ONE of the loveliest windows in Truro Cathedral celebrates the life of a 26 year-old woman who died of childbed fever in 1678, writes Judith Field. Who was this unlikely heroine?

Margaret Godolphin was born in 1652, three years after England's bitter civil war ended with the execution of King Charles I. Defeat meant hardship for Royalist families like hers, and by the time the victorious Puritans lost power, Margaret’s father had died. Finding work was essential and at the age of only 14, Margaret left home to enter the service of King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza.

Life at the royal court was a byword for drunkenness, gluttony and lechery – a stark contrast with the austere Puritan era that preceded it and scarcely a safe environment for a fresh-faced 14 year-old. Pretty, witty and a gifted mimic, the young girl would have been a natural target for predatory men, but she had two things on her side: firstly, her profound Christian faith, and secondly, her friend and mentor, the famous diarist John Evelyn.

Margaret walked a daily tightrope. Her dilemma is familiar – how not to bow to peer pressure without becoming unpopular, and how to keep both your job and your integrity. In her diary, she wrote herself resolutions about how to survive, and she reviewed her tactics before going down to the drawing room each night. "Talk little when you are there", she wrote, "Be sure never to talk to the King. When they speak filthily, though I be laughed at, look grave ... Never meddle with others' business and ... do not talk lightly of religion." By the age of 21, Margaret was finding life at court intolerable. Not even the love of a rising young courtier, Sidney (later, Earl) Godolphin, could keep her there. In a dramatic move, captured in the cathedral window, she resigned and, two years later, they married. Tragically, after only three years, Margaret died leaving her nine-day-old son, Francis, motherless. Sidney was absolutely distraught. At huge expense, Margaret’s body was carried from London to the Godolphin family vault in St Breaca's Church at Breage, near Helston. The dolphin-topped funerary helmets that adorned her horse-drawn hearse can still be seen in St Breaca's today. Margaret's short life would have been forgotten, if it weren't for the rediscovery in 1847 of a tribute written by John Evelyn to his "precious pearl without a spot" who "made virtue and holiness a cheerful thing, [as] lovely as herself". Its publication caused a sensation. Margaret's saint-like qualities made her a poster-girl for a Victorian ideal of womanhood - grace, purity and devotion to one's husband – that persisted for 100 years. Like today’s #MeToo movement, the Victorians were alive to the toxic environment women like Margaret faced at work. In Truro’s window, they rejoiced in her triumph over it: an unlikely heroine, whose faith and resourcefulness enabled her not only to survive, but to sparkle.

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