“Made on purpose, and lin’d with velvet”: Containing the Amours of Messalina

This article discusses a six-part à clef secret history, The Amours of Messalina, alongside Peter Belon’s The Court Secret and the pamphlet play The Abdicated Prince. These texts narrate a series of allegations surrounding the contested birth of James Francis Edward Stuart in June 1688, the most notorious of which was that he was not the issue of the queen but an impostor born in an adjacent convent and delivered into the birthing chamber inside a warming pan. The pamphlets and broadsides which work together to construct this narrative and other fictions of illegitimacy have been well studied; this article asks what difference it makes when those allegations are translated into sequential narratives, and what this specific case might tell us about the political uses of early novelistic forms like secret history. It argues that rather than revelation and disclosure, these secret histories prioritise displacement and containment, liberating English readers from the need to take the deposed Stuarts seriously.