The Jacobite’s Wife
This absorbing debut creates a fictional biography for the legendary Countess of Nithsdale (c.1680-1749), best known for helping her husband, accused Jacobite sympathizer William Maxwell, escape execution in the Tower of London. Born to a high-ranking Catholic family, Winifred Herbert sees her mother, father, and brother all thrown in the Tower before she escapes to a sheltered and pampered life of leisure at the court of the exiled James II and Mary Beatrice at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France. When she marries the young and charming Earl of Nithsdale and runs away with him to Scotland, Winifred matures quickly through the challenges of being a new mother, manager and farmhand, and wife of a frivolous spendthrift more dedicated to political causes than his struggling estate.
Edwards adeptly frames the political tumult following the Glorious Revolution, portraying the hostility and suspicion toward Catholics, the secret veins of Jacobite rebellion, and the brutal violence of the righteous mobs that more than once attack Winifred’s home. Though as a girl she is surprisingly immature and as a matron interested in little beyond her husband and pregnancies, Edwards’ heroine emerges as a practical, principled woman learning self-reliance and strength, and her audacious rescue of her husband provides a sequence of thrilling suspense. After her triumph, it’s almost a disappointment that the book ends without following this remarkable woman to the end of her life. Though the characters are somewhat transparent—Winifred’s family seem one-dimensional, and her lifelong handmaiden, Grace, has no inner life the reader can see—Edwards’ prose is sharp and clean, the dialogue very often pitch-perfect, and the descriptions of physical settings float off the page. This is an impressive, lively narrative of a memorable woman who, aside from her one daring exploit, is lamentably little-known.
