Lady Sophia Bulkeley’s Share: Exile, Poverty and Catholic Proselytism Between Rome and Saint-Germain-en-Laye

The survival of the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was largely dependent on subsidies from the Catholic courts, from favourable contacts in the British Isles or from the hands of businessmen and other private benefactors. This article will examine the strategies employed by one of its members, Lady Sophia Bulkeley (c.1650-c.1718), dame of honour to Queen Maria Beatrice d’Este, to gain access to part of the bequest of her distant relative Sir William Godolphin (1635-96), a former English ambassador to Spain and a Catholic convert resident in Madrid. From the outset, her aim was to stress the exceptional nature of her precarious financial situation, which stemmed from the constraints imposed by a forced exile in the convulsive geopolitical context following the Nine Years’ War. It will be argued that, ultimately, it was the confessional value of her case—that of a well-placed courtier whose husband had abjured Catholicism before his death—which convinced the Jesuit missionaries and, in particular, Edward Meredith (1648-1715), the trustee in charge of Godolphin’s Roman legacy, that she should be helped to become a proselytising instrument and to prevent attitudes like that of her late husband’s from permeating Saint-Germain.