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cahnLast post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.
Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal
Date: 2023-03-19 02:23 pm (UTC)After a brilliant beginning his embassy to Petersburg had proved as futile and unsuccessful as his earlier missions ot Dresden and Berlin, Warsaw and Vienna. Few diplomatists have such a record of unmitagated failure. At every court to which he was sent Williams sooner or later rendered his recallimperative. He quarrelled with Frederick the Great; he wrangled with Maria Theresa and Kaunitz; after some years' residence at Dresden he broke violently with Brühl; at Petersburg, he offended the Empress, quarrelled with the Great Chancellor, and, but for the sound advice of the Grand Duchess, would probably have followed a line of conduct which would have led to his own expuslion from Russia and would have embroiled the relations of Britain and Russia. The mere enumeration of these facts proves that Wiliams was pre-eminently unsuited for the tiplomatic life. NOmatter how bad the relations of his Govenrment were with the courts at which he resided, it was surely unnecessary for the British minister, by quarelling personally with the sovererigns and ministers with whom he had to transact business, to make relations worse.
A distinction must, however, be drawn between his failure at Berlin and Dresden, which was due almost entirely to his own fault, and at Vienna and Petersburg, for which his Government was largely responsible. HIs mission ot Vienna was a fool's errand, and no good could have come of it no matter how skillful the envoy. At Petersburg, after success appepared to be within his grasp, the volte-face of his own Government deprived him of it, and the rashness and folly of the King of Prussia made failure irredimable. The growing coldness between Britain and Russia lay in thelogic of events after Frederick had invaded Saxony and Britain had definitely decided to support Prussia, which Russia, with the hlep of Austria and the connivance of France, was determined to crush. Williams' conduct intensified this coldness, but not not exercise a decisive influence on the relations of Britain and Russia, and the coldness increased rather than diminished after Williams had been succeeded by Robert Keith.
The author also uses the dispatches and a Berlin Journal which H-W (like Mitchell later) used as a big dispatch rather than a private diary, and some quotes underline the sexual censorship of the biography. For example, the quote about being cold to George Keith continues: "So I put on a sullen dignity, ate my pudding and held my tongue. I went away very soon after dinner to see Celia." (His mistress du jour.
Something else that's clearer there is that London was deeply worried Fritz would support another Jacobite rising and that this is what him hosting all those Jacobite exiles was all about. Him sending George Keith as envoy to France put those fears in overdrive, because at this point the Prussia/France alliance was still a thing, and so basically Newcastle and Uncle G2 were wondering whether Fritz was about to stage a Franco-Prussian-Jacobite invasion of England. H-W sending dispatch after dispatch about how Fritz was the worst rather heightened that fear.
Something else I learned from this book and not from the other one is a new fact that finally enlightened me why SD, Mrs. I Want My Kids to Marry Their English Cousins, and G2 are at odds as they're reported to be both by a French envoy report in the 1750s and according to Hervey, who said G2 had hostility and contempt for his sister, with her deserving the later but not the former, something I never understood.
Well, remember that G2 surpressed G1's last will because of its clause concerning the idea that Britain and Hannover should be in the future split up if a reigning King has more than one son, with one getting England and one Hannover? G1 wrote this BEFORE G2 and Caroline produced future Cumberland, so he meant it to apply for Fritz of Wales as yet unborn kids. However, by the time G1 died, William "The Butcher" Cumberland existed, and so the will could have been used for him to get Hannover and FoW England, when G2 and Caroline wanted rather the reverse, if they couldn't get FoW out of the picture altogether? Okay, something I never considered but in retrospect is logical - that will contained other legacies, of course. And SD was absolutely convinced G2 was cheating her out of something their Dad wanted to leave her by surpressing the Will. The footnote in the book doesn't mention it, but I bet both FW and Fritz thought so, too.
More zingers: Instead of proceeding with caution and reserve, Williams showed a complete lack of self-control. He flung himself headlong into the arms of Frederick II's bete noire, Gross - the Russian envoy - and together they followed a policy of espionage and intrigue.Worse still, Williams could not conceal the hurt inflicted onhis vanity by the little notice which was taken of him at court. His picque led him to behave, according to his own confession, in a way entirely unsuited to his official position. To take one example, Williams mentions in his diary on 30 July that the Tartar envoy 'in his dirty boots' was placed at the upper end of the table. Williams promptly seated himself at the foot, explaining in al oud voice he did not wish to associate with canaille.
"The respect of the Prussian ministers to his Tartar Excellency," he continues, "put me in mind of the ceremony of making a Mamamouchi in Molière's Bourgois Gentilhomme. I immediately communicated my thoughts to Count Puebla - the Austrian envoy - who, in the company of his neighbours, immediately burst out into a fit of laughter, which laughter according to the best of my observation made Count Podewils - Prussian foreign minister - rather angry than merry to my no small satisfaction".
....How to win friends in high places, indeed.
Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal
Date: 2023-03-19 05:49 pm (UTC)In other news, I found an article online that I think you'd be interested in,
It definitely fleshes out the picture, as well as including a critical historiography on the subject of treatments of Hanbury-Williams, and a decent bibliography in the footnotes.
From said footnotes, I notice the author published a book length treatment of Poniatowski and his Anglophilia, The Last King of Poland and English Culture in 1998, which looks worth reading. Alas, not to be had for less than $122, but there's the Stabi link if you have time and interest.
ETA: Because of reasons, I will probably not be able to reply to the rest of the amazing H-W write-ups immediately, but I will! and
Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal
Date: 2023-03-21 01:52 am (UTC)(I was looking for a better bio of August the Strong in the bibliography of the book on Poland I'm dipping into; didn't find one, but found this. I mean, there probably *is* one in here, it's just that 90% of the references are in Polish.)
Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal
Date: 2023-04-11 04:33 am (UTC)I went away very soon after dinner to see Celia."
hee!
And SD was absolutely convinced G2 was cheating her out of something their Dad wanted to leave her by surpressing the Will. The footnote in the book doesn't mention it, but I bet both FW and Fritz thought so, too.
OMG, of course this dysfunctional family has will/estate issues. Of course! Tolstoy was wrong: all unhappy families are unhappy in the same ways :P (One of the many interesting things that popped up in my family trip last month was that when my mom's mother died a few years ago, there was apparently a big mess with her brothers and sisters and cheating my mom out of her fair share which I never even heard about at the time. On the other hand, in my dad's family, which is generally considered the more dysfunctional, this actually wasn't a problem really, as no one expected my dad's father/stepmother to leave him anything, and they didn't.)
ETA: Williams promptly seated himself at the foot, explaining in a loud voice he did not wish to associate with canaille... "which laughter according to the best of my observation made Count Podewils - Prussian foreign minister - rather angry than merry to my no small satisfaction".
OMG. This guy just seems completely clueless. In a really obnoxious way.
Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal
Date: 2023-04-11 02:33 pm (UTC)Lol! Well, I think unhappy families are probably like Rachel's description of PTSD: there are about a dozen symptoms, and one person rarely has all of them, but once you've met a bunch of people with PTSD, you can see that they each have a different subset of a handful of those dozen symptoms. There are ways in which dysfunctional families are dysfunctional, and each unhappy family grabs a different handful of dysfunctions to operate on.
Inheritance has never been a thing in my dysfunctional family. It's not discussed, nor does anyone care, nor have I ever heard of anyone leaving anyone anything that was worth talking about. When I met my wife and she talked about inheritance in her family, it was like when you first talked about family reunions: "Oh, yeah, other families do that. I forgot that was a thing."
You have to go back 100 years in oral family history to get a story about inheritance disputes in my family.
Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal
Date: 2023-04-11 03:43 pm (UTC)What I was thinking. I mean, in a way, they're still at it, or were until very recently, with them sueing the state to get "their inheritance" back.
OMG. This guy just seems completely clueless. In a really obnoxious way.
I mean, I'm perfectly willing to believe he was lovely to Catherine and Poniatowski, but at the same time, I really can see why he failed as a diplomat pretty much everywhere else, not just with Fritz. Now you'd think that having succeeded to piss so many people in different countries off, he'd question whether it just might have had something to do with himself, not just them, but nooo.
(Though the second book points out he was explicitly sent to Vienna AFTER the Fritz disaster BECAUSE they wanted him to be "tough" towards MT and thought she had the previous British envoy, yet another Keith, wrapped around her finger. Basically:
Newcastle: You know, we really need someone to remind MT how she owes everything to Britain and how she should be grateful to us and listen to us.
Henry Fox: I know! That sounds like a job for H-W!
Though as Mildred would say, there's also the matter of the good and bad feedback loop. Obvious H-W had a terrible one with first Fritz and then tout Berlin. Yet H-W had a great one with Poniatowski, who was the youngest son in a big and larger than life family - his father had been 56 already when P was born - , was a mixture of lots of book knowledge and zero practical skills, with both too much (by doctors and teachers) and too little (by his parents) attention given to him, arrived in Berlin an unhappy 19 years old who didn't know anyone and thought the British man of the world envoy who gave him time and attention was just the coolest person alive. H-W had arrived there expecting to be appreciated as a wit and poet by Fritz and run diplomatic circles around him, and instead had ended up in a position where he was ostracized and didn't not get anywhere with his supposed task and no one seemed to appreciate him in the way he wanted to be appreciated, and there's this young man who FINALLY gives him nothing but admiration, whom he can mentor, and who is top Polish nobility to boot. And H-W had no son. Now he was unusually involved (for a man of his time) with his two daughters, even at a geographic distance, he did care about them, but he was the product of a patriarchy and so it would be very surprising if he hadn't wanted a son - and there was one, present where his daughter was absent, and without a mother to compete for him. They filled each other's emotional needs perfectly and would continue to do so.