cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

Last 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.

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

(Footnote from Erskine: "freiratico", as a noun, means Wone who is given too much to the love of nuns" or "one who goes often to nunneries". Perhaps "Nunnish" is the best English equivalent.)

Mr. Erskine assures us the nuns were most likely not actual nuns who had taken the vows but the great many unmarried daughters of the nobility dumped into nunneries until they got married, or, if a match couldn't be made, to be taken care of.

I made a mental note to talk about this, and then I read further and you and Mr. Erskine had beaten me to it! I remember Joao V of Portugal was known for being a freiratico, and now that I look up the book where I'd read this, Augustus Hervey is indeed mentioned!

King John needed more than religion to sublimate his desires; indeed in his case the ceremonies of the church opened the door for love affairs. He became a 'freiratico', a man who loved nuns. Courting nuns was an old Portuguese custom which long persisted. A generation earlier the duke of Grafton had taken to it with zest and King Pedro, though no mean amorist himself, had made firm rules to restrict access to the grilles of convents. These measures made little difference; the custom was in high favour throughout King John's reign and in 1752 Captain the Hon Augustus Hervey, R. N., no mean connoisseur, found his way to many agreeable assignations. Even in the 1830s British troops stationed in the Azores continued to benefit. The Portuguese nobility bred more daughters than could find husbands; it was not easy to provide them with dowries to secure a gentleman with enough quarterings and unsullied purity of blood. An easier solution and a cheaper one for a girl of good family was to place her in a fashionable convent; these institutions were packed with nubile girls, many of whom had little vocation but a hunger for life. At home an unmarried girl had a dull time; she could never go out, except heavily escorted to church, and her married sisters fared little better. Even the Princess of Brazil who had more facilities than most and came from the court of Spain, where women also went little abroad, complained often of the dullness of the Portugese court. Any girl who fancied a little social life had a far better time in a convent, where at least she could join in parties, concerts, dacnes, and sing-songs, organised often under the guise of religious celebrations. Also she could be wooed through the grilles by all the young men of the district. Convents were regular ports of call for the bright sparks, who sought diversion and had tired of the only other female company available, that of the prostitutes. They strummed their guitars and sang their love songs, and snatched an occasional kiss pressed on an arm stretched through the bars. Often it went no further, but assignations could ensue, and certainly did so in Hervey's time. It must also be remembered that not all the girls had taken their final vows; some were in an intermediate stage; they were scarcely advanced in their novitiate or were merely temporary visitors.

Among those who got beyond the grilles was undoubtedly King John. The time was to come when he preserved his ardour by aphrodisiacs, and the last of his loves, a French actress named Petronilla, had to be sent away for the sake of his health, to continue her successful career in Paris. But in his younger days success in love offset his melancholy and gave him confidence ad inspiration for his manifold activities. One of the earlier and most famous of his loves was a seventeen-year-old of great beauty, who became known as Mother Paula. She was an inmate of the convent of Odivelas, one of the most fashionable and famous, where there had been such toying with advanced ideas that in 1714 one of the nuns had been found guilty of Judaism. The nuns there had luxurious apartments. Mother Paula, whose real name was Teresa da Silva, was paid a handsome allowance; her affair with the king lasted at least ten years from 1718 to 1728, and resulted in one or more children, one of whom was Dom José, one of the Meninos de Palhava, who became Grand Inquisitor; the other Menino, so called after the quinta where they were brought up, was called Dom Antonio and was the son of a French girl. The first nun from Odivelas to captivate the king was Dona Magdalena de Miranda, mother of Dom Gaspar, who became archbishop of Braga. These three were acknowledged sons and all lived to a great age...

Dances in church had been part of many traditional ceremonies; the cardinals restricted them and closed the churches at nightfull, so that they could not be used for assignations. But music and dacing in convents was very popular.

Source: Alan David Francis, Portugal, 1715-1808 : Joanine, Pombaline, and Rococo Portugal as seen by British diplomats and traders, 1985.

1753, and when Augustus is visiting soon to be world famous archaelogical digs near Naples, which Wilhelmine will also visit a few years later

And which Algarotti claimed he wanted to visit during his 1748 Frexit, but Fritz noticed that he never got further than Bologna (where the dissertation writer says he was looking for a job), and Fritz wrote scornfully to Wilhelmine that he could have studied the digs just as well from Berlin.

And then there's that time back in Portugal Augustus gets kidnapped by a henchman who turns out not to be a robber but the servant of a lady later to be revealed the Duchess of Castval, who wants to have her way with Augustus.

This fandom is definitely better than fiction!

From:

selenak

It is, though of course it's also an illustration of how gender changes a story. I dare say a Duke abducting a female traveller would not have felt as amusing. And of course if the Duchess had not been good looking, and thus Augustus not, hm, inspired, who knows how it would have ended...

Anyway, we now know that the Hervey clan, not just solely Lord Hervey the memoirist, is providing as much entertainment value for the discerning historical fan as the royals across Europe...

BTW: I wonder whether all this royal nun-loving was already going on a century earlier? Because now I'm curious how much Catherine de Braganza taking Charles II's infidelities - with the one notable exception of Barbara Villiers - in stride was coming from this background - or was this her nephew's innovation?

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I dare say a Duke abducting a female traveller would not have felt as amusing.

I had the same thought! Speaking in real life, I'm not a fan of abducting in either direction. But Augustus at least had more social power to compensate than his female counterpart would, and also my morals disappear when we're talking about fiction or remote history, in favor of "what is most interesting to read about?" :P

BTW: I wonder whether all this royal nun-loving was already going on a century earlier? Because now I'm curious how much Catherine de Braganza taking Charles II's infidelities - with the one notable exception of Barbara Villiers - in stride was coming from this background - or was this her nephew's innovation?

Not sure! Portuguese Wikipedia tells me that "the term flourished in the time of João V of Portugal, documented in the archives between 1653 and 1744." So it was definitely around before she got married, but how much it might have influenced her, I can't say.

From:

cahn

Any girl who fancied a little social life had a far better time in a convent, where at least she could join in parties, concerts, dacnes, and sing-songs, organised often under the guise of religious celebrations. Also she could be wooed through the grilles by all the young men of the district.

...this is definitely not my picture of a convent!

I also didn't realize that dances in church were a thing!

From:

selenak

...this is definitely not my picture of a convent!

You haven't read Casanova's memoirs. :) Seriously though, it's not that the 18th century didn't have actual convents where praying and good works in poverty were the order of the day, but if you use convents as a de facto pension for your unmarried daughters regardless of their inclinations, this is a likely result.

BTW, remember that one of Joseph's reforms were to shut down every nunnery or monastery where the nuns and monks weren't engaged in actual social work (i.e. caring for the sick, teaching)?