Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

[cahn]

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

Comments

Merrie Olde England

[mildred_of_midgard]

she has Anne of Bohemia, Richard's first wife, refer to herself as a girl from the back of beyond coming to the wonderful English court when marrying Richard.

Whuuuhh? Wow. That is some wishful thinking right there.

I mean, it's been waaay too long since I even looked at the period in question, and it was never "my period," so I could be misremembering, but didn't Matilda/Maud, a couple centuries earlier, alienate her English subjects during the civil war by considering herself Empress of the Romans first, and Queen of England/Lady of the English second? Granted a lot can change in a couple centuries, but I don't think England becoming *that* prestigious to Continental Europeans was one.

Matilda/Maud, cahn, was victim of another Pragmatic Sanction (although not called that) situation like MT's. Her father had no surviving male heirs and got all the rival claimants to sign an agreement saying they would recognize her claim as his successor. Five minutes after he died, her cousin Stephen was going, "Agreement, what agreement? That's a WOMAN on the throne," and having himself declared King of England. Civil war ensued.

Unfortunately for her, she was not as successful as MT. She never managed to be formally crowned, and though she contended with him for a long time and had a following, Stephen is the one recognized as king during this period, and she does not get listed as queen in most of the regnal histories, or if so is parenthesized and asterisked. Eventually, she gave up and went back to Normandy (all the rulers of England at this point were descended from Norman William the Conqueror and saw themselves as Normans at least as much, if not more than, rulers of England). Her son continued waging war on Stephen, and eventually there was a treaty in 1153 that recognized Stephen as king until his death, and Matilda's son Henry II as his heir.

Oh, the Holy Roman Empress thing comes in because she was married by her father to Henry V of the HRE when she was young. Very young, as I recall. Okay, Wikipedia says 12. Yep, pretty young. He died about ten years later, and she came home, but she never stopped seeing being empress as her primary claim to fame.

Also, her name is Matilda or Maude, depending on whether you go with the Germanic or French version--both are common in histories--and that's useful, because the name of literally every other woman at the time is also Matilda. Her mother was named Matilda, her father's mother (wife of William the Conqueror) was named Matilda, her cousin Stephen's wife was named Matilda, and it gets really really confusing, really really fast.

Oh, and the one anecdote about her that entered into popular legend that I still remember is that she was being held prisoner by Stephen's forces in a castle, and she made herself a rope out of blankets (??) and lowered herself out the window. It was winter, and everything was covered in snow, so she wore a white nightgown for camouflage, and her escape was successful.

As for Stephen...Wikipedia doesn't have this particular anecdote, but I remember him, aside from being a misogynist, being portrayed as a general softy. Whether you as a historian think this makes him weak or not depends on how much ruthlessness you think is acceptable or necessary in a monarch. But the anecdote I'm remembering, if I'm not thinking of someone else, was that he took a kid hostage and told his father not to do such-and-such in support of Matilda, or he'd kill the guy's son. Bluff called.

Hostage's dad: Fine, kill the kid. I can have another one.

Stephen: Dammit. I can't kill kids. Why did you have to go and put me in this position?

Stephen's supporters: You can't make threats and not follow through! That's what hostages are *for*! What the hell kind of king are you?

Stephen: One that has to sleep at night, dammit.

I feel like this gets contrasted with a case that happened when Stephen was younger and someone else (Henry I?) gouged out two boys' eyes when he had them as hostages? But I'm blanking on names and details.

Oh, man. I went and looked this up. I was right, but it even was worse than I remembered, or in some cases had even learned.

Henry I (Matilda's father, Stephen's uncle) was dealing with a rebellion by his illegitimate daughter Juliana and her husband Eustace. They exchanged hostages, Juliana/Eustace's kids in return for some other important kid belonging to someone on Henry's side. As the dispute went on, Eustace blinded the kid he had as hostage. Henry was then like, "Fine. Fuck it, we're blinding your kids. AKA MY GRANDKIDS."

Moral lesson ensues about how Henry is ruthless enough to be a good king while easy-go-lucky Stephen is not, or alternately how you might invite Stephen to dinner but not Henry. Your role model mileage may vary.

Anyway. This part I learned. Then there's the followup, which I am pretty sure (!!) I did not.

So now Juliana is pissed off and decides to take possession of a castle and put up a fight against Dad. During a truce with her father--a truce!--Juliana fires a bolt from a crossbow at him, but misses. Oops! Henry manages to take the castle from his daughter, but she swims across the moat of freezing water and escapes to join her husband Eustace.

Wow.

See, history is just full of things you never learn in school. And European royals are one big dysfunctional family.

Re: Merrie Olde England

[cahn]

Yeah, this is something else I know zip about, wow. (My English history is better than my European history, but spotty.) Wow. Yes. European Royals: when terrible inbreeding (though maybe not at that point?), PTSD, and absolute power combine, EVERYTHING IS DYSFUNCTIONAL. (I'm surprised Stephen was as humane as he was!)

Re: Merrie Olde England

[selenak]

re: Matilda/Maud - btw I usually call her "Maud" in my head and Stephen's wife "Matilda", with defaulting to the old fashioned "Mahault" for her sister-in-law who surived the White Ship and later had become the abbess of Fontevrault when Eleanor of Aquitaine was married to Henry II - you could always tell who was supporting her and who was supporting Stephen by them referring to her either as "the Empress" (her supporters) or "the Countess of Anjou" (Stephen's supporters); the later was her title by second marriage, the one to Geoffrey d'Anjou. They both loathed each other but did produce four sons.

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

[cahn]

Hee. Thank you, as always, for all this lovely information :D

Re: Merrie Olde England

[mildred_of_midgard]

That is a pretty good summary indeed.

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 selenak refers. If you're looking for historical fiction, cahn, Sharon Kay Penman is known for some well-received doorstoppers: Stephen & Maud, Llywelyn the Great and other Welsh princes, Richard III, and apparently some about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry, and their sons (including Richard the Lion-hearted and John) that were written after I stopped reading historical fiction of this period.

Re: Merrie Olde England

[selenak]

o 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?

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

[cahn]

I feel like I saw her books around at the library when i was growing up! I... don't think I read any of them, though. (I read a whole metric ton by someone named... Jean Plaidy, I think? I don't remember anything about them, only that she wrote a bunch and I read them, but all the actual historical content seeped out of my head shortly after reading.)

Re: Merrie Olde England

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, man, that takes me back. I think I read everything by Jean Plaidy back in the day, and yes, it is a metric ton. I'm not surprised they seeped out of your head, they were fairly forgettable as literature goes, but they were super useful for me in retaining history. My MO for history in high school was nonfiction to know what to believe, and historical fiction so I had a hope of retaining it. So it's partly thanks to her that I remember any European history outside the 18th century.

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

[cahn]

haha, yes, it would have helped had I actually been interested in any of the people as people at the time! As it was they all kind of blurred together. I think historical fiction only works for me as a memory aid if I really like the book or like the history :)

Re: Merrie Olde England

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, yeah, if you weren't into the people, they would super all blur together, one queen after another. Her books *were* pretty darn similar.

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

[cahn]

Yeah, I remember reading something by Jean Plaidy writing under another name! I don't think it was Eleanor Hibbert, though. And I don't care enough to look up the other name :)

Re: Merrie Olde England

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, I don't know that she wrote under that name; that's her real name. Her two pseudonyms that my mom had in the house when I was growing up were Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr, if either of those ring a bell. (I don't care enough to look up her other pseudonyms either. ;) )

Re: Merrie Olde England

[cahn]

Oh, yes! Both those names ring a bell, so I probably read something by both of them. :)