![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnBackground: 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*
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*
Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-07 12:41 pm (UTC)Contemporaries hostile to James: Yep, he definitely did it with at least three of those guys. Poor England, getting not only a bloody Scot but a Sodomite for a King! And Anne his wife is a spendthrift, too!
Contemporaries positive about James: All hail our bible-translation-commmissioning learned and religious King who is the new Salomon! (Private life not mentioned.)
English Civil War Time writers: Yep, the trouble started long before Charles. James had those icky faves and threw money at them!
19th Century: If Anne hadn't argued with James about wanting to raise their oldest son, thus ruining what was the first few yeas a perfect marriage, and hadn't been so interested in masques and clothing, maybe he wouldn't have been driven into the (platonic) arms of those icky faves (though nothing sexual happened!!!!). Bad Anne. She put James off the het by being a period-atypical noble mother who wanted to raise her own kids.
1967 (the year male homosexuality becomes legal in GB): Yeaaaaaah, we guess he did fancy them boys. But only in a homosocial, not actively homosexual way. There's no proof he actually did the physical deed! Yes, there's the letter to Robert Carr where he complains Carr doesn't want to sleep with him in the same bed anymore and wants him back in said bed "a thousand times", and then there are the letters from and to Buckingham where Buckingham says they won't be able to pry his fingers away from James' bedpost upon their reunion, but look, sleeping in the same bed as the King was a ceremonial honor and a sign of distinction that had nothing to do with sex! The very fact that James and the boys can talk about it so openly and that James is described by contemporaries as kissing and hugging them in public proves they had nothing shameful to hide! Anyone raised in Presbyterian Scotland the way James was would have been ashamed! ALSO, we now don't consider James as a weak King anymore but as a smart guy who kept England out of the Thirty Years War, therefore, he can't have been a sexualy active gay man!
1980s: Enter Caroline Binham, first biographer to say that of course he had sex with the lot of them. (Essay writer: go figure it was a woman, presumably not as threatened.) For the next two decades, there are more and more male historians coming around to the idea that sex was going on. Then!
2000s: Backlash: some of those guys who previously said "yeah, could see it, probably sex" are now all "nah, no proof, he was super religious and thus would have stopped himself from doing the actual deed, and also he had seven kids with Anne and therefore must have been bi, not gay, and also another proof that he probably didn't do the deed with his faves is that Anne was among those pushing young future Buckingham at him! She even initialized it!
Michael B. Young: You, fellow historians, are falsifying source material if you claim Anne initialized it or was leading. Abbot the Archbishop of Canterbury and the others from the Anti-Somerset-Team had to do some considerable work before Anne reluctantly agreed to promote future Buckingham and ask her hubby to knight him, and she only did it because she disliked Somerset that much. Here are source material quotes x, y, and z to prove it. And speaking of Anne, having sex with your wife to produce offspring has never been proof of anyone's orientation! Oh, and check out my earlier essay XYZ where I show that yet another passage from a letter from Buckingham to James is clearly an allusion to the two of them having enjoyed mutual masturbation, which you, you turncoats, even agreed with before the end of the millennia and this new trend to shove James back into the closet!
Selena: ...at least no one theorized James had his penis broken after he and Anne stopped with the marital relations? Which they did in 1607. Anne had given birth to babies 7 times - only three of those kids made it beyond weeks - and had additional miscarriages, and she just did not want another dead baby and risk to her life, so she put her foot down at that point.
19th Century: Anne was clearly a shallow woman only concerned for her looks and masques and fashion. And that drove James away!
Tracy Borman: I am a previously respected Tudor historian, and my theory, voiced in the online essay "Killer Queen", is Anne was behind the Gunpowder Plot!
Selena: Say what?
Tracy Borman: Hear me out. Sure, Anne grew up a Lutheran. But once she and James started to drift apart over her wanting to raise Henry, there were rumors she'd secretly converted to Catholicism. These were so insistent that even Queen Elizabeth I. asked her about it in writing, and Anne had to lie, err, reassure her? Everyone was talking about it! Even the Pope!
Selena: The other sources I've started to read say the Pope said he had no idea whether she was a Catholic or not and that he was totally confused by these rumors.
Tracy Borman: the rumors went into overdrive when Anne during her coronation as Queen of England at James' side refused to take communion. In an Anglican service. Clearly because she was a secret Catholic!!!!!!
Selena: I could see other reasons, but okay, it's not impossible.
Tracy Borman: By this time, she had had it with James and his boyfriends. So clearly she teamed up with other Catholics like Guy Fawkes & Co. to kill her gay husband by blowing up Parliament. Via middlemen, I'm not claiming she did so directly, but I'm sure she was the mastermind.
Selena: ....so, she could think of no other way to kill James than to blow him up with Parliament AND her oldest son? That same son Henry whom she had fought tooth and nails with James about and whom she finally, once the family moved from Scotland to England, was allowed to live with?
Tracy Borman: Yep. She had it with men, full stop, and wanted to make her daughter Elizabeth Queen. And since Elizabeth later produced Sophia who produced G1 and whose bloodline pushed the Stuarts from the English throne for good, Anne did have her long term revenge!!!!
Selena: You and Nancy Goldstone should have a drink.
Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-07 04:57 pm (UTC)a smart guy who kept England out of the Thirty Years War, therefore, he can't have been a sexualy active gay man!
Yes, because intelligence and sexually active gay men could never go together!
Ghost of Alan Turing: *has a coughing fit*
Selena: You and Nancy Goldstone should have a drink.
Maybe they did!
Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-07 06:07 pm (UTC)Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-07 10:52 pm (UTC)Hee!
but look, sleeping in the same bed as the King was a ceremonial honor and a sign of distinction that had nothing to do with sex!
They... were gay and fancied each other and slept... in the same bed... but this had nothing to do with sex... okay!
Anne had given birth to babies 7 times - only three of those kids made it beyond weeks - and had additional miscarriages, and she just did not want another dead baby and risk to her life, so she put her foot down at that point.
19th Century: Anne was clearly a shallow woman only concerned for her looks and masques and fashion. And that drove James away!
THESE WERE MALE HISTORIANS. WEREN'T THEY.
Tracy Borman: Yep. She had it with men, full stop, and wanted to make her daughter Elizabeth Queen.
Wow!
Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-08 10:25 am (UTC)BTW, Young also points out that in the case of James' three most famous favourites, there's a twenty years age gap in each case, though in the first case in the other direction, as James was only 13 when falling in love with his cousin Esme Stuart who was in his mid thirties. Whereas both Robert Carr/Somerset and George Villiers/Buckingham were a mit more than two decades younger than James. (Though both way older than 13 - they were adult men when coming to his attention.)
THESE WERE MALE HISTORIANS. WEREN'T THEY.
Amazingly enough, not exclusively so. Agnes Strickland who is a Victorian writer about all the Kings and Queens of England (we owe her, among other things, a completely fictional governess for Anne Boleyn due to her misreading two French words, but she otherwise was a very hard working lady, just with the ethics of her times), also chides Anne for her luxury loving shallowness and ruining of marital harmony by the who-raises-Henry argument, apparently a firm believer that women should be moral angels guiding men to be better, and James had some good qualities and would have been a better person if Anne had "reformed" him. I should add that Anne, like James, has found her defenders in the 20th century.
Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-12 01:04 am (UTC)Hee!
Re Agnes Strickland: gosh, okay, yeah, I... guess I see how this kind of thing happens. (Strickland's attitudes, I mean.) But still!
Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-08 11:59 am (UTC)Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-08 04:06 pm (UTC)I mean, there are monarchs where you really can make a case for "we just don't know", or "it's all slander by their enemies - James' granddaughter Anne comes to mind, because part of the claims about her having sex with her female faves comes from a vengeful Sarah Churchill commissioning a poem accusing Anne of this with Sarah's successor as Anne's favourite, Abigail Masham. But with James, we have the freaking letters to his favourites, private letters, not something written for publication and with an eye to later chroniclers.
Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-08 04:35 pm (UTC)From a letter to Buckingham when Buckingham and Charles were on their months long trip to Spain:
‘…I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.’
And when years earlier people (having realised they got out of the frying pan (Somerset) into the fire (Buckingham) in terms of powerful favourites) complained, he stated to his nobility:
‘I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore, I act like a man and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here, assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.’
Re: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version
Date: 2024-01-12 01:10 am (UTC)(I mean, to be fair, some of those verses about the disciple Jesus loved reclining on his breast and so on, I don't blame him! Although to me it reads more one-way pining/RPF, especially combined with my favorite part of the Gospel of John, the bit where the disciple Jesus loved totally beat Peter to the tomb, but who's keeping score? :D )