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Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!
All Yuletide requests are out!
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Re: Merrie Olde England
The hostage kid Stephen didn't find himself able to kill was William Marshal, Guillaume le Marechal, as an adult the most famous knight of his era, which is why we have this story. William became bff with Eleanor's and Henry's oldest son Henry (usually nicknamed Hal in novels to differentiate him from his father), after his death entered Henry's service, and lived long enough (i.e. through the reigns of Richard and John) to become regent for John's son the future Henry III.
The problem with Stephen sparing him was indeed that he'd made the threat in the first place and then not following through; not least because there were a lot of nobles, not all supporting Maude but several just in business for themselves, who then revolted and had to be bribed back into following him. "Go raide a few lands and monasteries, have the King reward you with money and more lands so you don't support his cousin Maude" became the tried and true method of noble enrichment, which is why this period is often refered to as "the anarchy".
I've always liked this summary of Maude and Stephen by Sharon Penman in the afterword of her novel about them: It might be said that both Stephen and Maude were victims of their age, for the twelfth century was not friendly terrain for a too-forgiving king or a sovereign queen. HIstory has not been kind to either of them. In Maude's case, I think the judgement might be overly harsh, for if you study her past, you find three Maudes. There was the young woman who made a succssful marriage to a manic depressive and so endeared herself to her German subjects that they were loath to see her return to England and in fact petioned her not to. There was the aging matriarch who passed her last years in Normandy, on excellent terms with the Church and her royal son, respected for the sage counsel she gave Henry. In between, there was the harpy, the termagant so reviled by English chroniclers, whose mistakes were exaggarated and magnified by the hostile male monks writing her history.
Maude could be infuriating and exaspaerating, but she had great courage, and she never lost a certain prickly integrity. As for Stephen, I think the truest verdict was one passed by a contemporary chronicler: "He was a mild man, gentle and good, and did no justice."
Re: Merrie Olde England
Re: Merrie Olde England
But the question that led to all this: do you know if I was right about Matilda seeing her most important title as that of Empress of the Romans and the English not being too pleased about this, or if I was misremembering? A quick skim of Wikipedia did not enlighten me one way or the other.
why this period is often refered to as "the anarchy".
And unofficially, as the period "when Christ and his saints slept," which is a phrase taken from a contemporary chronicler, and is also the title of that novel to which
Re: Merrie Olde England
Honestly, I don't know, because I never read a non-fiction book about Matilda specifically (non-fiction biographies of her daughter-in-law didn't cover this), but the impression I did get from a variety of novels was that individual acts aside, what the English (or rather, the Norman barons having holdings in England - Matilda/Maude was the granddaughter of William the Conqueror, after all, and talking about "English" here is a bit misleading) were way more resentful about her second marriage than about her using the title from her first one. This was because Geoffrey d'Anjou, nicknamed "Plantagenet", wasn't Norman. He was Angevin. And of course being a man, her being Queen would mean that REALLY an Angevin would be ruling. Competition! Boo! Never mind that Geoffrey was years younger than Matilda, that her father had forced her to marry him and when she tried to leave him after a miserable first year had forced her to go back. (This was before she'd gotten pregnant with future Henry II.)
Now some of the novels also speculate that since Matilda had grown up and thus been schooled in the HRE (having been married with twelve), she might have been used to the type of deference an Emperor did get and thus was set on a confrontation course with her English (or "English", i.e. Norman) subjects to begin with. But to me that's massive projecting of the idea that anything British was automatically less authoritarian and more proto democratic. Her father, after all, was that charming gentlemen you described earlier who wasn't above blinding his grandkids to make a political point. His court was not one where you messed about with the King. What she probably did imprint on was that in her first marriage, her husband the Emperor despite or because of the age difference actually had included her a lot - German wiki says he had her with him on his various journeys, incuding to Italy when he was duking it out with the Pope in one of those power struggles a great many German Emperors had with a great many Popes, she got crowned as Empress as well, and at one point acted as regent for her husband in Italy when he was in the German speaking territories.
Re: Merrie Olde England
Re: Merrie Olde England
Haha, I read a Stephen/Maud-shipping romance that, while it was full of inaccuracies and implausibilities, was probably responsible for more of my vague memories persisting to this day than the few actual histories I read.
Re: Merrie Olde England
Re: Merrie Olde England
Jean Plaidy was also only one of the other's several pseudonyms. I happen to know far too much about her and her work because my mother was a fan, and I had so little access to books growing up that I desperately read all my mother's romance novels, even though that's not my genre *at all*. Wikipedia tells me Plaidy (real name Eleanor Hibbert) produced 200 books under her various pseudonyms in her lifetime, which I think has a lot to do with them being so similar.
And now I am glad I have access to other books. :)
Re: Merrie Olde England
Re: Merrie Olde England
Re: Merrie Olde England