cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 46

Background: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.

Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

selenak

I mean, it's not that the Scots had any reason to trust young Charles - never mind hindsight and knowledge of Charles II, Charles I had also promised them all kinds of things and evidently had not kept them. But then, demanding of either Charles not just freedom of practice for themselves but to dictate to all their kingdoms, i.e. England AND Ireland, that everyone should become Presbyterian is just insane, and asking for something like that is asking to feel betrayed.

But even if you see it from the perspective of a true believer who (presumably) thinks they're doing everyone else a favour by forcing them to convert, that still leaves the demand to sign a publish trashing of one's parents. And that is simply not explainable by anything but the wish to humiliate young Charles and glory in just how much they have the upper hand bcause he desperately needs military support.

Whereas this is just funny:

Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess and 8th Earl of Argyll: Hi! So, when my Dad embarrassed the family by becoming a Roman Catholic while James was King. I took over and went in the other direction: yay Presbyterianism, that's me! I was part of Charles I's Privy Council for a while but fell out of favour when he wanted to Anglicize our glorious Scottish Kirk. I called for the cancelling of all Bishops and got kicked out of the council, but I became a Scottish national hero. Because I was the darling of Team Covenant in Scotland, part of the peace conditions they gave to Charles I. after he lost the Bishops' Wars was that he had to make me a Marquess. Sweet! I basically was boss in Scotland and negotiated first with the Junto and later with Cromwell. It all went swimmingly until the English had to go and behead Charles I. Now look, I wasn't a fan, obviously, but that was just too much, and not what we Scots had signed up for. We wanted a constitutional monarchy! NOT BEHEADING! Not to mention: now Cromwell didn't need us anymore, and did you see what he did to the Irish? Time to switch teams, says I, and open up negotiations with young Charles, ready to take him to the cleaners while absolutely sincerely wanting him as King.

Now you know most of our conditions and demands, but what you don't know is one demand I added because look, why not? I said to Charles he was supposed to marry my daughter as soon as we had him crowned. For some reason, he wasn't eager and kept fobbing me off with "war first, marriage later" and other excuses like that, and given Cromwell was right THERE with his army, I couldn't disagree. Anyway, Charles loses at Worcester and then has that mysteriously unfilmed getaway while I had to come to terms with Cromwell (again). Cromwell wasn't impressed my my temporary switching, but knew I was the man, and he needed one in Scotland, so... happy ending, I guess. For a while. After the Restoration, I offered my services, but wouldn't you know it - I ended up as one of the ca.30 people who'd gone to war against Charles I whom no longer that young Charles II didn't forgive in his otherwise general civil war amnesty. Instead, he had me beheaded for treason. I mean: how was I to know he'd hold that much of a grudge about having to trash his parents and almost becoming my son-in-law?

Edited Date: 2023-10-29 03:38 pm (UTC)

From:

luzula

Oh, hmm, this must be the Marquess of Argyll who was foster-father to Ewen Cameron of Lochiel. I'd forgotten he was beheaded!

Also, the group of Scottish nobles who plotted leading up to the 1708 Jacobite almost-rebellion were called the Juncto.

From:

selenak

Hm, would that work, date wise? I mean, if your Ewen Cameron is an 18th century character, because that Argyll died shortly after the Restoration, which was in 1660. Isn't it more likely Ewen Cameron's foster father was the Argyll who rebelled together with Monmouth against James II?

From:

luzula

I meant this guy!

From:

selenak

Ah, okay then. Yes, that one's Argyll was the top Scot during the Civil War.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

There was also the Whig Junto in the 1690s and first decade of the 1700s, which comes up a lot if you read about the War of the Spanish Succession, which I have.

Wikipedia also tells me about another Junto:

In North America, the Whig Junto was the inspiration for Benjamin Franklin's Junto in 1727 Philadelphia upon his return from London.

It concludes:

The term "Junto" is derived from "Junta", a Hispano-Portuguese term for a civil deliberative or administrative council, which in 18th-century English had not yet gained its present association with the governments of a military dictatorship.

Which is why when Selena wrote "the English Junto (yes, Junto, not Junta, and yes, they were called that)" it took me a minute to figure out why that would be noteworthy at all. I'm just too used to seeing Juntos in this period, it's my primary association. ;)

Not my first time and won't be my last of being more familiar with the 18th century than the modern day; I still remember arguing with a modern map about the German/Polish border as a teenager, only to belatedly realize that my mental map owed a lot to Fritz. :'D

Edited Date: 2023-11-01 05:02 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

My wife tells me that in Portuguese, "junta" still just means sth like committee or board, nothing to do with dictatorships.

From:

cahn

Heh! It's funny to think that Charles II might have held a grudge over the possiblity of marrying Campbell's daughter. Though presumably it was the other way around, right? That he didn't want to marry Campbell's daughter because he already had a grudge against him, possibly from the parent-trashing?

From:

selenak

The dislike because of the trashing (and all the other humiliating conditions) came surely before the marriage idea was voiced, but that wasn't the reason why young Charles refused to marry her as diplomatically as he could at the time. Remember, it's a plot point in The King's Touch when it comes to the debate as to whether or not he married Jemmy's mother: being single is one of the few cards young, penniless and exiled Charles had to play. Gaining a bride who came with a huge dowry, rich and royal connections and preferably even some soldiers was therefore instrumental. (In his late conversation with Jemmy where he at last spells it out to him in no ambiguous terms, he says that if he'd married Lucy at that time, he'd have conceded that he would never become King. And that he was tempted in his more nihilistic "to hell with everything" moments back then when basically everything went wrong, but that his survival instinct was just too strong. Now that's Jude Morgan the novelist's interpretation, of course, and note that Jemmy still doesn't want to believe it at that point because he's invested so much in this idea his parents were married, but it's all plausible enough.)

Now of course Miss Campbell the Marquess of Argyll's daughter did come with advantages, but Charles due to having agreed to all the other humiliating conditions first knew he'd get the Scottish army anyway at this point. I mean, Argyll was the unofficial regent of Scotland, but he knew that if after they'd gotten Charles to promise basically everything everyone else had wanted, including making the entire island and Ireland adhere to the Scottish Kirk, he'd have refused support just because Charles didn't want to marry his daughter, all the other Scots nobles would have been after his blood. Also, again, Cromwell and his army were already in Scotland and mightily pissed off their former Covenant allies were now on Team Stuart, and Cromwell had come straight from Ireland where he'd infamously committed massacres to subject the Irish. If there was ever a chance to solve the Civil War militarily left, they needed to invade England now; the idea was to leave Cromwell and his New Model Army, who'd beaten the Scots at Dunbar, tied up there and invade England where people would flock to the new young King's banner so that by the time Cromwell had caught up with them, their armies would be at equal size, swelled by popular support. Except popular support didn't come, Cromwell moved fast, and was one of the great generals of the era.

(Life lesson learned by young Charles II: if the Restoration will happen, it won't happen via foreign armies, which was how the Scots were perceived by even the royalist English. Even if you remove Oliver Cromwell and his personal competence from the equation, and indeed when Oliver C. died, the transition to his son happened smoothly - it was then, when Richard C. took power, that it became evident the Protectorate was too unstable to survive without one specific guy at the helm. But even then, Charles remained on the continent and waited until the Protectorate had crashed and burned and a free Parliament had been elected while negotiating with General Monck, and then still waited until said Parliament explicitly called him back, instead of trying to push things by showing up in person and backed up by exiles and foreign soldiers the way he had done twelve years earlier.)

Anyway, it does say something about how intensely Charles II resented Argyll that he refused his offer of service and instead had him executed after the Restoration, though, because he wasn't vendetta minded as a rule. Yes, anyone still alive who had personally signed Charles I. death warrant was excempted from the general Civil War amnesty Charles II, Monck and Parliament had agreed upon, but that was a given. Getting Cromwell's body out of his grave, beheading him and putting his head on a pike was symbolic; by contrast, and much to the indignation of many a royalist exile, Cromwell's surviving sons, Henry and Richard, were allowed to keep all of their (considerable) possessions and lived out their lives comfortably and in obscurity. Thomas Fairfax, who had been just as important as Oliver Cromwell, if not more so (because he was the top Commander of the New Model Army and Cromwell his right hand man until Fairfax resigned in the wake of Charles I's execution), for the victory of Parliament over Charles I, was treated with respect and even took part in Charles II's entry into London. (Okay, Fairfax had famously only attended the first day of Charles I.'s trial and then excused himself because he did not think this was a just court, his wife, who remained, had openly protested what was going on during the trial, and Fairfax had refused to sign Charles I's death warrant and resigned his army command over this. It would have looked badly if he'd been treated as a rebel. But still, Henrietta Maria, Charles' mother, certainly still resented him for having defeated her husband in the first place, and didn't understand why Charles was treating him as an honorable veteran.

Anyway, my point being: Charles II in general wasn't acting vengeful during the Restoration, the thirty something people directly involved in Charles I's execution excepted, and one could make a case that subjects executing their King had set such a dangerous precedent that he pretty much had to go after them. Otherwise, reconciliation was the word of the day. But not with Argyll, who hadn't been involved in Charles I's execution. Yes, he had very much contributed to Charles I' ending up defeated and in Parliament's hands in the first place, but then so had Thomas Fairfax. Both had explicitly been against the execution. But Fairfax hadn't put a young and grieving Charles through the extortion and humiliation wringer, and I think that was a difference. (That, and Argyll's position in Scotland wasn't one a truly sovereign King of Scotland could have allowed to continue, there was that as well.)

From:

cahn

but Charles due to having agreed to all the other humiliating conditions first knew he'd get the Scottish army anyway at this point.

Ah, got it! -- why give up his trump card until he absolutely has to?

But even then, Charles remained on the continent and waited until the Protectorate had crashed and burned and a free Parliament had been elected while negotiating with General Monck, and then still waited until said Parliament explicitly called him back, instead of trying to push things by showing up in person and backed up by exiles and foreign soldiers the way he had done twelve years earlier.

Charles is really the Picard of the Stuarts, isn't he! (Well, at least in regards to the politics, if not the reputation with women.)

by contrast, and much to the indignation of many a royalist exile, Cromwell's surviving sons, Henry and Richard, were allowed to keep all of their (considerable) possessions and lived out their lives comfortably and in obscurity.

Huh, that's great.

Okay, Fairfax had famously only attended the first day of Charles I.'s trial and then excused himself because he did not think this was a just court, his wife, who remained, had openly protested what was going on during the trial, and Fairfax had refused to sign Charles I's death warrant and resigned his army command over this.

Ohhhh, that's awesome. Go Fairfax.

But still, Henrietta Maria, Charles' mother, certainly still resented him for having defeated her husband in the first place, and didn't understand why Charles was treating him as an honorable veteran.

Lol Henrietta Maria. I mean, I have got the impression there are a lot of things she didn't see the same way...