As opposed to his son, where I would describe my opinion only getting slightly modified, not really changed, over the years, I really did do a turnaround on James. For a long time, basically neither of the two main associations I had when thinking of him were to his credit: a) when his mother was about to be executed, James lodged a token protest with Elizabeth but simuiltanously sent a letter to Leicester to ensure it wouldn't be taken too seriously, and b) he wrote one of those ghastly books encouraging witchhunts in the 17th century, with devastating results. Yes, I also knew that during his reign, the English equivalent of the Luther bible was created (i.e. just as Luther's translation of the bible into early modern German is a major major step in the develpment of the language and was to prove influential for writers up to and including the decidedly not religious Bertolt Brecht, the "King James bible" did the same for early modern English), but since as opposed to Martin L., James didn't do the translating himself, I did not consider this to be a plus in his favour.

I think the first to make me question this low or at least limited opinion was jesuswasbatman, who had just watched Howard Benton's play about James and Anne Boleyn (in two different timelines, obviously), and then deborah_judge who was also an advocate. A decade, some biographies and a few podcasts later... Okay, I admit it: He was, to tongue-in-cheekily quote a current day translation of a very different epic, a complicated man.

As to not making more than a token protest: given he never knew his mother (he'd last seen her when he was four months old and she had left the country when he was a little more than a year), and was raised by a gallery of her bitterest enemies who kept teaching him she was the worst, this is really not surprising. What is actually interesting is that both James and Mary inherited their Scottish throne as babies, had regents until they were adults and became responsible for a nation with a lot of internal strife, an uncomfortably powerful neighbour next door and nobles with a power that the British nobility had lost post Wars of the Roses, but the results when they took over became very very different. Yes, in a sexist age James had the advantage of being a man and also of not being a Catholic in a country with a majority Protestant population. But he still deserves credit for being the first Scottish ruler in a long time who managesd to stablize the country, lead it well and avoid costly wars with the English. (The fact that he was King of Scotland for a staggering 58 years - to the 22 years of his English and Irish Kingship - tends, I'm told, to be overlooked on the English side of the border in the public consciousness. Even if you discount his childhood and youth., i.e. the years before his personal rule, that's still an impressively long reign.) And he did after a childhood which was if anything even tougher than that which had served as a tough apprenticeship to Elizabeth Tudor (and was so crucially different to his mother Mary's childhood as the darling of the French court): his uncle and first regent, Moray, was shot in 1570, followed by his second regent and grandfather, whom a five years old James saw bleeding to death because Lennox was equally assassinated. This bloody regent turnover continued and got accompagnied with uprisings. When James was eleven, Stirling Castle was raided by Catholic rebels. At sixsteen, he was kidnapped by William Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, and imprisoned for ten months. And then there was his teacher, George Buchanan, who managed to get him fluent in Scots, English, French, Greek and Latin, but did so via constant beatings and humiliations. Buchanan had the declared aim of teaching him about not just his mother being the worst but all the Stuarts being rotten and that as a King he was to exist for his subjects, not for himself. Unsurprisingly, what James actually learned when those lessons where conveyed via beatings was to dissemble, and conclude that it wasn't his ancestors but but rebels who were "monstrous". He also had Buchanan's writings on limited Kingship forbidden as soon as the man was dead.

By now, I've come across a considerable number of royals whom in modern terms we'd classify as gay or at least as bi with a strong preference for men, of which James definitely was one, and who were married because that was par the course for royalty. This often, but not always, means misery for their wives. Compared some of the truly castastrophic to at least very cold marriages (Henriette Anne "Minette" of England/Philippe d'Orleans "Monsieur", Edward II/Isabella of France, Frederick II of Prussia/Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick etc.), James and Anne of Denmark didn't do badly. They even had a sort of romantic origin story, in that Anne, after being married by proxy as was usual, was supposed to be delivered to Scotland via ship, terrible weather made it impossible and her ship ended up in Norway instead, so young James, for the first and last time making a grand romantic gesture for a woman instead of a man, instead of waiting tilll weather and sea were calm enough for Anne to make the trip from Norway instad took the boat to Norway himself, united with his bride and brought her home to England. (His son Charles would decades later try to accomplish something similar by travelling to Spain to woo the Spanish Infanta. It did not have the same results.) This resulted in a good start to the marriage, but also in a dark time for some other women in Scotland because James believed all the bad weather was undoubtedly the result of witchcraft and someone had to be punished for that. Later on, the biggest disagreements James and Anne had weren't about his male favourites but about who got to raise their children, specifically the oldest son, Henry. Anne wanted to do this herself. James, whose own childhood had been a series of bloody turnovers in authority figures (see above), wanted Henry to be raised in the most secure castle in Scotland and by an armed to the teeth nobleman. This made for a lot of rows and repeated attempts by Anne to get her oldest son by showing up at his residence and demanding he be handed over, with the last such occasion coming when James was already en route to England to get crowned.

James' iron clad conviction of the dangers of witchcraft still is chilling to me, but even that is more complicated than, say, the utter ghastliness that was going on in German speaking countries in the 17th century, because James in his later English years actually paired his anti-witchcraft attitude with the admoniishment of judges not to be fooled by conmen and -wen, superstituions and local feuds, and the few times he got personally involved in England (as opposed to earlier in Scotland) it was in the favour of the accused. This doesn't mean women and men didn't die on other occasions in the realm(s) ruled by a monarch known to fear witches, but I still can't think of a parallel among the "theologians" who wrote their anti-wtiches books simultanously in my part of the world, and who never would have admitted the possibility of false accusations, let alone admonished their judges to be sceptical and discerning.

Some of what got James a bad press back in the day now looks good to us, most of all the fact he genuinely and consistently disliked war. BTW, this was less different from Elizabeth I's own attitude than historians and propagandists for a long time presented it. Elizabeth had avoided actual war with Spain for as long as she could, and hadn't been very keen on supporting the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands directly, either, much preferring it if she got someone else to do it. Once the war was there, of course, it had to be fought, but those eighteen years of war had left both England and Spain exhausted and with enormous debts, and one of James' signature policies, the peace of Spain, was undoubtedly to the benefit of both countries. That in the later years of his reign a majority of people yearned for war with Spain again, for a replay of the late Elizabethan era's greatest hits (without considering the expense of all that national glory), and that James still held out against it is to his credit, especially given the results when his son Charles actually pursued such a policy after ascending to the throne. Something that's also to James' credit as a monarch though not as a father is that he kept England out of the 30 Years War while he lived despite the fact that his daughter Elizabeth and his son-in-law were prime protagonists in its earliest phase and might never have become King and Queen of Bohemia if the Bohemians hadn't believed that surely, the King of England (and Scotland, and Ireland), leader of Protestants, would support his daughter against the Austrian Catholic Habsburgs if they elected his son-in-law as a counter condidate to said Habsburg. He also was ruthless enough to deny his daughter and son-in-law sanctuary in England once they were deposed and on the run, which wasn't very paternal but understandable if you consider that this was before his son Charles was married (let alone had produced an heir of his own), meaning that if he, James died and Charles ruled, Elizabeth was the next in the line of succession, and the thought of her husband, the unfortunate "Winter King" of Bohemia whose well-meaning but inept leadership had kickstarted the war, becoming the King of England if anything should happen to Charles gave James nightmares. In conclusion: not participating in one of the most brutal wars fought in Europe ever and in fact trying his utmost diplomatically to prevent it was a good thing. But in centuries where "manly" and "warrior" were going together in the public imagination, it's no wonder that it didn't make James popular.

Mind you: a misunderstood humanist, James wasn't, either. And something that can definitely be laid as his doorstep (though not exclusively so) is that his relationship with the English (as opposed to Scottish) Parliament went from bad to worse every time there was one during his reign, which definitely played a role in what was to come once his son Charles became King. (ironically, Prince Charles had his first and as it turns out last time as a firm favourite of Parliament when he led the opposition to continued peace with Spain and the pro War party in the last year of his father's life.) Why do I qualify this with "not exclusively"? Because Parliamentarians didn't always cover themselves with glory, either. I mean, as I understand it, James' first English parliament went like this:

James: Here I am, fresh from Edinburgh, your new King. Thanks for all the enthusiasm I encountered on the road, guys. Well, seeing as I am now King of England, Scotland and Ireland, I propose and will coin a phrase: A United Kingdom of Great Britain! How about that? Starting with an English/Scottish Union, not just by monarch but by state?

English Parliament: NO WAY. Scots are thieving beggars who are by nature evil and will deprive us of our FREEDOM and RIGHTS and PRIVILEGES if they are treated as citizens of the same country. WE HATE SCOTS. You excepted, because that would be treason.

(Meanwhile in Scotland: Are ye daft, Jamie? We hate those English murderous bastards!!!!!)

James: So basically no one except for me wants a United Kingdom of Great Britain, got it. I still think I'm right and you're wrong, but fine, for now. How about some money for me, my queen, my kids and my lovers?

EP: About that....

Which brings me to the topic of the Favourites. Most monarchs have them. They're usually hated. (It's easier to count the exceptions.) Ironically, one of the very few exceptions, the only one of Elizabeth I's favourites who wasn't hated while being the Favourite, the Earl of Essex, had all the qualities royal favourites are usually hated for - he held monopolies that provided him with lots of money (and one of the fallouts between Essex and Elizabeth was when she refused to prolong said monopoly), his attempts at playing politics were disastrous (and also outclassed by his rival Robert Cecil), and the only thing he had going for himself really were good looks and cutting a dashing figure when raiding Spanish coastal cities. In over forty years of Elizabeth's reign, a court culture wherein the male courtiers played at being in love with the Queen had been established, and certainly all her long term favourites were framing their relationship with her in romantic language. Now presumably when James became King, people who hadn't been paying attention to gossip from Scotland had expected things to go back to the Henry VIII model where certainly the King still had his faves but the romantic language was out . But lo and behold, while it's impossible to prove James actually had sex with any of the young handsome men he favoured, the language used in his letters to at least two of them (Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham) is certainly suggestive, and he did kiss them and others in public. While men kissing men in that day and age wasn't necessarily coded erotic, especially coming from a monarch, James did it often enough for ambassadors to notice and report. And certainly when courtiers wanted to remove the current Favourite, they tried it via presenting young good looking men to James. (This worked in one case - the toppling of Somerset in favour of Buckingham, though there were other factors involved as well - but failed when Buckingham's earlier sponsors, realizing they had just traded Skylla for Charybdis, tried to do the same thing again. No matter how many sexy young things were presented, Buckingham remained James' Favourite till James' death.) Favourites were on the one hand certainly a symptome of the corruption inherent int he absolutist system, but otoh also hhighly useful in that they offered an out for both King and subjects in whom to blame for unpopular policies. Instead of critiquing the King, the opposition could frame its complaints in being the venting of loyal subjects about the Evil Advisors (tm), while the King could sacrifice a scapegoat if things went too badly to quench public anger. As opposed to his son, James was ready to do that if needs must. But his Favourites still contributed to the overall perception of the court as a den of sin and corruption. (Which, yeah, but as opposed to which previous court?)

(BTW, and speaking of the usefulness of scapegoats for monarchs, my favourite example for the story about Henry starting out as this charming well meaning prince going bloodthirsty monarch only after he didn't get his first divorce and had a tournament accident being wrong remains the fact that when Henry ascended to the throne at age 18, one of the first things he did was to accuse two of his father's more ruthless tax men of treason and have them beheaded in a cheap but efficient bid for popularity. Now, no one could deny said two officials, one of whom, Edmund Dudley, was the grandfather of Elilzabeth's childhood friend and life long favourite Leicester, had been absolutely ruthless in their mission to squeeze money out of the population by every legal or barely legal trick imaginable. But they had done so under strict instructions from Henry VII, and the accusation of treason for this was ridiculous. Note that Henry VIIII could simply have dismissed them when he became King. But no. He went for legal murder from the get go. However, since everyone hates tax men, absolutely no one minded and many celebrated instead of thinking of the precedent. This is why the Tudors, by and large, when governing had a genius for (self) propaganda the Stuarts just didn't.)

I wouldn't agree with one of the latest biographers, Clare Jackson, that James was the most interesting monarch GB had, but he certainly is interesting, and far more dimensional than younger me gave him credit for.


The other days

Stella Duffy: Theodora : The Empress Theodora is one of those historical characters I am perennially interested in, and I have yet to find a novel about her entire life that truly satisfies me. So far, Gillian Bradshaw's The Bearkeeper's Daughter comes closest, but a) it's only about her last two or so years, and b) while she is a very important character, the main character is actually someone else, to wit, her illegitimate son through whose eyes we get to see her. This actually is a good choice, it helps maintaining her ambiguiity and enigmatic qualities while the readers like John (the main character) hear all kind of contradictory stories about her and have to decide what to believe. But it's not the definite take on Theodora's life I'm still looking for. Last year I came across James Conroyd Martin's Fortune's Child, which looked like it had another intriguing premise (Theodora dictating her memoirs to a Eunuch who used to be a bff but now has reason to hate her) but alas, squandered it. But I'm not giving up, and after hearing an interview with Stella Duffy about Theodora, both the woman and her novel, I decided to tackle this one, and lo: still not the novel about her entire life (it ends when she becomes Empress) I'm looking for, but still far better than Martin's while covering essentially the same biographical ground (i.e. Theodora's life until she becomes Empress; Martin wrote another volume about her remaining years, but since the first one let me down, I haven't read the second one).

What I appreciate about Duffy's Theodora: It does a great job bringing Constantinople to life, and our heroine's rags to riches story, WITHOUT either avoiding the dark side (there isn't even a question as to whether young - and I do mean very young - Theodora and her sisters have to prostitute themselves when becoming actresses, nobody assumes there is a choice, it's underestood to be part of the job) or getting salacious with it. There are interesting relationships between women (as between Theodora and Sophia, a dwarf). The novel makes it very clear that the acrobatics and body control expected from a comic actress (leaving the sexual services aside) are tough work and the result of brutal training, and come in handy for Theodora later when she has to keep a poker face to survive in very different situation. The fierce theological debates of the day feature and are explained in a way that is understandable to an audience which doesn't already know what Monophysites believe in, what Arianism is and why the Council of Chalcedon is important. (Theological arguments were a deeply important and constant aspects of Byzantine daily life in all levels of society, were especially important in the reign of Justinian and Theodora and are still what historical novels tend to avoid.) Not everyone who dislikes our heroine is evil and/or stupid (that was one of the reasons why I felt let down by Martin). I.e. Theodora might resent and/or dislike them in turn, but the author, Duffy, still shows the readers where they are coming from. (For example: Justinian's uncle Justin was an illiterate soldier who made it to the throne. At which point his common law wife became his legal wife and Empress. She was a former slave. This did not give her sympathy for Theodora later, on the contrary, she's horrified when nephew Justinian gets serious with a former actress. In Martin's novel, she therefore is a villain, your standard evil snob temporarily hindering the happy resolution, and painted as hypocritical to boot because of her own past. In Duffy's, Justinian replies to Theodora's "She hasn't worked a day in her life" with a quiet "she was a slave", and the narration points out that Euphemia's constant sense of fear of the past, of the past coming back, as a former slave is very much connected to why she'd want her nephew to make an upwards, not downwards marriage. She's still an impediment to the Justinian/Theodora marriage, but the readers get where she's coming from.

Even more importantly: instead of the narration claiming that Theodora is so beautiful (most) people can't resist her, the novel lets her be "only" avaragely pretty BUT with the smarts, energy and wit to impress people, and we see that in a show, not tell way (i.e. in her dialogue and action), not because we're constantly told about it. She's not infallible in her judgments and guesses (hence gets blindsided by a rival at one point), which makes her wins not inevitable but feeling earned. And while the novel stops just when Theodora goes from being the underdog to being the second most powerful person in the realm, what we've seen from her so far makes it plausible she will do both good and bad things as an Empress.

Lastly: the novel actually does something with Justinian and manages to make him interesting. I've noticed other novelists dealing with Theodora tend to keep him off stage as if unsure how to handle him. Duffy goes for workoholic geek who gets usually underestimated in the characterisation, and the only male character interested in Theodora in the novel who becomes friends with her first; in Duffy's novel, she originally becomes closer to him basically as an agent set on him by the (Monophysite) Patriarch of Alexandria who wants the persecution of the Monophysites by Justinian's uncle Justin to end and finds herself falling for him for real, so if you like spy narratives, that's another well executed trope, and by the time the novel ends, you believe these two have become true partners in addition to lovers. In conclusion: well done, Stella Duffy!


Grace Tiffany: The Owl was a Baker's Daughter. The subtitle of this novel is "The continuing adventures of Judith Shakespeare", from which you may gather it's the sequel to a previous novel. It does, however, stand on its own, and I can say that because I haven't read the first novell, which is titled "My Father had a daughter", the reason being that I heard the author being interviewed about the second novel and found the premise so interesting that I immediately wanted to read it, whereas the first one sounded a bit like a standard YA adventure. What I heard about the first one: it features Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, running away from home for a few weeks dressed up as a boy and inevitably ending up in her father's company of players. What I had heard about the second one: features Judith at age 61 during the English Civil War. In the interview I had heard, the author said the idea came to her when she realised that Judith lived long enough to hail from the Elizabethan Age but end up in the Civil War and the short lived English Republic. And I am old enough to now feel far more intrigued by a 61 years old heroine than by a teenage one, though I will say I liked The Owl was a Baker's Daughter so much that I will probably read the first novel after all. At any rate, what backstory you need to know the second novel tells you. We meet Judith at a time of not just national but personal crisis: she's now outlived all three of her children, with the last one most recently dead, and her marriage to husband Tom Quiney suffers from it. This version of Judith is a midwife plus healer, having picked up medical knowledge from her late brother-in-law Dr. Hall, and has no sooner picked up a new apprentice among the increasing number of people rendered homeless by the war raging between King and Parliament, a young Puritan woman given to bible quoting with a niece who spooks the Stratfordians by coming across as feral, that all three of them are suspected after Judith delivers a baby who looks like he will die. (In addition to everything else, this is the height of the witchhunting craze after all.) Judith goes on the run and ends up alternatingly with both Roundheads and Cavaliers, as she tries to survive. (Both Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell get interesting cameos - Stratford isn't THAT far from Oxford where Charles has his headquarters, after all, while London is where Judith is instinctively drawn to due to her youthful adventure there - , but neither is the hero of the tale.)

Not the least virtue of this novel is that it avoids the two extremes of English Civil War fiction. Often when the fiction in question sides with Team Cromwell, the Royalists are aristo rapists and/or crypto Catholic bigots, while if it sides with Team Charles the revolutionaries are all murderous Puritans who hate women. Not so here. Judith's husband is a royalist while she's more inclined towards the Parliament's cause, but mostly as a professional healer she's faced with the increasing humber of wounded and dead people on both sides. Both sides have sympathetic characters championing them. (For example, Judith's new apprentice Jane has good reason to despise all things royal while the old friend she runs into, the actor Nathan Field, is for very good reason less than keen on the party that closed the theatres.) Making Judith luke warm towards either cause and mostly going for a caustic no nonsense "how do I get out of this latest danger?" attitude instead of being a true partisan for either is admittedly eaier for the general audience, but it's believable, and at any rate the sense of being in a topsy turvy world where both on a personal level (a marriage that has been going strong for decades is now threatening to break apart, not just because of their dead sons but also because of this) and on a general level all old certainties now seem to be in doubt is really well drawn. And all the characters come across vividly, both the fictional ones like Jane and the historical ones, be they family like Judith's sister Susanna Hall (very different from her, but the sisters have a strong bond, and I was ever so releaved Grace Tiffany didn't play them out against each other, looking at you, Germaine Greer) or VIPs (see above re: Cromwell and Charles I.). And Judith's old beau Nathan Fields is in a way the embodiment of the (now banished) theatre, incredibly charming and full of fancy but also unreliable and impossible to pin down. You can see both why he and Judith have a past and why she ended up with Quiney instead.

Would this novel work if the heroine wasn't Shakespeare's daughter but an invented character? Yes, but the Shakespeare connection isn't superficial, either. Judith thinks of both her parents (now that she's older than her father ever got to be) with that awareness we get only when the youth/age difference suddenly is reversed, and the author gives her a vivid imagination and vocabulary, and when the Richard II comparisons to the current situation inevitably come, they feel believable, right and earned. All in all an excellent novel, and I'm glad to have read it.

Leanda de Lisle: Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior and Phoenix Queen: basically "Henrietta Maria: For the Defense!", a spirited new biography of one of the most unpopular English Queens. It's well written, presents its assumptions with source quotes and does a great job with establishing context and bringing not just its titular character but also the people around her to life. This holds especially true for Henrietta Maria's sisters, Christine of Savoy and Elisabeth/Isabel of Spain, both of whom are very interesting in their own right and make for a great compare and contrast to her. (Meanwhile, brother Louis XIII - that's the one from the Three Musketeers - remains a bit vague, but being overshadowed by his First Minister Richelieu has been his lot since his life time.) By quoting from letters between the sisters, Leanda de Lisle also shows they remained in contact throughout their turbulent lives. Henrietta Maria was the youngest (literally a baby when their father, Henri IV, was assassinated), and how her sisters fared in their marriages and adopted countries of course informed her own behaviour. Both Christine and Elisabeth were distrusted and resented at first, but then became popular - Christine especially was impressive in that Richelieu, like many a head of government before and after him, assumed she'd basically the representative of French interests in Savoy, whereas Christine, to Richelieu's great displeasure, played the bad cards she was dealt (Savoy wasn't a huge and powerful Kingdom like France, Spain or England, but it was strategically very iimportant for everyone's plans in the Europe of the Thirty Years War) exceedingly well and kept the Duchy independent for her son to rule. Of course, Christine and Elisabeth shared the religion of the majority in their adopted countries - and Henrietta Maria did not. Which meant the initial standard xenophobic distrust never went away, as in her sisters' cases, but multiplied.

In terms of establishing context, Leanda de Lisle also does a great job in pointing out that Catholics in England (and Scotland, and good lord, Ireland) were relentlessly persecuted, both by the government(s) - and here, far from doing better under Charles I, they at first did worse than under James, denying the claim that Henrietta Maria made Charles pro Catholics - and by a very vocal part of the Protestant population, who basically was convinced every Catholic was secretly planning a second Bartholomew's Night massacre and acted accordingly. 15 years old Henriettta Maria when sent to England as a bride was very much expected to help her co-religionists to at least toleration status and was told as much by the papal legate. She tried. It didn't help the initial tense state of her marriage or how she was perceived by the Brits. A classic early situation is teen Henrietta Maria passing Tyburn, where Catholics priests had been executed, and praying, essentially treating the spot as a place of martyrdom, while for the Protestant Brits these had been dirty traitors getting their just deserts and they thought her honouring their memory was outrageous. New to England teen Henrietta Maria also said, when asked about whether she could live with and love Protestants, "why not? My father was one!", which is a far cry from the Catholic fanatic secretly plotting to bring the Inquisition to England her enemies portrayed her at. All this said, I think while Leanda de Lisle makes a good case for young Henrietta Maria being earnestly driven to achieve toleration, not dominance, she's letting middle aged Henrietta Maria off too easily for her behaviour re: religion vis a vis both her youngest and her oldest son, more about this later.

Henrietta Maria and Charles I pretty much were the real life version of the "arranged marriage after initial obstacles and mutual misunderstandings becomes true love match" trope, which paradoxically was both great for more than a decade of personal happiness and bad for her ever darkening reputation. Because one of the obstacles to marital bliss had been the favourite Charles had inherited from his father, the Duke of Buckingham. (Not in the sense of also romancing Buckingham, but Buckingham was whom he was emotionally closest to.) When Buckingham was killed, there was, as Leanda de Lisle wryly observed, only one part of his many, many offices, riches, and standing his enemies did not covet - and that was Buckingham playing the role of Evil Advisor (tm) in the public perception. It's the classic get out both for a monarchically minded population - of course you don't blame the King, you're not against the King, it's just the Evil Advisor responsible for anything wrong, not the King - and for the monarch (who if and when making concessions to appease disgruntled nobles and/or commons can always throw said advisor under the bus. Charles I. had already shown himself stubborn re: that last part re: Buckingham (i.e. he defended him at every turn), but as long as Buckingham was still alive, he still made for a good scapegoat in the public perception. Once Buckingham was dead, the role of Evil Advisor (tm) went to... Henrietta Maria, whose increasing closeness to the King was very noticeable. Plus Charles did not have any mistresses to play the role instead. As a result, Henrietta Maria in addition to all the distrust she already got for being Catholic now got all the hostlity Buckingham used to get. In terms of how much political influence she actually had: Leanda de Lisle, who also wrote a biography about Charles I, shows that while he took her advice more into account in those later years, he still disagreed with her a lot, too. Some of his most disastrous decisions in the long term, like trying to impose the "Arminian" (= Anglican Catholicism, basically) style championed by his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, on England and Scotland had nothing to do with her (and didn't come with much improvement for Roman Catholics, though there was a bit - though they still had to pay heavy fines for going to mass; quarelling with his parliament Charles definitely could not do without that money). (Speaking of Scotland, de Lisle points out that the only Scots Henrietta Maria knew personally were the few Catholic Scottish Lords at court in Westminster, which was bound to give her a distorted impression as what Scotland was like, where Catholics by then were only one percent of the population or thereabouts. Her urging son Charles to make a deal with the Scots decades later partly came from this very wrong idea that the country was full of Royalist Catholics burning to rally to the Stuart cause.)

One attractive quality Henrietta Maria had was that she was a loyal friend (and patron, and relation) to have. As mentioned, she hadn't gotten along well with Buckingham, but apparantly his sister, Susan Denbigh, whom he'd placed at her side as a lady-in-waiting (as he'd done with a probable mistress, Lucy Hay, the legendary Countess of Carlisle who's switch sides three times in the Civil War), must have behaved well towards Henrietta Maria during the Buckingham years, because far from dismissing her post Buckingham's death, Henrietta Maria kept her (and the other Villiers ladies, including Buckingham's widow) in her service (and not to humiliate them, either, but as prefered courtiers). And when her mother, Maria de' Mediici, who'd lost her power struggle with Richelieu and had been touring the continent in exile ever since, chose the worst possible time to visit Britain (i.e. around the time of Wentworth's execution, when everyone was on powder kegs already, and receiving the French Queen Mother, seen as an embodiment of the Counter Reformation, really REALLY REALLY did not help), she stll did her best to make her welcome. (Maria de' Medici eventually had to leave because Charles I. could no longer guarantee her personal safety.) This quality explains conversely while the few courtiers who followed her into exile remained loyal to her through thick and thin when there was nothing to gain and everything to lose by staying around her. And she was both a good organizer and full of personal courage, with the most obvious example being her organizing guns and another army for her husband during her first trip to the continent (the Protestant Netherlands being her first call, not yet France) and bringing them with her when making it back to England. Another example are the circumstances of her last pregnancy which resulted from he reunion with husband Charles during that occasion. Henrietta Maria was very aware that if she was captured by the Parliamentarian army, she would make either a powerful hostage or might not survive. So she gave birth at Exeter (to Henriette Anne, aka Minette), heard the army under the command of the Earl of Essex (yes, that one, Frances Howard's first husband) were fastly approaching, left newborn baby Miinette in the care of a lady-in-waiting (as a baby could not make a fast escape ride) and basicaly made her successfull escape (to France, this time) directly after having birth. (That it was necessary, from her pov, is shown by Essex - never one to avoid the chance of showing himself as a jerk towards a woman - having sent a message to her saying he'd happily escort her back to London for the sake of her health as the air was better there.) (Baby Minette would be smuggled out of England by said lady in waiting two years later.)

Now for the criticism: it's basically what makes the book compelling, too, that it is unabashedly partisan in its defense of its titular heroine. More often than not, this works for me, and for example, I don't begrudge de Lisle showing Richelieu mainly in his capacity as feuding with Maria de' Medici, and then her daughters, as this is how he impacted Henrietta Maria's life, and not getting in depth into his policies aside from this. But basically spending only spending a paraphrase of Tallyrand's "worse than a crime, a mistake" re: the punishment of several anti Laud, anti Armenian Puritans by Charles I made me say "hang on...". Showing how bad Catholicis had it in England: fair and important, and often neglected in traditional accounts of the Civil War. Not spending much narrative time on all the genuine issues Parliament had with Charles I., otoh, results in Team Roundheads coming across as mostly motivated by hysteria, which is as unfair as painting Henrietta Maria as The Evil Catholic Queen Planning A Takeover Through Her Weak Husband. And then there's Leanda de Lisle defending one of Henrietta Maria's decisions from her exile years that's most often held against her, to wit, her relentless attempt to convert her youngest son, Henry (once he'd been finally released by Parliament and joined his family in continental exile), to Catholicism, and her basically kicking ihm out when he refused and her oldest son, not really yet Charles II, also told her that converting his brothers to Catholicism was a no go. (Since it fed direclty into the Roundheads narrative of the Stuarts as a bunch of hidden Catholicis anyway and if he, Charles, was ever to make it back to the throne, then as a Protestant.) Leanda de Lisle argues that from Henrietta Maria's pov, becoming a Catholic would have heightened Henry's chances on the mostly Catholic continent, allowing for marriages to rich Catholic princesses, and for Charles (not yet II) to become a Catholic as well would have granted him in adddition to a rich Catholic bride access to in-laws with armies. I don't doubt these reasons were part of her thinking. (Sidenote re: the realism of such a prospect: the French had their own internal Civil War, the Fronde, and once that was done Mazarin - who was like his mentor Richelieu a pragmatist, and had made a deal with Cromwell's Commonwealth - and later a young Louis XIV this early on in his own reign would not have spend the amount of money and men that would have been necessary to put a Catholic Cousin Charles on the throne. Decades later, maybe, but not with the Fronde and the memory of his own nobles fighting against him just a few years ago. As for the Spanish, they also were exhausted by war - with the fellow Catholic French, incidentally - , and contrary to English imagination had no desire to organize another Armada.) But to pressure young Henry - who had seen his father shortly before Charles I.'s execution and had explicitly promised to Charles I he'd stay true to the Church of England and would obey his mother in all things BUT matters of religion - and to react so very badly to his refusal strikes me as being motivated not by any practical concern for his future but by the by then hardcore religious conviction in middle aged Henrietta Maria, the idea that she had to save his soul. She wasn't the teenager ready to refer to her own father as a Protestant (despite his famous "Paris is worth a mass" conversion) anymore, the intervening decades had made her faith one of the few things she could rely on to keep her going. By ascribing practical motives to Henrietta Maria instead of religious ones, I think our author is very aware that current day readers tend to be put off by any kind of religious conversion zeal, and this entire book is meant to defend its subjects and make the readers like her. Which I think would still have been possible while granting Henrietta Maria a few genuine mistakes born out of less than sympathetic to a contemporary of ours but very much part of her era motivation.

(One last note on authorial defensiveness for HM - when quoting the passage from Sophia of Hannover's memoirs where young Sophie, age 12, describes being put off by seeing her aunt for the first time in rl becuase van Dyck made her look so beautiful and here she was, with teeth like cannons out of a fortress and too long arms for too small a figure, Leanda de Lisle is pointing out this is exhausted and traumatized Henrietta Maria mid Civil War and this is cold and heartless. Having read the entire memoirs, Sophie makes fun of her own and her siblings' looks as well, and also she's not writing for publication, she's writing what she recalls of her own impression as a child, and that kind of narrative honesty is what makes her memoirs so vividly entertaining to read.)

All in all: a good biography of its main subject. But if you want a non-royalist perspective on the Civil War, you need to look elsewhere.



Margaret Irwin: Royal Flush: this, on the other hand, is not a new but a very old book, from the 1930s, which kathyh after beta reading my Minette story for Candyhearts told me about. An audio version on Audible was available. It turned out to be a very entertaining historical novel, dated in some parts (not just because research marches on, but so do attitudes), but still a good read, and also full of shades of grey. I'm not sure I'd call it a biographical novel about Henriette Anne/Minette exactly, though her life is certainly the read thread holding it together (it starts with her as a small child in France and ends with her death), because the focus isn't always on her, and by "not always" I mean considerable parts of the novel focus on other characters from their pov. I don't mean that as a crticisim, just not to set up wrong expectations. What I'd call this novel is an ensemble story about the Bourbon and the Stuart family in Minette's life time, with some sections where she's the pov character, or very prominent, and others where she isn't; listening to the book, I thought that the Grande Mademoiselle (Minette's cousin, daughter of Gaston D'Orleans) probably gets as much pov time as Minette, say, and Henrietta Maria and Louis XIV only slightly less, and then Charles II. (Philippe D'Orleans aka Monsieur, Minette's husband, never gets a pov but he is very present in the book, obviously.) Irwin is a very good writer who gives shades of grey to everyone, which also ensures three dimensionality for her characters. And she has fun even with the ones that briefly show up, like Louise, oldest daughter of Elizabeth Stuart the Winter Queen (and another of Minette's cousins), or that tireless schemer Gaston d'Orleans, and brings them all too life. As for Minette herself, it's not quite how I see her, but it's certainly a plausible and sympathetic portrait.

The actress reading the book does a good job, both with the always faintly ironic narrative voice and for the character voices, except for one thing which touches on a pet peeve of mine, and I'm not sure anyone but me would mind, escpecially in an audio format where it's useful to signal which character is from where. But: all the French characters (except Minette) speak in French accents. Given that except for conversations involving Charles II and his brothers, every single character in this novel actually talks in French to each other, I don't see the point. (Except to signal to the listener who is French and who is not, but like I said: letting Minette, who grows up in France and while speaking English does so in a second language way, not have a French accent is inconsistent then.)

But as I said: the whole "accents when no one in rl speaks in English anyway and we just read/hear it because that's the language the book is written in/the film is shot in" is a personal pet peeve, and probably no one else would mind.

candyheartsex has gone live! I received a gift and a treat:

Around the world in 80 Days: A Matter of Propriety, a lovely take on the OT3 from Abigail's pov.

17th Century RPF/ the novel "The King's Touch" by Jude Morgan: The Prince and the Princess' Touch, another lovely combination of three, these ones being Stuart cousins, to wit, future monarchs William and Mary as well as their rebellious cousin Jemmy (aka James Duke of Monmouth), currently spending his exile with them.

Now excuse me while I read the other stories!

Dear Writer of Unsent Letters,

I am very much looking forward to reading your story - and grateful. All the prompts are just suggestions; if you have very different ideas, go for them. Also, I enjoy a broad range from fluff to angst, so whatever suits you best works fine with me.

General DNW: I'm okay with characters who canonically loathe other characters expressing that opinion as a part of the story, but there's a difference between this and character bashing, i.e.: if you always loathed character X, please don't use the story you're writing for me for venting, vent elsewhere.

Canon specific DNW, see below for individual canons.

General Preferences: I'm easy. The format of this exchange seems immensely suitable to exploring feelings and thoughts without having to provide plot to go with them. (Not that I'm against plot if you can use the letter format to provide one.) I like complications and contradictory elements in relationships - affection and resentment intermingled, dislike but also respect, that kind of thing.

On to the fandoms.

( 18th Century Frederician RPF )

( Babylon 5 )

( Alias (TV) )

( 17th Century CE Stuarts RPF )

( Star Trek: Discovery )

One of the many reasons why I'm curious about the tv show Versailles and hope it will show up either in dvd form or on Netflix in my part of the worlds is that the audience favourite is Philippe d'Orleans, aka Monsieur, brother to Louis XIV. This surprised me, to put it mildly, until I realised that a) played by Alexander "Mordred" Vlahos, and b) openly gay male relation of powerful person striving to be with his (male) true love = audience favourite, of course.

The reason why I was at first surprised at first is that Monsieur has had a terrible press, as far as historical novels I've read are concerned, and a not much better one in non-fiction I've read. (The only positive film depiction of him I can recall is as a minor supporting character in Alan Rickman's last movie, A Little Chaos, where there's a lovely little scene between the middle aged royal brothers as played by Alan Rickman as Louis and Stanley Tucci as Philippe.) Not because he was gay, though of course one can never discount homophobia in older sources, but because he was a terrible husband, and that is the context in which I mostly encountered him. When I say "terrible", I don't mean "cheating because arranged marriage and gay", I mean "using his social power over his wives to humiliate them on a regular basis, strip wife I. of all her friends in their household, act incredibly jealous of every man (including her brothers and nephew) who comes near her while simultanously making it clear he despises her and loves only his favourite" and "unable to stand the idea of the children loving either wife I or wife II better, tries to get the kids to hate their mothers at various points".

Wife II was Liselotte von der Pfalz, aka Charlotte Elisabeth of the Palatine, whose thousands of letters to her German relations through the decades of her life at Versailles provide a tremendously entertaining glimpse at the era and the people. Wife I , the first Madame, was Henriette Anne, aka Minette, Charles II.'s favourite sister. I'd read Liselotte's letters before (where Monsieur mellows down somewhat as they grow old together, and the last three years of their marriage are downright harmonious, and also the only ones she later describes as happy), but I hadn't read Minette's, other than what gets quoted in Antonia Fraser's biographies of Charles II. and of Louis XIV. This I've now rectified:

Ruth Norrington (editor): My Dearest Minette: Charles II to the Duchess of Orleans.

Despite the subtitle, it collects all of Minette's stille existing letters as well and isn't a one sided correspondance. Technical notes on the editing: Ruth Norrington provides context not with footnotes but with explaining texts in between letters, which is sometimes very helpful even if you're familiar with the era (like yours truly, though not an expert), and sometimes feels redundant, as when she's essentially just repeating what then gets said in the next letter. She's also unabashedly partisan in her descriptions: both Charles and Minette often get described as "charming" and "delightful", the Chevalier de Lorraine (Philippe's favourite boyfriend) hardly shows up without the moniker "evil". (To be fair, I haven't yet found any one, either in memoirs or letters, who had anything good to say about the Chevalier aside from his looks, and he comes across as both obnoxious and vile, as when he's boasting of having gotten rid of Minette's governess and confessor and being powerful enough to get Philippe to divorce her as welll; not surprisingly, this was when Minette and the English ambassador did their level by lobbying with Louis XIV to get rid of the Chevalier instead.) Occassionally, you wish that Norrington when stating something as fact that's actually still hotly debated would at least indicate with a footnote that hers is not the only interpretation out there, as with the question as to whether or not Charles II. actually meant to convert to Catholicism in the Treaty of Dover. Norrington taking it as granted that Charles meant to and totally would have announced it, too, had Minette not died made me raise my eyebrows in scepticism because given what actually happened (Charles pocketing the money Louis XIV provided him with for that promised conversion but not actually converting & announcing it until he was on his death bed, which is how he technically fulfilled the terms of the Treaty but certainly not the spirit) and given Charles II.'s life long pragmatism and dislike of dogma and clear awareness that the country wouldn't stomach a Catholic monarch ("I'll not go on my travels again"), I very much doubt that had Minette lived, he'd have done anything else than what he did. (I.e always arguing that he'd love to, sure, but the political situation right now won't allow it, in the meantime, how about some more cash?)

Despite her open dislike for Philippe ("a vainglourious narcisisst and bully"), Norrington actually provides a more interesting interpretation for his jealousy re: Minette than I've seen so far, which makes it about more than ego, by pointing out that Philippe's relationship with his brother was other than the one with the Chevalier the central one in his life, and both the supposed Louis/Minette affair early on (whether or not they actually had sex or just engaged in an intense flirtation, it was serious and public enough to make both their mothers remonstrate with them) and the fact that Louis took Minette later seriously as a politician in a way he never did Philppe (who wasn't privy to the secret negotiations between Louis, Minette and Charles about the Treaty of Dover, presumably because he wasn't trusted to keep it secret) were interfering with that relationship. Hence Phiippe retaliating by using his status as Minette's husband to delay her journey to England as much as he could, then forbid her to stay longer than three days etc.

Another technical observation: as Norrington says, most of Charles' letters are written in English, not least because he wanted Minette, who'd lived in France since she was two years old, to practise the language, while all of Minette's letters but one were written in French and thus are translated in the present volume, and come across as a bit more formal due to this fact. The one exception is a letter not directed at Charles but at Sir Thomas Clifford, written just a few days before her death, and its conclusion gets across what people, not just Norrington, mean when they talk about Minette's charm:

This is the ferste letter I Have ever write in english. you will eselay see it bi the stile and tograf. prai see in the same time that i expose mi self to be thought a foulle in looking to make you know how much I am your frind.

re: the correspondance in general in terms of content, even given the more emotional language of the time, it's very affectionate on both parts, with the siblings clearly adoring each other, which doesn't mean they always agree. Minette doesn't hesitate to chide her older brother when she thinks he's in the wrong, as when he made his mistress, Barbara Palmer, Lady Castlemain, a lady of the bedchamber to his wife Catherine of Braganza over the later's understandable anger and hurt:

But to speak seriously, I beg you to tell me how the Queen has taken this. Here people say that she is in the deepest distress and to speak frankly I think she has only too good reason for her grief.

(After this, Charles made a point of mentioning spending time with his wife in his letters to Minette, though he's a bit defensive on the subject of his mistresses: If you were as well acquainted with a little fantastical gentleman called Cupide as I am, you would neither wonder, nor take ill, any sudden changes which do happen in the affaires of his conducting.) They also confide some pretty intimate details to each other; in a sadly lost letter Minette seems to have told Charles that on her wedding night she had her period and hence there was no sex until a few nights later (and then it wasn't , because he references both when telling her that Catherine, too, had had her period on their wedding night:

"(A)and though I am not as furious as Monsieur was but I am content to let those pass over before I go to bed to my wife, yet I hope I shall entertain her at least better the first night than he did you.

The letters are usually a mixture of family and friends gossip, state affairs - Charles talked politicis to Minette long before the Treaty of Dover was in anyone's min; he basically treated her as the inofficial English ambassador to France, which was a good thing because his first two official ambassadors were lousy at the job - and the occasional interesting oddity, like the meteor which fascinated Charles. He more often than not ends his letters by remarking he's off to the theatre. His irreverent sense of humor also often comes through, as in this reply to Minette's swearing that her newborn daughter resembles her uncle:

I hope it is but a compliment to me, when you say my niece is so like me, for I never thought my face as even so much as intended for a beauty.

("Oddsfish", he famously said on another occasion, "I am an ugly fellow." You wouldn't have caught Louis XIV. allowing anyone to think that.)

As for religion: "I am of those bigotts," writes Charles to Minette, "who thinke that malice is a much greater sinn than a poor frailety of nature." Minette, otoh, was a passionate Catholic, with one of her main childhood memories being when her mother, Henrietta Maria, threw out her brother Henry (who was to die young, not long after Charles was crowned) for not converting. But she doesn't talk dogma often in her letters (even the Treaty of Dover letters are mainly concerned with possible political percussions of Charles converting).

An interlude with contemporary resonances comes when early in the Dutch-English war Minette to her horror hears about French sailors getting tortured by the crew of an English frigate (France at this point was peripherally involved in the war, though with opposite alliances to those it would have later): It is also reported that your people have made some Frenchmen prisoners, and tortured them cruelly, to make them confess they were going to Holland, but I maintain that this cannot be true, or at least that it is done without your approval, and that so generous a soul as yours would never allow such treatment of your enemies, far less of Frenchmen who are your friends. Write me word, I beg, of what has happened and whether, if this is true, you have taken care it should not happen again, since nothing is more worthy of you than to use your power to make yourself at once beloved and feared, and to provent all the horrors which too often accompany war.

Sadly, Charles found the story to be true, but promised Minette the perpetrators would be punished: "I do assure you I am extreamly troubled at it, there shall be very seveare justice done."

Having read the biography of Charles' oldest illegitimate son, James, the Duke of Monmouth, recently, I was struck by how many loving (and funny) references to him there are in the letters (he visited Versailles repeatedly, which Monsieur took offense to; one of his conditions for finally letting Minette visit England was that she was not to meet Monmouth on that occasion, which Charles promptly ignored). He's invariably referenced as "James", which made me wonder what they called his uncle James, the Duke of York, when talking about him, other than "brother", which is the designation from the letters. Anyway, some typical Monmouth references: "Your kindnesse to him obliges me as much as tis possible, for I do confesse I love him very well", "I (...) only desire you to have the same goodnesse for James you had the last time, and to chide him soundly when he does not that he should do. He intendes to put on a perriwig againe, when he comes to Paris, but I beleeve you will thinke him better farr, as I do, with his short haire, and so I am intierly yours".

The letters Charles sent by way of his son are also more detailed than the ones by courtier couriers (which could presumably be intercepted). When Minette's marriage goes from bad to worse, the siblings at first alludes to it only indirectly and discreetly, but then there's one letter which discusses it in detail:

I take the occasion of this bearer to say some thinges t you which I would not send by the post, and to tell you that I am ver glad that Monsieur beings to be ashamed of his ridiculous fancyes; you ought undoutedly to oversee what is past, so that, for the future, he will leave being of those fantasticall humours, and I thinke the less eclairecissement there is upon such kind of matters, the better for his friend the Chevalier. I thinke you have taken a very good resolution not to live so with him, but that, when there offers a good occasion, you may ease your selfe of such a rival, and by the character I have of him, there is hopes he will find out the occasion himselfe, which, for Monsieur's sake, I wish may be quickly.

That turned out to be wishful thinking on both Charles' and Minette's part. Instead, it was the Chevalier who got rid of Minette's allies in the Orleans household. Because the correspondance between Charles and Minette from the last year of her life is not preserved, it's paradoxically a good thing the Chevalier caused the governess of Minette's children to be replaced, because Minette then kept up a correspondance with her old governess and confidant, Madame de Saint-Chaumont, and Ruth Norrington includes these letters near the end of her book. At this point, the English ambassador (not one of the two incompetent ones mentioned earlier, but the first good one, Montagu), had already written an alarmed letter to Charles about how bad things truly were, Charles had remonstrated with Louis, and the Chevalier finally overreached himself when Philippe asked for the income from two abbeys being given to him, which Louis refused to do, which caused the Chevalier to speak out against the King. Cue banishment to Italy, for which Philippe blamed Minette, at first refusing to let her travel to England at all, hoping to blackmail both Kings into letting the Chevalier return. Writes Minette to her governess:

The King has worked hard to bring him to reason, but all in vain, for his only object in treatin gme so ill is to force me to ask favours for the CHevalier, and I am determined not to give in to blows. This state of things does not admit of any reconciliation, and Monsieur now refuses to come near me, and hardly ever speaks to me, which, in all the quarrels we hae had, has never happened before. But the gift of some traditional revenues from the King has now osftened his anger a little, and I hope that by Easter, all may yet be well. (...)

Fat chance. For:

I have indeed wished to see the King my brother, but there has been no question of the Chevalier's return in all Monsieurs opposition to my journey. Only he still declares he cannot love me, unless his favourite is allowed to form a third in our union. Since then, I have made him understand that, however much I might desire the Chevalier's return, it would be impossible to obtain it, and he has given up the idea, but, by making a noise about my journey to England, he hopes to show that he is master, and can treat me as ill in the Chevalier's absence as in his presence. This being his policy, he began to speak openly of our quarrels, refused to enter my room, and pretended to show that he could revenge himself for having been left in ignorance of these affairs, and make me suffer for what he calls the faults of the two Kings.

Charles tried to help by offering to give the Chevalier an honored place at his court in England, but again, no such luck. (Otoh he refused to invite Philippe himself along with Minette, using the excuse of protocol - the King of France's brother couldn't visit England without the King of England's brother visiting France, and since his brother the Duke of York was absolutely needed elsewhere. Writes Minette to her friend the governess:

This refusal has renewed Monsieur's irritation. He complains that all the honour will be mine, and consents to my journey with a very bad grace. At present, his chief friends are M. de Marsan, the Marquis de Villeroy and the Chevalier de Beuvron. The Marquis d'Effiat is the only one of the troop who is perhaps a little less of a rogue, but he is not clever enough to manage Monsieur, and the three others do all they can to make me miserable until the Chevalier returns. Although Monsieur is somewhat softened, he still tells me there is only one way in which I can show my love for him. Such a remedy, you know, would be followed by certain death!

This line took on an entire new meaning when after her return from England Minette died after drinking some chicory water. She believed herself poisoned; Philippe said if that was what she suspected, they should give some of the water to the dog to test it (in one version of the story, he also offered to drink himself), and today historians largely think Minette died of natural causes, but either way, she died in horrible agony which lasted for hours. She had asked for the banished (thanks to the Chevalier) Bossuet to give her the last rights, and he was sent for, but before he arrived, the bigoted M. Feuillet even added spiritual agony to the physical one. When she cried out "My God, will not these fearful pains be over soon", he said "What, Madame, you are forgetting yourself; you have offended God twenty-six years, and your penitence has but lasted six hours; rather say with St. Augustine, cut, tear, destroy, let my heart ache, let all my limbs thrill with anguish, let dung flow in the marrow of my bones, let worms revel in my breast!"

Minette even in this state still had the gift of irony she shared with her brother Charles, and replied: "Yes, sir, I hope so; in case God were to restore me to health, and I were so wretched as not to practise them, I entreat you to remind me of them."

When the English ambassador asked her, in English, whether she had been poisoned, Feuillet interrupted and warned her not to think of recriminations but the plight of her soul. Minette told the ambassador: "If this is true you must never let the King, my brother, know of it. Spare him the grief at all events and do not let him take revenge on the King here for he is at least not guilty."

"The King here", Louis, later told the second Madame, Liselotte, that Minette had been poisoned but not by his brother, otherwise he'd never have let Philippe marry again. Otoh he also ordered an autopsy of Minette's corpse, where the doctors found no traces of poison. Charles when the news reached him had no doubt she was poisoned. He cried out "Monsieur is a villain! at the unfortunate messenger", retreated in his bedchamber and didn't leave for five days. All in all, it had taken Minette eight hours to die, and only at the end when Bossuet had arrived and replaced the odious Feuillet was she comforted. To read about it makes for a harrowing ending to what is mostly a very endearing book about a brother-sister relationship.

Two biographies of people on the different ends of the social scale, a century apart.

The Fortunes of Francis Barber by Michael Bundock deals with one of the few black inhabitants of Georgian London we know something about: Francis Barber. The reason why we know about Francis is in the subtitle: "The true story of the Jamaican slave who became Samuel Johnson's heir". Francis Barber started life on a Jamaica plantation as the property of his maybe biological father, Colonel Bathurst, who took him with him when the plantation ran into financial trouble and Bathurst returned (or came, he was actually born on Jamaica) to England to die. (Which he did a few years later, Francis was officially freed in his will.) The child Francis, who in Jamaica wasn't called Francis yet but had the generic slave name Quashey, was then baptized and, at the instigation of Colonel Bathurst's son Dr. Bathurst, who was anti slavery, given to Dr. Samuel Johnson (recently widowed, in the throws of very deep depression and in need of cheering up) as a servant. And thus began an association that lasted for the rest of Johnson's life; Johnson being one of the most famous men in England, it meant that Francis Barber shows up in a lot of people's memoirs and letters as well. Becoming Johnson's main heir also meant he was involved in a very nasty inheritance struggle, since several white friends thought they'd have been far more deserving. He did get his inheritance, and a novelist would end the story here, with Francis, his wife and children moving to Johnson's hometown Lichfield to start a new life, with Francis becoming England's first black school master. But real life unfortunately allowed for no happy ending. The school wasn't a success, the money was gone, and Francis was dependent on help from old time friends like my guy Boswell when he died in poverty.

Michael Bundock has the problem familiar to biographers of servants, that very few first hand source material is available; a very few letters of Francis survive, and he also told Boswell about his life when Boswell was researching his biography of Johnson; Boswell's notes are the best we have on Francis' own view of his life, which was a bit different from how Johnson saw it, and much different from the view anti-Francis folk from Johnson's circle like John Hawkins or Hester Thrale took. (Hawkins, who published the very first Johnson biography two years before Boswell finished his, concludes it with a five page rant on how much he hates Francis Barber, and that includes some racist stuff on how Francis' white wife was a) disgusting for having married him in the first place, and b) how she surely cheats on him, since their kids are light skinned.) With these obstacles in mind, it's not surprising that the book at times is less of a classic biography and more an analysis of the story of slavery in Britain during Francis' life time, the general situation of free black people there, etc. I don't mean this as a criticism: all of it is tremendously interesting to read. (And often both chilling and infuriating, as in the opening chapters describing the situation in Jamaica during Francis' early childhood; Bundock quotes from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, who started out as the overseer of a large sugar estate and then became the owner of a smallholding, noting down the floggings of both male and female slaves and the constant sexual abuse of female ones just as matter of factly as the details of the weather or the books he read.) Just that Francis himself, as a person, remains more a sketch than a portrait. He and Dr. Johnson developed what was very much a father-son relationship, but that doesn't mean Francis always agreed with what Johnson (who was very much anti slavery, but also very much the type To Know Best What's Good For You) had in mind for him, not to mention that if you're a teenager in a house where all the other residents are over 50 and prone to be either depressed or argumentative, you could be forgiven for wanting to leave, which is what Francis did for a while, first working for an apothecary and then joining the navy, before returning to Johnson. He also was social and independently minded enough to find his own circle of friends (there's a letter excerpt from a visitor's at Johnson's who describes Francis sitting with some "of his fellow Africans", "their sooty faces all looking up" when the man entered, for example), not just relying on Johnson's, and, as Hester Thrale, who diidn't like him, grudgingly admitted "not bad looking for a blackamoor". But all too often, there's a limit on what a biographer can speculate if there is no first hand testimony. How did Francis and his later wife Elizabeth Ball meet, for example? What was their relationship really like? Thrale and Hawkins accuse him simultanously of being jealous (Mrs. Thrale makes the obvious allusion when calling his wife "his Desdemona") and of being stupid for thinking his wife's children were his; otoh, Dr. Johnson fully accepted Elizabeth as a sort of daughter in law, gave her his dead wife's Common Prayer book (it survives, and has inscriptions by both), and the couple remained with each other through thick and thin, so you can make educated guesses, but you can't know for sure because there are no letters surviving to each other.

Similarly, we can make educated guesses what Francis thought of the big trials involving slaves seeking their freedom that took place in London while he was there, like the Somerset case, but we simply don't know (as opposed to knowing what Johnson thought). And so forth. One wishes for a novel, because a novelist, not bound to what can be proven, could fill in Francis' thoughts and feelings.

Like many a biography, this one also works a an analysis of biographies and how narrative bias works. To quote from a passage dealing with quotes.

In her "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson" (1786), (Hester Thrale) recounted that when Johnson's cat Hodge had grown old,

Mr. Johnson always went out himself to buy Hodge's dinner, that Francis the Black's delicacy might not be hurt, as seeing himself employed for the convencience of a quadruped.

The story is intended to be comical in its use of the pseudo-Johnsonian vocabulary "The convenience of a quadruped." It is also intended to show Johnson in a good light, willing to stoop to menial tasks rather than give offence to his employee. On both these accounts, it succeeds. But is is impossible to miss the sneer at Barber in the phrase "that Francis the black's delicacy might not be hurt" - there is clearly an implication that he is getting above himself. There were other servants in the household (as (Hester Thrale) knew), so Barber was not the only one to benefit from Johnson's action, but he alone is the object of Mrs. Thrale's jibe. It is not just any servant who is giving himself airs; it is a particular black servant. Boswell's version of the same story, published in his "Life of Johnson", provides a revealing contrast:

I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having the trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.

In this account the dig at Barber does not appear, and Johnson's actions are for the benefit of all the servants, not just Barber.

(Boswell in general fares well in this book, which you wouldn't think given that Boswell, as opposed to Johnson, was pro slavery and the subject is a former slave. But Boswell truly liked Francis Barber, and Michael Bundock makes a good case that he did so in a non-patronising manner, writing to and about Barber not different than to his white friends, and was there for him when Barber fell on hard times.)

All in all, I found the book very much worth reading, and the frustrations I have are not the author's fault, but that of the source material availability.

The Last Royal Rebel by Anna Keay, subtitle, "The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth", has no such source material difficulties. Her main character has had a lot of bad press in his time (unsuccessfully rebelling with the victor writing your story will do that), but not only is he prominent in a lot of people's letters, memoirs, etc., but we have his own letters as well, and plenty accounts from both friends and enemies to provide a three dimensional picture. Our hero is the oldest and favourite illegitimate son of Charles II., and while I've read a novel about him which I've reviewed here and of course came across numerous references in biographies of other people, notably his father, but this is the first non-fictional biography about Monmouth himself I've read.

First of all, I was surprised that some of what I had assumed novelist Jude Morgan to have invented in his novel was actually historical fact, such as Monmouth's closeness to his aunt (though only five years older than him), Charles II.' favourite sister Henriette Anne (Minette), and how much her husband, Philippe d'Orleans (Monsieur, famously homosexual but no less petty and authoritarian with his wife for that) resented it. Also, the central father-son relationship between Charles and Monmouth comes across as very similar in both novel and biography, with biographer Anna Keay making a good case against the depiction of Monmouth as an empty headed greedy idiot prone to be used by every opposition politician, or, alternatively, wanting the crown from the start (both of which his enemies said about him), and for the disastrous fallout between father and son being as much Charles' fault as Monmouth's. Even the unofficial reconciliation between them near the end of Charles' life, and Charles' intentions of calling his son back from exile, is actually backed up with chapter and verse, and I thought Morgan the novelist had made that one up for sure so the central relationship doesn't end on a bad note.

Otoh Keay the biographer is harsher on the younger Monmouth than Morgan the novelist while being more admiring of the older. Mind you, she's not condemning; but she does provide the numbers of how much money young James spends on clothing alone, and that's just part of the inevitable result of giving a teenager after a somewhat poor childhood unrestricted access to every worldly indulgence at a court that made all the preceding ones seem tame by comparision in licenteousness. For Keay, the key shift that turned Monmouth from young Restoration rake to responsible human being happens at age 22 when he's part of the French-Dutch war and experiences the realities of battle after knowing just the fun of dressing up as a soldier. What's remarkable then isn't that he turns out to be capable of physical bravery but that ever subsequently, he shows caring about his men (keeping pushing for them to get paid, the lack of paying of soldiers being all too common vice of the era, and lobbying with his father for hospitals for veterans being built), and also distaste for needless death (when he had the job of crushing a Scottish rebellion and found part of the army continued killing even after the battle had ended, he put an end to it and when word came from London that there shouldn't have been any prisoners, he wrote back that killing prisoners was what butchers did, not soldiers, and he wouldn't).

She also makes a good case for Monmouth not seeking the crown for himself until late in the game (i.e. after his father had died), arguing his support from and friendship with his cousins William of Orange and Mary depended on that, as they were in fact the legitimate Protestant claimants (and would turn out to claim the throne from Mary's father, James II., contender for the "most disastrous Stuart king ever" title despite such rivals as Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I., after Monmouth's death). What's truly appalling to read is the account of Monmouth's death and the aftermath. His followers were butchered in the "Bloody Assisses" (meaning they got the full hanged, drawn and quartered treatment), and while Monmouth himself was beheaded, the executioner bungled the job badly, resorting after five ineffective strokes with the axe and a still twitching Monmouth to hacking off the head with a knife, and when he finally held it up, no one cheered but many cried.

Charles II. was generally fond of his illegitimate children (and provided for them, which wasn't self evident), and Keay's speculation as to why the relationship with Monmouth was extra intense rings plausible: she points out all the others had living mothers who fought and sometimes schemed for them, but Monmouth didn't, and even when his mother HAD been alive, Charles, who'd been 18 when this first child was born, had tried to kidnap him from her, not once but three times (the last time successful), meaning Charles really was everything to this particular son, and the jealousy this inspired would contribute to dooming him in the end. It's a compelling and tragic story to read, and it's hard to disagree with the physician James Welwood, who wrote to Mary of Orange about her cousin:

"Monmouth seem'd to be born for a better Fate; for the first part of his life was all Sunshine, though the rest was clouded. He was Brave, Generous, Affable, and extremely Handsome: Constant in his Friendships, just to His Word, and an utter enemy to all sorts of Cruelty. He was easy in his Nature, and fond of popular Applause which led him insensibly into all his Misfortunes; But wherever might be the hidden Designs of some working Heads he embark'd with, his own were noble, and chiefly aim'd at the Good of his Country."

Back in Munich, right in time to catch the end of the Munich Film Festival. The film I saw was Stage Beauty, which I'm aware is familiar with the English speaking since quite a while, but it hasn't been shown in Germany yet. I loved it.

To get the obvious comparison out of the way, what this has in common with Shakespeare in Love is that neither cares about factual accuracy very much, but one doesn't mind because of the cleverness and vitality, and because something quintessential about the theatre at the time is captured. Otherwise, the films are as different as an Elizabethan romp and a cynical, witty Restoration play would be.

( On with the show... )

***

Alias rec: kangeiko wrote a tasty Irina/Jack/Sloane threesome, Irina pov, set post season 4. Now I must just go and bother monanotlisa and andrastewhite some more...