I've now read the rest of the "The Court of Louix XIV in Eyewitness Accounts" book. Compared with the "Frederick the Great and Maria Theresia in Eye Witness Accounts" book from the same series, it's noticeable less enamoured with its main subject. (Reminder: the editor of the Fritz/MT book is an aherent of the "it was all a misunderstanding, Fritz wanted to be MT's champion and protector when he invaded Silesia!" school of thought, blaming "Austrian propaganda" for making this look like a cynical land grab and a protection racket. It's still a book full of great quotes.) Whereas is a lot of Louis critical stuff among the selections here, and also courtier critical stuff. For example, when we get around to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, those same courtier sources previously presented as amusing gossip providers and/or witty literati are now made to look like callous fanatics by their own quotes, like Madame de Sevigné saying the soldiers of the King make excellent missionaries (to force the Huguenots to convert), and the actual preachers can do the rest. And while most of the book is gossipy, the editor never loses sight of the gigantic cost of it all, presents stories featuring starving peasants and in general solidly blames Louis for leaving his kingdom in an exhausted, poor and terrible state, for all the superpower dressings. And he doesn't just say this about Louis' final years. This story is from the glorious beginning, when Versailles was built/expanded from a country mansion into what it became. The author of the quote is Parliamentary Council Lefèvre d'Ormesson, who notes into his diary on July 1668:
A woman who had lost her son through a fall when he was working on the machines of Versailles and who had been condemned to payments by the Chambre du Justice, presented full of pain a general petition in order to get some attention, and indeed she was asked whatever she wanted; she then shouted insults about the King, called him whoreson, King of Machines, tyrant and a thousand other scotises and extravaganzas, whereupon the King, surprised, asked whether she was talking of him. Whereupon she said yes and continued in her rant. She was arrested and immediately condemned to be whipped and be brought to the Petites-Maisons (then the madhouse of Paris). The whip was used on her with extraordinary hrashness throughout the entire Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the woman didn't make a sound, suffering the evil like a martyr for God's glory. Many have disliked this strict punishment and have said that the woman should have been treated as a madwoman and immeditaely brought to the Petites-Maisons, instead of letting oneself provoked into this punishment.
The editor also gives us, late in Louis' reign, the entire letter from the Abbé Fénelon (bestselling author of Telemaque, the How-to-be-a-good-prince novel so beloved by Fritz and Leopold Mozart, in which he provides Louis with an almighty "here's why you suck, in detail, and how your people suffer from it" speech. (This did not end well for Fénelon, who had started out with a very good job - teacher of the King's Grandsons - and was one of the candidates to become the next bishop of Paris, but after that letter, Louis made him first bishop of Cambrai instead (far less prestitigious, and far away), and then, when Fénelon wrote a pro Quietism pamphlet (Quietism, like Jansenism, was one of those inner Catholic branches which got popular in the later part of Louis' reign, but Quietism less so, and it was outright condemned), brought down the thunder, meaning he got the Pope to excommunicate Fénelon until Fénelon recanted (in public).)
But for all the social injustices, two thirds of the book consists of sensational gossip. Sometimes the editor presents conflicting accounts, as whenever there's a poisoning accusation, or how an affair came to be. For example: Louis and his first Maitresse en Titre, Louise de La Valliere. In one version, this started out as a kind of beard/cover story for his flirtation with his sister-in-law, Minette, and then became real, in another, La Valliere approched with and she was so devoted and crushing that he was nice to her at first, what with her not being a great beauty (too thin, and a slight limp, the courtiers said), but then fell in love with her.
Now, the chapter Madame est morte about Minette's death has a lot of very long quotes, and I can't translate them all, but here are some
Daniel de Cosnac, Bishop of Valence, about the early days when Minette still thought she could get rid of the Knight of Lothringia:
Madame replied to me that, if someone would advise her well, she would be capable of being careful, for the Chevalier de Lorraine was passionately in love with Madame de Monaco; Madame de Monaco was the friend of her heart and of unshakeable devotion, and thus she would be able to move her to signal the Chevalier de Lorraine whatever she wanted. I returned: 'I don't know either Madame de Monaco nor the Chevalier de Lorraine well enough to reassure your royal highness in this matter that such a strategy would be successful." She said: "I swear it will." Only a few days after this conversation, Madame started to change her mind. I already said that Monsieur had demanded of the Chevalier de Lorraine that he, MOnsieur, was supposed to have precedence in his emotions before Madame de Monaco, and the later undoubtedly recognized that this was the key point in order to keep Monsieur's favor, and thus he prefered the fortune he could expect from Monsieur to the true or pretended love to Madame de Monaco. At various opportunities, it became clear without any shadow of a doubt that he was devoted exclusively to Monsieur and was Madame's enemy. This went so far that he showed open hostility and contempt towards Madame. Madame recognized too late that she shouldn't have put any hopes into Madame de MOnaco, who did not fulfill the expectations Madame had of her, and who had no influence on the Chevalier whatsoever.
(According to Horowski, Madame de Monaco was actually bi and either flirted with or had an affair with Minette herself, and later made a pass to Liselotte as well, who said no. But there is no quote supporting this in this book.)
Then the negotiations for the Treaty of Dover take up steam (reminder: the treaty for a France/England alliance, with the secret additional clause that Charles II promises to convert to Catholicism, which he'll only keep on his deathbed), which means Minette after years of neglect is increasingly important to Louis again, which means Philippe sulks. Simultanously, there's the matter of the abbeys he wants for the Chevalier, and it all explodes on January 30th, 1670. According to Saint-Maurice, who is working for the Duke of Savoy and reporting to him, this happened:
This, Monseigneur is the complete truth, as Madame de Montespan wrote it to her father the Duke of Monetemart, and how I learned it from Madame de Trambonneau, her trusted and beloved friend. But I ask your royal highness not to tell anyone I named these people as my sources. The Abbé de Rivière and Bishop of Langres had two abbeys who belonged to Monsieur's territories. As the Bishop was old and fragile, (Monsieur) had been waiting for a long time for his death in order to give these abbeys to the Chevalier de Lorraine. He said this to the King at Chambord, but the King immediately replied that as the Chevalier was not a member of the clergy, his conscience did not permit him to allow this, and that besides this man was leading a far too debauched life to get a clerical income. Nonetheless Monsieur begged him for his permission, but his Majesty replied again that this was impossible, but that he, as he loved him (i.e. as Louis loved Philippe, his brother), would give the Chevalier a pension of 40 000 Livres despite having little respect for him once the abbeys in question were free. Monsieur told all of this to the Chevalier de Lorraine, and they made a hundred jokes about the conscience of the King which accomodated for all the ladies. The King learned of this. The King accused the Chevalier de Lorraine of the shameful crime of sodomy with the Comte de Guiche and other men who have been burned for this crime at the Place de Grève. When the Bishop of Langries died on Thursday morning, Monsieur told the King that he had given the abbeys to the Chevalier de Lorraine, whereupon the King said that he didn't want this to happen. Monsieur replied that it was a done deed and a fact. HIs Majesty told him again that he would prevent this. The conversation got so heated that the people around them started to notice.(...)
Philippe takes off to Saint Cloud with his entire household. To get the next paragraph, reminder that the Duchess of Orleans is Minette, Philippe's wife, the first Madame.
Madame asked (Louis) to agree that the Chevalier de Lorraine was to receive these abbeys. He told her that this was not possible. She asked for it as a favor to herself. He remained firm in his refusal and chided her for having forgotten the bad treatment she'd been subjected to so quickly. She told him that she prefered Monsieur's contentment to her own interests, that the Chevalier de Lorraine was a young man , that he would change his behavior, and asked (Louis) to forgive him, but when she saw that she could not succeed, she threw herself at the King's feet, crying, and told him that she saw it as the greatest injury to be separated from his person, but that it was her duty to follow Monsieur who wanted to leave the court. The King withdrew and tsaid that if his brother would wish to separate himself from him for this reason, he'd know how to punish those responsible.
=> The Chevalier gets arrested. Philippe decides to move his entire household to the furthest estate he owns (300 miles from Versailles) until he gets his boyfriend back. And because it still cracks me up how the tv show Versailles presented this whole thing in s1, complete with the Chevalier suffering in a ratty dungeon, here's how his arrest actually proceded:
The Chevalier spent the night in Saint-Germain; he wasn't brought to the Bastille. He was asked how many servants he wanted to have, he could bring as many as he wished; he chose two of his nobleman and two valets. He left on Friday in his carriage with a strong escort commanded by a lieutenant of the Gardes des Corps. He's supposed to be sent to Pierre-Encise; others say to the citadel of Montpellier, or maybe to Collioure, at the Catalonian border.
Monsieur can't endure the countryside for long and comes back to Versailles. Louis offers a compromise: the Chevalier is freed on the condition that he takes up residence either in Rome or in Malta (after all, he is in theory a Maltese Knight, that's why he's a Chevalier). The King provides a pension of 10 000 livres, and the abbeys will go to the Chevalier's brother, the Abbé d'Harcourt, who is at least a priest. Minette takes off to Dover, meets Charles, James and Jemmy, and returns. Then we get several descriptions of her death, one by her lady in waiting Madame de La Fayette (presumably an ancestress?), one from Louis' and Philippe's cousin, the Grande Mademoiselle (daughter of Gaston the schemer, older sister of Marguerite Louise the involuntary Medici wife), and then various descriptions from various people of the aftermath. What all these have in common is that she felt a pain in her side on the first day of her return, scandalalized her court by insisting on bathing in the river on Saturday and on Sunday felt worse. On Sunday, a painter was busy painting a portrait of her and Monsieur (oh joy, under these circumstances). While Monsieur is about to leave, Madame takes a glass of Zichory Wataer, drinks, her side attacks return, and she breaks down. From then onwards, it's an extremely painful dying, for hours and hours. Madame de La Fayette:
Suddenly (Minette) said one should take care of hte water which she had drunk. It was surely poisonous, maybe someone had confused a bottle, she was poisoned, she felt it, and was asking for an antidote.I was standing in front of her bed, next to Monsieur, and while I thought him incapable of such a crime, a feeling close to human malice made me take a good hard look at him. He was neither moved nor embarassed by this thought of Madame's. He said that the water should be given to a dog. He was sharing Madame's opinion that oil and an antidote should be brought to her in order to take such an evil suspicion from her. Madame Desbordes, her first chamberwoman, who was devoted to her, said that she had prepared the water, and drank from it, but Madame insisted on bring given oil and an antidote. She was given both.
It doesn't work, she gets worse, and Louis gets send for, who arrives with the Queen, two of his current mistresses (La Valliere and Montespan) and the Comtesse de Soissons, i.e. Olympe Mancini, Eugene's mother, and briefly also a mistress of Louis. Minette wants another medication to make her throw up, the doctors (now present in the plural) say no, and Louis starts to argue.
The King wanted to argue with htem, they didn't know how to reply to him. He told them: "One cannot let a woman die without trying to help her!" They looked at each other and didn't say a word. There was a constant coming and going in this room, people were having conversations, some even laughed as if Madame was in a very different state.
At which point both Madame de Lafayette and the Grande Mademoiselle claim they were the ones who thought that Minette needed a proper confessor, not the "lousy Capuchin" already present, and another, more renowned confessor is sent for so she can go through the final rites with him. The English envoy, as opposed to all the French memoirists, also mentions this exchange in his report to Charles:
I took the liberty of asking her whther she believed she had been poisoned. Her confessor, who was present, and heard what I had asked, said to her: "Madame, don't accuse anyone and offer your death as a sacrifice to God." This stopped her from replying, and despite the fact I kept asking her this question repeatedly, she only answered with a shrug. I asked her for the box in which all her letters were preserved in order to send them to His Majesty, and she ordered me to demand it from Madame de Bordes, who kept fainting and nearly dying from the pain to see her mistress in such a lamentable condition, and so Monsieur was able to get his hands on the letters before (Madame de Bordes) got to her senses again.
Louis orders an autopsy and the result says she wasn't poisoned. (The English envoy is not convinced.) Saint-Simon, who wasn't alive then, let alone in Versailles, still has a version of this story in his memoirs, and he not only reports it as being poison, administered by the Marquis d'Effiat and ordered by the Chevalier de Lorraine, but includes an aftermath where Detective Louis comes to the same conclusion and interrogates the Marquis:
"Now you listen to me, my friend: If you admit all to me and tell me the truth about what I want to know, then, whatever you may have done, I shall pardon you, and it will never be mentioned again. But take care not to keep anything from me, for if you do, you are a dead man. Has Madame been poisoned?" "Yes, Sire," he said. "And who has poisoned her?" the King asked, "and how was it done?" He replied that the Chevalier de Lorraine had sent the poison to Beauvron and d'Effiat, and told him what I have described earlier. Whereupon the King continued to ask: (...)"And my brother, did he know?" "No, Sire, none among us three was that stupid. He cannot keep a secret, he'd have betrayed us." Upon this reply, the King exclaimed a loud "Ha!", like a man who after having had a constricted throat can breathe again.
If this conversation happened, it didn't result in anything negative for the Chevalier or D'Effiat. On February 12th 1672, Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter:
The King asked Monsieur who had just been in Paris: "Well, my brother, what is the talk of Paris?" Monsieur said to him: "Sire, one talks a lot about this unfortunate Marquis." - "And what do they say about him?" - "That he wanted to plead for another unfortunate man." - "And for which unfortunate man?" the King asks. "For the Chevalier de Lorraine", Monsieur says. "But," says the King, "do you still think of this Chevalier de Lorraine? Are you worried about him? Would you love him who returned him to you?" "Really," Monsieur said, "that would be the greatest joy anyonen could ever provide for me in my life." "Well," the King said, "then I shall make you this present. Two days ago a courier has left. He will return, I give him back to you, and wish you to be obliged to me for the rest of your life. What's more, I'll promote him to Field Marshal of my army." Consequently, Monsieur threw himself at the King's feet, hugged his kneeds and kissed his hand in boundless joy. The King lifted him and said to him: "My brother, brothers should not embrace like this." And he embraced him in a brotherly fashion.
Not thrilled: the English ambassador. The Chevalier de Lorraine has been permitted to return to court and to serve in the army as Field Marshal. If Madame has been poisoned, like nearly everyone in the world believes, then France regards him as the killer and is justly amazed that the King of France has so little respect of our King that he permits this creature to return to court, especially if one thinks of the impudent way he has treated the Princess throughout her life.
I don't have any history to discuss, but I saw that Princeton University Press was having a book sale that included Frederick the Great's Philosophical Writings for $10, and I thought of you people!
but tomorrow I might need him against the Normans. For example.
I laughed!
Crusaders: What kind of Christian Emperor are you anyway?
heeeee!
The irony is that Basil - who grew up to be one of the most powerful eunuch officials of the Byzantine Empire and managed to serve and survive several Emperors in a row - did not betray Romanos, but his legitimate sons did.
This sound super interesting and... I'm gonna have to wait until I'm through the German podcast and starting this one to hear the story, huh? :PP (*)
Theophanu the younger was his niece, not his daughter, plus hadn't been born in the purple at all
I totally laughed at his comparison of Theophanu with... someone I've never heard of, and the podcast guy was like "Yeah, I've never heard of her either. Anyway, that was the equivalent of Theophanu." That was great and was a very visceral way of explaining to me how not-purple Theophanu was :)
On a different note (or maybe the same note, in the sense of, things that amused me):
I mean. The readers of Voltaire's memoirs and pamphlets are not going to find themselves thinking, "Oh, I see, Fritz likes to bottom. I've read the Kinsey report, and that all checks out." !!!
LOLOLOLOLOL! The statistics are just SOMETHING ELSE.
(*) Otto III has just died, and also recently (maybe the previous episode?) is where Sylvester II became Pope and only then did I realize -- okay, this is super embarrassing but I guess I might as well admit it and amuse you guys -- that this guy "Jabert" that he's been talking about for ages and who sounded super cool and interesting but whom I had never heard of before was actually Gerbert d'Aurillac. (My brain just recognized that it sounded like (American-accented-French) Javert, okay? I'm not good at French phonetic spelling!)
(ETA: No, as you can infer, I still haven't reread Ars Magica. But now I have even more reason to!)
ETA2: Huh, it seems that Judith Tarr wrote a novel about Theophanu! I will have to read and report back! (Lol forever, Publishers Weekly didn't seem to like it at all. "But when she writes of Theophano's nuptial banquet, 'the feast dragged itself into eternity,' she could be describing this novel." Aw.)
So, the Affair of the Poisons, which ensured that whenever someone prominent died of anything but old age (and sometimes even then), people would suspect poisoning all over Europe even more than they did before. (Like future F1 after the deaths of his two full brothers, Karl Emil and Ludwig, and feeling sick after lunching with Stepmom, suspecting his stepmother and probably also his father and becoming the first Prussian Prince to very publically escape from Prussia. Only in his case sucessfully - he made it to Hannover.) It's a rather complicated story, and I'll try to simplify it. One key problem is this: while there was some poisoning for which we have sold proof (as in, phioles with poison and correspondence mentioning poisoning), once the ball got rolling and confessions poured out of the arrested people who weren't of the nobility and thus could and did get tortured, you have to put a question mark on those confessions that comes with every confession produced by either torture or the threat of torture.
Another problem is that the underground network the French police uncovered on that occasion, which certainly did have some high class clients (hence all of Europe munching popcorn and observing the scandal) wasn't primarily consisting of poison deliveries, but provided abortions and their less-good-to-modern-eyes-looking twin service, midwife services plus letting your illegitimate child disappear, beautfy products like potions to enlarge your breasts, soothsaying and love potions. Someone like Catherine "La Voisin" did also include poisons in her offerings, but not all of the other "Sorceresses" of the Parisian scene did, plus there were certainly any number of courtiers who had used La Voisin's non-poisoning services, - a credible case could be made that Madame de Montespan, for example, who was at that point visibly losing Louis' favour, had wanted a love potion - but now found their names among the clients. Plus some of the "sorceresses" like La Voisin's daughter deduced that if they hinted at knowledge of sensational poison plots (ideally directed against the King himself), they remained alive longer, becauses then the police would have to investigate further and need you as a source, whereas if you just confess to, say, being an abortionist, you get condemned and executed immediately. So how many of the big poisoning accusations are actually true, beyond the initial cases that got the whole scandal going? Who knows.
It all starts with Marie-Magdelaine d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers. When her (a noble as well, and an alchemist) lover dies, a box is found in his posession containing phioles with poison and a letter from her demanding them from him. She makes a runner to England but gets arrested in Lüttich and brought back to France. Unlike a great many women later, she doesn't get tortured, she is nobility, and so she gets a trial in front of the highest court available in France, in which she is accused of having poisoned her father and her brothers for the inheritance she then made. Alas, the fatal box doesn't just contain letters from her, but also from a guy (noble, too) who basically had the office of highest clerical tax collector, who visited the Marquise after her lover's death and gave her a large sum of money, for what, he doesn't want to say. The Marquise confesses to having poisoned her brothers and father (with Arsenic, btw) and having intended to poison her sister as well. As a member of the nobility, she gets beheaded (once stroke, she was lucky). But now people are starting to wonder. And then an anonymous letter gets found in a Jesuit church in which the writer says that there is a a conspiracy to kill the King, and a lot of people have confessed to using poison regularly, but he can't break the seal of othe confession so can't name names, but please investigate, save the King.
=> A series of arrests follow, first of an alchemist who knew the Marquise's dead lover, then of his girlfriend, and then of the (non-noble) "sorceresses" she names - La Vigoureux (wife if a tailor), Marie Bosse (whose main trade is soothsaying via cards), and then, finally, Catherine Deshayes, wife of Antoine Voisin, hence "La Voisin". These ladies are not members of the nobility, they get the according treatment, and then they start to name noble clients left, right and center. Here's Primi Visconti (aka the guy who rebuffed the pass of the Marquis de La Valliere):
(There was) a certain Voisin, who under the pretense of sorcery and soothsaying made her house to a place of debauchery and traded with drugs and perfume which got suspected of having been poisons. Fact is that she caused a great many stillbirths and collected plants of all types. Most ladies in Paris visited her; she had alist of their names and of what they wanted from her. It got said that the Duchess of Foix wanted a potion to develop her breasts further, Madame de Vassé such a one for her hips; many wanted a secret recipe to awaken love, and several wanted the position Madame de Montespan had. Moreover, La Voisin claimed that it was due to her art that Madame de Montespan and Louvois retained the royal favor.
Madame de Montespan doesn't keep it much longer. Louis has started a fling with an 18 years old beauty named Angelique de Fontanges. (Who won't be around for long; her early death is another case of "poison? Maybe?". The final winner, as mentioned repeatedly, will be Madame de Maintenon, the former Francoise Scarron, who started out as governess of the Louis/Athenais de Montespan children, one reason, btw, why she will be such a partisan of the Duc de Maine, the oldest boy of that set, against Liselotte's son Philippe II for the regency.) La Voison makes her confession naming Madame de Montespan as a client on March 12, and in April, Madame de Montespan gets dismisssed. As Louis' mistress, mind you, not yet from court. Instead, Madame de Montespan gets an office in the Queen's household, currently owned by none other than the Comtesse de Soissons, aka Olympe Mancini, Eugene's mother.
Trichateau writes to Busby-Rabutin: This Wednesday, the Comtesse de Soissons get the order to hand over her office. This princess was staying at Chaillot in a small hows she owns there. Monsieur Colbert had to run around a lot. She talked with the the King in the evening when being with the Queen, who told her that there was a joyful surprise waiting for her. She replied with the suitable submissiveness, and finally she received two hundred thousand Taler, and with that sum, Madame de Montespan became supreme intendant of the Queen's household and now isn't the King's mistress anymore.
Meanwhile, the interrogations continue, and more and more noble names are getting named. Louvois (Minister of War, scourge of the Palatinate) writes to Louis about his conversation with La Reynie, the police boss, about the confession wave and with ill conceiled glee because the guys named are two rivals of his:
Everything which Your Majesty has seen against the Sieur de Luxemburg and the Marquis de Feuquières is nothing compared to the declaration which this interrogation contains, and in which the Sieur de Luxemburg gets accused to have demanded the death of his wife, and that of the Marshal de Créquy, and furtherly the marriage of his daughter with my son, his regaining of the Dukedom of Montmorency and glorious deeds of war which would make your Majesty forget the mistakes which he has made at Philippsburg. Monsieur de Feuquères gets described asa the most evil man of the world, who used the opportunities to sell his soul to the devil in order to move Madame Voisin to poison the uncle or guardian of a girl he wanted to marry.
In November, La Voisin accuses none other than one of three greatest writers of the age - the three being Corneille, Racine and Moliere. The guy she accuses is Racine, at this point already a living classic, member of the Academy and official historian of the King. Some years earlier, Moliere's best actress , La du Parc, left his troupe and Moliere himself for Racine, who wrote the play and the main part of Andromaque for her and also had a love affair with her. Racine's son Louis, indignantly writing after his father's death, says du Parc died of the aftermath of childbirth, that his father loved du Parc and would never have harmed her. But La Voisin claims Racine poisoned her, and the book quotes the interrogation protocol of November 21st:
Q: How did she get to know the actress Du Parc? A: She has known her for fourteen years, they were very good friends, and she was in her confidence for all her affairs. (...) She had all the more cause to suspect (Racine) as Jean Racine always stopped her, who was the good friend of Du Parc, from visiting her during her entire illness of which she died, despite Du Parc constantly asking for her. But whenever she went there, in order to see her, she was stopped from entering, and this on Racine's orders; all she learned through Du Parc's stepmother, who calls herself Mademoiselle de Gorle, and through the daughters of Du Parc, who are in the Hotel de Soissons and have told (La Voisin) that Racine is the cause of her misery. La de Gorle has told her that Racine, who secretly married la Du Parc, was jealous of all the world and especially of her, La Voisin, whom he distruisted; and that he got rid of Du Parc through poison because of his boundless jealousy, that Racine throughout Du Parc's illness had not left her side, that he took a precious diamond of her finger, and that he also removed the jewelry and those things owned by Du Parc which had some worth.
This testimony sounds less than convincing to the French police, and so there is no order to Racine's arrest. Unlilke for... drumroll...well, you'll haven noted La Voisin's supposed sources are staying at the Hotel de Soissons...
Letter from Bussy-Rabutin to La Rivière: I'm sharing big news with you. The special commisson for the affair of the poisons has produced orders of arrest for the Sieur de Luxemburg, the Comtesse de Soissons, the Marquise d'Alluye and Sieur de Polignac. Furtherly, the following have been asked to appear in person in front of the commission: Madame de Bouillon, the Princess of Tingry, the wife of the Marshall de La Ferté, and Madame du Roure. Moroever, there has been an order of arrest for Cessac. Rumor has it that the crime of the Sieur de Luxemburg has been to have poisoned a tax official for Flanders when with the army, who had provided him with royal money. The Comtesse de Soissons gets accused of having poisoned her husband; the Marquise d'Alluye her brother-inlaw; the Princess of Tingry her newborn children; Madame de Bouillon a valet who knew about her love affairs. The King has returned a billet written by teh Duchess of Foix to her, in which she had written to La Voisin an din which she told her: "The more I rub, the less they grow." As His Majesty demanded an explanation for these words, she replied that she had asked la Voisin for a recipe for the development of her breasts.
Also arrested: two priests, who supposedly read black mass over various ladies' bodies in order to get them the objects of their desires.
The Abbé de Choisy about Eugene's Mom and her reaction to all of this: The King, with a last consideration of the memory of the late Cardinal - i.e. .Mazarin, Olympe's uncle - sent Sieur de Bouillon to her, in order to tell her that she had a choice: either to go to the Bastille tomorrow, and to endure the hardship of imprisonment and condemnation there, or to leave France at once. The Duke of Villeroy and the Marquise d'Alluye both were with her at the time. She asked for their advice. Everyone wanted her to go to the Bastille, since she said she was innocent, but she did not dare to do it; she told them: "Monsieur de Louvois is my mortal enemy, because I refused to marry my daughter to his son. He has so much credit that he can get me accused, he can provide false witnesses. If an order of arrest has been issued for a person of my standing, then he will complete his crime and will let me die on the block, or at least let me rot in prison. I prefer to escape. I will justify myself later. Her dear friend the Marquises d'Alluye went with her.
La Voisin gets condemned to death on January 19th, and the Duke of Luxemburg brought to the Bastille. Madame de Sevigné, the most famous female letter writer of her generation, writes on the 29th to the Count of Guiteau:
At a distance, don't you have the impression that we breathe in nothing but poisons here and are surrounded by sacrilege and abortions? Indeed, all of this causes disgust everywhere in Europe, and whoever will read us in a hundred years will lament for those who were witness to all these accusations. You know that poor Luxemburg went to the Bastille on his own free will; he himself was the officer leading himself there, he presented the arrest warrent to Bèzemaux. He came from Saint-Germain and met Madame de Montespan on the way; they both left their carriages in order to talk undisturbed with each other; he cried a lot. (...) At first, he was brought into a rather beautiful room. Three hours later the order arrived to treat him more strictly. Now he's residing on the top floor in a miserable room. He was interrogated for four hours by Sirs Bezon and de la Reynie. As for the Comtesse de Soissons, that is another matter entirely. She has sworn that she is innocent. She left in the night and said she did not want to endure prison or the shame to be confronted with beggars and villains. The Marquise d'Alluye went with her. They took the way to Namur. There is no intention of pursuing them. There is something natural and noble in this behavior. As far as I am concerned, I approve of it. It's said that the things she is accused of are nothing but idiocies, which she has told a hundred times, as one does if one comes from these sorceresses or however they call themselves.
The Duke is eventually released. None of these nobles mentioned in the book seems to be executed. La Voisin, otoh, gets burned alive on February 22nd. Madame de Sevigné:
I'll tell you about la Voisin now. It wasn't on Wednesday that she was burned, as I mistakenly told you earlier, it was yesterday. She knew her sentence since Thursday, which was very unusual. In the evening, she told her guards: "HOw now, don't we keep medianoch?" She ate with them at midnight, for the hell of it, for it wasn't a fasting day. She drang a lot of wine. She sang twenty drinking songs. On Tuesday, she was put though the regular and extraordinary interrogation - the later is the euphemism for torture, of course - ; she had eaten and slept for eight hours. She was confronted with the ladies de Dreux and Le Fréron - who were supposed to have killed their husbands - and with some others while on the rack. There is no public declaration yet what she has testified. There is just rumor that a few more extraordinary things have been revealed. (...) She appeared on the cart dressed in white; that is the dress for being burned. She was very red faced, and one could see she violently pushed back the confessor and his cruxifix. We saw her pass from Hotel de Sully.
This still isn't the end, though, because there are more arrests, more interrogations, and now Marguerite Voisin, the daughter, accuses Madame de Montespan of having been not a one off but a regular client of her mothers. And of having ordered Black Masses. Which is when we get a letter from Louis himself:
After I saw the declaration which Marguerite Voisin, prisoner in my chateau de Vincennes, has made on the 12th of the past month, I write you this letter in order to tell you that it is my wish that you use all your abilities in order to bring light to the facts which are contained in this declaration and in the interrogation, that you take care that the comparisons of protocols, confrontations and investigations made about the mentioned declaration and the interrogation are noted in separate documents.
Separate, because the one naming the mother of seven of his children sure as hell won't be published.
From Marguerite Voisin's interrogation protocol, which Louis has just read:
She has seen that two masses were read by Guibourg - that's the main black mass priest, who has already admitted of having read black masses for Voisin's clients - (...) The first one she knows about happened more than six years ago. She helped her mother to prepare the necessary things, to wit, a mattress to be put on chairs two sools on both sides on which the chandeliers were put. Then Guibourg entered dressed in his mass robe from the little room that was next, and then la Voisin let the woman enter over whose body the mass should be read, and told her - Marguerite Voisin - to leave. When she was older, her mother didn't hesitate anymore and she was present during masses of this type and has seen that the lady was put on the mattress completely naked, the head supported through a cushion on an upturned chair, the legs hanging down, a hankerchief on her body, and on the hankerchief, placed above the stomach, a cruxifix and the cup. Madame de Montespan had such a mass read for hserlf by Guibourg at La Voisin's place three years ago. She came around ten in the evening and left around midnight. And as La Voisin told the lady that she needed to name the times at which one should read the other two masses that were needed to achieve the success for her cause, the later said she couldn't find the time for them, and that she (La Voisin) would have to do without her and would have to do everything needed to bring this affair to a good end. Whereupon (La Voisin) promised her that she would substitute herself to have the two masses read in hers, the Marquise de Montespan's cause. Some time later, she (Marguerite Voisin) was prsent a mass which Guibourg read in this way over the body of her mother, and during the sacrifice he named the name Louis de Bourbon and that of a lady which consisted of two or three names, but did not say the name Montespan.
By now, La Reynier has 140 people prisoners in both the Bastille and Vincennes, and every single one of them, as he writes to Louvois, has been accused of either having used poison or of trading with poison. Louvois orders the files to be brought to him. These include supportive evidence against Madame de Montespan, who is named as a client of La Voisins by Le Sage (another ex priest turned black mass priest). Accoding to them, there was an additional plot going on: while Montespan ordered a love potion so she could give it to Louis, in reality what was prepared was a poison which would kill him, but without her knowledge. Otoh, she did want something lethal against young Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Who does die. Louis this time does explicitly NOT want an autopsy. The Affair of the Poisons interrogations won't be finished until July 1682. Inconclusion, there were 210 interrogations, 319 orders of arrest, 318 actual arrests, 88 people condemned. La Reynie in his final report says: It is well advised to end the comission, but one has to avoid leaving the impression this happens out of fatigue or because of the disgust of the judges, so that a great many interested people won't use this as an excuse to ridicule our justice system.
Well, quite, La Reynie. So: was everyone accused guilty? Were some, and others were accused the same way victims of with hunts just a generation earlier were? Was everyone after the Marquise de Brinvilliers innocent? The biggest argument against the last one is that La Reynie actually did NOT want to produce that many accusations of VIPs, whereas during a witch trial, the interrogators do want more accusations and operate accordingly. Otoh: Madame de Montespan was both unpopular and on her way out, which everyone knew. So more than one of the accused could have named her as a safe bet. Or she could, indeed have been so desperate to remain Maitresse en Titre that she resorted to Satanism and love potions. We will never know. But the difference in sentences for noble and not noble accused is yet another reason why I am utterly unsurprised the Revolution happened (if a century later.)
I'm planning a series of write-ups on "Danish kings and their favorites". This is the first installment, and subsequent installments, which have been outlined but not yet written, will cover Christian VII and Struensee.
Obvious caveats are obvious: this is all from a combination of Wikipedia (English, German, and Danish, the last thanks to helpful Google translate) and a biographie romancee by a guy who thinks FS was French, along with other factual gaffes. I have ordered more academic-looking books on Struensee, but who knows if I will read them, much less write them up--my German is slow, the post is slow, and by the time the books arrive, I will probably be on to some other obsession. (I considered sending one to Selena for the free shipping + 2-5 business day delivery, but I hear she's really overcrowded these days. ;))
So here goes. Take EVERYTHING with several grains of salt, and I reserve the right to retract things later. (And yes, I *am*, predictably, half-seriously wondering how far you can get with Danish on 3 years of German and 1 year of Old Norse. ;))
Intro So to understand how Struensee got into power, you have to understand Christian VII, the mentally ill king who let him get all that power, and to understand Christian VII, you have to go two generations back to behold the propagation of trauma.
The story of Grandpa Christian VI and Dad Frederik V has some interesting parallels with Cosimo III and Gian Gastone, my favorite dysfunctional Medici. (Seriously, the Danes immediately started making me want to give them fix-its too.)
Cast of characters Christian VI: King of Denmark 1730-1746 Frederik V: King of Denmark 1746-1766, son of Christian VI Count Adam Moltke: Favorite of Frederik V Christian VII: King of Denmark 1766-1808, son of Frederik V Caroline Matilda: Queen of Denmark 1766-1772, d. 1775, daughter of Frederick Prince of Wales, wife of Christian VII Doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee: Favorite of Christian VII, in power 1770-1772.
Frederik V Christian VI was your everyday autocratic religious bigot. He made everything fun illegal. He was an unpopular king (and dad). Major difference between him and Cosimo: instead of being strong-willed and free-spirited like Marguerite-Louise, Christian's wife was exactly like him. So their son, young Frederik V, grows up with a lot of parental emotional neglect and religious trauma.
Frederik turns into a freethinking/loosely Christian libertine, much like Gian Gastone. It gets so bad that Christian VI considers disinheriting him. But he is stopped because he can't legally do that any more than FW can. So at age 23 (quite a bit younger than poor GG, who had to put up with his father until he was 53), Frederik becomes Frederik V.
Also like GG, Frederik is a super laid-back, friendly, people-pleasing sort who wants everyone to be happy. As soon as he comes to power, he makes himself popular by agreeing to revoke all the Ridiculous Laws (TM). Theater is allowed again! But he does no ruling himself, because he's too busy drinking and having sex with (female) prostitutes. He's not one of those dime-a-dozen powerful men, like August the Strong, who takes advantage of his position to have tons of sex. Frederik basically abdicates power in order to treat orgies as his full-time job (again, much like GG). He also drinks non-stop and is too incapacitated to rule even if he wanted to (which he very much doesn't). His installment in a series of short bios on Danish kings I found is subtitled "the reign without a ruler."
Like Gian Gastone, Frederik gives total control to his "favorite", whom he's named as his chamberlain. Frederik's chamberlain is Count Moltke, who will get a whole section to himself in this post.
In the end, Frederik drinks himself to death and spends several years severely ill, so there is a lot of hanging out in bed while slowly dying (sound familiar?). He also does another thing GG does, which is end up bedridden after falling down drunk and breaking his leg (in Frederik's case; ankle in GG's case).
When Frederik dies in Moltke's arms, age 42, he is sincerely mourned for the same reasons as GG was: because he revoked all the bad laws and allowed tolerance to reign. His last words could have been Gian Gastone's: "It is a great consolation to me in my last hour that I have never wilfully offended anyone, and that there is not a drop of blood on my hands."
Major differences between Frederik and Gian Gastone:
- Frederik doesn't have the same social anxiety and agoraphobic tendencies GG did, so he doesn't spend his entire reign in bed. He's actually popular because he likes visiting farms and taking walks where his subjects can meet him, and going hunting. At least until the alcohol-induced illnesses and injuries kick in. Then it's bedridden time.
- The chamberlain favorite, Count Moltke, is not a former peasant like Giuliano Dami, but born nobility, which in his case means he is both prepared to rule and allowed to do it (as we'll see later, Struensee's non-noble birth was a major strike against him).
- Frederik will actually sign off on whatever Moltke puts in front of him (GG: "I do not sign things if I can help it!"), so the council of nobles actually gets some work done. And so the country of Denmark turns into an oligarchy-in-practice and somewhat flourishes, instead of going down the toilet because Tuscany basically turned into an anarchy-in-practice. This is the Bernstorff era in Denmark; Moltke may be the most powerful man in the country because of his influence over Frederik, but Bernstorff rules foreign policy.
- Frederik's first marriage is functional. He and his wife Louisa, one of G2's daughters, are both generally friendly people and get along and have enough sex to carry on the family line. They're not in love, but they also don't refuse to sleep with each other. He's generally nice to her, and she looks the other way while he has sex with every prostitute in the country. (He does have two long-term mistresses, but he's way more into casual, no-strings-attached sex (for which he paid), and even the two mistresses, judging by their Wikipedia articles, may not have been cases of super romantic love.)
So it's like a slightly less extreme version of the last of the Medici. Which is why this write-up is not called "The Last of the Oldenburgs." ;)
Moltke Count (dammit, I had to delete "Graf" and start over :P, but at least I did remember the word eventually) Adam Gottlob Moltke started out as a page at the Danish court. He was assigned to be the personal chamber page of crown prince Frederik as soon as Christian VI became king.* Moltke and Frederik became very close.
* Christian VI, you probably have forgotten but I remember, is the guy who became king right before Katte's death, and thus recalled Lovenorn, leaving von Johnn to write us the report of Katte's execution, much to Lovenorn's relief because he was in very hot water with FW. So when Moltke becomes personal page to future Frederik V, it's 1730.
Now, while my brain immediately went to a Fritz/Peter or Fritz/Fredersdorf place, as you can see, I checked the dates and it doesn't work: in 1730, when they met, Frederik was only 7, and his new chamberlain Moltke was 18. And unlike Fritz, or GG and his chamberlain Giuliano, Frederik seems to have been straight. I have found no hints of anything between him and Moltke; Frederik seems to have treated him as a surrogate father figure (actually calling him "father" in his letters). And given his relationship with his actual father, you can see why he was in need of a surrogate.
Wikipedia articles differ in how much Moltke enabled vs. unsuccessfully tried to restrain the nonstop drinking and orgies. There seem to be some letters from Frederik to Moltke apologizing for being so depraved, but whatever Moltke may have said or tried to convince him of, it obviously neither stopped the orgies and alcoholism nor harmed their relationship. So other Wiki articles say he just enabled Frederik's drinking and sex.
Moltke specifically avoided public positions that might put him on the level of the other nobles, and relied instead on his position as chamberlain and BFF to get things done.
When Frederik became king, suddenly "chamberlain" was not a meaningless honorary position, but the thing that allowed Moltke to be around him night and day and influence him, becoming the eminence grise of Denmark.
[Fritz: Not on my watch, Peter!]
Once in power, Moltke appears to have worked for the good of the country. He was not one of your radicals; he was opposed to abolishing serfdom, but he apparently did the thing Voltaire did, which was make his own estates prosperous precisely by treating his serfs well. He got very rich, but apparently through legal and ethical ways. People suspected him of lining his pockets, but apparently no evidence could be found (maybe he had it destroyed, who knows! but Wikipedia seems to believe he was clean).
When Struensee comes to power and started reforming left and right, Moltke refuses to support him, so he gets dismissed without a pension. But Moltke also refuses to join the conspiracy to overthrow Struensee. Apparently his memoirs also refuse to gossip and are very matter-of-fact. I get a kind of "upstanding, conservative, cautious" vibe from this guy, at least from Wikipedia.
Frederik's second marriage (Some anecdotes I had to tuck in at the end here.)
After Queen Louise dies, and Frederik V has to remarry, he doesn't really want to.
Frederik V: Unless maybe I can get another English princess?
English: Sorry, no English princesses available.
[ViennaJoe: I said I wanted to marry a sister of Isabella's if I had to remarry at all, but no, no dice for me. You have my sympathy, Frederik.]
Frederik: Hmm. Okay, maybe I can marry Moltke's unmarried daughter? Moltke's my favorite person in the whole world. Any daughter of his is sure to be great!
Moltke: *quiet panic*
Moltke: *marries his daughter off asap*
Moltke: Sorry, Your Majesty, I have no unmarried daughters at this time either!
Now, it is reeeally interesting to speculate why Moltke might do that. I immediately thought of Mazarin, of course! (cahn: reminder, Louis XIV wanted to marry one of Mazarin's nieces (the Mancini sisters); another man might have gone for being the king's practically father-in-law, but Mazarin said, "Nope, you will marry a Spanish princess for the good of the country!")
So is Moltke in it for the good of the country? Or does he think he's got nothing to gain and everything to lose? He's got the king's ear 100% already, this marriage will just expose him to the envy and hatred of the other nobles. And if the marriage *doesn't* work out, what then? Or does he maybe not want his daughter married to an alcoholic who does nothing but participate in orgies, no matter how nice said depraved alcoholic may be? All of the above? Who can know!
Anyway, Frederik ends up married to Juliana Maria, EC's sister (and future host of Ivan VI's siblings after their Siberian stint). This marriage does not go nearly as well as Frederik's first. It doesn't go spectacularly badly, they even have kids, but Juliana's much less laid-back than Louise, much more of a stickler for etiquette (this is explained as a German court thing), and much less forgiving of the non-stop orgies. Later, after she gains power after Struensee's fall, when she's the widowed queen mother regent, she will apparently propose a chastity commission based on MT's! (I gather this one does not take off.)
[MT: Those super nice and laid-back husbands who sleep around, I know the type well. You have my sympathy, Juliana.]
Christian's childhood is full of OMG stories, that would be worthy of their own post. As you can probably guess from the Frederik V write-up, Frederik was not the stuff of which good fathers are made. His country was being run by other people, his son was being raised by other people, and if anything was going badly...don't bother him. He had a full time job called "drunken orgies."
Christian's first governor is a religious fanatic who considers it his job to beat Christian and yell at him to save his soul. To quote Barz the romanticizer:
In the background Reventlow's terrible question roars again and again, whether Christian wants to end up a swine like his father, who spends all his time messing around with whores. Christian doesn't want that at all. He doesn't even really know what whores are; but they must be something evil for this dreadful man to get so upset about.
At one point, Christian tries running to Dad for help, but as he bangs frantically on the door:
Behind this door only a babble and groaning could be heard, and Christian guessed what the whole court knew: As always, the father had a few Copenhagen ladies of pleasure with him, as always he poured down streams of alcohol, and it wasn't the merry drinking of his ancestors. Friedrich V. was ill, an alcoholic, and he finally dies of cirrhosis of the liver, a ruler who does not know why he is actually a ruler. The king no longer rules in Denmark.
Christian also didn't have a great relationship with Juliana Maria. Later in life, he cast her as the evil stepmother who wanted him dead so her son could inherit (and tells some really heart-rending stories to Struensee later); Barz is willing to acknowledge that we haven't heard her side of the story, but whatever happened there, it wasn't the kind of relationship that would compensate for paternal neglect and tutorial abuse.
When he's 11, little Christian gets a second tutor, a Voltaire protege who manages to alleviate some of the non-stop abuse, and then Christian decides he's going to become a freethinker. (Oh, *man*, I need to write up the Ferdinand of Parma monograph, it's so relevant!)
But he still turns out a mess. He ends up with severe trauma when he's king: first threatening to get rid of the guy who abused him, then crying and saying his beloved tutor can't leave. THERAPY FOR EVERYONE.
Once he becomes king, there's a combination of drinking and carousing, not wanting to get out of bed, jerky movements and general nervousness, delusions, impulse control problems (he's not at the butt-groping Ferdinand of Naples level, but they have to keep him out of public sight, because it's pretty obvious he's not normal), some punching down, and general chaos.
He admires Fritz in a sort-of Peter III style, even mimicking his walk, but also wants to go to war with him and beat him, because if you can beat the best, you are the best! (ViennaJoe is Sir Not Appearing in This Story, as we'll see later.)
He watches torture scenes, and wants to know all the details of executions. Heroleplays his own execution, writhing in pretend agony as he's "beheaded".
His mistress is an Amazon type woman with a whip, and at least according to our author, he was a masochist in the literal, sexual sense of the word.
He's awful to his wife, Caroline Matilda, sister of George III, and says he doesn't care who "mounts the cow."
At some point, his desperate advisors decide he needs to go on a Grand Tour to see if a change of scenery will do him any good. But they need to bring a doctor along, and there's this new up-and-coming guy making a name for himself, this Johann Friedrich Struensee guy. "Do you want to be the king's doctor while he's on tour?"
Struensee: Sure!
They go to Germany, France, and England. Struensee keeps an eye on him, kind of pissing off the nobles already by actually caring what's good for his patient, and not being a courtier. Christian is somewhat impressed by the guy who's willing to tell it like it is, but the time of great influence has not come yet.
He burns out quickly on the tour, probably clinically depressed, and wants to go home even before they go to Italy. His entourage is mostly disappointed because winter is setting in in Denmark, and they were looking forward to Italy. But, the king has spoken, and back they go. Once they're in Denmark again, and he's miserably mentally ill with Struensee as official physician, that's when Struensee begins to gain influence.
Christian doesn't want to get out of bed, is threatening suicide, says he can't sleep with his wife, because she's really his mother, etc.
No one else knows what to do, but Struensee thinks his mental illness is neither immoral nor demonic possession, but that Christian is just a lost and scared child driven into mania. He becomes the first person who sits down and listens to Christian, and makes him feel heard and taken seriously.
Christian is all, "Oh, let me tell you all the stories about my childhood! My evil governor, my evil stepmother, my deadbeat dad..."
So now Struensee is what we would call Christian's therapist. Someone actually gets therapy!
And it helps. Christian's mental health starts to improve! He becomes a huge Struensee fan. Even better, it turns out his therapist also has all these liberal reforming ideas, which Christian had vaguely had before (remember, his second tutor was a Voltaire protege), but all his nobles were like, "With all due respect, Your Majesty, that's a stupid idea."
But now he has a strong-willed man at his side to put these ideas into practice! So he gives Struensee the green light to start reforming. Struensee tries to get Christian involved in governing, for the sake of his mental health and for the country, but Christian's approach to governing is rather like his father's: "I have all these demons from my childhood to cope with, you just tell me what to sign and I'll sign it."
So now Struensee's in power. He's therapist to the king, and as we'll see, therapist to the queen as well, then probably her lover, he's entrusted with their son's education, and now he's allowed to reform the country. The king even seems fine with the menage a trois they have going.
Everything is great for about five minutes! But there is a snake in paradise. Workaholic Struensee becomes obsessed with all the good he can do as minister. He stops having time for Christian.
Who still needs a therapist. And now suddenly he doesn't have one. If you know anything about clinical practice today, it is a very, very bad thing to lose your therapist without warning.
Christian's behavior becomes very erratic again. Struensee is all, "Ugh, I do not have time for this," and gives him a babysitter. One Enevold Brandt, a friend of Struensee's who likes putting on plays, and whom Struensee puts in charge of entertaining at the court. His instructions are "distract the King while I do the ruling."
Only Brandt and Christian have very different taste in plays, and they don't get along at all.
And things go even further south.
Christian keeps challenging people to duels, knowing that if they obey, assaulting the king is high treason, and if they disobey, disobeying the king is just as bad! He's got them in a catch-22, ha!
One day, Brandt, who is totally fed up with Christian and with Struensee for not letting him quit this stupid job of royal babysitter, finally snaps and takes Christian up on his challenge. They go into another room, throw a few punches, Brandt bites the king's hand, and then they come out laughing and in a better mood with each other. Having let off some steam, as it were.
Unfortunately, they're not the discreet type, and they tell everyone. As rumors spread and grow in the telling, it does not contribute to Struensee's PR that his friend that he put in charge of the king is punching and biting the king.
Christian is also showing signs of being fed up with Struensee never having time for him any more. He tells one of his ministers that the King of Prussia is sleeping with his wife. When asked who this King of Prussia is, he cackles madly and says, "Struensee, obviously!" (As we've seen, both Fritz and Struensee would be offended by this comparison, but...you can see where Christian got it.)
Eventually Struensee decides they have to take Christian out to a remote palace, just like in the bad old days, and hide him from the people so no one sees how erratic the king's behavior is.
Unfortunately, never seeing the king allows rumors to start among the population: that he's being kept against his will, abused, even poisoned.
Eventually, there's a coup.
Christian gets woken up in the middle of the night by a group of conspirators (which Moltke, remember, refused to join), and told Struensee is plotting against him. He signs paperwork agreeing to let Struensee be taken prisoner, and also agrees to divorce his wife and send her away. There's a show trial, and Struensee is condemned to lose a hand and his head. Former babysitter Brandt gets executed alongside Struensee, for an alleged assassination attempt (the punching and biting episode retold). Christian is supposedly distracted with a lot of festivals and parties from realizing what was going on and having time to reflect and change his mind.
His stepmother Juliana Maria, leader of the coup, ends up running the country in concert with some ministers. Later in life, Christian's son will get him to sign yet another document without reading it, allowing the son to be regent. Sadly, the tragedy of Struensee is also the tragedy of Christian VII.
Next up: the tragedy of Struensee, and also of Queen Caroline Matilda.
And now, the man I supposedly came here to talk about!
Johann Friedrich Struensee is born in 1737 in Halle. Remember that Halle is the center of Pietism in Germany (and not just Germany--Christian VI, pious dad of alcoholic Frederik V, is also a Pietist), and deeply influenced FW. Francke, a very influential founding figure of Pietism and influential on FW (Wilhelmine trashes him in her memoirs), was pastor of the St. Ulrich church in Halle.
Guess who Francke's successor was? Struensee's father! A devout Pietist himself.
Our biographer describes him as the sort of strong-willed father who effectively forces his sons to either follow him blindly or go to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. With one exception, the Struensee kids got to the extreme other end and become liberal freethinkers.
[FW: *waves sadly*]
Our man, the doctor, gets a reputation as a ladies' man and an epicure.
Then Fritz comes to power, and Struensee the father finds life intolerable in Halle. He says they're being persecuted; since he's used to being top dog, I wonder if this means "actually persecuted" or "just not able to persecute others any more".
He writes, "Son! I know you're kind of at loose ends after getting your medical degree and trying to find a job. I can't stand Fritz. Let's go to Denmark!"
During the 18th century, lots of Germans go to Denmark. You may remember Fouquet, he who probably did *not* allow Fritz to have a candle at Kustrin, went to Denmark in the 1730s, and only came back when Fritz became king. Nobody speaks Danish at the court, and only one minister (Bernstorff) really speaks French. It's all German, all the time. Frederik V will get made fun of by his mother and called "the Danish prince" for occasionally speaking Danish.
This influx of Germans to Denmark will be a plot point later.
At any rate, despite not really getting along with his father, Doctor Struensee decides to go to Denmark for the job opportunities.
Unlike most doctors, who are theorists, Struensee goes out on rounds, risks getting sick, and inspects living conditions in the slums. He's a workaholic like Fritz, if he wants something done, he feels he has to do it himself. He's also an empiricist. He's skeptical about the humors and believes in radical new ideas like hygiene.
He feuds with other doctors. He is furious at quacks who try to get rich selling cures that do not work. They are furious at him for challenging the establishment.
Struensee starts a periodical to try to try to win the PR battle, but he kind of sucks at PR. Despite advocating for poor people and visiting them, he never really clicks with them. He doesn't speak their language in either the literal or the figurative sense of the word. He's an overeducated man full of learned allusions and metaphors, and there's a huge cultural barrier between him and the people he's trying to help.
This will be a plot point later. Yes, everything is building up to how he lost the PR battle badly enough to be given a show trial and a summary execution.
But first, things go well.
A chain of events begins in France. In 1765, Jean Calas is exonerated thanks to Voltaire's efforts. Voltaire writes to all the courts of Europe asking for donations. Christian VII, who, as we remember, is somewhat liberal, is like, "Oh, hey, my hero, my favorite author, my teacher's teacher! Here, yes, have some money."
Voltaire writes a praise poem to Christian VII in thanks. Voltaire becomes a really big fan of Christian VII. In 1769, when the young king is about to set off on his Grand Tour, Voltaire writes, "He must be going to see poor, oppressed people, because he can't find any in his own country!"
[Voltaire: really just desperate for liberal monarchs to implement his ideas.]
When Voltaire's French praise poem arrives in Denmark, someone has to translate it into German so it can be understood at court. Who translates it? Doctor Struensee!
This is how he comes to the attention of the ministers who are looking for a doctor to accompany Christian on his Grand Tour. A doctor who's just translated a praise poem of Christian? What's not to like!
And so the wheel of fortune begins to turn.
We've heard how Struensee wins the young king's confidence. I'll save the part about his probable affair with the queen for her installment. Just know that he probably had an affair, and certainly had an emotional affair with her and fathered a daughter on her, while acting as her therapist and her husband's therapist and their kid's governor. Yes, nowadays we would call this a breach of trust, but in olden times they just called it high treason.
We've seen how Christian started signing anything Struensee gave him, in 1770. On December 27, 1770, he stages a coup by abolishing the council of ministers, so that he can do his work without having to go through the nobles. The date struck me, because that is exactly what Gustav III does in August 1772: end the Age of Liberty in Sweden and restore absolute monarchy so he can push through his enlightened reforms.
At this time, Gustav is married to Christian VII's sister, and has just visited Denmark. Now, he's not a fan of Struensee, because he's a class snob. He makes a snide remark at the Danish court that with all these middle class types rubbing shoulders at the court, all that's missing is a few Jews.
Struensee: I used to live next door to the Jewish ghetto and visit it. I agree, some Jews at court would be nice.
No, he didn't say that to Gustav's face, but he apparently did live for several years on the border of the ghetto, by choice, and had no problem with Jews.
[Gustav: *shudder*]
So anyway, Gustav goes home, and the next thing you know, is pushing through his own absolutist coup, thus causing no small amount of panic in his uncles Heinrich and Fritz.
Now, as for these reforms, Selena has listed a bunch from Wikipedia, but I can summarize the whole Struensee reforms for you in one word: Joseph.
Imagine Joseph II is a middle-class doctor in Denmark who manages to get power.
- Absolute monarchy, because nobles suck. - No more noble privileges, we have a meritocracy now. - No more special privileges, period. - Everyone works for the state. - Austerity enforced, luxury abolished. - Danish, not Latin, taught in schools. - Lives austerely himself, does not enrich himself. - Workaholic. - Got the ideas for his reforms by traveling and seeing how poor people actually lived. - Abolishes censorship. - Is shocked when the free press is used to attack him. - Has to restore censorship at least partially. - Issues 1800 decrees in 16 months. (I know I've seen numbers for Joseph, I would love to find them again and compare them.) - Rams reforms down everyone's throat and is shocked when people don't appreciate it!
Struensee has some fatal strikes against him, though: - He's not a monarch, he's an upstart burgher. - He doesn't even speak Danish. Joseph at least spoke a number of the languages of the people he ruled, most notably German. - He's believed to be (and probably is) sleeping with the queen.
The author talks extensively about how Struensee 1) went too fast, 2) never realized that absolute monarchies have to work with their nobles, not against them. Sound familiar?
I was truly amazed, because the author compares Struensee to everyone and their brother: Fritz, Robespierre, the Prussian officer from Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing and Struensee were friends), Orlov and Potemkin, Gustav III, the Marquis de Posa (so many Schiller call-outs! I was glad to be a product of salon and know who Posa is :))...probably numerous other people I'm forgetting. But no mention of Joseph or Leopold. Between this and the "FS was French" remark, I think he just doesn't know anything about Austria in this period.
Anyway, I came to the conclusion that if Joseph had been in Struensee's shoes, there would have been a coup. If Struensee had been in Joseph's shoes, he would have had to claw back the reforms. Even the poor people were upset, because one of the things he never realized by going too fast was how much the luxury of the nobles was supporting the economy. All he could see was the pointless waste, not how many regular people would lose their income. He shut down the unprofitable silk manufacturing for the same reason.
Eventually, even the poor people are rioting. Struensee tries to compromise, but there are smear campaigns being run by the nobles he alienated, the working classes never clicked with him, and he falls in January of 1772. There's a huge backlash against Germans, and nationalism/proto-nationalism begins earlier in Denmark than in other places. Laws against letting Germans hold office are passed.
I was struck by how short his rule was: just 16 months.
After Struensee's locked up in the middle of the night, he doesn't take prison well. He starts screaming and dashing his head against the wall, and he has to be chained. But when he has to walk to his execution (by axe) in April 1772, he has a good death. The author comments that he embodied the noble ideals of his time: cry over trivialities, face death bravely.
Then there's an episode that had echoes of Katte. As is usual for prisoners, Struensee is granted religious comfort at the end of his life. A pastor goes to talk to him. But Struensee doesn't want religious consolation, he's a freethinker.
But in the end, the pastor is victorious--or so he says. He writes a whole self-aggrandizing book about how Struensee's "principles" turned out to be nonexistent and he was easily converted. The author says the book is very suspect and propaganda-ish, and we don't know what really happened in that cell.
Here's a fascinating addition, though: supposedly the pastor said that all he asked of Struensee in return for saving his soul was that Struensee appear to him as a ghost after his death, so the pastor would know for sure that there was life after death.
Balthasar Münter returns home very satisfied. His book just needs to be written. But he frightens his wife with such graphic stories about the executed dear friend in heaven that the good woman lies awake at night in anxious foreboding. Struensee awaits her every hour, perhaps without a head or hands, just a bleeding torso: shuddering, she pulls the covers over her ears. But she can rest easy. Struensee no longer appears. However, his ghost haunts Danish history for a long time. And his life, this short, violent attempt to create a better world, is not without consequences.
Finally, the author expresses his disappointment in Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing, and the rest. Fritz satirizing Struensee is only to be expected of Fritz in his cynical old age, but where are the rest of the philosophes? Where's the outrage? Why didn't they try to protect him, if not his life, then at least rehabilitate his reputation posthumously? Voltaire made a snide remark about Denmark being the only place where you could be executed for having an affair (really, Voltaire?), but none of them engaged with Struensee's ideas or seemed to take them seriously. And that, says the author, was Struensee's second death.
Caroline Matilda, sister of G3, is married off at age 15 to a mentally ill 16 year old who is a terrible husband. Not surprisingly, she is unhappy when Struensee shows up. She doesn't approve of him, because he has that ladies' man reputation and she is rather pious. So she gives him the cold shoulder at court.
But! She ends up in bed with what I can only imagine is stress-related illness. Maliciously, Christian decides he has just the idea: the best doctor he knows, the one who helped him. Struensee must be her physician!
"Ugh, no," says Caroline Matilda.
"But I insist!" says her husband, the king.
Struensee, being an intelligent and observant man, realizes that most of what's wrong with Caroline Matilda is that she's bored with court life and unhappy in her marriage.
By the way, he makes a lot of remarks that will be familiar to anyone who's read Lehndorff's diaries: court life is boring and superficial and people are frittering their lives away when they should be reading and improving their lives. The author of the book says that one major reason masked balls were so popular was that everyone saw the same faces day in, day out, and they were all sick to death of each other! Masks added at least a little variety.
Struensee, realizing that what she needs is a mental health treatment, couches it as physical health: get out, get some fresh air, take up horseback riding.
She loves it! She puts on mens' riding clothes and finds meaning in life!
The court is scandalized, but she loves riding more than anything and doesn't care.
Interestingly, Elizaveta and Catherine, over in Russia, are said to have loved cross-dressing balls and riding in mens' clothes in order to show off their legs. Caroline Matilda apparently is willing to walk around in skintight hose despite having a short, dumpy figure, because it feels good! Any chance she gets, she is in her riding habit. (Good for her, I say. And as much as Elizaveta seems to have been obsessed with her appearance, she and Catherine might well have had other reasons for liking men's clothes.)
And now Christian starts to be attracted to her for the first time in their marriage. Christian, whose mistress, remember, is an Amazon type with a riding whip that she uses on him.
This is where Barz gets super homophobic, and manages to pathologize, in a single paragraph: - Christian's attraction to masculine women wearing men's clothes, - Caroline Matilda's close, possibly homoerotic relationships with her female friends, - Marie Antoinette's supposedly lesbianish relationships,
as all being sexually frustrated heterosexuals. Once they find fulfillment, in their marriages and out of it, all the unnatural longings go away.
Sigh.
Anyway, like Marie Antoinette, Caroline Matilda also probably has an extramarital relationship: with Struensee, whom she is now in love with, ever since he started listening to her, taking her seriously, and telling her to stop letting society restrict her and go live a meaningful life.
Like Zweig, Barz ships his extramarital pairing, but not nearly as intensely as Zweig ships MA/Axel Ferson. Barz is kind of "meh" on whether Struensee was as much in love with her as she was with him. He thinks that, while Struensee sincerely cared about her and was attracted, he was kind of not the type to be serious about women and have long-term romances. But hey, Barz hopes they had a good time while it lasted (about a year and a half).
(And no, she's not 15 any more; by the time he shows up, she's 19, he's 32. Better than nothing, I guess, especially in this day and age.)
Did they or didn't they? They both confessed to it in writing, but Struensee was being threatened with torture, and she later recanted and insisted that she was sick and weak and her hand was forced across the paper to sign it. Barz thinks she may have been told that he'd already confessed, and she was trying to save him by saying that she was the seducer and he had only gone along with what she wanted.
Once they have his signature, it's all over: either he slept with her, which is high treason because they betrayed the king, or he didn't, which is high treason because he's accusing the queen of having an adulterous affair.
Wikipedia and Barz seem to agree that the most likely possibility is that they did sleep together, and that he was probably the father of her daughter.
The Danish government, after the counter-coup, swept all that under the rug and insisted that Louisa Augusta was *totally* Christian's daughter, no question about it. Later in life, in the 19th century, Louisa Augusta was known to say that she'd rather be the daughter of an intelligent doctor than a foolish king. Kaiser Willy II, who was married to a descendant of hers, liked to joke about the Struensee heritage (it was several generations back at that point, so I guess you could see the funny side by then).
During the counter-coup in 1772, Caroline Matilda is divorced after confessing to adultery. Christian gets to keep the kids, even the one who's supposedly not his.
She's sent into exile to Hannover, where she hangs out at Celle, remembering Sophia Dorothea. Who, when Caroline Matilda was growing up, was held up as a cautionary tale to the kids. Don't be like Great-grandma SD, or you'll regret it!
At least she doesn't get locked up?
Her brother, George III, is "meh" about coming to her defense before it's proved that his sister is not an adulteress. The English, though, are outraged. "What kind of lazy king is going to let the Danes get away with this?! We need to start a war."
Juliana Maria: Fritz, brother-in-law, famous general with the famous army! You're on Denmark's side in this war, right?
Fritz: I might be, yeah. Let's talk.
But before general war can break out over the adultery scandal, there's a scarlet fever outbreak in Celle. A hundred people are dying a day. One of them is Caroline Matilda, whose last letter still protests her innocence to her brother G3. She dies, aged just 23.
Her ex-husband Christian, when informed, supposedly just says, "Too bad about the pretty young girl! Her calves were her best feature."
But, before she died, she had that one happy year with horseback riding and a lover.
Some tidbits from the Struensee bio that didn't fit anywhere else.
* Back when Selena read us the book on Danish-Prussian relations in the 18th century, we saw that Hartmann's take on Struensee was that he was a selfish schemer, and that Danish minister Bernstorff was Fritz's only contemporary equal as a genius.
So imagine my entertainment at Barz's take on Bernstorff:
Johann Hartwig Ernst Bernstorff is one of those not so rare phenomena in politics that everyone considers great men, without anyone being able to say what actually accounts for their greatness. Their basic trait is perseverance, their principle strict conservatism. They are the great harmonizers of existing relations...
Deliberately, more reliable than resourceful, he steered Denmark's fortunes for twenty years. But even before Struensee's appearance, his time is coming to an end. He feels it himself: Denmark needs newer, fresher impulses than his policy of neutrality. The treaty with Russia, which is so brilliant on the outside, has brought the country into a threatening state of almost unlimited openness to blackmail.
* A summary of Fritz's satire on Struensee:
In the satire he wrote on the subject, Struensee was not only convicted, but already executed, and in the afterlife the beheaded poisoner gave a French colleague, Friedrich's arch-enemy Choiseul, good advice to give his ruler a few opiates as well.
Remember that Struensee was accused of poisoning/drugging Christian. When the conspirators went through the papers in the palace after his death, they were dismayed to find no prescriptions for anything suspicious. But that doesn't stop Fritz the rumor mill.
Also, this book, at least, doesn't present any evidence that Struensee destroyed his papers Katte-and-Wilhelmine style, but he did know he was unpopular and that a coup was probably coming in general. So the lack of evidence against him for the numerous charges could have been because there was nothing to find (the author's take) or because he had been warned (me trying to keep an open mind).
* When recounting the execution, Barz draws a contrast with the famous Damiens execution we've talked about before, in that Struensee's execution was a lot more lowkey. He adds an (apocryphal?) anecdote that I hadn't encountered: that while the four horses Damiens were tied to were being whipped to pull him into four pieces, i.e. quarter him, a lady watching is supposed to have cried, "Oh, the poor horses!"
"Se non fu vero, fu bene trovato": it would be the most 18th century thing ever.
I *did* know that at the Damiens execution, if your place of residence or business had a window with a view, you could make good money selling "seats", as it were.
* Barz repeats the usual popular myths that Doctor Guillotin invented the guillotine (he did not) and then was executed by it (this was an unrelated Guillotin), but he does add another apocryphal anecdote that was new to me, or at least I had forgotten it:
The French are supposed to have presented Louis XVI with the brand-new guillotine in 1792, and he, the hobbyist locksmith, is supposed to have critiqued the design. "The blade is too weak to go through a lot of necks; for example, mine would be too thick," (he was pretty fat), and gave technical advice on how to make the blade more effective.
My immediate reaction was "No way!" French Wikipedia tells me that it is in fact considered apocryphal.
So I cannot recommend this author, and I'm looking for other works on the subject, but I will say the man could write (he also wrote novels and plays, unsurprisingly), and I was fascinated all the way through. I hope you all can see why I felt contractually obliged to share the gossip!
Okay, not super gossipy, but my it entertained me, and I couldn't resist sharing the latest from my French practice:
Eugene: Dear Imperial Majesty, thanks for putting me in charge of the army in Italy. It's just, uh, we kind of have no money here. Please remedy asap, k, thx.
Emperor Leopold: We have no money here either. The imperial war chest is empty. I'm sure you'll figure something out.
Eugene: Aren't there a bunch of rich princes who could contribute to a war fund?
Princes: Sorry, too busy building palaces. The court Jew can handle it.
Eugene: I'm waiting...
Leopold: Regret to inform you that the court Jew just died, bankrupt, because we never paid him back. I'm sure you'll figure something out. I hear great things about you!
Eugene: There's only so much I can DO if the men aren't getting PAID!! Your Majesty.
Eugene: *sends a messenger to Vienna because letters are clearly not doing it*
Leopold, to the messenger: So my wife and I want to know, is it true Eugene's hair is going white lately?
The messenger: DUH! (But politely, like you say it to an emperor.)
Eugene knows what to expect. Although he has been wearing a wig for some time to hide his whitening hair, people are more interested in it than in his letters.
Poor Eugene. Eventually he gets some political power to go with his generalship, and then he figures out how to finance the army. But first it is very stressful.
(Btw, the bromance with Marlborough has just begun: they exchanged some letters when Marlborough congratulated Eugene on his victory, and now they've met for the first time in person.)
Revisiting all the Kaphengst stuff in a visual medium made me wonder again why Fritz bothered to intervene as massively as he did on that particular occasion. I mean, the Marwitz stuff is pretty straightforward in comparison, but: why Kaphengst? He wasn't the first of Heinrich's boyfriends to spend money, and the truly crazy spending spree was yet to come once Kaphengst had Meseberg. (Now Lehndorff resents him from the get go, but Lehndorff with a very few exceptions can't stand any of Heinrich's boyfriends.) As opposed to Kalkreuth with the Mina business, Kaphengst had not caused trouble for anyone in the royal family. As opposed to Mara the violinist, he was a noble, not a commoner. Granted, he had lasted longer than many a Heinrich boyfriend at this point already, which presumably got Fritz' attention, but still: why did Fritz on this particular occasion feel the need to massively intervene in his brother's love life and order him to ditch the boyfriend? Was he bored and spoiling for a fratenal fight? Did the latest letter from Voltaire get his goat? Was he in a "if I can't have a lover at my side, Heinrich can't, either" kind of mood? WHAT?
Just popping in really quick to tell you that I am procrastinating on the second of my papers due in March by preparing for my thesis. For this purpose I recently acquired "Katte. Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft" by Gertrud von Brockdorff from 1934 and it's... Intense.
I'll just chuck some stuff at you:
- there's a huge emphasis on Katte's love for the arts, literature, and his travels. He had his own glass candle holder design made in Venice. That is not relevant, but I think it's funny.
- Katte feels strange and lonely after facing Rochow and noticing that him and his sister truly seem to love each other.
- Right after that, he meets Fritz: Only then did Katte notice a second face, upon which he paled; because he recognized it without ever having seen it before. This, of course, could be because the Hohenzollern are rather easy to recognize, but considering the repeated emphasis on destiny throughout the book so far it feels more related to that.
- This is followed by: A pair of wide eyes, impenetrable despite their brightness, were fixed on Katte inquisitively. "I am happy to meet you, Herr von Katte. I have heard a lot about you. I have been made curious." It was smooth, very euphonious French. And there was an expression of captivating kindness around the intelligent, slightly mocking mouth. Katte made those two observations first, before even taking notice of the rest of the prince's appearance. And in this first second he had already been won.
- He proceeds to be so distracted by Fritz's overall existence that he can't talk as smoothly as usual
- He then tells Keyserlingk that he has been bewitched, to which Keyserlingk says "We all are. But we have to fight it because there is danger in all magic."
- Ingersleben wants to set Fritz up with Doris Ritter, Katte is not too into the idea. Ingersleben is all "Come on, Katte, help me with this, they say you know your way around those things!" to which Katte rips a twig from a bush and says that he hasn't had any mind for women in a long time. Ingersleben says "But back in the day you did all the more!", Katte says he won't get involved in this, Ingersleben asks whether he has really changed so much since Halle. Katte says perhaps he did and has his aunt Sophie Charlotte's image in mind that seems to radiate warmth. And then:
But he did not love Sophie Charlotte. If I am ever to love a woman, she would have to have wide, bright, and impenetrable eyes, he thought and was shocked by the nonsensical nature of this idea. Because it had been the Crown Prince's eyes that he had imagined.
- A conversation with Fritz: "There is a loneliness among people, Katte." "Yes." "You speak like you know it." "Yes."
- "You are not of [the King's] party", [Frederick] said strangled and pleading, "You can't be. I know too much about you, Katte, not to see an ally in you."
- Short skip to Fritz's POV to remark on how Katte's face is really quite nice
- Fritz then takes a look at Katte's drawings, loves them, is surprised to see Katte pale and shaking and finds a portrait of himself.
"You drew this from memory? - But Katte, you're an artist!" "No!" Katte answered harshly and was in this moment unable to force a courtly smile. "Just a poor human, who is constantly reminded of his own shortcomings and especially so in the presence of Your Royal Highness." The prince lowered the drawing without taking his bright gaze off of Katte's features. It seemed like he did not understand all that was behind the words of the other. "Own shortcomings?" he asked with a tremor in the corners of his mouth. "Do you mean feeling your wings go numb when you want to fly?" "Maybe I mean something of the like."
- They continue talking beliefs and philosophy and end up standing so close to each other their hands are brushing each other's clothes.
- "I want you to become my friend, Katte", he said strangled, "I need you." He had grasped Katte's arm, which was shaking quietly and incessantly. Katte had turned very pale, even his lips seemed ashen. He wanted to answer something, could not muster it, and contented himself with bowing over the prince's hand and clasping it with an almost hard grasp.
- Katte continues to make nightly trips to Potsdam to see Fritz and thinks about how romantic and dangerous that is.
So after 70 pages of the queercoding being more text than subtext, we meet Wilhelmine. Katte's first thoughts are "she looks like the white lady" and "she's cold". And suddenly that's supposed to be the romantic plot of this book :'D The fawning about Fritz continues after this, btw. Wilhelmine gets mentioned at times. It truly does feel like the author's attempt at covering up whatever "friendship" she's built up before. 220 pages to go, let's see how this turns out :'D
Considering Louis XIV and brother Philippe d'Orleans, aka Monsieur, keep coming up, I thought I might as well excerpt another couple of quotes for you, not least because of the compare and contrast to Fritz and his brothers. Now, generally speaking a monarchy doesn't exactly encourage fraternal closeness in the royal family, seeing that on the one hand, having more than one son available is good because of the high infant mortality rate, and in fact several French monarchs started out as younger sons, but on the other, if the original heir does survive and reign, the spare stops being seen as a good insurance and starts looking like competition at worst, as kind of superfluos at best. And then there's the question of paternal preference. The way Louis and Philippe were raised and related was inevitably influenced by the previous generation of royal brothers, because Louis XIII's younger brother Gaston d'Orleans had been a non-stop schemer joining practically every plot there was in the assurance that he was irreplaceable and untouchable as long as he was the only Bourbon heir, which he was for more than two decades, until Louis XIII & Anne of Austria finally managed to produce a living child. And even then Gaston didn't stop scheming. He was one of the leading nobles in the Fronde once his brother and Richelieu were dead. And he'd been their mother Marie de' Medici's firm favourite. So if there was one thing Anne absolutely wanted to prevent, it was a replay of this particular fraternal relationship, which she'd seen up close for years, with her sons. Mind you, this did not prevent her from favouritism, which went in the other direction. Louis was the miracle child, whom she must have strongly feared she'd never get after over twenty years of trying in vain. (She'd had some stillbirths early on, but no full term pregnancy, and then nothing at all for eons, not least because her marriage was so bad and there really wasn't much marital sex.) Anne spent far more time with her son than usual for noble, let alone royal mothers, including bathing him, which was the kind of thing really left to nurses otherwise. Philippe, born only two years later, couldn't compete with being the long denied miracle from the get go, though his arrival was reassurance (and also good because of the inevitable rumors that Louis had been somehow not Louis XIII's son).
Because the age difference was only two years, and because pretty soon their father died and the regency years started to become unstable and then the Fronde happened, the two brothers were raised closely with each other, but it was always clear which one was the older and the future king. Now the stories that Anne deliberately encouraged Philippe's homosexual inclinations by dressing him in girl clothes long beyond toddlerdom (when all children were dressed that way) were written decades later, when Philippe was an openly gay man who occasionally crossdressed, and not by eye witnesses to the childhood, so who knows whether they were invented with the knowledge of hindsight. (Mind you, the assumption that "making Philippe wear dresses = making Philippe gay" = "making Philippe less of a future danger than Uncle Gaston was" is pretty telling on the part of the storytellers. Insert names of gay or bisexual ambitious royal folk throughout the millenia here. Anyway, there's an anecdote when Philippe and Louis were small boys where they literally pissed at each other (this story comes from their valet du chambre at the time, du Bois, and thus is probably true) and both boys gave as good as they got which doesn't sound as if kid!Philippe felt very oppressed, but evidently the older they got the more the difference of their stations must have been marked. Louis signed his letters to Philippe with "petit Papa", and Philippe was certainly encouraged to defer to Louis on all public occasions, all the time.
When Louis was 19 and Philippe was 17, Louis fell seriously ill (of typhoid fever), and there was panic and the real possibility he could die for about ten days. Courtiers did start to make their moves just in case Monsieur would end up King Philippe after all. However, here's how Antonia Fraser puts it:
It was at this moment that the remarkable subjugation of Monsieur's spirit - subjugated since birth - was evinced. For Monsieur himself never wavered publicly and privately in his despair at his brother's illness and his total loyalty to him personally. In turn this critical moment in Louis' life cemented his own feelings of protection and loyalty to his brother.
That Philippe didn't use the opportunity to scheme, or to bask in the sudden sun, but kept being at Louis' sickbed really showed the difference to Gaston, and it may indeed have had something to do with the way Louis replied in later years to challenges he should come down hard on homosexuals with "I'd have to start with my brother" and the self evident implication "I never will do that", and that for all the occasional arguments re: abbeys for his favourites, not telling Philippe what Minette's mission to England was about and so forth, he did not try to change his brother.
Of course, if you're more cynically inclined, which a lot of the later chroniclers and eye witnesses were, you can speculate that Philippe's flamboyant gay persona made Louis feel he shone all the more as dignified many King in comparison, and no one would try to conspire with his brother against him. There's also the bit Voltaire mentions in one of the excerpts I quoted from "The Age of Louis XIV" about how when PHilippe, against everyone's expectations, turned out to be actually good at leading an army and fought in the field, Louis made sure he couldn't do that again. (Not least because Louis, while occasionally visiting the army, never led battle, i.e. he was never his own general. This was remarked upon. Bear in mind that the cousins across the channel, Charles II and James II, had in their youth fought at their father's side in the English Civil War. And Charles II had then later fought and lost at Worcester, while James fought for cousin Louis while everyone was in exile. Doesn't mean either of them came across as a great general as the result - though James during Charles II's reign later got a good reputation as a leader at sea - , but everyone knew they had faced the dangers of combat not from a hill but in person, and in an age where military = manly, the fact that Louis never did that (and Philippe had) was, as I said, remarked upon.
Anyway, fast forward to Philippe's death decades later. This happened unfortunately after he and Louis had a blazing row about their children. Quick reminder: Philippe's (and Liselotte's) only surviving son, Philippe the future Regent, at this point Duke of Chartres, was married to Louis' illegitimate daughter with Athenais de Montespan, much to Liselotte's (and also Monsieur's) displeasure. To no one's surprise, the marriage wasn't happy, and Philippe the Younger cheated on his wife. Who complained to Dad. Presto fraternal battle as Monsieur took his son's part and landed a palpable hit when reminding Louis of the days when Louis had run Louse de La Valliere and Athenais de Montespan in tandem, and seriously, where's the difference? And also, while we're at it, Louis (here comes the direct witness quote):
(...)Monsieur told the King that he'd promised the sky to him when marrying (Philippe's) son (to Louis' daughter), but that (Monsieur) hadn't even gotten a governorship from him in return; that he very much would have wished to see his son with the army in order to keep him away from debaucheries, and that his son would wish this very much, too, which (Louis) knew very well; that, since the King did not want to do this, (Monsieur) didn't see why he should stop his son from amusing himself in order to comfort himself. He added that he could now see the truth of what had been predicted at the time, to wit, that he'd only get the shame and the dishonor from this marriage without ever reaping benefits from it.. (Shame and dishonor because Louis' daughter is a bastard.) The King, who had gotten angrier and angrier, replied to him that the war would soon force him to cut down several budgets and that since (Monsieur) was showing himself so disagreeable to his wishes, he'd start with the lowering of (Monsieur's) pensions before limiting himself.
Philippe storms off. (The court is in Marly at this point, which was the neat little getaway from Versailles in the later years of Louis' reign.) Philippe goes to Saint Cloud, talks a bit to Liselotte, who doesn't feel too well and therefore is skipping dinner, as opposed to Philippe, who does have dinner. And then he has a stroke. Philippe the Younger, the future Regent and Duke of Chartres, goes to Marly to report this to Uncle Louis. Unfortunately because of the circumstance, Louis seems to suspect Philippe his brother is faking this as the result of their earlier argument and to get concessions from him.
Upon receiving this news, the King, who on other occasions came running to Monsieur because of every trifle, instead went to Madame de Maintenon, whom he had woken up. He remained for the quarter of an hour with her, and then, around midnight, returned to his rooms and ordered to get his carriages ready, and that the Marquis de Gesvres was supposed to go to Saint-Cloud and wake him up if Monsieur should get worse; whereupon he withdrew to sleep.
Saint-Simon (cahn, famous Versailles memoirist, also a snob, also bff with Philippe the younger), from whom this account hails, thinks that Madame de Maintenon (who is Team Montespan children, whom she has raised, and not Team Both Philippes) advised Louis that Monsieur was surely faking it and not to fall for it. However, the Marquis does report back that Monsieur is really sick and getting worse, and so Louis gets up again and goes to Saint-Cloud.
The King arrived around three in the morning at Saint-Cloud. Monsieur had not achieved consciousness again since getting worse. He had only a brief glimmer for a moment when in the morning Father de Trévoux had gone to read the mass, and even this glimmer did not return. The most terrible moments have sometimes aspects of ridiculous contrasts. When Father du Trévoux returned and called to Monsieur: "Monsieur, don't you recognize your confessor? Don't you recognize good Father Trévoux, who is talking to you?" those who were less than sad exploded into indecent laughter. The King seemed to be very sad. As he cried easily, he was full of tears right then. He had only had cause to love Monsieur with great tenderness; though they had been arguing, these sad moment were evoking the old tenderness; maybe he even accused himself of having hastened the death through the scene in the morning, for Monsieur was the younger by two years and had been as healthy as the King was all his life, if not healthier. The King attended mass at Saint-Cloud, and around eight in the morning, when Monsieur's state was hopeless, Madame de Maintenon and the Duchess of Burgundy - that's his granddaughter-in-law, the mother of future Louis XV, who'll die tragically and suddenly with most of her immediate family more than a decade later - urged (Louis) not to stay any longer, and left with him in the carriage. When he was about to go and said a few friendly words to Monsieur de Chartres - i.e. Philippe the son, cause of the argument - whereupon both burst into tears, this young prince knew how to use the moment. "Ah, Sire," he said, "what will become of me, I am losing Monsieur and know you do not love me." The King was very moved and surprised, embraced him and spoke in kind words to him. After arriving at Marly, he went with the Duchess of Burgundy to Madame de Maintenon's apartments. Three hours later Fagon arrived, whom the King had ordered not to leave Monsieur's side until the later was either dead or until his health had improved, which only could have happened through a miracle. As soon as he noticed him, the King said: "Well, Monsieur Fagon, is my brother dead?" "Yes, Sire," the later returned, "it could not be helped." The King cried for a long time.
He also said to Liselotte: "I don't know how to accept the fact that I shall never see my brother again."
Dumping these 18th century-related book reviews here, in case anyone is interested...
A Lady of Lost Years by John Buchan (1899) I do NOT recommend this Jacobite novel. I had read that it was going to be about Margaret Murray of Broughton, but it is not really. The main character is one Francis Birkenshaw, and I dragged myself through the first 50 pages about him; he is unpleasant to his mother, sisters, and companions, and loses his apprenticeship because he punches a guy who married a woman he was into, and then stabs a random bystander for good measure. I don't mind characters who are not especially virtuous, but I do need something sympathetic to care about. Anyway, he has no particular political principles, and at one point he tries to rob Broughton house and then intends to sell Jacobite correspondence to the government. But Margaret Murray is beautiful! And so he confesses everything to her and pledges himself to the Jacobite cause. She sends him on an important mission to persuade Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, to come out. Er, because that's a reasonable person for the Jacobites to choose for such a mission, surely?? Later on, Simon Fraser entrusts incriminating correspondence to this unknown person, who could just as well be a government spy, for all he knows?? Arrgh. Skipping some plot, at the end of the rising Murray of Broughton famously turns King’s Evidence, something which is so heavily foreshadowed in the book that it seems as though the characters know it's going to happen before it does. And after that, Margaret Murray is a vulnerable damsel in distress who has nobody to turn to but this random guy who once tried to rob her house and that she then sent on a mission. Surely she had family and trusted friends?? They go to London to visit Murray of Broughton in prison and then fall in love, but Francis nobly refuses her (at the end of the book he has reformed and is now all noble).
The one thing I liked about this book is the writing style--there are some nice nature descriptions. Also, it does portray Margaret Murray as politically engaged and active in the rising, which is nice--but at no point does it mention any other such women, of whom there were many! It's like she is the only Jacobite woman. *rolls eyes* Also, I have read quotes from eyewitness reports of Margaret Murray and her friend Rachel Erskine robbing Whig gentry at pistol point (backed up by Highlanders) to get money for the cause. Which, uh, does not really match up with her personality in the book.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Fashion in Detail by Avril Hart and Susan North (1998) This is great! It has close up details of clothing, most of it from the upper classes. Very good for writing fic, if you want to be able to say something more specific than somebody having a blue silk gown, or whatever. And I am extremely impressed by all the craftsmanship! *boggles*
I know no one else remembers this, but it's been bugging me since 2020: Fritz's titles in 1740 included "Prince of East Frisia", but the Cirksena family didn't die out and East Frisia didn't pass to the Hohenzollerns until 1744!
Hartmann finally explained to me that in 1732, the inheritance was so contested by the Danes and Hanoverians that FW decided to start adding the title to his list.
Most of the German principalities just sighed and said, "Sure," but the emperor got annoyed that FW hadn't asked him, and G2 and the Danes got annoyed! Neither of them wanted FW holding more territory in their neighborhood.
Danish minister: You can't just start going by a title that someone else holds! That's not a thing!
FW: It is so! I'm not challenging the current incumbent, I'm just making sure everyone knows that I'm next in line!
Danish minister: NOT A THING.
FW: IS TOO.
So when Fritz took over in 1740, he adopted the East Frisia title in expectation of his inheritance.
In 1744, when he finally inherited, there were some protests from Britain and Denmark, but since there was a bigger war to worry about (Austrian Succession), and Fritz had just won his last land grab, everyone declined to start a war with Fritz over this and just let him have it.
Hartmann, btw, has turned out to be a really informative read given my foreign policy interests. Yes, he's problematic, but almost all the books I read are, and it's not as bad as I'd feared from Selena's comment that he "regards 'History of my Time' and 'History of the Seven Years War' (both by Fritz) as his main sources for all things Prussia." His main sources are the respective bodies of political correspondence of his two heroes, Fritz and Bernstorff, supplemented by some archival material (not as much as I'd like). And while he doesn't question his heroes enough (he does some!), and he's got some real zingers, as pointed out by Selena (I did raise two eyebrows at everyone wanting to dismember Prussia in 1740), the book does provides valuable context to the Danish aspects of the Political Correspondence on Trier, which is on my list of things to dive into when my French is better. And if I decide I want to wrestle with Bernstorff's 18C German (I looked at it), his correspondence has been published and is also freely available. I will probably revisit Hartmann if/when I start reading the PC. Though I'm still hoping to find a better book on 18th century Danish history than either Barz or Hartmann! (Two more Struensee books are currently in the mail. Fingers crossed.)
ETA: Okay, I've just gotten to the part where he talks about the partition of Poland, and I need some help here. Per selenak's original writeup:
But Hartmann's true masterpiece comes when he has to talk about Poland. See, Danish PM Bernstorff, about whom more in a moment, predicts Fritz would want to divide the country in 1768 already. However, says Hartmann: Bernstorff's judgment on the Prussian policy towards Poland did not reflect reality. From 1772 onwards, Berlin didn't promote the plan of a partioning of Poland, just of separating some Polish territories and adding them to the Hohenzollern state, with the sole intent of not letting Russian influence in the Commonwealth get too powerful.
I'm still staring at that sentence, refusing to believe it was published in 1983.
Emphasis mine, because in my copy of the text, it reads:
Vor 1772 betrieb man in Berlin nicht den Plan einer Teilung Polens, sondern die Abtrennung polnischer Gebiete und ihre Einverleibung in den Hohenzollernstaat, mit dem Hintergedanken, den russischen Einfluß in der Adelsrepublik nicht übermächtig werden zu lassen.
I would have read "vor 1772" as before 1772, meaning in 1768 when Bernstorff is speculating about Fritz's motives. Does it really mean "from 1772 onwards?"
Because I am not the expert here, but I distinctly remember Heinrich having to talk Fritz *into* taking a piece of Poland during the First Partition.
Now, Fritz's reluctance was on the grounds that he feared Russia would object, and Fritz's plans for grabbing West Prussia go all the way back to 1731, and Prussian hopes of partitioning Poland go back to before that (to even before FW, I think). So given all that, I think it's absurd to say Fritz's motivation was to keep Russia from getting too strong. Hell, in the early days, the motive was to keep Saxony from getting too strong! although by 1768 that's no longer a concern.
But I do think it's fair to say that before 1772, Fritz wasn't planning on partitioning Poland, and that though he had hopes of a land grab at various points in his reign, he wasn't seriously contemplating one in 1768, and thus that Bernstorff missed the mark there. The rest of Hartmann's claim is, of course, absurd.
I have also now read the Hampton Tales of Hollywood script, thank you selenak! It's very funny and very heartbreaking, and then I had to go back and watch all the Heinrich Mann bits on Youtube again. I'm going to have to try to find this so I can watch it all the way through -- I have some leads.
I'll try to write it up for DW soon, but in the meantime, I had a question. The part about Nelly Mann, how when she committed suicide Heinrich Mann took her to three different hospitals because the first two wouldn't take them and the third pronounced her dead -- did it really happen like that? (It doesn't, indeed, seem like the sort of thing Hampton would make up.) I missed just how awful it was when I was watching, I think I got distracted by the visuals a bit somehow, but reading the stark words meant there was no distraction from exactly how terrible it was. (I suppose also, in the Youtube video excerpt, Horvath's monologue about Heinrich and Thomas gets cut off.)
..which is now over, including the "Lies" episode they always do a bit later where they talk about some things they left out and/or did/said wrongly and realized too late, or were caught out on.
In general, it's a nice introduction to the subject, and the mistakes aren't of the type that completely distort the story. (The potato anecdote made it as true fact, and also Fritz was the sole organizer and idea haver of the First Polish Partition, but what else is new.) They also do a nice job keeping things balanced - there's neither the 19th century style Fritz worship nor the proto Nazi Fritz demonisation that happened/happens post WW2 in some quarters. It did crack me up that in the big 7 Years War episode, they solved the problem of all the battles by presenting it as a Wrestling Match, including the Second Miracle of the House of Brandenburg.
Heinrich made it into the series, but on the sidelines; he's mentioned in two episodes as most important support to Fritz in the 7 Years War, especially once there was really dire need for generals who manage to preserve their armies lives a bit better than the boss, and in the Wrestling Sequence, he's Fritz' coach (which wouldn't please either of them if they saw it). Fredersdorf never gets mentioned by name, but in the last episode in a distorted and factually wrong manner ("in the last 20 years of his life he lived with his valet whose room was next to his"), whereas Algarotti not only makes it as Fritz' lover by name in episode 2 but is also amply talked about in the "Lies" episode where we get the orgasm poem story. Given that Prinzsorgenfrei recently did a poll on Tumblr where Fredersdorf finished even behind CASANOVA (he who met Fritz only once - or twice, can't remember - ) in terms of popularity as a Fritz boyfriend, I can only conclude that I predicted this all too well in my speculation about Fritz fandom if there was a tv series and how Fritz/Fredersdorf would be treated and dismissed as the safe, boring ship.
(Never mind, Fredersdorf. As Mildred once said, you weren't just Caroline's favourite husband, you also were Fritz' favourite husband.)
More seriously, I can see the Orgasm Poem as a big attraction which promoted Algarotti to post Katte fave, but does Tim Blanning (who, no surprise, gets mentioned as a source in the last ep) quote the adorable Gott Bewahre Dir letter to Fredersdorf at all, asks she who still hasn't read Blanning?
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Court of Louis XIV: Madame est morte
A woman who had lost her son through a fall when he was working on the machines of Versailles and who had been condemned to payments by the Chambre du Justice, presented full of pain a general petition in order to get some attention, and indeed she was asked whatever she wanted; she then shouted insults about the King, called him whoreson, King of Machines, tyrant and a thousand other scotises and extravaganzas, whereupon the King, surprised, asked whether she was talking of him. Whereupon she said yes and continued in her rant. She was arrested and immediately condemned to be whipped and be brought to the Petites-Maisons (then the madhouse of Paris). The whip was used on her with extraordinary hrashness throughout the entire Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the woman didn't make a sound, suffering the evil like a martyr for God's glory. Many have disliked this strict punishment and have said that the woman should have been treated as a madwoman and immeditaely brought to the Petites-Maisons, instead of letting oneself provoked into this punishment.
The editor also gives us, late in Louis' reign, the entire letter from the Abbé Fénelon (bestselling author of Telemaque, the How-to-be-a-good-prince novel so beloved by Fritz and Leopold Mozart, in which he provides Louis with an almighty "here's why you suck, in detail, and how your people suffer from it" speech. (This did not end well for Fénelon, who had started out with a very good job - teacher of the King's Grandsons - and was one of the candidates to become the next bishop of Paris, but after that letter, Louis made him first bishop of Cambrai instead (far less prestitigious, and far away), and then, when Fénelon wrote a pro Quietism pamphlet (Quietism, like Jansenism, was one of those inner Catholic branches which got popular in the later part of Louis' reign, but Quietism less so, and it was outright condemned), brought down the thunder, meaning he got the Pope to excommunicate Fénelon until Fénelon recanted (in public).)
But for all the social injustices, two thirds of the book consists of sensational gossip. Sometimes the editor presents conflicting accounts, as whenever there's a poisoning accusation, or how an affair came to be. For example: Louis and his first Maitresse en Titre, Louise de La Valliere. In one version, this started out as a kind of beard/cover story for his flirtation with his sister-in-law, Minette, and then became real, in another, La Valliere approched with and she was so devoted and crushing that he was nice to her at first, what with her not being a great beauty (too thin, and a slight limp, the courtiers said), but then fell in love with her.
Now, the chapter Madame est morte about Minette's death has a lot of very long quotes, and I can't translate them all, but here are some
Daniel de Cosnac, Bishop of Valence, about the early days when Minette still thought she could get rid of the Knight of Lothringia:
Madame replied to me that, if someone would advise her well, she would be capable of being careful, for the Chevalier de Lorraine was passionately in love with Madame de Monaco; Madame de Monaco was the friend of her heart and of unshakeable devotion, and thus she would be able to move her to signal the Chevalier de Lorraine whatever she wanted. I returned: 'I don't know either Madame de Monaco nor the Chevalier de Lorraine well enough to reassure your royal highness in this matter that such a strategy would be successful." She said: "I swear it will."
Only a few days after this conversation, Madame started to change her mind. I already said that Monsieur had demanded of the Chevalier de Lorraine that he, MOnsieur, was supposed to have precedence in his emotions before Madame de Monaco, and the later undoubtedly recognized that this was the key point in order to keep Monsieur's favor, and thus he prefered the fortune he could expect from Monsieur to the true or pretended love to Madame de Monaco. At various opportunities, it became clear without any shadow of a doubt that he was devoted exclusively to Monsieur and was Madame's enemy. This went so far that he showed open hostility and contempt towards Madame. Madame recognized too late that she shouldn't have put any hopes into Madame de MOnaco, who did not fulfill the expectations Madame had of her, and who had no influence on the Chevalier whatsoever.
(According to Horowski, Madame de Monaco was actually bi and either flirted with or had an affair with Minette herself, and later made a pass to Liselotte as well, who said no. But there is no quote supporting this in this book.)
Then the negotiations for the Treaty of Dover take up steam (reminder: the treaty for a France/England alliance, with the secret additional clause that Charles II promises to convert to Catholicism, which he'll only keep on his deathbed), which means Minette after years of neglect is increasingly important to Louis again, which means Philippe sulks. Simultanously, there's the matter of the abbeys he wants for the Chevalier, and it all explodes on January 30th, 1670. According to Saint-Maurice, who is working for the Duke of Savoy and reporting to him, this happened:
This, Monseigneur is the complete truth, as Madame de Montespan wrote it to her father the Duke of Monetemart, and how I learned it from Madame de Trambonneau, her trusted and beloved friend. But I ask your royal highness not to tell anyone I named these people as my sources.
The Abbé de Rivière and Bishop of Langres had two abbeys who belonged to Monsieur's territories. As the Bishop was old and fragile, (Monsieur) had been waiting for a long time for his death in order to give these abbeys to the Chevalier de Lorraine. He said this to the King at Chambord, but the King immediately replied that as the Chevalier was not a member of the clergy, his conscience did not permit him to allow this, and that besides this man was leading a far too debauched life to get a clerical income. Nonetheless Monsieur begged him for his permission, but his Majesty replied again that this was impossible, but that he, as he loved him (i.e. as Louis loved Philippe, his brother), would give the Chevalier a pension of 40 000 Livres despite having little respect for him once the abbeys in question were free.
Monsieur told all of this to the Chevalier de Lorraine, and they made a hundred jokes about the conscience of the King which accomodated for all the ladies. The King learned of this. The King accused the Chevalier de Lorraine of the shameful crime of sodomy with the Comte de Guiche and other men who have been burned for this crime at the Place de Grève.
When the Bishop of Langries died on Thursday morning, Monsieur told the King that he had given the abbeys to the Chevalier de Lorraine, whereupon the King said that he didn't want this to happen. Monsieur replied that it was a done deed and a fact. HIs Majesty told him again that he would prevent this. The conversation got so heated that the people around them started to notice.(...)
Philippe takes off to Saint Cloud with his entire household. To get the next paragraph, reminder that the Duchess of Orleans is Minette, Philippe's wife, the first Madame.
Madame asked (Louis) to agree that the Chevalier de Lorraine was to receive these abbeys. He told her that this was not possible. She asked for it as a favor to herself. He remained firm in his refusal and chided her for having forgotten the bad treatment she'd been subjected to so quickly. She told him that she prefered Monsieur's contentment to her own interests, that the Chevalier de Lorraine was a young man , that he would change his behavior, and asked (Louis) to forgive him, but when she saw that she could not succeed, she threw herself at the King's feet, crying, and told him that she saw it as the greatest injury to be separated from his person, but that it was her duty to follow Monsieur who wanted to leave the court. The King withdrew and tsaid that if his brother would wish to separate himself from him for this reason, he'd know how to punish those responsible.
=> The Chevalier gets arrested. Philippe decides to move his entire household to the furthest estate he owns (300 miles from Versailles) until he gets his boyfriend back. And because it still cracks me up how the tv show Versailles presented this whole thing in s1, complete with the Chevalier suffering in a ratty dungeon, here's how his arrest actually proceded:
The Chevalier spent the night in Saint-Germain; he wasn't brought to the Bastille. He was asked how many servants he wanted to have, he could bring as many as he wished; he chose two of his nobleman and two valets. He left on Friday in his carriage with a strong escort commanded by a lieutenant of the Gardes des Corps. He's supposed to be sent to Pierre-Encise; others say to the citadel of Montpellier, or maybe to Collioure, at the Catalonian border.
Monsieur can't endure the countryside for long and comes back to Versailles. Louis offers a compromise: the Chevalier is freed on the condition that he takes up residence either in Rome or in Malta (after all, he is in theory a Maltese Knight, that's why he's a Chevalier). The King provides a pension of 10 000 livres, and the abbeys will go to the Chevalier's brother, the Abbé d'Harcourt, who is at least a priest. Minette takes off to Dover, meets Charles, James and Jemmy, and returns. Then we get several descriptions of her death, one by her lady in waiting Madame de La Fayette (presumably an ancestress?), one from Louis' and Philippe's cousin, the Grande Mademoiselle (daughter of Gaston the schemer, older sister of Marguerite Louise the involuntary Medici wife), and then various descriptions from various people of the aftermath. What all these have in common is that she felt a pain in her side on the first day of her return, scandalalized her court by insisting on bathing in the river on Saturday and on Sunday felt worse. On Sunday, a painter was busy painting a portrait of her and Monsieur (oh joy, under these circumstances). While Monsieur is about to leave, Madame takes a glass of Zichory Wataer, drinks, her side attacks return, and she breaks down. From then onwards, it's an extremely painful dying, for hours and hours. Madame de La Fayette:
Suddenly (Minette) said one should take care of hte water which she had drunk. It was surely poisonous, maybe someone had confused a bottle, she was poisoned, she felt it, and was asking for an antidote.I was standing in front of her bed, next to Monsieur, and while I thought him incapable of such a crime, a feeling close to human malice made me take a good hard look at him. He was neither moved nor embarassed by this thought of Madame's. He said that the water should be given to a dog. He was sharing Madame's opinion that oil and an antidote should be brought to her in order to take such an evil suspicion from her. Madame Desbordes, her first chamberwoman, who was devoted to her, said that she had prepared the water, and drank from it, but Madame insisted on bring given oil and an antidote. She was given both.
It doesn't work, she gets worse, and Louis gets send for, who arrives with the Queen, two of his current mistresses (La Valliere and Montespan) and the Comtesse de Soissons, i.e. Olympe Mancini, Eugene's mother, and briefly also a mistress of Louis. Minette wants another medication to make her throw up, the doctors (now present in the plural) say no, and Louis starts to argue.
The King wanted to argue with htem, they didn't know how to reply to him. He told them: "One cannot let a woman die without trying to help her!" They looked at each other and didn't say a word. There was a constant coming and going in this room, people were having conversations, some even laughed as if Madame was in a very different state.
At which point both Madame de Lafayette and the Grande Mademoiselle claim they were the ones who thought that Minette needed a proper confessor, not the "lousy Capuchin" already present, and another, more renowned confessor is sent for so she can go through the final rites with him. The English envoy, as opposed to all the French memoirists, also mentions this exchange in his report to Charles:
I took the liberty of asking her whther she believed she had been poisoned. Her confessor, who was present, and heard what I had asked, said to her: "Madame, don't accuse anyone and offer your death as a sacrifice to God." This stopped her from replying, and despite the fact I kept asking her this question repeatedly, she only answered with a shrug. I asked her for the box in which all her letters were preserved in order to send them to His Majesty, and she ordered me to demand it from Madame de Bordes, who kept fainting and nearly dying from the pain to see her mistress in such a lamentable condition, and so Monsieur was able to get his hands on the letters before (Madame de Bordes) got to her senses again.
Louis orders an autopsy and the result says she wasn't poisoned. (The English envoy is not convinced.) Saint-Simon, who wasn't alive then, let alone in Versailles, still has a version of this story in his memoirs, and he not only reports it as being poison, administered by the Marquis d'Effiat and ordered by the Chevalier de Lorraine, but includes an aftermath where Detective Louis comes to the same conclusion and interrogates the Marquis:
"Now you listen to me, my friend: If you admit all to me and tell me the truth about what I want to know, then, whatever you may have done, I shall pardon you, and it will never be mentioned again. But take care not to keep anything from me, for if you do, you are a dead man. Has Madame been poisoned?"
"Yes, Sire," he said.
"And who has poisoned her?" the King asked, "and how was it done?"
He replied that the Chevalier de Lorraine had sent the poison to Beauvron and d'Effiat, and told him what I have described earlier. Whereupon the King continued to ask: (...)"And my brother, did he know?"
"No, Sire, none among us three was that stupid. He cannot keep a secret, he'd have betrayed us."
Upon this reply, the King exclaimed a loud "Ha!", like a man who after having had a constricted throat can breathe again.
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Eyewitness reports
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Court of Louis XIV: Aftermath
The King asked Monsieur who had just been in Paris: "Well, my brother, what is the talk of Paris?" Monsieur said to him: "Sire, one talks a lot about this unfortunate Marquis." - "And what do they say about him?" - "That he wanted to plead for another unfortunate man." - "And for which unfortunate man?" the King asks. "For the Chevalier de Lorraine", Monsieur says.
"But," says the King, "do you still think of this Chevalier de Lorraine? Are you worried about him? Would you love him who returned him to you?"
"Really," Monsieur said, "that would be the greatest joy anyonen could ever provide for me in my life."
"Well," the King said, "then I shall make you this present. Two days ago a courier has left. He will return, I give him back to you, and wish you to be obliged to me for the rest of your life. What's more, I'll promote him to Field Marshal of my army."
Consequently, Monsieur threw himself at the King's feet, hugged his kneeds and kissed his hand in boundless joy. The King lifted him and said to him: "My brother, brothers should not embrace like this." And he embraced him in a brotherly fashion.
Not thrilled: the English ambassador. The Chevalier de Lorraine has been permitted to return to court and to serve in the army as Field Marshal. If Madame has been poisoned, like nearly everyone in the world believes, then France regards him as the killer and is justly amazed that the King of France has so little respect of our King that he permits this creature to return to court, especially if one thinks of the impudent way he has treated the Princess throughout her life.
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A few replies from the last post
but tomorrow I might need him against the Normans. For example.
I laughed!
Crusaders: What kind of Christian Emperor are you anyway?
heeeee!
The irony is that Basil - who grew up to be one of the most powerful eunuch officials of the Byzantine Empire and managed to serve and survive several Emperors in a row - did not betray Romanos, but his legitimate sons did.
This sound super interesting and... I'm gonna have to wait until I'm through the German podcast and starting this one to hear the story, huh? :PP (*)
Theophanu the younger was his niece, not his daughter, plus hadn't been born in the purple at all
I totally laughed at his comparison of Theophanu with... someone I've never heard of, and the podcast guy was like "Yeah, I've never heard of her either. Anyway, that was the equivalent of Theophanu." That was great and was a very visceral way of explaining to me how not-purple Theophanu was :)
On a different note (or maybe the same note, in the sense of, things that amused me):
I mean. The readers of Voltaire's memoirs and pamphlets are not going to find themselves thinking, "Oh, I see, Fritz likes to bottom. I've read the Kinsey report, and that all checks out." !!!
LOLOLOLOLOL! The statistics are just SOMETHING ELSE.
(*) Otto III has just died, and also recently (maybe the previous episode?) is where Sylvester II became Pope and only then did I realize -- okay, this is super embarrassing but I guess I might as well admit it and amuse you guys -- that this guy "Jabert" that he's been talking about for ages and who sounded super cool and interesting but whom I had never heard of before was actually Gerbert d'Aurillac. (My brain just recognized that it sounded like (American-accented-French) Javert, okay? I'm not good at French phonetic spelling!)
(ETA: No, as you can infer, I still haven't reread Ars Magica. But now I have even more reason to!)
ETA2: Huh, it seems that Judith Tarr wrote a novel about Theophanu! I will have to read and report back! (Lol forever, Publishers Weekly didn't seem to like it at all. "But when she writes of Theophano's nuptial banquet, 'the feast dragged itself into eternity,' she could be describing this novel." Aw.)
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Eagle's Daughter
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Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: The Usual Suspects
Another problem is that the underground network the French police uncovered on that occasion, which certainly did have some high class clients (hence all of Europe munching popcorn and observing the scandal) wasn't primarily consisting of poison deliveries, but provided abortions and their less-good-to-modern-eyes-looking twin service, midwife services plus letting your illegitimate child disappear, beautfy products like potions to enlarge your breasts, soothsaying and love potions. Someone like Catherine "La Voisin" did also include poisons in her offerings, but not all of the other "Sorceresses" of the Parisian scene did, plus there were certainly any number of courtiers who had used La Voisin's non-poisoning services, - a credible case could be made that Madame de Montespan, for example, who was at that point visibly losing Louis' favour, had wanted a love potion - but now found their names among the clients. Plus some of the "sorceresses" like La Voisin's daughter deduced that if they hinted at knowledge of sensational poison plots (ideally directed against the King himself), they remained alive longer, becauses then the police would have to investigate further and need you as a source, whereas if you just confess to, say, being an abortionist, you get condemned and executed immediately. So how many of the big poisoning accusations are actually true, beyond the initial cases that got the whole scandal going? Who knows.
It all starts with Marie-Magdelaine d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers. When her (a noble as well, and an alchemist) lover dies, a box is found in his posession containing phioles with poison and a letter from her demanding them from him. She makes a runner to England but gets arrested in Lüttich and brought back to France. Unlike a great many women later, she doesn't get tortured, she is nobility, and so she gets a trial in front of the highest court available in France, in which she is accused of having poisoned her father and her brothers for the inheritance she then made. Alas, the fatal box doesn't just contain letters from her, but also from a guy (noble, too) who basically had the office of highest clerical tax collector, who visited the Marquise after her lover's death and gave her a large sum of money, for what, he doesn't want to say. The Marquise confesses to having poisoned her brothers and father (with Arsenic, btw) and having intended to poison her sister as well. As a member of the nobility, she gets beheaded (once stroke, she was lucky). But now people are starting to wonder. And then an anonymous letter gets found in a Jesuit church in which the writer says that there is a a conspiracy to kill the King, and a lot of people have confessed to using poison regularly, but he can't break the seal of othe confession so can't name names, but please investigate, save the King.
=> A series of arrests follow, first of an alchemist who knew the Marquise's dead lover, then of his girlfriend, and then of the (non-noble) "sorceresses" she names - La Vigoureux (wife if a tailor), Marie Bosse (whose main trade is soothsaying via cards), and then, finally, Catherine Deshayes, wife of Antoine Voisin, hence "La Voisin". These ladies are not members of the nobility, they get the according treatment, and then they start to name noble clients left, right and center. Here's Primi Visconti (aka the guy who rebuffed the pass of the Marquis de La Valliere):
(There was) a certain Voisin, who under the pretense of sorcery and soothsaying made her house to a place of debauchery and traded with drugs and perfume which got suspected of having been poisons. Fact is that she caused a great many stillbirths and collected plants of all types. Most ladies in Paris visited her; she had alist of their names and of what they wanted from her. It got said that the Duchess of Foix wanted a potion to develop her breasts further, Madame de Vassé such a one for her hips; many wanted a secret recipe to awaken love, and several wanted the position Madame de Montespan had. Moreover, La Voisin claimed that it was due to her art that Madame de Montespan and Louvois retained the royal favor.
Madame de Montespan doesn't keep it much longer. Louis has started a fling with an 18 years old beauty named Angelique de Fontanges. (Who won't be around for long; her early death is another case of "poison? Maybe?". The final winner, as mentioned repeatedly, will be Madame de Maintenon, the former Francoise Scarron, who started out as governess of the Louis/Athenais de Montespan children, one reason, btw, why she will be such a partisan of the Duc de Maine, the oldest boy of that set, against Liselotte's son Philippe II for the regency.) La Voison makes her confession naming Madame de Montespan as a client on March 12, and in April, Madame de Montespan gets dismisssed. As Louis' mistress, mind you, not yet from court. Instead, Madame de Montespan gets an office in the Queen's household, currently owned by none other than the Comtesse de Soissons, aka Olympe Mancini, Eugene's mother.
Trichateau writes to Busby-Rabutin: This Wednesday, the Comtesse de Soissons get the order to hand over her office. This princess was staying at Chaillot in a small hows she owns there. Monsieur Colbert had to run around a lot. She talked with the the King in the evening when being with the Queen, who told her that there was a joyful surprise waiting for her. She replied with the suitable submissiveness, and finally she received two hundred thousand Taler, and with that sum, Madame de Montespan became supreme intendant of the Queen's household and now isn't the King's mistress anymore.
Meanwhile, the interrogations continue, and more and more noble names are getting named. Louvois (Minister of War, scourge of the Palatinate) writes to Louis about his conversation with La Reynie, the police boss, about the confession wave and with ill conceiled glee because the guys named are two rivals of his:
Everything which Your Majesty has seen against the Sieur de Luxemburg and the Marquis de Feuquières is nothing compared to the declaration which this interrogation contains, and in which the Sieur de Luxemburg gets accused to have demanded the death of his wife, and that of the Marshal de Créquy, and furtherly the marriage of his daughter with my son, his regaining of the Dukedom of Montmorency and glorious deeds of war which would make your Majesty forget the mistakes which he has made at Philippsburg. Monsieur de Feuquères gets described asa the most evil man of the world, who used the opportunities to sell his soul to the devil in order to move Madame Voisin to poison the uncle or guardian of a girl he wanted to marry.
In November, La Voisin accuses none other than one of three greatest writers of the age - the three being Corneille, Racine and Moliere. The guy she accuses is Racine, at this point already a living classic, member of the Academy and official historian of the King. Some years earlier, Moliere's best actress , La du Parc, left his troupe and Moliere himself for Racine, who wrote the play and the main part of Andromaque for her and also had a love affair with her. Racine's son Louis, indignantly writing after his father's death, says du Parc died of the aftermath of childbirth, that his father loved du Parc and would never have harmed her. But La Voisin claims Racine poisoned her, and the book quotes the interrogation protocol of November 21st:
Q: How did she get to know the actress Du Parc?
A: She has known her for fourteen years, they were very good friends, and she was in her confidence for all her affairs. (...) She had all the more cause to suspect (Racine) as Jean Racine always stopped her, who was the good friend of Du Parc, from visiting her during her entire illness of which she died, despite Du Parc constantly asking for her. But whenever she went there, in order to see her, she was stopped from entering, and this on Racine's orders; all she learned through Du Parc's stepmother, who calls herself Mademoiselle de Gorle, and through the daughters of Du Parc, who are in the Hotel de Soissons and have told (La Voisin) that Racine is the cause of her misery.
La de Gorle has told her that Racine, who secretly married la Du Parc, was jealous of all the world and especially of her, La Voisin, whom he distruisted; and that he got rid of Du Parc through poison because of his boundless jealousy, that Racine throughout Du Parc's illness had not left her side, that he took a precious diamond of her finger, and that he also removed the jewelry and those things owned by Du Parc which had some worth.
This testimony sounds less than convincing to the French police, and so there is no order to Racine's arrest. Unlilke for... drumroll...well, you'll haven noted La Voisin's supposed sources are staying at the Hotel de Soissons...
Letter from Bussy-Rabutin to La Rivière: I'm sharing big news with you. The special commisson for the affair of the poisons has produced orders of arrest for the Sieur de Luxemburg, the Comtesse de Soissons, the Marquise d'Alluye and Sieur de Polignac.
Furtherly, the following have been asked to appear in person in front of the commission: Madame de Bouillon, the Princess of Tingry, the wife of the Marshall de La Ferté, and Madame du Roure. Moroever, there has been an order of arrest for Cessac.
Rumor has it that the crime of the Sieur de Luxemburg has been to have poisoned a tax official for Flanders when with the army, who had provided him with royal money.
The Comtesse de Soissons gets accused of having poisoned her husband; the Marquise d'Alluye her brother-inlaw; the Princess of Tingry her newborn children; Madame de Bouillon a valet who knew about her love affairs. The King has returned a billet written by teh Duchess of Foix to her, in which she had written to La Voisin an din which she told her: "The more I rub, the less they grow." As His Majesty demanded an explanation for these words, she replied that she had asked la Voisin for a recipe for the development of her breasts.
Also arrested: two priests, who supposedly read black mass over various ladies' bodies in order to get them the objects of their desires.
Re: Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: The Usual Suspects
Re: Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: The Usual Suspects
Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: Sentences
La Voisin gets condemned to death on January 19th, and the Duke of Luxemburg brought to the Bastille. Madame de Sevigné, the most famous female letter writer of her generation, writes on the 29th to the Count of Guiteau:
At a distance, don't you have the impression that we breathe in nothing but poisons here and are surrounded by sacrilege and abortions? Indeed, all of this causes disgust everywhere in Europe, and whoever will read us in a hundred years will lament for those who were witness to all these accusations. You know that poor Luxemburg went to the Bastille on his own free will; he himself was the officer leading himself there, he presented the arrest warrent to Bèzemaux. He came from Saint-Germain and met Madame de Montespan on the way; they both left their carriages in order to talk undisturbed with each other; he cried a lot. (...) At first, he was brought into a rather beautiful room. Three hours later the order arrived to treat him more strictly. Now he's residing on the top floor in a miserable room. He was interrogated for four hours by Sirs Bezon and de la Reynie.
As for the Comtesse de Soissons, that is another matter entirely. She has sworn that she is innocent. She left in the night and said she did not want to endure prison or the shame to be confronted with beggars and villains. The Marquise d'Alluye went with her. They took the way to Namur. There is no intention of pursuing them. There is something natural and noble in this behavior. As far as I am concerned, I approve of it. It's said that the things she is accused of are nothing but idiocies, which she has told a hundred times, as one does if one comes from these sorceresses or however they call themselves.
The Duke is eventually released. None of these nobles mentioned in the book seems to be executed. La Voisin, otoh, gets burned alive on February 22nd. Madame de Sevigné:
I'll tell you about la Voisin now. It wasn't on Wednesday that she was burned, as I mistakenly told you earlier, it was yesterday. She knew her sentence since Thursday, which was very unusual. In the evening, she told her guards: "HOw now, don't we keep medianoch?" She ate with them at midnight, for the hell of it, for it wasn't a fasting day. She drang a lot of wine. She sang twenty drinking songs. On Tuesday, she was put though the regular and extraordinary interrogation - the later is the euphemism for torture, of course - ; she had eaten and slept for eight hours. She was confronted with the ladies de Dreux and Le Fréron - who were supposed to have killed their husbands - and with some others while on the rack. There is no public declaration yet what she has testified. There is just rumor that a few more extraordinary things have been revealed. (...) She appeared on the cart dressed in white; that is the dress for being burned. She was very red faced, and one could see she violently pushed back the confessor and his cruxifix. We saw her pass from Hotel de Sully.
This still isn't the end, though, because there are more arrests, more interrogations, and now Marguerite Voisin, the daughter, accuses Madame de Montespan of having been not a one off but a regular client of her mothers. And of having ordered Black Masses. Which is when we get a letter from Louis himself:
After I saw the declaration which Marguerite Voisin, prisoner in my chateau de Vincennes, has made on the 12th of the past month, I write you this letter in order to tell you that it is my wish that you use all your abilities in order to bring light to the facts which are contained in this declaration and in the interrogation, that you take care that the comparisons of protocols, confrontations and investigations made about the mentioned declaration and the interrogation are noted in separate documents.
Separate, because the one naming the mother of seven of his children sure as hell won't be published.
From Marguerite Voisin's interrogation protocol, which Louis has just read:
She has seen that two masses were read by Guibourg - that's the main black mass priest, who has already admitted of having read black masses for Voisin's clients - (...) The first one she knows about happened more than six years ago. She helped her mother to prepare the necessary things, to wit, a mattress to be put on chairs two sools on both sides on which the chandeliers were put. Then Guibourg entered dressed in his mass robe from the little room that was next, and then la Voisin let the woman enter over whose body the mass should be read, and told her - Marguerite Voisin - to leave.
When she was older, her mother didn't hesitate anymore and she was present during masses of this type and has seen that the lady was put on the mattress completely naked, the head supported through a cushion on an upturned chair, the legs hanging down, a hankerchief on her body, and on the hankerchief, placed above the stomach, a cruxifix and the cup. Madame de Montespan had such a mass read for hserlf by Guibourg at La Voisin's place three years ago. She came around ten in the evening and left around midnight. And as La Voisin told the lady that she needed to name the times at which one should read the other two masses that were needed to achieve the success for her cause, the later said she couldn't find the time for them, and that she (La Voisin) would have to do without her and would have to do everything needed to bring this affair to a good end. Whereupon (La Voisin) promised her that she would substitute herself to have the two masses read in hers, the Marquise de Montespan's cause. Some time later, she (Marguerite Voisin) was prsent a mass which Guibourg read in this way over the body of her mother, and during the sacrifice he named the name Louis de Bourbon and that of a lady which consisted of two or three names, but did not say the name Montespan.
By now, La Reynier has 140 people prisoners in both the Bastille and Vincennes, and every single one of them, as he writes to Louvois, has been accused of either having used poison or of trading with poison. Louvois orders the files to be brought to him. These include supportive evidence against Madame de Montespan, who is named as a client of La Voisins by Le Sage (another ex priest turned black mass priest). Accoding to them, there was an additional plot going on: while Montespan ordered a love potion so she could give it to Louis, in reality what was prepared was a poison which would kill him, but without her knowledge. Otoh, she did want something lethal against young Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Who does die. Louis this time does explicitly NOT want an autopsy. The Affair of the Poisons interrogations won't be finished until July 1682. Inconclusion, there were 210 interrogations, 319 orders of arrest, 318 actual arrests, 88 people condemned. La Reynie in his final report says:
It is well advised to end the comission, but one has to avoid leaving the impression this happens out of fatigue or because of the disgust of the judges, so that a great many interested people won't use this as an excuse to ridicule our justice system.
Well, quite, La Reynie. So: was everyone accused guilty? Were some, and others were accused the same way victims of with hunts just a generation earlier were? Was everyone after the Marquise de Brinvilliers innocent? The biggest argument against the last one is that La Reynie actually did NOT want to produce that many accusations of VIPs, whereas during a witch trial, the interrogators do want more accusations and operate accordingly. Otoh: Madame de Montespan was both unpopular and on her way out, which everyone knew. So more than one of the accused could have named her as a safe bet. Or she could, indeed have been so desperate to remain Maitresse en Titre that she resorted to Satanism and love potions. We will never know. But the difference in sentences for noble and not noble accused is yet another reason why I am utterly unsurprised the Revolution happened (if a century later.)
Re: Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: Sentences
Re: Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: Sentences
Re: Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: Sentences
Re: Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: Sentences
Re: Court of Louis XIV: The Affair of the Poisons: Sentences
Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Obvious caveats are obvious: this is all from a combination of Wikipedia (English, German, and Danish, the last thanks to helpful Google translate) and a biographie romancee by a guy who thinks FS was French, along with other factual gaffes. I have ordered more academic-looking books on Struensee, but who knows if I will read them, much less write them up--my German is slow, the post is slow, and by the time the books arrive, I will probably be on to some other obsession. (I considered sending one to Selena for the free shipping + 2-5 business day delivery, but I hear she's really overcrowded these days. ;))
So here goes. Take EVERYTHING with several grains of salt, and I reserve the right to retract things later. (And yes, I *am*, predictably, half-seriously wondering how far you can get with Danish on 3 years of German and 1 year of Old Norse. ;))
Intro
So to understand how Struensee got into power, you have to understand Christian VII, the mentally ill king who let him get all that power, and to understand Christian VII, you have to go two generations back to behold the propagation of trauma.
The story of Grandpa Christian VI and Dad Frederik V has some interesting parallels with Cosimo III and Gian Gastone, my favorite dysfunctional Medici. (Seriously, the Danes immediately started making me want to give them fix-its too.)
Cast of characters
Christian VI: King of Denmark 1730-1746
Frederik V: King of Denmark 1746-1766, son of Christian VI
Count Adam Moltke: Favorite of Frederik V
Christian VII: King of Denmark 1766-1808, son of Frederik V
Caroline Matilda: Queen of Denmark 1766-1772, d. 1775, daughter of Frederick Prince of Wales, wife of Christian VII
Doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee: Favorite of Christian VII, in power 1770-1772.
Frederik V
Christian VI was your everyday autocratic religious bigot. He made everything fun illegal. He was an unpopular king (and dad). Major difference between him and Cosimo: instead of being strong-willed and free-spirited like Marguerite-Louise, Christian's wife was exactly like him. So their son, young Frederik V, grows up with a lot of parental emotional neglect and religious trauma.
Frederik turns into a freethinking/loosely Christian libertine, much like Gian Gastone. It gets so bad that Christian VI considers disinheriting him. But he is stopped because he can't legally do that any more than FW can. So at age 23 (quite a bit younger than poor GG, who had to put up with his father until he was 53), Frederik becomes Frederik V.
Also like GG, Frederik is a super laid-back, friendly, people-pleasing sort who wants everyone to be happy. As soon as he comes to power, he makes himself popular by agreeing to revoke all the Ridiculous Laws (TM). Theater is allowed again! But he does no ruling himself, because he's too busy drinking and having sex with (female) prostitutes. He's not one of those dime-a-dozen powerful men, like August the Strong, who takes advantage of his position to have tons of sex. Frederik basically abdicates power in order to treat orgies as his full-time job (again, much like GG). He also drinks non-stop and is too incapacitated to rule even if he wanted to (which he very much doesn't). His installment in a series of short bios on Danish kings I found is subtitled "the reign without a ruler."
Like Gian Gastone, Frederik gives total control to his "favorite", whom he's named as his chamberlain. Frederik's chamberlain is Count Moltke, who will get a whole section to himself in this post.
In the end, Frederik drinks himself to death and spends several years severely ill, so there is a lot of hanging out in bed while slowly dying (sound familiar?). He also does another thing GG does, which is end up bedridden after falling down drunk and breaking his leg (in Frederik's case; ankle in GG's case).
When Frederik dies in Moltke's arms, age 42, he is sincerely mourned for the same reasons as GG was: because he revoked all the bad laws and allowed tolerance to reign. His last words could have been Gian Gastone's: "It is a great consolation to me in my last hour that I have never wilfully offended anyone, and that there is not a drop of blood on my hands."
Major differences between Frederik and Gian Gastone:
- Frederik doesn't have the same social anxiety and agoraphobic tendencies GG did, so he doesn't spend his entire reign in bed. He's actually popular because he likes visiting farms and taking walks where his subjects can meet him, and going hunting. At least until the alcohol-induced illnesses and injuries kick in. Then it's bedridden time.
- The chamberlain favorite, Count Moltke, is not a former peasant like Giuliano Dami, but born nobility, which in his case means he is both prepared to rule and allowed to do it (as we'll see later, Struensee's non-noble birth was a major strike against him).
- Frederik will actually sign off on whatever Moltke puts in front of him (GG: "I do not sign things if I can help it!"), so the council of nobles actually gets some work done. And so the country of Denmark turns into an oligarchy-in-practice and somewhat flourishes, instead of going down the toilet because Tuscany basically turned into an anarchy-in-practice. This is the Bernstorff era in Denmark; Moltke may be the most powerful man in the country because of his influence over Frederik, but Bernstorff rules foreign policy.
- Frederik's first marriage is functional. He and his wife Louisa, one of G2's daughters, are both generally friendly people and get along and have enough sex to carry on the family line. They're not in love, but they also don't refuse to sleep with each other. He's generally nice to her, and she looks the other way while he has sex with every prostitute in the country. (He does have two long-term mistresses, but he's way more into casual, no-strings-attached sex (for which he paid), and even the two mistresses, judging by their Wikipedia articles, may not have been cases of super romantic love.)
So it's like a slightly less extreme version of the last of the Medici. Which is why this write-up is not called "The Last of the Oldenburgs." ;)
Moltke
Count (dammit, I had to delete "Graf" and start over :P, but at least I did remember the word eventually) Adam Gottlob Moltke started out as a page at the Danish court. He was assigned to be the personal chamber page of crown prince Frederik as soon as Christian VI became king.* Moltke and Frederik became very close.
* Christian VI, you probably have forgotten but I remember, is the guy who became king right before Katte's death, and thus recalled Lovenorn, leaving von Johnn to write us the report of Katte's execution, much to Lovenorn's relief because he was in very hot water with FW. So when Moltke becomes personal page to future Frederik V, it's 1730.
Now, while my brain immediately went to a Fritz/Peter or Fritz/Fredersdorf place, as you can see, I checked the dates and it doesn't work: in 1730, when they met, Frederik was only 7, and his new chamberlain Moltke was 18. And unlike Fritz, or GG and his chamberlain Giuliano, Frederik seems to have been straight. I have found no hints of anything between him and Moltke; Frederik seems to have treated him as a surrogate father figure (actually calling him "father" in his letters). And given his relationship with his actual father, you can see why he was in need of a surrogate.
Wikipedia articles differ in how much Moltke enabled vs. unsuccessfully tried to restrain the nonstop drinking and orgies. There seem to be some letters from Frederik to Moltke apologizing for being so depraved, but whatever Moltke may have said or tried to convince him of, it obviously neither stopped the orgies and alcoholism nor harmed their relationship. So other Wiki articles say he just enabled Frederik's drinking and sex.
Moltke specifically avoided public positions that might put him on the level of the other nobles, and relied instead on his position as chamberlain and BFF to get things done.
When Frederik became king, suddenly "chamberlain" was not a meaningless honorary position, but the thing that allowed Moltke to be around him night and day and influence him, becoming the eminence grise of Denmark.
[Fritz: Not on my watch, Peter!]
Once in power, Moltke appears to have worked for the good of the country. He was not one of your radicals; he was opposed to abolishing serfdom, but he apparently did the thing Voltaire did, which was make his own estates prosperous precisely by treating his serfs well. He got very rich, but apparently through legal and ethical ways. People suspected him of lining his pockets, but apparently no evidence could be found (maybe he had it destroyed, who knows! but Wikipedia seems to believe he was clean).
When Struensee comes to power and started reforming left and right, Moltke refuses to support him, so he gets dismissed without a pension. But Moltke also refuses to join the conspiracy to overthrow Struensee. Apparently his memoirs also refuse to gossip and are very matter-of-fact. I get a kind of "upstanding, conservative, cautious" vibe from this guy, at least from Wikipedia.
Frederik's second marriage
(Some anecdotes I had to tuck in at the end here.)
After Queen Louise dies, and Frederik V has to remarry, he doesn't really want to.
Frederik V: Unless maybe I can get another English princess?
English: Sorry, no English princesses available.
[ViennaJoe: I said I wanted to marry a sister of Isabella's if I had to remarry at all, but no, no dice for me. You have my sympathy, Frederik.]
Frederik: Hmm. Okay, maybe I can marry Moltke's unmarried daughter? Moltke's my favorite person in the whole world. Any daughter of his is sure to be great!
Moltke: *quiet panic*
Moltke: *marries his daughter off asap*
Moltke: Sorry, Your Majesty, I have no unmarried daughters at this time either!
Now, it is reeeally interesting to speculate why Moltke might do that. I immediately thought of Mazarin, of course! (
So is Moltke in it for the good of the country? Or does he think he's got nothing to gain and everything to lose? He's got the king's ear 100% already, this marriage will just expose him to the envy and hatred of the other nobles. And if the marriage *doesn't* work out, what then? Or does he maybe not want his daughter married to an alcoholic who does nothing but participate in orgies, no matter how nice said depraved alcoholic may be? All of the above? Who can know!
Anyway, Frederik ends up married to Juliana Maria, EC's sister (and future host of Ivan VI's siblings after their Siberian stint). This marriage does not go nearly as well as Frederik's first. It doesn't go spectacularly badly, they even have kids, but Juliana's much less laid-back than Louise, much more of a stickler for etiquette (this is explained as a German court thing), and much less forgiving of the non-stop orgies. Later, after she gains power after Struensee's fall, when she's the widowed queen mother regent, she will apparently propose a chastity commission based on MT's! (I gather this one does not take off.)
[MT: Those super nice and laid-back husbands who sleep around, I know the type well. You have my sympathy, Juliana.]
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
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Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
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Fritz is not your dream boss: The Bad Pyrmont edition
Re: Fritz is not your dream boss: The Bad Pyrmont edition
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Re: Fritz is not your dream boss: The Bad Pyrmont edition
Re: Fritz is not your dream boss: The Bad Pyrmont edition
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Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Oettinger's History of the Danish Court
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Christian's first governor is a religious fanatic who considers it his job to beat Christian and yell at him to save his soul. To quote Barz the romanticizer:
In the background Reventlow's terrible question roars again and again, whether Christian wants to end up a swine like his father, who spends all his time messing around with whores. Christian doesn't want that at all. He doesn't even really know what whores are; but they must be something evil for this dreadful man to get so upset about.
At one point, Christian tries running to Dad for help, but as he bangs frantically on the door:
Behind this door only a babble and groaning could be heard, and Christian guessed what the whole court knew: As always, the father had a few Copenhagen ladies of pleasure with him, as always he poured down streams of alcohol, and it wasn't the merry drinking of his ancestors. Friedrich V. was ill, an alcoholic, and he finally dies of cirrhosis of the liver, a ruler who does not know why he is actually a ruler. The king no longer rules in Denmark.
Christian also didn't have a great relationship with Juliana Maria. Later in life, he cast her as the evil stepmother who wanted him dead so her son could inherit (and tells some really heart-rending stories to Struensee later); Barz is willing to acknowledge that we haven't heard her side of the story, but whatever happened there, it wasn't the kind of relationship that would compensate for paternal neglect and tutorial abuse.
When he's 11, little Christian gets a second tutor, a Voltaire protege who manages to alleviate some of the non-stop abuse, and then Christian decides he's going to become a freethinker. (Oh, *man*, I need to write up the Ferdinand of Parma monograph, it's so relevant!)
But he still turns out a mess. He ends up with severe trauma when he's king: first threatening to get rid of the guy who abused him, then crying and saying his beloved tutor can't leave. THERAPY FOR EVERYONE.
Once he becomes king, there's a combination of drinking and carousing, not wanting to get out of bed, jerky movements and general nervousness, delusions, impulse control problems (he's not at the butt-groping Ferdinand of Naples level, but they have to keep him out of public sight, because it's pretty obvious he's not normal), some punching down, and general chaos.
He admires Fritz in a sort-of Peter III style, even mimicking his walk, but also wants to go to war with him and beat him, because if you can beat the best, you are the best! (ViennaJoe is Sir Not Appearing in This Story, as we'll see later.)
He watches torture scenes, and wants to know all the details of executions. Heroleplays his own execution, writhing in pretend agony as he's "beheaded".
His mistress is an Amazon type woman with a whip, and at least according to our author, he was a masochist in the literal, sexual sense of the word.
He's awful to his wife, Caroline Matilda, sister of George III, and says he doesn't care who "mounts the cow."
At some point, his desperate advisors decide he needs to go on a Grand Tour to see if a change of scenery will do him any good. But they need to bring a doctor along, and there's this new up-and-coming guy making a name for himself, this Johann Friedrich Struensee guy. "Do you want to be the king's doctor while he's on tour?"
Struensee: Sure!
They go to Germany, France, and England. Struensee keeps an eye on him, kind of pissing off the nobles already by actually caring what's good for his patient, and not being a courtier. Christian is somewhat impressed by the guy who's willing to tell it like it is, but the time of great influence has not come yet.
He burns out quickly on the tour, probably clinically depressed, and wants to go home even before they go to Italy. His entourage is mostly disappointed because winter is setting in in Denmark, and they were looking forward to Italy. But, the king has spoken, and back they go.
Once they're in Denmark again, and he's miserably mentally ill with Struensee as official physician, that's when Struensee begins to gain influence.
Christian doesn't want to get out of bed, is threatening suicide, says he can't sleep with his wife, because she's really his mother, etc.
No one else knows what to do, but Struensee thinks his mental illness is neither immoral nor demonic possession, but that Christian is just a lost and scared child driven into mania. He becomes the first person who sits down and listens to Christian, and makes him feel heard and taken seriously.
Christian is all, "Oh, let me tell you all the stories about my childhood! My evil governor, my evil stepmother, my deadbeat dad..."
So now Struensee is what we would call Christian's therapist. Someone actually gets therapy!
And it helps. Christian's mental health starts to improve! He becomes a huge Struensee fan. Even better, it turns out his therapist also has all these liberal reforming ideas, which Christian had vaguely had before (remember, his second tutor was a Voltaire protege), but all his nobles were like, "With all due respect, Your Majesty, that's a stupid idea."
But now he has a strong-willed man at his side to put these ideas into practice! So he gives Struensee the green light to start reforming. Struensee tries to get Christian involved in governing, for the sake of his mental health and for the country, but Christian's approach to governing is rather like his father's: "I have all these demons from my childhood to cope with, you just tell me what to sign and I'll sign it."
So now Struensee's in power. He's therapist to the king, and as we'll see, therapist to the queen as well, then probably her lover, he's entrusted with their son's education, and now he's allowed to reform the country. The king even seems fine with the menage a trois they have going.
Everything is great for about five minutes! But there is a snake in paradise. Workaholic Struensee becomes obsessed with all the good he can do as minister. He stops having time for Christian.
Who still needs a therapist. And now suddenly he doesn't have one. If you know anything about clinical practice today, it is a very, very bad thing to lose your therapist without warning.
Christian's behavior becomes very erratic again. Struensee is all, "Ugh, I do not have time for this," and gives him a babysitter. One Enevold Brandt, a friend of Struensee's who likes putting on plays, and whom Struensee puts in charge of entertaining at the court. His instructions are "distract the King while I do the ruling."
Only Brandt and Christian have very different taste in plays, and they don't get along at all.
And things go even further south.
Christian keeps challenging people to duels, knowing that if they obey, assaulting the king is high treason, and if they disobey, disobeying the king is just as bad! He's got them in a catch-22, ha!
One day, Brandt, who is totally fed up with Christian and with Struensee for not letting him quit this stupid job of royal babysitter, finally snaps and takes Christian up on his challenge. They go into another room, throw a few punches, Brandt bites the king's hand, and then they come out laughing and in a better mood with each other. Having let off some steam, as it were.
Unfortunately, they're not the discreet type, and they tell everyone. As rumors spread and grow in the telling, it does not contribute to Struensee's PR that his friend that he put in charge of the king is punching and biting the king.
Christian is also showing signs of being fed up with Struensee never having time for him any more. He tells one of his ministers that the King of Prussia is sleeping with his wife. When asked who this King of Prussia is, he cackles madly and says, "Struensee, obviously!" (As we've seen, both Fritz and Struensee would be offended by this comparison, but...you can see where Christian got it.)
Eventually Struensee decides they have to take Christian out to a remote palace, just like in the bad old days, and hide him from the people so no one sees how erratic the king's behavior is.
Unfortunately, never seeing the king allows rumors to start among the population: that he's being kept against his will, abused, even poisoned.
Eventually, there's a coup.
Christian gets woken up in the middle of the night by a group of conspirators (which Moltke, remember, refused to join), and told Struensee is plotting against him. He signs paperwork agreeing to let Struensee be taken prisoner, and also agrees to divorce his wife and send her away. There's a show trial, and Struensee is condemned to lose a hand and his head. Former babysitter Brandt gets executed alongside Struensee, for an alleged assassination attempt (the punching and biting episode retold). Christian is supposedly distracted with a lot of festivals and parties from realizing what was going on and having time to reflect and change his mind.
His stepmother Juliana Maria, leader of the coup, ends up running the country in concert with some ministers. Later in life, Christian's son will get him to sign yet another document without reading it, allowing the son to be regent. Sadly, the tragedy of Struensee is also the tragedy of Christian VII.
Next up: the tragedy of Struensee, and also of Queen Caroline Matilda.
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Christian VII
Danish kings and their favorites: Struensee
Johann Friedrich Struensee is born in 1737 in Halle. Remember that Halle is the center of Pietism in Germany (and not just Germany--Christian VI, pious dad of alcoholic Frederik V, is also a Pietist), and deeply influenced FW. Francke, a very influential founding figure of Pietism and influential on FW (Wilhelmine trashes him in her memoirs), was pastor of the St. Ulrich church in Halle.
Guess who Francke's successor was? Struensee's father! A devout Pietist himself.
Our biographer describes him as the sort of strong-willed father who effectively forces his sons to either follow him blindly or go to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. With one exception, the Struensee kids got to the extreme other end and become liberal freethinkers.
[FW: *waves sadly*]
Our man, the doctor, gets a reputation as a ladies' man and an epicure.
Then Fritz comes to power, and Struensee the father finds life intolerable in Halle. He says they're being persecuted; since he's used to being top dog, I wonder if this means "actually persecuted" or "just not able to persecute others any more".
He writes, "Son! I know you're kind of at loose ends after getting your medical degree and trying to find a job. I can't stand Fritz. Let's go to Denmark!"
During the 18th century, lots of Germans go to Denmark. You may remember Fouquet, he who probably did *not* allow Fritz to have a candle at Kustrin, went to Denmark in the 1730s, and only came back when Fritz became king. Nobody speaks Danish at the court, and only one minister (Bernstorff) really speaks French. It's all German, all the time. Frederik V will get made fun of by his mother and called "the Danish prince" for occasionally speaking Danish.
This influx of Germans to Denmark will be a plot point later.
At any rate, despite not really getting along with his father, Doctor Struensee decides to go to Denmark for the job opportunities.
Unlike most doctors, who are theorists, Struensee goes out on rounds, risks getting sick, and inspects living conditions in the slums. He's a workaholic like Fritz, if he wants something done, he feels he has to do it himself. He's also an empiricist. He's skeptical about the humors and believes in radical new ideas like hygiene.
He feuds with other doctors. He is furious at quacks who try to get rich selling cures that do not work. They are furious at him for challenging the establishment.
Struensee starts a periodical to try to try to win the PR battle, but he kind of sucks at PR. Despite advocating for poor people and visiting them, he never really clicks with them. He doesn't speak their language in either the literal or the figurative sense of the word. He's an overeducated man full of learned allusions and metaphors, and there's a huge cultural barrier between him and the people he's trying to help.
This will be a plot point later. Yes, everything is building up to how he lost the PR battle badly enough to be given a show trial and a summary execution.
But first, things go well.
A chain of events begins in France. In 1765, Jean Calas is exonerated thanks to Voltaire's efforts. Voltaire writes to all the courts of Europe asking for donations. Christian VII, who, as we remember, is somewhat liberal, is like, "Oh, hey, my hero, my favorite author, my teacher's teacher! Here, yes, have some money."
Voltaire writes a praise poem to Christian VII in thanks. Voltaire becomes a really big fan of Christian VII. In 1769, when the young king is about to set off on his Grand Tour, Voltaire writes, "He must be going to see poor, oppressed people, because he can't find any in his own country!"
[Voltaire: really just desperate for liberal monarchs to implement his ideas.]
When Voltaire's French praise poem arrives in Denmark, someone has to translate it into German so it can be understood at court. Who translates it? Doctor Struensee!
This is how he comes to the attention of the ministers who are looking for a doctor to accompany Christian on his Grand Tour. A doctor who's just translated a praise poem of Christian? What's not to like!
And so the wheel of fortune begins to turn.
We've heard how Struensee wins the young king's confidence. I'll save the part about his probable affair with the queen for her installment. Just know that he probably had an affair, and certainly had an emotional affair with her and fathered a daughter on her, while acting as her therapist and her husband's therapist and their kid's governor. Yes, nowadays we would call this a breach of trust, but in olden times they just called it high treason.
We've seen how Christian started signing anything Struensee gave him, in 1770. On December 27, 1770, he stages a coup by abolishing the council of ministers, so that he can do his work without having to go through the nobles. The date struck me, because that is exactly what Gustav III does in August 1772: end the Age of Liberty in Sweden and restore absolute monarchy so he can push through his enlightened reforms.
At this time, Gustav is married to Christian VII's sister, and has just visited Denmark. Now, he's not a fan of Struensee, because he's a class snob. He makes a snide remark at the Danish court that with all these middle class types rubbing shoulders at the court, all that's missing is a few Jews.
Struensee: I used to live next door to the Jewish ghetto and visit it. I agree, some Jews at court would be nice.
No, he didn't say that to Gustav's face, but he apparently did live for several years on the border of the ghetto, by choice, and had no problem with Jews.
[Gustav: *shudder*]
So anyway, Gustav goes home, and the next thing you know, is pushing through his own absolutist coup, thus causing no small amount of panic in his uncles Heinrich and Fritz.
Now, as for these reforms, Selena has listed a bunch from Wikipedia, but I can summarize the whole Struensee reforms for you in one word: Joseph.
Imagine Joseph II is a middle-class doctor in Denmark who manages to get power.
- Absolute monarchy, because nobles suck.
- No more noble privileges, we have a meritocracy now.
- No more special privileges, period.
- Everyone works for the state.
- Austerity enforced, luxury abolished.
- Danish, not Latin, taught in schools.
- Lives austerely himself, does not enrich himself.
- Workaholic.
- Got the ideas for his reforms by traveling and seeing how poor people actually lived.
- Abolishes censorship.
- Is shocked when the free press is used to attack him.
- Has to restore censorship at least partially.
- Issues 1800 decrees in 16 months. (I know I've seen numbers for Joseph, I would love to find them again and compare them.)
- Rams reforms down everyone's throat and is shocked when people don't appreciate it!
Struensee has some fatal strikes against him, though:
- He's not a monarch, he's an upstart burgher.
- He doesn't even speak Danish. Joseph at least spoke a number of the languages of the people he ruled, most notably German.
- He's believed to be (and probably is) sleeping with the queen.
The author talks extensively about how Struensee 1) went too fast, 2) never realized that absolute monarchies have to work with their nobles, not against them. Sound familiar?
I was truly amazed, because the author compares Struensee to everyone and their brother: Fritz, Robespierre, the Prussian officer from Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing and Struensee were friends), Orlov and Potemkin, Gustav III, the Marquis de Posa (so many Schiller call-outs! I was glad to be a product of salon and know who Posa is :))...probably numerous other people I'm forgetting. But no mention of Joseph or Leopold. Between this and the "FS was French" remark, I think he just doesn't know anything about Austria in this period.
Anyway, I came to the conclusion that if Joseph had been in Struensee's shoes, there would have been a coup. If Struensee had been in Joseph's shoes, he would have had to claw back the reforms. Even the poor people were upset, because one of the things he never realized by going too fast was how much the luxury of the nobles was supporting the economy. All he could see was the pointless waste, not how many regular people would lose their income. He shut down the unprofitable silk manufacturing for the same reason.
Eventually, even the poor people are rioting. Struensee tries to compromise, but there are smear campaigns being run by the nobles he alienated, the working classes never clicked with him, and he falls in January of 1772. There's a huge backlash against Germans, and nationalism/proto-nationalism begins earlier in Denmark than in other places. Laws against letting Germans hold office are passed.
I was struck by how short his rule was: just 16 months.
After Struensee's locked up in the middle of the night, he doesn't take prison well. He starts screaming and dashing his head against the wall, and he has to be chained. But when he has to walk to his execution (by axe) in April 1772, he has a good death. The author comments that he embodied the noble ideals of his time: cry over trivialities, face death bravely.
Then there's an episode that had echoes of Katte. As is usual for prisoners, Struensee is granted religious comfort at the end of his life. A pastor goes to talk to him. But Struensee doesn't want religious consolation, he's a freethinker.
But in the end, the pastor is victorious--or so he says. He writes a whole self-aggrandizing book about how Struensee's "principles" turned out to be nonexistent and he was easily converted. The author says the book is very suspect and propaganda-ish, and we don't know what really happened in that cell.
Here's a fascinating addition, though: supposedly the pastor said that all he asked of Struensee in return for saving his soul was that Struensee appear to him as a ghost after his death, so the pastor would know for sure that there was life after death.
Balthasar Münter returns home very satisfied. His book just needs to be written. But he frightens his wife with such graphic stories about the executed dear friend in heaven that the good woman lies awake at night in anxious foreboding. Struensee awaits her every hour, perhaps without a head or hands, just a bleeding torso: shuddering, she pulls the covers over her ears. But she can rest easy. Struensee no longer appears. However, his ghost haunts Danish history for a long time. And his life, this short, violent attempt to create a better world, is not without consequences.
Finally, the author expresses his disappointment in Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing, and the rest. Fritz satirizing Struensee is only to be expected of Fritz in his cynical old age, but where are the rest of the philosophes? Where's the outrage? Why didn't they try to protect him, if not his life, then at least rehabilitate his reputation posthumously? Voltaire made a snide remark about Denmark being the only place where you could be executed for having an affair (really, Voltaire?), but none of them engaged with Struensee's ideas or seemed to take them seriously. And that, says the author, was Struensee's second death.
Next up: Caroline Matilda!
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Struensee
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Struensee
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Struensee
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Struensee
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Struensee
Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
But! She ends up in bed with what I can only imagine is stress-related illness. Maliciously, Christian decides he has just the idea: the best doctor he knows, the one who helped him. Struensee must be her physician!
"Ugh, no," says Caroline Matilda.
"But I insist!" says her husband, the king.
Struensee, being an intelligent and observant man, realizes that most of what's wrong with Caroline Matilda is that she's bored with court life and unhappy in her marriage.
By the way, he makes a lot of remarks that will be familiar to anyone who's read Lehndorff's diaries: court life is boring and superficial and people are frittering their lives away when they should be reading and improving their lives. The author of the book says that one major reason masked balls were so popular was that everyone saw the same faces day in, day out, and they were all sick to death of each other! Masks added at least a little variety.
Struensee, realizing that what she needs is a mental health treatment, couches it as physical health: get out, get some fresh air, take up horseback riding.
She loves it! She puts on mens' riding clothes and finds meaning in life!
The court is scandalized, but she loves riding more than anything and doesn't care.
Interestingly, Elizaveta and Catherine, over in Russia, are said to have loved cross-dressing balls and riding in mens' clothes in order to show off their legs. Caroline Matilda apparently is willing to walk around in skintight hose despite having a short, dumpy figure, because it feels good! Any chance she gets, she is in her riding habit. (Good for her, I say. And as much as Elizaveta seems to have been obsessed with her appearance, she and Catherine might well have had other reasons for liking men's clothes.)
And now Christian starts to be attracted to her for the first time in their marriage. Christian, whose mistress, remember, is an Amazon type with a riding whip that she uses on him.
This is where Barz gets super homophobic, and manages to pathologize, in a single paragraph:
- Christian's attraction to masculine women wearing men's clothes,
- Caroline Matilda's close, possibly homoerotic relationships with her female friends,
- Marie Antoinette's supposedly lesbianish relationships,
as all being sexually frustrated heterosexuals. Once they find fulfillment, in their marriages and out of it, all the unnatural longings go away.
Sigh.
Anyway, like Marie Antoinette, Caroline Matilda also probably has an extramarital relationship: with Struensee, whom she is now in love with, ever since he started listening to her, taking her seriously, and telling her to stop letting society restrict her and go live a meaningful life.
Like Zweig, Barz ships his extramarital pairing, but not nearly as intensely as Zweig ships MA/Axel Ferson. Barz is kind of "meh" on whether Struensee was as much in love with her as she was with him. He thinks that, while Struensee sincerely cared about her and was attracted, he was kind of not the type to be serious about women and have long-term romances. But hey, Barz hopes they had a good time while it lasted (about a year and a half).
(And no, she's not 15 any more; by the time he shows up, she's 19, he's 32. Better than nothing, I guess, especially in this day and age.)
Did they or didn't they? They both confessed to it in writing, but Struensee was being threatened with torture, and she later recanted and insisted that she was sick and weak and her hand was forced across the paper to sign it. Barz thinks she may have been told that he'd already confessed, and she was trying to save him by saying that she was the seducer and he had only gone along with what she wanted.
Once they have his signature, it's all over: either he slept with her, which is high treason because they betrayed the king, or he didn't, which is high treason because he's accusing the queen of having an adulterous affair.
Wikipedia and Barz seem to agree that the most likely possibility is that they did sleep together, and that he was probably the father of her daughter.
The Danish government, after the counter-coup, swept all that under the rug and insisted that Louisa Augusta was *totally* Christian's daughter, no question about it. Later in life, in the 19th century, Louisa Augusta was known to say that she'd rather be the daughter of an intelligent doctor than a foolish king. Kaiser Willy II, who was married to a descendant of hers, liked to joke about the Struensee heritage (it was several generations back at that point, so I guess you could see the funny side by then).
During the counter-coup in 1772, Caroline Matilda is divorced after confessing to adultery. Christian gets to keep the kids, even the one who's supposedly not his.
She's sent into exile to Hannover, where she hangs out at Celle, remembering Sophia Dorothea. Who, when Caroline Matilda was growing up, was held up as a cautionary tale to the kids. Don't be like Great-grandma SD, or you'll regret it!
At least she doesn't get locked up?
Her brother, George III, is "meh" about coming to her defense before it's proved that his sister is not an adulteress. The English, though, are outraged. "What kind of lazy king is going to let the Danes get away with this?! We need to start a war."
Juliana Maria: Fritz, brother-in-law, famous general with the famous army! You're on Denmark's side in this war,
right?
Fritz: I might be, yeah. Let's talk.
But before general war can break out over the adultery scandal, there's a scarlet fever outbreak in Celle. A hundred people are dying a day. One of them is Caroline Matilda, whose last letter still protests her innocence to her brother G3. She dies, aged just 23.
Her ex-husband Christian, when informed, supposedly just says, "Too bad about the pretty young girl! Her calves were her best feature."
But, before she died, she had that one happy year with horseback riding and a lover.
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Caroline Matilda
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
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Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
(Anonymous) - 2023-04-30 09:58 (UTC) - ExpandRe: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
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Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Moltke's memoirs
Royal Remarriages: Byzantine Edition
Re: Royal Remarriages: Byzantine Edition
Re: Royal Remarriages: Byzantine Edition
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Danish kings and their favorites: Random
* Back when Selena read us the book on Danish-Prussian relations in the 18th century, we saw that Hartmann's take on Struensee was that he was a selfish schemer, and that Danish minister Bernstorff was Fritz's only contemporary equal as a genius.
So imagine my entertainment at Barz's take on Bernstorff:
Johann Hartwig Ernst Bernstorff is one of those not so rare phenomena in politics that everyone considers great men, without anyone being able to say what actually accounts for their greatness. Their basic trait is perseverance, their principle strict conservatism. They are the great harmonizers of existing relations...
Deliberately, more reliable than resourceful, he steered Denmark's fortunes for twenty years. But even before Struensee's appearance, his time is coming to an end. He feels it himself: Denmark needs newer, fresher impulses than his policy of neutrality. The treaty with Russia, which is so brilliant on the outside, has brought the country into a threatening state of almost unlimited openness to blackmail.
* A summary of Fritz's satire on Struensee:
In the satire he wrote on the subject, Struensee was not only convicted, but already executed, and in the afterlife the beheaded poisoner gave a French colleague, Friedrich's arch-enemy Choiseul, good advice to give his ruler a few opiates as well.
Remember that Struensee was accused of poisoning/drugging Christian. When the conspirators went through the papers in the palace after his death, they were dismayed to find no prescriptions for anything suspicious. But that doesn't stop
Fritzthe rumor mill.Also, this book, at least, doesn't present any evidence that Struensee destroyed his papers Katte-and-Wilhelmine style, but he did know he was unpopular and that a coup was probably coming in general. So the lack of evidence against him for the numerous charges could have been because there was nothing to find (the author's take) or because he had been warned (me trying to keep an open mind).
* When recounting the execution, Barz draws a contrast with the famous Damiens execution we've talked about before, in that Struensee's execution was a lot more lowkey. He adds an (apocryphal?) anecdote that I hadn't encountered: that while the four horses Damiens were tied to were being whipped to pull him into four pieces, i.e. quarter him, a lady watching is supposed to have cried, "Oh, the poor horses!"
"Se non fu vero, fu bene trovato": it would be the most 18th century thing ever.
I *did* know that at the Damiens execution, if your place of residence or business had a window with a view, you could make good money selling "seats", as it were.
* Barz repeats the usual popular myths that Doctor Guillotin invented the guillotine (he did not) and then was executed by it (this was an unrelated Guillotin), but he does add another apocryphal anecdote that was new to me, or at least I had forgotten it:
The French are supposed to have presented Louis XVI with the brand-new guillotine in 1792, and he, the hobbyist locksmith, is supposed to have critiqued the design. "The blade is too weak to go through a lot of necks; for example, mine would be too thick," (he was pretty fat), and gave technical advice on how to make the blade more effective.
My immediate reaction was "No way!" French Wikipedia tells me that it is in fact considered apocryphal.
So I cannot recommend this author, and I'm looking for other works on the subject, but I will say the man could write (he also wrote novels and plays, unsurprisingly), and I was fascinated all the way through. I hope you all can see why I felt contractually obliged to share the gossip!
Re: Danish kings and their favorites: Random
Re: Danish kings and their favorites - Film excerpts
Eugene
Eugene: Dear Imperial Majesty, thanks for putting me in charge of the army in Italy. It's just, uh, we kind of have no money here. Please remedy asap, k, thx.
Emperor Leopold: We have no money here either. The imperial war chest is empty. I'm sure you'll figure something out.
Eugene: Aren't there a bunch of rich princes who could contribute to a war fund?
Princes: Sorry, too busy building palaces. The court Jew can handle it.
Eugene: I'm waiting...
Leopold: Regret to inform you that the court Jew just died, bankrupt, because we never paid him back. I'm sure you'll figure something out. I hear great things about you!
Eugene: There's only so much I can DO if the men aren't getting PAID!! Your Majesty.
Eugene: *sends a messenger to Vienna because letters are clearly not doing it*
Leopold, to the messenger: So my wife and I want to know, is it true Eugene's hair is going white lately?
The messenger: DUH! (But politely, like you say it to an emperor.)
Eugene knows what to expect. Although he has been wearing a wig for some time to hide his whitening hair, people are more interested in it than in his letters.
Poor Eugene. Eventually he gets some political power to go with his generalship, and then he figures out how to finance the army. But first it is very stressful.
(Btw, the bromance with Marlborough has just begun: they exchanged some letters when Marlborough congratulated Eugene on his victory, and now they've met for the first time in person.)
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Why Kaphengst?
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New Fictional Katte-trial
I'll just chuck some stuff at you:
- there's a huge emphasis on Katte's love for the arts, literature, and his travels. He had his own glass candle holder design made in Venice. That is not relevant, but I think it's funny.
- Katte feels strange and lonely after facing Rochow and noticing that him and his sister truly seem to love each other.
- Right after that, he meets Fritz:
Only then did Katte notice a second face, upon which he paled; because he recognized it without ever having seen it before.
This, of course, could be because the Hohenzollern are rather easy to recognize, but considering the repeated emphasis on destiny throughout the book so far it feels more related to that.
- This is followed by:
A pair of wide eyes, impenetrable despite their brightness, were fixed on Katte inquisitively. "I am happy to meet you, Herr von Katte. I have heard a lot about you. I have been made curious."
It was smooth, very euphonious French. And there was an expression of captivating kindness around the intelligent, slightly mocking mouth.
Katte made those two observations first, before even taking notice of the rest of the prince's appearance. And in this first second he had already been won.
- He proceeds to be so distracted by Fritz's overall existence that he can't talk as smoothly as usual
- He then tells Keyserlingk that he has been bewitched, to which Keyserlingk says "We all are. But we have to fight it because there is danger in all magic."
- Ingersleben wants to set Fritz up with Doris Ritter, Katte is not too into the idea. Ingersleben is all "Come on, Katte, help me with this, they say you know your way around those things!" to which Katte rips a twig from a bush and says that he hasn't had any mind for women in a long time. Ingersleben says "But back in the day you did all the more!", Katte says he won't get involved in this, Ingersleben asks whether he has really changed so much since Halle. Katte says perhaps he did and has his aunt Sophie Charlotte's image in mind that seems to radiate warmth. And then:
But he did not love Sophie Charlotte.
If I am ever to love a woman, she would have to have wide, bright, and impenetrable eyes, he thought and was shocked by the nonsensical nature of this idea. Because it had been the Crown Prince's eyes that he had imagined.
- A conversation with Fritz:
"There is a loneliness among people, Katte."
"Yes."
"You speak like you know it."
"Yes."
- "You are not of [the King's] party", [Frederick] said strangled and pleading, "You can't be. I know too much about you, Katte, not to see an ally in you."
- Short skip to Fritz's POV to remark on how Katte's face is really quite nice
- Fritz then takes a look at Katte's drawings, loves them, is surprised to see Katte pale and shaking and finds a portrait of himself.
"You drew this from memory? - But Katte, you're an artist!"
"No!" Katte answered harshly and was in this moment unable to force a courtly smile. "Just a poor human, who is constantly reminded of his own shortcomings and especially so in the presence of Your Royal Highness."
The prince lowered the drawing without taking his bright gaze off of Katte's features. It seemed like he did not understand all that was behind the words of the other.
"Own shortcomings?" he asked with a tremor in the corners of his mouth. "Do you mean feeling your wings go numb when you want to fly?"
"Maybe I mean something of the like."
- They continue talking beliefs and philosophy and end up standing so close to each other their hands are brushing each other's clothes.
- "I want you to become my friend, Katte", he said strangled, "I need you."
He had grasped Katte's arm, which was shaking quietly and incessantly. Katte had turned very pale, even his lips seemed ashen.
He wanted to answer something, could not muster it, and contented himself with bowing over the prince's hand and clasping it with an almost hard grasp.
- Katte continues to make nightly trips to Potsdam to see Fritz and thinks about how romantic and dangerous that is.
So after 70 pages of the queercoding being more text than subtext, we meet Wilhelmine. Katte's first thoughts are "she looks like the white lady" and "she's cold". And suddenly that's supposed to be the romantic plot of this book :'D The fawning about Fritz continues after this, btw. Wilhelmine gets mentioned at times. It truly does feel like the author's attempt at covering up whatever "friendship" she's built up before. 220 pages to go, let's see how this turns out :'D
Re: New Fictional Katte-trial
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A strong case for queercoding
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Re: A strong case for queercoding
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Happy V-day, everybody!!!!
/is delighted
Re: Happy V-day, everybody!!!!
Re: Happy V-day, everybody!!!!
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Re: Happy V-day, everybody!!!!
Bourbon Brothers
Because the age difference was only two years, and because pretty soon their father died and the regency years started to become unstable and then the Fronde happened, the two brothers were raised closely with each other, but it was always clear which one was the older and the future king. Now the stories that Anne deliberately encouraged Philippe's homosexual inclinations by dressing him in girl clothes long beyond toddlerdom (when all children were dressed that way) were written decades later, when Philippe was an openly gay man who occasionally crossdressed, and not by eye witnesses to the childhood, so who knows whether they were invented with the knowledge of hindsight. (Mind you, the assumption that "making Philippe wear dresses = making Philippe gay" = "making Philippe less of a future danger than Uncle Gaston was" is pretty telling on the part of the storytellers. Insert names of gay or bisexual ambitious royal folk throughout the millenia here. Anyway, there's an anecdote when Philippe and Louis were small boys where they literally pissed at each other (this story comes from their valet du chambre at the time, du Bois, and thus is probably true) and both boys gave as good as they got which doesn't sound as if kid!Philippe felt very oppressed, but evidently the older they got the more the difference of their stations must have been marked. Louis signed his letters to Philippe with "petit Papa", and Philippe was certainly encouraged to defer to Louis on all public occasions, all the time.
When Louis was 19 and Philippe was 17, Louis fell seriously ill (of typhoid fever), and there was panic and the real possibility he could die for about ten days. Courtiers did start to make their moves just in case Monsieur would end up King Philippe after all. However, here's how Antonia Fraser puts it:
It was at this moment that the remarkable subjugation of Monsieur's spirit - subjugated since birth - was evinced. For Monsieur himself never wavered publicly and privately in his despair at his brother's illness and his total loyalty to him personally. In turn this critical moment in Louis' life cemented his own feelings of protection and loyalty to his brother.
That Philippe didn't use the opportunity to scheme, or to bask in the sudden sun, but kept being at Louis' sickbed really showed the difference to Gaston, and it may indeed have had something to do with the way Louis replied in later years to challenges he should come down hard on homosexuals with "I'd have to start with my brother" and the self evident implication "I never will do that", and that for all the occasional arguments re: abbeys for his favourites, not telling Philippe what Minette's mission to England was about and so forth, he did not try to change his brother.
Of course, if you're more cynically inclined, which a lot of the later chroniclers and eye witnesses were, you can speculate that Philippe's flamboyant gay persona made Louis feel he shone all the more as dignified many King in comparison, and no one would try to conspire with his brother against him. There's also the bit Voltaire mentions in one of the excerpts I quoted from "The Age of Louis XIV" about how when PHilippe, against everyone's expectations, turned out to be actually good at leading an army and fought in the field, Louis made sure he couldn't do that again. (Not least because Louis, while occasionally visiting the army, never led battle, i.e. he was never his own general. This was remarked upon. Bear in mind that the cousins across the channel, Charles II and James II, had in their youth fought at their father's side in the English Civil War. And Charles II had then later fought and lost at Worcester, while James fought for cousin Louis while everyone was in exile. Doesn't mean either of them came across as a great general as the result - though James during Charles II's reign later got a good reputation as a leader at sea - , but everyone knew they had faced the dangers of combat not from a hill but in person, and in an age where military = manly, the fact that Louis never did that (and Philippe had) was, as I said, remarked upon.
Anyway, fast forward to Philippe's death decades later. This happened unfortunately after he and Louis had a blazing row about their children. Quick reminder: Philippe's (and Liselotte's) only surviving son, Philippe the future Regent, at this point Duke of Chartres, was married to Louis' illegitimate daughter with Athenais de Montespan, much to Liselotte's (and also Monsieur's) displeasure. To no one's surprise, the marriage wasn't happy, and Philippe the Younger cheated on his wife. Who complained to Dad. Presto fraternal battle as Monsieur took his son's part and landed a palpable hit when reminding Louis of the days when Louis had run Louse de La Valliere and Athenais de Montespan in tandem, and seriously, where's the difference? And also, while we're at it, Louis (here comes the direct witness quote):
(...)Monsieur told the King that he'd promised the sky to him when marrying (Philippe's) son (to Louis' daughter), but that (Monsieur) hadn't even gotten a governorship from him in return; that he very much would have wished to see his son with the army in order to keep him away from debaucheries, and that his son would wish this very much, too, which (Louis) knew very well; that, since the King did not want to do this, (Monsieur) didn't see why he should stop his son from amusing himself in order to comfort himself. He added that he could now see the truth of what had been predicted at the time, to wit, that he'd only get the shame and the dishonor from this marriage without ever reaping benefits from it.. (Shame and dishonor because Louis' daughter is a bastard.)
The King, who had gotten angrier and angrier, replied to him that the war would soon force him to cut down several budgets and that since (Monsieur) was showing himself so disagreeable to his wishes, he'd start with the lowering of (Monsieur's) pensions before limiting himself.
Philippe storms off. (The court is in Marly at this point, which was the neat little getaway from Versailles in the later years of Louis' reign.) Philippe goes to Saint Cloud, talks a bit to Liselotte, who doesn't feel too well and therefore is skipping dinner, as opposed to Philippe, who does have dinner. And then he has a stroke. Philippe the Younger, the future Regent and Duke of Chartres, goes to Marly to report this to Uncle Louis. Unfortunately because of the circumstance, Louis seems to suspect Philippe his brother is faking this as the result of their earlier argument and to get concessions from him.
Upon receiving this news, the King, who on other occasions came running to Monsieur because of every trifle, instead went to Madame de Maintenon, whom he had woken up. He remained for the quarter of an hour with her, and then, around midnight, returned to his rooms and ordered to get his carriages ready, and that the Marquis de Gesvres was supposed to go to Saint-Cloud and wake him up if Monsieur should get worse; whereupon he withdrew to sleep.
Saint-Simon (
The King arrived around three in the morning at Saint-Cloud. Monsieur had not achieved consciousness again since getting worse. He had only a brief glimmer for a moment when in the morning Father de Trévoux had gone to read the mass, and even this glimmer did not return. The most terrible moments have sometimes aspects of ridiculous contrasts. When Father du Trévoux returned and called to Monsieur: "Monsieur, don't you recognize your confessor? Don't you recognize good Father Trévoux, who is talking to you?" those who were less than sad exploded into indecent laughter. The King seemed to be very sad. As he cried easily, he was full of tears right then. He had only had cause to love Monsieur with great tenderness; though they had been arguing, these sad moment were evoking the old tenderness; maybe he even accused himself of having hastened the death through the scene in the morning, for Monsieur was the younger by two years and had been as healthy as the King was all his life, if not healthier. The King attended mass at Saint-Cloud, and around eight in the morning, when Monsieur's state was hopeless, Madame de Maintenon and the Duchess of Burgundy - that's his granddaughter-in-law, the mother of future Louis XV, who'll die tragically and suddenly with most of her immediate family more than a decade later - urged (Louis) not to stay any longer, and left with him in the carriage. When he was about to go and said a few friendly words to Monsieur de Chartres - i.e. Philippe the son, cause of the argument - whereupon both burst into tears, this young prince knew how to use the moment. "Ah, Sire," he said, "what will become of me, I am losing Monsieur and know you do not love me." The King was very moved and surprised, embraced him and spoke in kind words to him.
After arriving at Marly, he went with the Duchess of Burgundy to Madame de Maintenon's apartments. Three hours later Fagon arrived, whom the King had ordered not to leave Monsieur's side until the later was either dead or until his health had improved, which only could have happened through a miracle. As soon as he noticed him, the King said: "Well, Monsieur Fagon, is my brother dead?" "Yes, Sire," the later returned, "it could not be helped." The King cried for a long time.
He also said to Liselotte: "I don't know how to accept the fact that I shall never see my brother again."
Re: Bourbon Brothers
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Bad Jacobite novel + great book on clothing
A Lady of Lost Years by John Buchan (1899)
I do NOT recommend this Jacobite novel. I had read that it was going to be about Margaret Murray of Broughton, but it is not really. The main character is one Francis Birkenshaw, and I dragged myself through the first 50 pages about him; he is unpleasant to his mother, sisters, and companions, and loses his apprenticeship because he punches a guy who married a woman he was into, and then stabs a random bystander for good measure. I don't mind characters who are not especially virtuous, but I do need something sympathetic to care about. Anyway, he has no particular political principles, and at one point he tries to rob Broughton house and then intends to sell Jacobite correspondence to the government. But Margaret Murray is beautiful! And so he confesses everything to her and pledges himself to the Jacobite cause. She sends him on an important mission to persuade Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, to come out. Er, because that's a reasonable person for the Jacobites to choose for such a mission, surely?? Later on, Simon Fraser entrusts incriminating correspondence to this unknown person, who could just as well be a government spy, for all he knows?? Arrgh. Skipping some plot, at the end of the rising Murray of Broughton famously turns King’s Evidence, something which is so heavily foreshadowed in the book that it seems as though the characters know it's going to happen before it does. And after that, Margaret Murray is a vulnerable damsel in distress who has nobody to turn to but this random guy who once tried to rob her house and that she then sent on a mission. Surely she had family and trusted friends?? They go to London to visit Murray of Broughton in prison and then fall in love, but Francis nobly refuses her (at the end of the book he has reformed and is now all noble).
The one thing I liked about this book is the writing style--there are some nice nature descriptions. Also, it does portray Margaret Murray as politically engaged and active in the rising, which is nice--but at no point does it mention any other such women, of whom there were many! It's like she is the only Jacobite woman. *rolls eyes* Also, I have read quotes from eyewitness reports of Margaret Murray and her friend Rachel Erskine robbing Whig gentry at pistol point (backed up by Highlanders) to get money for the cause. Which, uh, does not really match up with her personality in the book.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Fashion in Detail by Avril Hart and Susan North (1998)
This is great! It has close up details of clothing, most of it from the upper classes. Very good for writing fic, if you want to be able to say something more specific than somebody having a blue silk gown, or whatever. And I am extremely impressed by all the craftsmanship! *boggles*
Re: Bad Jacobite novel + great book on clothing
Re: Bad Jacobite novel + great book on clothing
Re: Bad Jacobite novel + great book on clothing
East Frisia; Poland
Hartmann finally explained to me that in 1732, the inheritance was so contested by the Danes and Hanoverians that FW decided to start adding the title to his list.
Most of the German principalities just sighed and said, "Sure," but the emperor got annoyed that FW hadn't asked him, and G2 and the Danes got annoyed! Neither of them wanted FW holding more territory in their neighborhood.
Danish minister: You can't just start going by a title that someone else holds! That's not a thing!
FW: It is so! I'm not challenging the current incumbent, I'm just making sure everyone knows that I'm next in line!
Danish minister: NOT A THING.
FW: IS TOO.
So when Fritz took over in 1740, he adopted the East Frisia title in expectation of his inheritance.
In 1744, when he finally inherited, there were some protests from Britain and Denmark, but since there was a bigger war to worry about (Austrian Succession), and Fritz had just won his last land grab, everyone declined to start a war with Fritz over this and just let him have it.
Hartmann, btw, has turned out to be a really informative read given my foreign policy interests. Yes, he's problematic, but almost all the books I read are, and it's not as bad as I'd feared from Selena's comment that he "regards 'History of my Time' and 'History of the Seven Years War' (both by Fritz) as his main sources for all things Prussia." His main sources are the respective bodies of political correspondence of his two heroes, Fritz and Bernstorff, supplemented by some archival material (not as much as I'd like). And while he doesn't question his heroes enough (he does some!), and he's got some real zingers, as pointed out by Selena (I did raise two eyebrows at everyone wanting to dismember Prussia in 1740), the book does provides valuable context to the Danish aspects of the Political Correspondence on Trier, which is on my list of things to dive into when my French is better. And if I decide I want to wrestle with Bernstorff's 18C German (I looked at it), his correspondence has been published and is also freely available. I will probably revisit Hartmann if/when I start reading the PC. Though I'm still hoping to find a better book on 18th century Danish history than either Barz or Hartmann! (Two more Struensee books are currently in the mail. Fingers crossed.)
ETA: Okay, I've just gotten to the part where he talks about the partition of Poland, and I need some help here. Per
But Hartmann's true masterpiece comes when he has to talk about Poland. See, Danish PM Bernstorff, about whom more in a moment, predicts Fritz would want to divide the country in 1768 already. However, says Hartmann: Bernstorff's judgment on the Prussian policy towards Poland did not reflect reality. From 1772 onwards, Berlin didn't promote the plan of a partioning of Poland, just of separating some Polish territories and adding them to the Hohenzollern state, with the sole intent of not letting Russian influence in the Commonwealth get too powerful.
I'm still staring at that sentence, refusing to believe it was published in 1983.
Emphasis mine, because in my copy of the text, it reads:
Vor 1772 betrieb man in Berlin nicht den Plan einer Teilung Polens, sondern die Abtrennung polnischer Gebiete und ihre Einverleibung in den Hohenzollernstaat, mit dem Hintergedanken, den russischen Einfluß in der Adelsrepublik nicht übermächtig werden zu lassen.
I would have read "vor 1772" as before 1772, meaning in 1768 when Bernstorff is speculating about Fritz's motives. Does it really mean "from 1772 onwards?"
Because I am not the expert here, but I distinctly remember Heinrich having to talk Fritz *into* taking a piece of Poland during the First Partition.
Now, Fritz's reluctance was on the grounds that he feared Russia would object, and Fritz's plans for grabbing West Prussia go all the way back to 1731, and Prussian hopes of partitioning Poland go back to before that (to even before FW, I think). So given all that, I think it's absurd to say Fritz's motivation was to keep Russia from getting too strong. Hell, in the early days, the motive was to keep Saxony from getting too strong! although by 1768 that's no longer a concern.
But I do think it's fair to say that before 1772, Fritz wasn't planning on partitioning Poland, and that though he had hopes of a land grab at various points in his reign, he wasn't seriously contemplating one in 1768, and thus that Bernstorff missed the mark there. The rest of Hartmann's claim is, of course, absurd.
Re: East Frisia; Poland
Re: East Frisia; Poland
Re: East Frisia; Poland
Re: East Frisia; Poland
Tales of Hollywood - Heinrich Mann
I'll try to write it up for DW soon, but in the meantime, I had a question. The part about Nelly Mann, how when she committed suicide Heinrich Mann took her to three different hospitals because the first two wouldn't take them and the third pronounced her dead -- did it really happen like that? (It doesn't, indeed, seem like the sort of thing Hampton would make up.) I missed just how awful it was when I was watching, I think I got distracted by the visuals a bit somehow, but reading the stark words meant there was no distraction from exactly how terrible it was. (I suppose also, in the Youtube video excerpt, Horvath's monologue about Heinrich and Thomas gets cut off.)
Re: Tales of Hollywood - Heinrich Mann
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Fritz in the Media: The Extra History Series
In general, it's a nice introduction to the subject, and the mistakes aren't of the type that completely distort the story. (The potato anecdote made it as true fact, and also Fritz was the sole organizer and idea haver of the First Polish Partition, but what else is new.) They also do a nice job keeping things balanced - there's neither the 19th century style Fritz worship nor the proto Nazi Fritz demonisation that happened/happens post WW2 in some quarters. It did crack me up that in the big 7 Years War episode, they solved the problem of all the battles by presenting it as a Wrestling Match, including the Second Miracle of the House of Brandenburg.
Heinrich made it into the series, but on the sidelines; he's mentioned in two episodes as most important support to Fritz in the 7 Years War, especially once there was really dire need for generals who manage to preserve their armies lives a bit better than the boss, and in the Wrestling Sequence, he's Fritz' coach (which wouldn't please either of them if they saw it). Fredersdorf never gets mentioned by name, but in the last episode in a distorted and factually wrong manner ("in the last 20 years of his life he lived with his valet whose room was next to his"), whereas Algarotti not only makes it as Fritz' lover by name in episode 2 but is also amply talked about in the "Lies" episode where we get the orgasm poem story. Given that Prinzsorgenfrei recently did a poll on Tumblr where Fredersdorf finished even behind CASANOVA (he who met Fritz only once - or twice, can't remember - ) in terms of popularity as a Fritz boyfriend, I can only conclude that I predicted this all too well in my speculation about Fritz fandom if there was a tv series and how Fritz/Fredersdorf would be treated and dismissed as the safe, boring ship.
(Never mind, Fredersdorf. As Mildred once said, you weren't just Caroline's favourite husband, you also were Fritz' favourite husband.)
More seriously, I can see the Orgasm Poem as a big attraction which promoted Algarotti to post Katte fave, but does Tim Blanning (who, no surprise, gets mentioned as a source in the last ep) quote the adorable Gott Bewahre Dir letter to Fredersdorf at all, asks she who still hasn't read Blanning?
Re: Fritz in the Media: The Extra History Series
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"Du" in letters
Re: Fritz in the Media: The Extra History Series