Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
The English Civil War: C1 - the Prelude
Date: 2021-09-09 07:26 am (UTC)Some background on the players on the royal side first, because I know a bit more about their private lives than about Oliver Cromwell's.
Charles I: from now on, C1, to be easier told apart from his son Charles II. C1 starts out as the sickly third child of King James (the gay witch-persecuting one played by Alan Cummings on Doctor Who, whom you saw the clip of) of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. So sickly is little C that no one expects him to make it out of childhood alive, and when James inherits the English Crown from Elizabeth Tudor, little C1 is left behind in Scotland for a year. After which he's still alive and brought to England.
C1's older siblings, by contrast, are strong, healthy and smart: Henry, the Prince of Wales, and Elizabeth, future Winter Queen but right now golden girl at the English Court. Henry dies completely unexpectedly at age 18 while Elizabeth is in the middle of her marriage preparations. Reminder: she's about to marry young Friedrich of the Palatine, with intriguing prospects re: Bohemia but otherwise way below what the daughter of a King usually can expect, so her mother is mocking her as "Goodwife Palsgrave". (SD: not the first mother to take it out on her daughter for agreeing to a below rank marriage.) C1 is twelve and suddenly thrust in the spotlight as the new Prince of Wales. He's shy and developes a life long stammer. But more surprisingly, he goes from being a sickly child to being a healthy teen. What happened? Current theories include his childhood illnesses being caused by rickets and the increase of good food and more outdoors activities making a difference.
Now, Dad James is as openly gay as it is possible to be, and his new dashing young fave is (the Duke of) Buckingham, or as James calls him "Steeney". Buckingham, whom I should call B1 because his son also eventually has a role to play, is that rarity, a generations-hugging fave, as opposed to one who is loathed by his monarch's successor. He's who Hervey, a century later, would have loved to be, since he manages to befriend the young Prince of Wales without losing James' favour. And when James dies, Buckingham continues as C1's favourite and de facto PM. (The title didn't exist yet.) Since C1 throughout his life showed no m/m interest, the current position is that unlike Buckingham and James, they didn't have sex. But they definitely were close, and for the first few years of his reign, C1 clung to Buckingham for emotional support, advice, everything.
Now, during James' last years of life, he'd first planned to marry C1 to a Spanish Infanta, and young C plus Buckingham had in fact made an "incognito" (as in, everyone knew who they were but had to pretend not to) trip through Europe to Spain to nail down the deal. This turned out to be a complete dud (the Infanta wasn't keen at all to marry an English prince, presumably recalling the last Spanish princess who'd done that had been Catherine of Aragon), and only managed to cause a scandal because when C1 and Buckingham passed France en route, Buckingham fell for the young French Queen, Anne of Austria (the one from the Three Musketeers, where this event is highly plot relevant) and romanced her in public, upsetting everyone. On the bright side, James now had an alternate idea whom to marry Charles to - Anne of Austria's sister-in-law, Henrietta Maria, sister to Louis XIII (so more properly I should write her name as Henriette Marie, but the English Civil War fiction all goes with "Henrietta Maria"). This marriage happened, with one of conditions being that Henrietta Maria, as a Daughter of France a Catholic, would be allowed to continue practicising her religion and would not have to convert to the Anglican church.
*cue ominous music*
She was 15, and partly because her young husband C1 was so completely hung up on his bff Buckingham, their first few years of marriage were unhappy. And childless. But then! After a few troublesome years as Charles' fave in which in Buckingham continues to piss off everyone BUT the monarch whose fave he is, gets Charles involved in several failed attempts as flexing his military muscles abroad (this includes the vain attempt to help the Protestants of the besieged La Rochelle, also plot relevant in The Three Musketeers), and finally is assassinated. (In The Three Musketeers, the assassin, one John Felton, was put up to it by the novel's main villainess, Milady de Winter, who in turn acted on behalf of Cardinal Richelieu since he didn't want Buckingham interrupting his ultimately successful conquest of La Rochelle anymore. This, I should point out, is entertaining fiction. But as Nancy Goldstone, the author of the Winter Queen book, puts it, in the England and France constellation of the day, it was C1 plus B1 versus Louis XIII and Richelieu, which meant Buckingham versus Richelieu, which was no contest at all.)
C1 is crushed and deeply mourns. He also takes Buckingham's kid, little B2, in and raises him with his own (to be born soon), which is why C2 and B2 will be incredibly tight as well in future years. However, partly because the C1 & B1 combo has pissed off the British nobility so much, and partly because Buckingham made sure he had no competition in the affection of the monarch, there isn't a friend for C1 to turn to in his grief. But there is a wife! Perhaps it's that she's now older, no longer a gawky teen, or that he's utterly bereft, or both, but C1 and Henrietta Maria now experience their own arranged marriage turning to true love story. They become a genuine love match, never far apart, producing one child after the other. There is no mistress for C1, and male favourite, either. There is only the Queen, who becomes his closest advisor as well.
...The Queen, who is a Catholic. C1 isn't, and won't become one, either, rumors to the contrary, but he does like his high church Anglicanism, and he's no more politically astute without Buckingham than he was with Buckingham. Only now instead of blaming the hated favourite, people start blaming the FRENCH CATHOLIC Queen. Who, in turn, starts to loathe them right back, especially the more hardcore Protestant parliamentarians.
*cue even more ominous music*
Before I get to further developments, some fiction covering this era:
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers and the sequel, Twenty Years Later, in which our heroes try in vain to save C1 from being beheaded. Some of the latest film versions have altered the plot so much that either Richelieu is scheming for the throne and allied with Buckingham (WTF?), or Buckingham is trying to conquer France (WTF? He was very hubristic, but not THAT much), or there is no English involvement in the plot at all, but if you ever catch the two part Richard Lester movies from the 1960s - The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers - they actually are the most faithful in existence, including the humor.
TV Series: The Devil's Whore: this was an utter let down to me. I liked the main actress, but in its attempt to rectify the over romantisation of the Royalist side and focusing on the parliamentarian side, the series managed to go way over the top with the evil Royals, and it used a plot device that made me roll my eyes so much I'm amazed I still have them; our heroine's first husband is scandalized by her enjoying sex and reviles her for it. Series makers, 17th century Brits were not freaking Victorians! Current theory then was that if a woman had an orgasm, this heightened her chances at conception, and since every noble wanted an heir, you bet the guy would have been thrilled. But no, in order for our heroine to be a rebel discovering her sexuality, we get this anachronistic taboo. Same with people being SHOCKED a noble lady would manage her estate and hold it in a dangerous situation. Again, they were supposed to! And don't get me started on Rapist!Rupert (the start of our heroine's disillusionment with the royals is when the King's nephew tries to rape her, which, well, you can't prove a negative, so it's impossible to say whether Sophie of Hannover's brother Rupert ever raped someone; however, he had a good reputation, and if even his enemies at the height of the propaganda war couldn't find something better to accuse him of than having his poodle as a familiar - complete with insinuation of bestiality -, as opposed to accusing him, half foreigner that he was, of molesting English maidens -, I'd say chances are he wasn't the royal rapist type). Despite good actors being involved, very much anti-recced.
Book: Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis, author of the Falco mysteries. Pro-Parliamentarian side, with fictional characters as the leads, good novel with a terrible (as in badly written) ending. Which is just weird. I linked my overall review. Other than this, it's an entertaining book showing how the Civil War would have felt to the population caught up in it.
Movie: "Oliver" (as in Cromwell), 1970 movie starring Richard Harris as Oliver C. and Alec Guinness as C1. A critic joked it should really be called "Charles and Oliver" since it's as much about C1 as it is about Cromwell. Solidly pro Cromwell, meaning the only Catholics who show up are the Queen and some scheming bishops, certainly no Irish peasants whom Cromwell goes genocidal on after winning the Civil War(s); "the people" are always Protestant people, and Charles is not personally malicious but clueless and due to his arrogance and unwillingness to compromise responsible for his own doom. (Which, fair enough.)
There is also Restoration fiction using the Civil War as background and a first part, but that I'll cover in a separate comment.
Re: The English Civil War: C1 - the Prelude
Date: 2021-09-10 05:00 am (UTC)(SD: not the first mother to take it out on her daughter for agreeing to a below rank marriage.)
argh why are all the parents in history fandom so awful
presumably recalling the last Spanish princess who'd done that had been Catherine of Aragon
...I can see how that might have soured her on the deal, indeed :P
Buckingham fell for the young French Queen, Anne of Austria (the one from the Three Musketeers, where this event is highly plot relevant) and romanced her in public, upsetting everyone.
omg. this whole writeup is basically telling me I have to read the Three Musketeers (I actually don't know why I haven't read it -- I read Count of Monte Cristo and loved it! -- but I also admittedly had a bit from Count in my fifth grade reading book, the bit where Dantes has the idea to escape from the Chateau d'If, and was shocked to find that it's a relatively small part of the book) :P
in the England and France constellation of the day, it was C1 plus B1 versus Louis XIII and Richelieu, which meant Buckingham versus Richelieu, which was no contest at all.
LOL, ...yeah. Even I know that :D
(I haven't got a chance to watch the Horrible Histories (or other clips) or read the links, I am excited to though, that really sounds tailor-made for me, lol!)