cahn

Last post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)

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From:

selenak

I do have questions!

1.) Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu‘s brother in law, the Earl of Mar, comes across as terrible and incompetent both in her biographies. What‘s this book‘s take on him?

2.) Any interesting mentions of our friends the brothers Keith (George and James) of future Prussian fame in their youth? Speaking of inner Scottish divisions, the mid 19th century editor of the Andrew Mitchell papers, Andrew Bisset, is like Mitchell a lowland Scot. And Bisset on the one hand fanboys especially James Keith like no one‘s business, but otoh can‘t stand the Jacobite cause, so in his Keith-themed appendixes he speculates the brothers weren‘t REALLY Jacobites in spirit, they might as well have joined Team Hannover, they were just doing their Mum a favor, it was an accident etc. This sounded less than plausible to me.

From:

luzula

I have seen your excellent questions and will eventually answer them! But I went away from home for some days and didn't bring the book along, so I'll check when I'm home again. : )

From:

luzula

George Keith is mentioned in the following circumstances:
- to state that he was a religious skeptic,
- he was repairing the fortifications of Dunnottar castle during the build up to the ’15,
- he had only done peacetime military service, and so was not a contender to be one of the military leaders of the ‘15 (I mean, both he and James were pretty young!)
- a bit about his actions during the battle of Sheriffmuir, where he seems to have commanded four cavalry squadrons and tried to charge three infantry regiments from the front, which didn't succeed well,
- he apparently argued that James III shouldn't give up and leave Scotland without more of a fight
- after the ‘15, he led a rival faction in the Jacobite court which opposed Mar,
- he couldn't speak French before he was exiled in connection with the ’15.

James Keith is quoted a few times in order to give evidence about the course of events or judgments about situations or characters. He is the source of the judgment about General Hamilton as being used to Dutch troops and not knowing what to do with the Highland troops. There is also a note near the end about Protestant Jacobites taking service in Catholic countries, and being pressed to convert. The book notes that James III never did this, and quotes him as saying that he did not want to convert his subjects except by example, nor display any partiality towards Catholics. But James Keith, when he served in the Spanish army, was explicitly told that he would not be promoted if he didn't convert, and that was why he left for Russia.

Yeah, it does seem implausible to argue that the Keith brothers were not actually Jacobites!

More in another comment later about Mar…

From:

selenak

I mean, both he and James were pretty young!

So they were. Also, judging by their later lives, only James seems to have had genuine liking for the military life - at least I don't recall George doing anything military, and certainly Friedrich II used him as a diplomat.

he couldn't speak French before he was exiled in connection with the ’15.

Now that is interesting, but chimes with something which I've come across in other contexts before - whereas being fluent in French was a sine qua non for the continental nobility (especially the Germans), to the point where this was literally their first language, this wasn't the case for the English nobility. Nor, going by this example, the Scots. (I'm reminded again that for all the Whig aristocracy bitching in their recollections about G1's lack of English as a sign of bad education, he was fluent in several languages (English just wasn't one of them) and had trouble finding a minister he could converse with in French because fluent French wasn't self evident for the English aristocracy. Didn't he have to start out in Latin in one case?)

But James Keith, when he served in the Spanish army, was explicitly told that he would not be promoted if he didn't convert, and that was why he left for Russia.

*nods* Figures. In addition to the Spanish heritage, I imagine Philippe V. as a Bourbon just adapted Grandpa's attitude in this regard, and Protestant officers wouldn't get far in the French army, either.

Incidentally, Seckendorff (Imperial envoy to Prussia in the later 1720s and early 1730s, and thus together with his buddy Grumbkow both pal of FW and for his successful opposition to the English marriage project deeply hated by SD) was a Protestant who made it all the way to Field Marshal in the service of the Habsburgs. Several of the Emperors he served did try the "won't you convert?" thing, but didn't make it a condition for further advancement, and he supposedly (according to his first biographer) impressed them by saying that if he went against his conscience there, how could they trust him, etc. (Or something like that.)

Thank you for extracting the Keith bits for me!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

G1's lack of English as a sign of bad education

Was it bad education per se, or bad preparation for ruling a monolingual English-speaking kingdom?

I imagine Philippe V. as a Bourbon just adapted Grandpa's attitude in this regard, and Protestant officers wouldn't get far in the French army, either.

Yeah, Philip V was deeeeply devout, far more so than Grandpa (this is the guy who practiced self-flagellation, after all), so I wouldn't expect Protestants to get far there.

Likewise in Portugal: Peter Keith had to have the Queen of England, Caroline of Ansbach, intercede to get him permission to join the Portuguese army without converting, and he was just a Lt. Col.!

Edited Date: 2022-12-18 01:24 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

being fluent in French was a sine qua non for the continental nobility (especially the Germans), to the point where this was literally their first language, this wasn't the case for the English nobility.

Nor Spain, at least at the beginning of the century. Obviously Philip "the Frog" V's court contained Frenchmen exported from Grandpa's court, but Horowski says that when Saint-Simon showed up in 1722 as envoy during the exchange of princesses, he had to speak Latin to the Spaniards. Furthermore, the pronunciation of Latin in France and Spain had diverged so much that after Saint-Simon gave his speech in Latin, one of the Spaniards very politely said he would prefer to speak Latin, as he unfortunately didn't understand French!

From Henry Kamen's bio of Philip:

Philip's contact with French ideas and influences was a novelty, not shared by most of the ruling class in Spain. The continued isolation of the nobility from European influences can be seen also in the conduct of the country's foreign affairs. Spain's new aggressive stance in European politics was directed by personnel who, if they were Spaniards, had little or no experience of the world outside the peninsula...In the first years of Alberoni's influence, the ambassadors of Spain in The Hague, London and Paris were all Italians. Only these people, for instance, had any knowledge of foreign languages, and in particular of French, the tongue used by all diplomats to communicate among themselves.

I'm also seeing, glancing through Kamen, that Isabella Farnese arrived "fluent" in French, but preferring to write in Italian in response to French letters (much like half the people I end up emailing in Germany, present company excepted).

Mind you, I continue to be annoyed that Kamen manages to produce the following sentences at different points in the same book:

He was unable to pick up the Spanish language, a failure which aggravated his feeling of isolation (throughout his reign he continued to speak only French).

He probably knew little of how Spaniards lived, for he did not habitually speak their language.

In nearly all these areas, he made tourist visits to cathedrals and monasteries, prayed at the principal shrines, and had some contact with his subjects. His language did not cut him off from them: though he always preferred to use French, he read and spoke Spanish, and (as we have seen) he habitually employed it when annotating state documents.

Make up your mind, Kamen!

Edited Date: 2022-12-18 01:09 pm (UTC)

From:

luzula

So, the Earl of Mar. Szechi is not the type of historian to gossip about anyone’s private life when it isn't relevant to the larger history, or make snarky judgments. (Bruce Lenman, on the other hand, I absolutely recall as making snarky judgments about Mar, but then he is pretty much the master of snarky judgments. As an example, he said that John Graham of Claverhouse "was primarily a very unimaginative soldier for whom the arrival of an order from a superior terminated all speculative thought, if indeed he ever indulged in such".)

Szechi portrays Mar as probably turning Jacobite because he was dismissed from office in September 1714. Mar was facing financial ruin without his minister’s salary (in fact he had not been paid his salary for a while because Oxford manipulated the payment of salaries to keep his followers in line), and in the first place (before turning Jacobite) he seemed to want to make himself a political nuisance who would be best bought off by the new regime. So he embarked on a campaign against the Union. But it failed because the Whigs and Tories couldn't work together, even though many Whigs were also skeptical about the union.

So after that, Mar turned to Jacobitism, and did what he could do promote rebellion in Scotland, among other things telling them that the English Jacobites were ready to rise. But it was larger than him, so it's not like the rising was caused by him. He has been called incompetent as a leader during the rising, and he probably wasn't very competent. But he never claimed to have military experience, and he did follow the advice of the officers he had (but none of them were that great).

Sorry, I don't think there's anything particularly juicy for you here!