Frances was the daughter of Walter Stewart, or Stuart, a physician in Queen Henrietta Maria's court, and a distant relative of the royal family, and his wife, Sophia. She was born on 8 July 1647 in exile in Paris, but was sent to England in 1663 after the restoration by Charles I's widow, Henrietta Maria, as maid of honour and subsequently as lady-in-waiting to Charles II's new bride, Catherine of Braganza. The great diarist Samuel Pepys recorded that she was the greatest beauty he ever saw. She had numerous suitors, including the Duke of Buckingham and Francis Digby, son of the Earl of Bristol, whose unrequited love for her was celebrated by Dryden. Her beauty appeared to her contemporaries to be equaled only by her childish silliness; but her letters to her husband, preserved in the British Museum, are not devoid of good sense and feeling. The Count de Gramont said of her that "it would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty." While a member of the royal court, she caught the eye of Charles II, who fell in love with her. The king's infatuation was so great that when the queen's life was despaired of in 1663, it was reported that he intended to marry Stewart, and four years later he was considering the possibility of obtaining a divorce to enable him to make her his wife because she had refused to become his mistress. Eventually, in March 1667, she married Charles Stewart, 3rd Duke of Richmond, 6th Duke of Lennox, a fourth cousin of King Charles II, but produced no issue. It is possible she had to elope, after being discovered with him by Lady Castlemaine, a rival for the king's affections. The now Duchess of Richmond, however, soon returned to court, where she remained for many years; and although she was disfigured by smallpox in 1669, she retained her hold on the king's affections. It is certain, at least, that Charles went on to post the Duke to Scotland and then to Denmark as ambassador, where he died in 1672. The duchess was present in 1688 at the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart, son of James II, and was one of those who signed the certificate before the council. She died in 1702 aged 55, leaving a valuable property to her nephew Alexander Stuart, 5th Lord Blantyre, whose seat of Lethington was renamed Lennoxlove after her.
Britannia
Following the war with the Dutch, Charles had a commemorative medal cast, in which her face was used as a model for Britannia; this subsequently became customary for medals, coins and statues. She continued to appear on some of the copper coinage of the United Kingdom until the decimalization of the currency in 1971. She also appeared on the fifty pence piece in 2006.
