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cahnIn the previous post Charles II found AITA:
Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?
Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-16 04:36 pm (UTC)(I haven't yet read a non fictional biography of his myself, but I am familiar with Heinrich Mann's magnum opus, the two part Henri Quatre novel, which he wrote in exile.)
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-17 07:29 pm (UTC)Unless you're one of his supporters. In which case you might be left going, "But if we risk life and limb for you and you ignore us, and the people who wage war on you get off scot-free, what even was the point of siding with you?!"
He lost a certain amount of support on his own side from this magnamimous behavior, is what I'm saying.
"Yeah, my mistress conspired against me...but I'm sure she's sorry."
To be clear, this is my summary of his attitude towards her, not a quote or anything.
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-21 05:21 am (UTC)"Yeah, my mistress conspired against me...but I'm sure she's sorry."
Lol, it's a great story but that would be an awesome quote. (Maybe one day it will appear on Wikipedia and it will be traced back here...)
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-21 09:00 pm (UTC)Or his wife. Did you run the first anecdote through Google translate, where he was dissing her (family) and her baby for being "dark and fat"? Sorry I never got around to translating that, but I figured your browser could handle it.
Lol, it's a great story but that would be an awesome quote. (Maybe one day it will appear on Wikipedia and it will be traced back here...)
ROFL! I can't stop imagining this now and laughing. It's funny cause it's true!
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-23 06:06 pm (UTC)Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-23 07:21 pm (UTC)Maybe she had light skin and dark hair. Maybe she had olive-colored Mediterranean skin. (Judging by the apparently olive-colored skin of some of her descendants, like Charles II, I'm guessing the latter.) But either way, he was using "schwarz und fett" as an insult to mean "unattractive", and making her cry, which means he was being AN ASSHOLE.
(I did, from the beginning, entertain the possibility that he could be saying that, while she was a light-skinned blonde, she had passed on the dark coloring of her Mediterranean Medici family. That was Selena's first theory based on Rubens, and it does grammatically fit "wie jene" (like them) but--how many Medici has Henri met? And if you thought your wife's coloring was attractive, would you insult her and make her cry by talking about how the baby looks darker and resembles a family you've never seen? Maybe, but I think it's much more internally consistent to suppose that he went for blondes, that he equated "Medici" with "dark" because he saw his darker Medici wife every day, and that her dark coloring was part of the reason he preferred his mistress(es) to his wife and insulted her and her kid for their appearance.)
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-23 07:58 pm (UTC)(Actually Henri was way nicer about Catherine than about Maria, it seems, proving your point about him and his enemies vs him and his supporters, in a way. He famously said re: Catherine when people called her a monster years after her death: "I ask you, what could a woman do, left by the death of her husband with five little children on her arms, and two families of France who were thinking of grasping the crown - our own [the Bourbons] and the Guises? (Meaning you win or you die at the game of thrones, I suppose.)
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-23 08:01 pm (UTC)Right you are! You'd think I hadn't just read an entire bio of Catherine and how she was always trying to keep Henri at court where she could keep an eye on him/try to convert him to Catholicism/use him as a hostage. That, and her coloring, would have influenced his impression of Medici coloring.
Actually Henri was way nicer about Catherine than about Maria
Indeed, this emerged from my reading as well.
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-24 06:26 am (UTC)Incidentally, speaking of Medici genes coming through, Antonia Fraser always claimed Charles II resembles Lorenzo the Magnificent (despite, may I had, Charles' grandmother Maria de' Medici coming from the younger branch of the Medici, which departed ways from Lorenzo's branch with the brother of Lorenzo's grandfather). Judge for yourself:
She's not entirely wrong.
However, now look at Maria de' Medici, and I don't just mean the Rubens portraits:
Maria as Regent:
And to prove it's not just Rubens, this is Maria as a girl in Florence:
Now, I don't know about you, and maybe everyone who ever painted Maria was explicitly told to use the hair color she wanted rather than the one they saw. But the thing is, her mother was a Habsburg. (Johanna von Österreich.) (Niece of Charles V.) And this is how Johanna looked like:
Conclusion, especially by comparison to Lorenzo and Charles: Maria inherited her looks from the Habsburgs rather than the Medici. Doesn't mean she can't have forwarded the dark Medici looks, she most probably did. And of course Henri was being an asshole with that "black and fat" remark either way, but methinks his idea of Medici looks really must have come from his mother in law rather than his wife. Catherine de' Medici when young Henri knew her:
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-24 02:49 pm (UTC)LOL! No, I would like to blame Appel, but I am to blame: I was thinking of Marie's contemporaries, not the previous generation that had died 10 years before. Which is silly, as humans tend to meet people from more than one generation, and Henri IV certainly did.
But! While I have speculated that Marie was one of those people whose hair darkens when they hit puberty and that she missed her blonde days (especially with a husband like that), it occurs to me: Catherine was fat in her later years. With ten pregnancies, what do you expect? And Marie, after a single pregnancy, at the age of 16, was probably not, not yet.
So actually, I reverse my opinion a second time: I now think Henri was thinking of Catherine and that Marie was a blonde after all, as per Rubens. Which is interesting, because you tend to think of dark hair and skin as dominant, but they're both polygenic, non-Mendelian traits, so I suppose a brunette and a blonde could have black-haired, olive-skinned descendants. (Googling suggests it's rare but possible.)
Furthermore, I should report that Schultz strikes a blow on Marie's behalf by saying that Henri IV was unattractive and reeked of garlic, that women found him repulsive, that his mistresses were generally cheating on him with the men they were actually attracted to, and that all the action he got and his reputation as the "vert gallant" were due solely to him being king, the only reason any woman would ever sleep with him.
:D
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-28 04:50 am (UTC)I appreciate all these pictures; aside from Charles, I didn't really have any idea what any of these people looked like :)
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-28 04:28 am (UTC)Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-04-28 07:37 am (UTC)(Reminder to your memory: Now, current dominating historical opinion isn't anymore that Catherine planned and masterminded the St. Bartholomew's massacre ahead of time but that she probably was sincere in arranging for the marriage of young Henri with her youngest daughter Margot to bring the Protestant and Catholic factions together. Also as a way to counteract the influence of the leading Protestant, Condé (Henri was a generation younger and outranking Condé as the King of Navarre, but both were Bourbons, i.e. the family which was next if Catherine's sons should all die without heirs), and to outmaneuvre the Guises, who were the leaders of the ultra-Catholic faction (and via their niece Mary Queen of Scots already owned one of the thrones of Europe with an eye on the English throne). But once Condé explicitly threatened her in the argument as to whether nor not to support the Netherlanders against Philip of Spain, Catherine signalled to the Duc de Guise who had a blood feud against Condé that she was okay with him murdering Condé. When that assassination was bungled by the assassin, with all the Protestants in the city for the Henri/Margot wedding, and a surviving Condé fuming, Catherine probably decided that it wasn't enough to kill Condé (this time not leaving it to the Guises) but that all the other heads of the Protestant faction had to go (minus Henri) so there could not be a retaliatory strike re: Condé. But it didn't happen this way, because religious hatred on the Catholic side was already at a boiling point - the whole idea of the marriage was hugely unpopular -, when people saw Protestants were killed they joined in, and instead of a surgical strike, a massacre evolved, which lasted for days. And later of course most people believed that was what Catherine had intended all along.
As I said, even if you don't believe that - Henri, unlike current day historians, didn't regard this as a historical event weighing evidence pro and against and with access to lots of source material, he was right there, his friends died along with so many others, and his own life was at stake because once the massacre was rolling and it was clear no one could stop it, he was basically given a "convert or die" option. So he would have had all the reason in the world to loathe Catherine and curse her memory, and nothing to gain by speaking well, even understanding of her, years after her death. But he did, and he also was the one to order that her earthly remains be transferred to the royal crypt in St. Denis next to her husband's and children's. (Catherine had died at Blois, not Paris, and at the time of her death France was split in a three ways war between her son Henri III, the Guises (now openly against the throne) and future Henri IV and the Protestants; one of Catherine's last political acts had been a journey to future Henri IV to negotiate an alliance between him and her son.) There's also the coincidence (or not) that Henri IV issued the Edict of Nantes, which gave Protestants equal civil rights (until his grandson Louis XIV revoked it), on Catherine's birthday once he ruled. Anyway: he did not hate Catherine, and it does look as if he respected her.
Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII
Date: 2022-05-05 04:42 am (UTC)if it was in an operaonce you remind me? :) ) That is really interesting that he didn't hate her and did respect her. Though I guess, as you say, at least he wasn't married to her :PPRe: Henri IV and conversion
Date: 2022-04-30 05:51 pm (UTC)To paraphrase loosely from memory, the official proclamation was along these lines:
I, Henri, totally said a long time ago that I wanted to sit down with some priests and ask them questions and learn more about the Catholic faith, so I could make an informed decision about the salvation of my soul. But it was never a good time, because the country was at war, so I was too busy campaigning
and wooing my mistresses. But now that my subjects seem inclined to peace, [translation: the Catholic League, led by the Guises, are about to elect a king that isn't me] I have the leisure to learn more about this faith that I've always been extremely interested in.And apparently he kept a straight face while saying all this, and everyone pretended to believe him, except for the people who didn't, and he gained Paris for the price of a mass, and eventually lost his life.
Because those people who didn't? We apparently have multiple accounts of diehard Catholics asking their confessors if regicide could ever be justified, and the priests either giving a noncommittal answer like "I'm sure God's forgiveness is infinite," or straight up rationalizing it as, "Well, one of the Ten Commandments is 'thou shalt not kill,' true, but that's like commandment number 5, but commandment number ONE is 'thou shalt have no other gods before me,' and a Protestant king who's only pretending to be Catholic for the sake of power clearly has gods before the one true God. And one comes before five. So in conclusion, my son, God will not only forgive you for regicide, but he fully expects you to commit regicide in his name. P.S. Don't forget this is a holy war and your soul is at stake. Godspeed."
So Henri survived something like 16 assassination attempts (depending on what you count as an "attempt"), and the seventeenth was fatal.
Btw, just before his conversion, I was struck by the phrasing of one of his Catholic supporters, who said to him, "Sire, the Catholic party in France as well as our Catholic neighbors are against you, and all you've got is a miserable few Huguenots. Now, I wouldn't dare say this to you if you were the sincerely religious type. But you live in good fellowship with us Catholics, which means we can't suspect that you're driven strictly by your conscience."
I was impressed by the Catholic saying he wouldn't have tried to convert a sincerely religious Protestant, but then it was, after all, the moderate Catholics who were on Henri's side in the first place.
Re: Henri IV and conversion - Richelieu Footnote
Date: 2022-05-01 06:11 am (UTC)When young Armand du Plessis (future Richelieu the Cardinal) went to Rome to get an dispensation for becoming a bishop while still way below the newly raised by the Council of Trent age, he was questioned by the Pope as to the sincerity of his monarch's Catholicism, which was a challenge and one of those in theory no good answer situations - remember, he's supposed to get the Pope to make him bishop (which is family's entire income depends on right then), so he can't afford to piss off the Pope, but if he agrees that Henri is a heretic in disguise, he's a disloyal subject and also can kiss any chance of a French career goodbye. However, apparantly young Armand was up to the task, and the Pope commented approvingly "Henricus Magnus Armandus Armando" and licensed him becoming a bishop.
(The irony is that he hadn't even wanted to be, at first. Young Armand was never meant for the church. He was a third son. His oldest brother, Henri, was the one who got the (modest - the du Plessis were a deeply provincial nobility on Dad's side, and Mom wasn't even that, she was from Beamtenadel) title, and brother No.2, Alphonse, was the one meant for the church. Alphonse actually loved his faith too much, i.e. he was all for becoming a priest, but he absolutely refused to make a career in it, he became a monk. This was a big problem for the family, because Dad was dead (another duel - did I mention Richelieu really had good reason to loathe duels?), and the family income partly came from the bishopry of Lucon, which they had a lockhold on, but when Uncle previous bishop died and Alphonse absolutely refused to become more than a monk, Mom, Suzanne, who was one tough lady, drafted teenage Armand out of his Parisian cadet school (where he was supposed to make a military career) and into the church, where he had to study theology in record time, and then go to Rome to convince the Pope that despite the recent reforms of the Council of Trent, which were designed to prevent among so many other things young men without any experience becoming bishops in name only, reaping the cash but not doing the work, he should be granted the office. Young Armand did just that by managing to defend Henri IV without insulting the Pope. Presto, Armand du Plessis, Bishop of Lucon at 21.
However, young Armand wasn't done. He also was one of life's workoholics. He did take the office seriously and put the fear of God into the sleepy Lucon administration which wasn't used to a Plessis actually showing up for work instead of appointing a local to do it, completely reorganized it, guilt tripped and scared the local nobility into contributing, too - this was an uphill battle, because Lucon, which happens to be not THAT far from La Rochelle, was surrounded by more Protestants than Catholics at this point, and the Catholic nobles weren't invested in doing something for Lucon since the Plessis family - not locals - had had that lockhold on the bishop seat -, all of which meant that at age 30, when Henri IV got murdered and a general assembly for France was called for the last time before the French Revolution, Armand du Plessis, Bishop of Lucon, was the guy voted for as one of the representatives. He went to Paris, spoke in front of the General Assembly and the new Regent Maria de' Medici, and the rest is history.
Decades later, when he was Cardinal Richelieu and thus the most powerful church official in France, with the corresponding clout in Rome, he forced brother Alphonse to leave his monastery, and had him appointed a cardinal by the Pope, too. Alphonse still absolutely did not want to, and Richelieu had to lean hard on his abbot to make that happen, but he did, and Alphonse had a nervous breakdown. To be fair, that was another family problem. An uncle, Alphonse and Armand's younger sister Nicole would all end up deemed insane. When Nicole had her final breakdown, and her husband just wanted to leave her in that state, Richelieu put the fear of God into him, too, and gave strict (and in terms of Nicole, very tender) instructions of how she could be cared for, which were very atypical for a time not known to deal well with people suffering from mental illness. But if he was a good brother to Nicole, he definitely triggered Alphone's breakdown by forcing him out of the monastery and into a Cardinal title, and if there is another explanation for this than "payback for destroying teenage Armand's dreams by refusing an ecclesiastical career", I haven't come across it yet.
Re: Henri IV and conversion - Richelieu Footnote
Date: 2022-05-05 05:14 am (UTC)Man, this seems... super in character.
Suzanne, who was one tough lady, drafted teenage Armand out of his Parisian cadet school (where he was supposed to make a military career) and into the church, where he had to study theology in record time, and then go to Rome to convince the Pope that despite the recent reforms of the Council of Trent, which were designed to prevent among so many other things young men without any experience becoming bishops in name only, reaping the cash but not doing the work, he should be granted the office.
Wooooow. That's awesome.
he forced brother Alphonse to leave his monastery,
Me: Omg, I am absolutely going to ask whether this was Richelieu's revenge on his brother --
and if there is another explanation for this than "payback for destroying teenage Armand's dreams by refusing an ecclesiastical career", I haven't come across it yet.
Me: Orrrrr I guess I don't have to! :)
Richelieu put the fear of God into him, too, and gave strict (and in terms of Nicole, very tender) instructions of how she could be cared for, which were very atypical for a time not known to deal well with people suffering from mental illness.
Now this is great. (And as usual I really like hearing about people who could be really nice and also really ruthless.)
Re: Henri IV and conversion
Date: 2022-05-05 05:07 am (UTC)Lol!
but commandment number ONE is 'thou shalt have no other gods before me,' and a Protestant king who's only pretending to be Catholic for the sake of power clearly has gods before the one true God. And one comes before five. So in conclusion, my son, God will not only forgive you for regicide, but he fully expects you to commit regicide in his name. P.S. Don't forget this is a holy war and your soul is at stake. Godspeed."
Wow, that is... impressive.
"Sire, the Catholic party in France as well as our Catholic neighbors are against you, and all you've got is a miserable few Huguenots. Now, I wouldn't dare say this to you if you were the sincerely religious type. But you live in good fellowship with us Catholics, which means we can't suspect that you're driven strictly by your conscience."
Heh. I like that.