure English either, with her Welsh Tudor ancestors, and Anne Boleyn's Irish blood. However compared to most monarchs Elizabeth, Anne and the future William V can claim a lot of "English blood", whatever that may be!