The Favourite: Was Queen Anne a Lesbian?

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18th Century England, 18th Century Europe, Abigail Masham, Early Modern Europe, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Kings and Queens, Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos

 A key plot point of The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) is that Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is in a secret lesbian relationship with Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz). When Abigail (Emma Stone) discovers this, she sets out to replace Sarah in Anne’s bed as well as her confidences. When Sarah discovers that she’s been replaced, she blackmails Anne by threating to publish Anne’s letters which would reveal their intimacies. The film is pretty explicit, presenting sex scenes and showing Abigail naked in Anne’s bed. So how true is this? Was Anne a lesbian?

 

“Spoiler” Alert: Since the film is still in the theaters, you may wish to see the film before you read this review, since I do discuss key details of the film. However, if you know anything about Anne and Sarah Churchill, there’s not really anything to spoil. There are no unexpected plot twists, so you can probably just keep reading.

First, as I’ve mentioned before, analyzing the sexuality of historical figures can be difficult. The modern language of homosexual/bisexual/heterosexual didn’t exist until the later 19^thcentury, and the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ didn’t exist either. The word ‘lesbian’ wouldn’t acquire its modern usage until that time. (Prior to then, it just meant someone from the island of Lesbos.) However, for the purpose of this post, I’m going to refer to female same-sex desires and sexuality activity as “lesbianism”, simply because it’s the term we tend to use nowadays. Note that the term as I am using it here doesn’t refer purely to women who felt desire exclusively for other women. All the women we’re going to discuss here were married and had multiple children, and so may have been bisexual as much as lesbian in modern terms.

In the 17^thand 18^thcenturies it was understood that some people did have sex with members of their own sex, but this was seen more as an immoral activity than an innate difference in their sexuality. In this period, male homosexuality was generally scorned. Female homosexuality was less acknowledged, in part because in the absence of a penis, it was less clear that what two women did in bed together was actually sex. (Indeed, there is evidence that some 19^thcentury lesbians may not have recognized their own intimate relationships as sexual even when they seem to us to be having sex. If one thinks of sex purely as involving penetration with a penis, a kiss between two women is not sex, regardless of where that kiss might be planted.)

That said, the 17^th century had a good deal of room for what we would see as homosexuality and bisexuality among both aristocratic men and women. Anne’s grandfather James I was known to have had many male favorites (although there is no clear evidence he had sex with any of them), and her brother-in-law William III was rumored to have developed a taste for men after his wife’s death (although again, there’s no solid proof he ever did anything). There was a strong culture of female ‘Romantic Friendship’ in the Stuart period, in which women were encouraged and expected to express their feelings for female friends in terms comparable to those expected between a heterosexual couple. The culture of Romantic Friendship particularly flourished in the period after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660.

Some scholars, especially LGBT scholars, have explored the extent to which Romantic Friendship may have expressed or served as cover for actual lesbian relationships. There was court gossip about ladies-in-waiting having affairs with each other. While this was immoral by the standards of the day, it wasn’t illegal (whereas male homosexuality was), and because it posed no threat to a man’s control of his wife’s reproduction, it was mostly permitted.

If this interests you, you might check out Heather Rose Jones’s Lesbian Historic Motif podcast. Jones is a historical fiction author who has done a good deal of writing exploring the lesbian text and subtext of late Stuart literature and devotes a whole episode of her podcast to the question of Anne’s sexuality, where she digs into the context more deeply than I do here. (She takes a much more favorable view of Sarah Churchill than I do, tending to accept Sarah’s characterization of Abigail Hill as a schemer and viewing Anne as vulnerable to the manipulations of others.)

 

Anne’s Marriage

The starting point for any discussion of Anne’s sexuality has to be her marriage, because it provides our only solid evidence for Anne’s sexual activity. Anne married her cousin Prince George of Denmark in 1683, when she was 18 years old. The marriage was arranged a few years earlier for diplomatic reasons, so Anne had no real choice as to her husband.

Queen Anne

The marriage lasted down until George’s death from respiratory problems in 1708. By most measures, it was a happy marriage. Anne and George got along quite well, and spent the majority of their marriage living together, which was definitely not a requirement of marriages at the time. George was not a particularly ambitious man and seems to have been quite clear that he was the junior partner in the marriage, especially after Anne became queen. During her reign, he only ever attempted to strongly influence her once, when he sought to persuade her that she had to accept the removal of one of her trusted ministers. To judge by the frequency with which Anne got pregnant (three times in one year at one point), they appear to have had a very healthy sex life, and Anne was deeply distressed when George died. Soon after his death, Sarah ordered his portrait removed from Anne’s bedroom, on the theory that seeing the portrait would increase Anne’s distress, but Anne was very upset by the action and found Sarah to be cruel.

The one way in which the couple were not happy was in the area of child-bearing. In this arena, the couple suffered profound tragedy. For a woman in her position, having a child was a vital consideration, and on top of that Anne seems to have had very intense maternal instincts. But her health was poor most of her life (indeed, she was essentially an invalid her entire reign), and bringing a healthy child to term was extremely difficult for her.

She got pregnant very soon after her marriage and between then and 1700, she had at least 17 pregnancies. (I say “at least” because she also had either two or three false pregnancies. There is some uncertainty about the outcome of the first of those potential false pregnancies.) Of those 17 definite pregnancies, 7 ended in miscarriages, 5 ended in stillbirths, and 5 ended in live births. Of the five live births, two lived for less than two hours. Her daughter Mary was born in June of 1685 and her daughter Anna Sophia was born in May of 1686. Both died in February of 1687 from smallpox.

Only William, born in 1689, made it out of infancy. But he was always a sickly child. He suffered from convulsions and hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”) and experienced developmental problems; he didn’t walk until he was three and wasn’t really speaking until he was five. But in 1700 he fell ill on his eleventh birthday with what was variously diagnosed as smallpox or scarlet fever and died six days later. Anne had suffered a stillbirth earlier the same year, and so she and George hoped that she might still produce a child, but that stillbirth was her last known pregnancy.

Prince George of Denmark

Anne’s tragedy, then, was that despite being able to get pregnant quite easily and being desirous to have children, her own medical conditions apparently made it very difficult for her bring a healthy child to term. The loss of so many children was unusual, even by the standards of her day in which high rates of child mortality were common. Her mother Anne Hyde had 8 children, three of whom lived less than a year and three more of whom died before the age of five. Her older sister Mary suffered between one and four miscarriages and never had a sustained pregnancy. So the Stuarts were familiar with this sort of domestic tragedy, but not on the same scale.

If all we had to go on was the available facts of her marriage, no one would suspect that Anne was anything other than a heterosexual woman with a healthy libido and a close relationship with her husband for 25 years. So where do these suspicions of lesbianism come from?

 

Sarah Churchill

Anne seems to have had a strong need for a female presence in her life. Between age 4 and age 6 ½, she lost her grandmother, her aunt, and her mother, and this may have contributed to a desire for an intimate relationship with a woman. She seems to have been close to her older sister Mary, but when Anne was 12, Mary left to get married to William of Orange and the two did not see each other much until Mary returned as queen in 1685, eight years later. Anne loathed her Catholic step-mother Mary of Modena and in 1688 actively spread rumors that her step-mother was faking a pregnancy. So Anne’s need for a female relationship could not be met within her family circle.

It’s also clear that there was some concern that Anne felt deep attachment to the women around her. When she was a girl, Anne’s father James became worried that Mary Cornwallis, one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, exercised too much influence over her and dismissed her. Her uncle Charles II is once reported to have said that “no man ever loved his mistress as [my] niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis.”

Anne’s relationship with Sarah Churchill provided her with a female authority figure she could be close to. They met in 1671, when Anne was six and Sarah was eleven. Anne was a shy, quiet girl who grew into a shy, quiet woman, while Sarah was a witty, vivacious, confident girl who grew into an increasingly over-confident and arrogant woman. Anne may have been attracted to Sarah’s outgoing nature as the opposite of her own.

Sarah Churchill. Note the key on her hip–that’s the symbol for her office as Mistress of the Privy Purse

For most of the remainder of Anne’s life, the two regularly exchanged letters that reflect an intense degree of feeling. One of Anne’s letters, from 1683, says “lett me beg you not to call me your highness but be as free with me as one friend ought to be with another & you can never give me any greater proofe of your frieindship then in telling me your mind freely in all things.” (quoted in Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 81; all spelling is original) Sometime in the next 6-7 years, the two of them agreed to pet names for each other: Anne was Mrs Morley and Sarah was Mrs Freeman. This is not as strange as it sounds. Anne did something similar with another young female friend, and it was not uncommon in this era for people to use ‘cant’ names in correspondence as a way to be discreet. In Abigail’s surviving correspondence, Anne is her “aunte Pye”.

Anne’s surviving letters are full of expressions of how deeply she loves Sarah. Phrases like “dear Mrs Freeman” and “your poor unfortunate faithful Morly” recur over and over in Anne’s writing. When Sarah and her husband talked of returning to their estates not long after Anne’s coronation, Anne wrote, ‘The thoughts that both my dear Mrs Freeman & Mr Freeman seems to have of retyering [retyring] gives me no small uneasiness…if ever you should forsake me, I would have nother more to do with the world, but make another abdication…I never will forsake your dear self, Mr. Freeman…but allways be your constant faithfull servant…” (quoted in Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 171).

Although contemporaries commented on how close they were and how much they loved each other, they weren’t so close that Sarah didn’t spent a great deal of time away from court. In her letters, Anne frequently complains of Sarah’s absence and asks her to come back to court. The Favouritedepicts Sarah as almost entirely living at Anne’s (unspecified) palace, but this is definitely untrue.

But there are two things missing from the picture provided by the correspondence. One is Sarah’s half of the correspondence. Anne, following Sarah’s request, burned most of Sarah’s letters after reading them. So we can’t easily gauge whether Sarah’s letters included such fervent statements of devotion or whether the relationship was more about Anne adoring Sarah because Anne needed someone to devote herself to. It seems clear that Sarah must have returned Anne’s devotion to some extent; Anne was neither blind nor stupid. But whether Sarah reciprocated Anne’s emotional outpourings the way a romantic partner might is just not clear.

George and Anne

The other thing that’s missing is anything overtly sexual in these letters. Anne clearly loved Sarah deeply, but there’s no indication in the letters that she loved Sarah carnally. She desired Sarah’s presence and attention, but there’s no evidence that she desired Sarah’s body.

Starting in the 1980s, LGBT scholars and amateur historians became interested in “queering the past”. Queering, simply stated, involves looking at an historical person and asking if there is any evidence that person was homosexual. Queering attempts to reclaim a lost LGBT past by reading historical evidence the way LGBT people have often learned to read each other’s small clues of body language, clothing, grooming, and speech. It’s sort of an exercise in ‘historical gaydar’. Because LGBT people generally have to learn to read each other’s subtext to find each other, the idea is that LGBT scholars can spot evidence of same-sex desires in the writings and activities of historical figures.

So while at first glance Anne’s letters seem completely non-sexual, some people have detected veiled sexual desire in words like “passion” and “inclination”. Personally, while I’m very sympathetic to the project of reclaiming the LGBT past, in Anne’s case, I don’t see it, and most other scholars don’t see it either. Anne doesn’t make much reference to Sarah’s appearance or body, she doesn’t mention any desire to touch or hold Sarah, she doesn’t resort to sexually-suggestive metaphors. She just says she loves Sarah, misses her, is devoted to her. This seems to be the language of friendship, not sexual desire.

If all we had to go on was Anne’s letters, there is no reason to think that this relationship was anything other than the sort of typical emotionally intimate relationship 17^thand 18^thcentury women were encouraged to have with each other. So where do these suspicions of lesbianism come from?

 

Enter Abigail

Abigail Hill entered Anne’s service probably in 1697 or so, when Anne determined that one of her “women of the bedchamber” was becoming too old to perform her duties. The women of the bedchamber performed tasks such as helping the queen bathe and dress (but not menial tasks such as scrubbing floors or doing laundry). By 1705, Abigail had some degree of influence with the queen, who agreed to grant her brother a military commission.

In 1706, George’s groom Samuel Masham came back to court after an absence and evidently began romancing Abigail. A year later, the queen arranged to assign Masham command of a regiment that was normally stationed in Ireland while allowing him to remain at court. This was probably done because Samuel and Abigail were courting, since sometime between April and June of that year, the two of them married at Kensington Palace at a moment when Anne was residing there. Anne seems to have given Abigail a rather handsome dowry of £2,000.

This portrait may or may not represent Abigail Masham

All of this was kept secret from Sarah, who only found out later that year when she noticed the queen’s withdrawal of the money from the account books (which Sarah, as Mistress of the Privy Purse, was responsible for). The queen realized that Sarah would take this poorly, and indeed she did, leaping immediately to the unwarranted conclusion that Abigail was now Anne’s favorite. Sarah retained that conviction for the rest of her life, even though it appears to have been untrue. Anne appears to always regarded Abigail as a servant, albeit one she was fond of. For example, Abigail seems to have had very little real influence with Anne in the realm politics; her cousin Edward Harley, who was one of Anne’s most relied- upon ministers, once remarked that while Abigail might be able to pull someone down in Anne’s sight, she did not have enough influence to build someone up. Her main contribution to the politics of her age was to act as a messenger and information conduit between Anne and Harley.

Anne and Sarah’s friendship had already been strained for several years at this point, but Sarah’s paranoia about Abigail caused things to rapidly deteriorate. She stopped residing at Kensington Palace, much to Anne’s dismay. But a year later, when she discovered that Abigail had been permitted to move into some of her rooms in the palace, she furiously paid a visit to court. She brought with her two poems that were currently circulating in London. One was an attack on Abigail’s influence with Harley. The other was about Abigail’s relationship with Anne. Here are four of the 35 verses (set to the tune of “Fair Rosamund,” a ballad about Henry II’s mistress):

 

When as Queen Anne of great Renown

Great Britain’s scepter sway’d,

Beside the Church, she dearly lov’d

A Dirty Chamber-Maid

 

O! Abigail that was her name,

She stich’d and starch’d full well,

But how she pierc’d this Royal Heart

No Mortal Man can tell.

 

However, for sweet Service done

And Causes of great Weight,

Her Royal Mistress made her, Oh!

A Minister of State.

 

Her Secretary she was not

Because she could not write

But had the Conduct and the Care

Of some dark Deeds at Night.

(quoted in Gregg, Queen Anne, p.275)

 

As if that weren’t enough of a hint, Sarah sent a letter to the Anne telling her about the existence of the poem and explaining the point of the song.

“…I remember you said att the same time of all things in this world, you valued most your reputation, which I confess surpris’d me very much, that your Majesty should so soon mention that word after having discover’d so great a passion for such a woman, for sure there can bee noe great reputation in a thing so strange & unaccountable, to say noe more of it, nor can I think the having noe inclenation for any but of one’s own sex is enough to maintain such a character as I wish may still be yours.” (quoted in Gregg,Queen Anne, p.275-6)

While neither the poem nor the letter explicitly says it, the implication is obvious–there are rumors that Anne is having sex with Abigail. This is the first solid evidence that anyone thought Anne was sexually interested in women.

Another anonymous pamphlet of the period depicts Abigail Masham having a fictional conversation with Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s one-time mistress and now wife. In it, Abigail admits that she was suspected of having too-great an attachment to women, which caused her to find a husband to cover her sexual activities. The pamphlet doesn’t say she was having sex with the queen however. It leaves the identity of her lovers up to the reader’s imagination.

The fact that there was a poem and a pamphlet circulating in London gossiping about Anne’s and Abigail’s sexuality suggests at first glance that there must have been serious talk about that relationship. But there is more going on than it looks on the surface. Although it’s not proven, it’s usually thought that these poems and the pamphlet were written by Arthur Maynwaring, a hardcore Whig member of Parliament. He was also an author who specialized in scurrilous political writings that attacked the Crown and defended Whigs like Sarah’s husband. He was very close to Sarah and considered himself her secretary.

Arthur Maynwaring

This raises the very real possibility that Maynwaring wrote this material at Sarah’s behest. Attacking one’s political opponents in anonymous writing was a common tactic in the late 17^thcentury. Sarah was at one point the target of a thinly-veiled roman a clefthat depicts her as the center of a circle of lesbians at court. It’s also noteworthy that these works are not attacks on Anne; they’re directed at Abigail, which increases the likelihood that they are Sarah’s effort to undermine Abigail, not efforts to ruin Anne’s reputation.

This poem and this pamphlet are the entirety of the documentary evidence that Anne had sex with women, and they seem to originate from a woman who was bitterly angry at Anne for what she perceived as Anne’s mistreatment of her. If she herself did not ask Maynwaring to write these works, he certainly was drawing on what she had to say about Anne and Abigail. So these sources are not independent evidence that people in early 18^thcentury London thought the queen was a lesbian. They’re really just evidence that someone, probably Sarah, was accusing Abigail of being a lesbian as a way to get Anne to dismiss her from the royal household.

Sarah continued making these claims to Anne until the final collapse of their friendship. But she went a step further. She pointed out to Anne that she could publish the queen’s letters to her if she wished, essentially resorting to blackmail, although she never actually did publish them. Anne clearly took these threats seriously. In the long run, Anne chose to pay her off. Unfortunately we don’t have the last of Sarah’s account books from her time as Mistress of the Privy Purse, but Edward Gregg speculates that Anne permitted Sarah to write off £20,000 that Sarah had borrowed from the Privy Purse to help fund the construction of Blenheim Palace, on top of giving her a £12,000 grant in 1708. That’s an enormous sum of money for the period. Basically, Sarah made out like a bandit from the end of her relationship with the queen.

To my mind, this fact—that the queen paid Sarah so much money to not publish her letters—is the only serious evidence that Anne may have been a lesbian. Why would Anne have paid Sarah off to such a degree if there wasn’t anything inappropriate in those letters?

There seem to be only three possibilities here. First, and least likely, perhaps those letters contained something inappropriate but non-sexual. It’s hard to imagine what that might be, and the fact that Sarah chose to make lesbianism the center of her threat also works against that, so we can probably discard that possibility.

A coin of Anne’s reign

Second, Anne may have made more open references to sexual activity with women in those letters. If that’s the case, it would have had to have been sex with Sarah, not Abigail, because the letters in question mostly pre-date Sarah’s suspicion that Abigail was displacing her. So Sarah was threatening to reveal that she and Anne had been lovers by publishing letters that offered explicit or nearly-explicit references to them having sex. But if that’s true, it was a very risky gambit for Sarah, because actually following through on that threat would have revealed her as a lesbian, and it would have ruined her reputation as well as Anne’s. She was essentially holding a hand grenade and daring Anne to pull the pin, knowing it would blow both of them up. Given Sarah’s later obsession with controlling her reputation through her memoirs, it’s hard to imagine that she would ever have actually taken that step. If this is the right scenario, the incriminating letters must have been destroyed, because they’ve never come to light among the letters Sarah possessed.

Third, there was nothing more incriminating in those letters than Anne’s intense statements of devotion, but Sarah was playing on Anne’s shyness and need for privacy to make Anne feel threatened. Anne was an intensely private woman who only opened up to a few trusted friends. She was deeply loyal to the members of her household; Beata Danvers literally served Anne all the way through her life and reign and Anne only replaced Ellen Bust when it became clear that Ellen was close to death. Sarah’s break with Anne wasn’t just the end of a friendship; it must have felt like a profound betrayal of Anne’s trust, especially as it culminated in blackmail. Perhaps Sarah was able to make Anne think that those letters said something worse than they really did, that Anne had crossed some line into lesbian sentiment.

To me, the third scenario seems most likely. I’m simply not convinced that we have enough evidence to conclude that Anne ever had sex with another woman. It seems more plausible to me that these claims stemmed entirely from Sarah Churchill’s anger over the breakdown of her friendship and her sense, at least partly untrue, that her cousin Abigail had displaced her. There’s just no independent evidence that Anne engaged in sex with women and it’s too easy to see how Sarah might have fabricated the rumors for her own purposes. Even Jones seems to feel the evidence is inconclusive.

It’s also hard to write off Anne’s 17 pregnancies as merely pursuing her duty to produce an heir, especially given that those pregnancies were clearly damaging her health. If she had found sex with George unpleasant, she could easily have put off sex with the excuse that she was not recovered enough from her previous prenancies or that she was too frail. If Anne was involved in women, I think we have to say that she was bisexual rather than homosexual.

However, none of this goes to prove that Anne did not have lesbian desires. It’s clear that her relationships with her female friends were intense (although her love for Prince George seems to have been pretty intense as well and no one ever considers that as evidence that she was heterosexual). Those relationships were intense enough that people around her were aware of her strong affections for women, and this was a trait she demonstrated throughout her life. I don’t think her letters reveal definite evidence of same-sex attraction, but I don’t think we can say they don’t support at least the possibility of it. And the second possibility, that Anne’s letters contained something explicit, cannot be entirely discounted.

I’ll give Jones the last word on the issue:

“…When one digs through the coded language, even if one takes an extremely conservative position that the sexual allegations were all politically motivated, it’s undeniable that Anne’s deepest and most lasting relationships were all with women like Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham, and that those relationships existed in a cultural context where other women with such bonds definitely wereengaging in sexual relationships. So, lesbian or not? The distinction seems scarcely worth making.”

 

Want to Know More?

The Favourite is still playing in theaters and so isn’t available on Amazon yet.

Although it’s close to 40 years old now, Edward Gregg’s Queen Anne is still probably the essential historical take on her.

If you’re interested in the issue of homoesexuality in late 17th century England, take a look at Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbians in Early Modern England and Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England as well as Jones’ Lesbian Historical Motif podcast.

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Start the Revolution Without Me: Farewell, Gene Wilder

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18th Century Europe, 18th Century France, Billie Whitelaw, Comedies, Donald Sutherland, Gene Wilder, Hugh Griffith, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Orson Welles, Start the Revolution Without Me, The French Revolution, Victor Spinetti, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Like all right-thinking people, I was deeply saddened to learn that comic actor Gene Wilder had died. The news brought back memories of my childhood in the 70s, watching his movies with my older brothers in Milwaukee, the hometown I share with Wilder. Although Wilder’s film career ran from 1967 to 1991, he did his best work in the 1970s, managing to release two of his most famous works in 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

Wilder in his most iconic role

But of course, what Wilder will always be best known for is his delightfully charismatic performance as Willy Wonka in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In some ways it’s an unlikely film. Although it was inspired by the great children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, the reason it got made into a movie is that Quaker Oats was looking for a vehicle to promote a new candy bar. Despite having no experience in film-making, Quaker bought the rights to the novel, renamed the new candy bar the Wonka Bar, and filmed the movie as publicity for its launch. That’s right. One of the greatest children’s movies ever was actually a massive exercise in product placement. The Wonka Bar was a bomb; it was released in 1971 and then quickly recalled because of problems with it, and the movie did poorly in the box office, but by the 1980s it had entered the canon of children’s films because of constant showings on television.

Wilder insisted that when Willy Wonka first appears, he seems to be near-invalid, leaning heavily on a cane, until he executes a somersault and reveals that he’s actually in good health. As Wilder realized, that moment would destabilize Wonka as a character, because the audience would never know if he was telling the truth or not. And it works brilliantly, setting up later scenes such as the frightening boat ride he subjects his guests to and even more importantly, the famous “You get nothing!” scene at the end. And the Wonka character plays perfectly to the two halves of Wilder’s screen persona, the calm, gentle, empathetic man and the man teetering on the edge of hysteria and total loss of control. It’s a performance for the ages. It is precisely what the best children’s literature offers, a combination of reassurance and uncertainty.

In contrast, the ill-conceived 2005 remake starring Johnny Depp failed to achieve that same quality because Depp’s Wonka is just weird. The film strips away all of Wonka’s mystery by giving him a complex back-story, father issues, and motives that pulled Wonka down to humanity where Wilder’s Wonka was some sort of supernatural tutelary deity given human form.

But this is a blog about movies and history, and so I want to call your attention to one of Wilder’s earliest films, a little known gem that holds a special place in my heart just beneath Willy Wonka.

 

Fun and Games with the French Revolution

Start the Revolution Without Me (1970, dir. Bud Yorkin) was only Wilder’s third film, and only his second in a leading role. It’s a parody of films and literature set in the Ancien Regime of 18^th century France. It’s only nominally about history, but it’s a glorious romp through a lot of clichés about the French past.

It opens with Orson Welles, that 1970s symbol of high-brow respectability, gazing at a French chateau. “Hello, I’m Orson Wells. It’s lovely, isn’t it? The summer palace of Louis XVI. You know, historians have recently discovered a previously unknown fact concerning this palace, an event that almost changed the entire history of Western Europe. Did you know that the entire French revolution could have been avoided? It’s true. No one knows what took place there. It’s an event of such importance that men of integrity and may I say considerable resources made a film on the subject. It’s a color film, which I am not in.”

The premise of the film is that in the mid-18^th century, a traveling Corsican nobleman and his pregnant wife are forced to stop at a small inn so his wife can give birth. At luck would have it, a peasant woman is also giving birth, and both women produce twin boys. Unable to figure out which boys are which, the harried doctor gives one of each set of twins to each father.

As a result, Wilder and co-star Donald Sutherland each play half of two sets of brothers, the cowardly but well-meaning peasants Claude and Charles Coupe, and the haughty, ruthless noblemen Philippe and Pierre de Sisi, the best swordsmen in all of Corsica. Louis XVI (Hugh Griffith) is a bumbling king dominated by his wife Marie (Billie Whitelaw) and the ruthless Duc d’Escargot (Victor Spinetti). Louis summons the de Sisi brothers to Paris because he wants them to kill Escargot, but Escargot intercepts the message and uses it to persuade the de Sisis to kill Louis instead. He plans to offer the brothers half of France while he marries Marie and rules the other half.

Sutherland and Wilder as the de Sisi brothers

The de Sisis travel to Paris disguised as peasants, not realizing that revolutionaries, including the reluctant Coupe brothers, are planning to attack the boat they’re on because it’s carrying weapons and ammunition that they need for their rebellion. In the confusion of the attack, naturally the rebels mistake the de Sisis for the Coupes and drag them off to their hidden base while Escargot’s men mistake the Coupes for the de Sisis and take them to the palace.

From there, the Coupes stumble their way through the intrigues of Louis’ court, where everyone seems determined to persuade the Coupes to kill someone else. Escargot is planning to marry Princess Christina of Belgium, because that will give him the Belgian army and allow him to kill Louis, marry Marie, and rule France, but only if Louis’ plan to have Pierre kill Escargot, marry Christina, and use the Belgian army to help him get rid of Marie doesn’t happen first. Marie wants Claude to kill Escargot, marry Christina, use the Belgian army to kill Louis, then kill Christina, marry Marie, and help her rule France. You get the idea.

The characters are drawn with broad strokes and make use of all sorts of tropes from French literature. Whitelaw’s Marie is a sex-crazed woman who is juggling multiple lovers simultaneously, including seemingly the entirety of the palace guard, and Louis is too addled to realize it; in one scene he fails to notice Marie and Escargot making out right next to him in his own bed.

Louis is kindly, but utterly incompetent. In one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, he shows up to a formal ball dressed as a chicken, because, as he spends the rest of the scene explaining to people, he thought it was a costume ball.

Whitelaw and Griffith as Marie and Louis

Escargot is a sneering villain, given to absurd extended metaphors such as “The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of an eagle, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.” And that’s one of the simple ones. Here’s a scene where he verbally spars with the Coupes masquerading as the de Sisis.

The film borrows liberally from historical fiction, including Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Alexandre Dumas’ The Corsican Brothers and The Man in the Iron Mask. It doesn’t particularly care that the Man in the Iron Mask belongs to the 17^th century, not the 18^th century.

The twin roles of Claude and Philippe allow Wilder to channel the two halves of his comic persona as well as Willy Wonka does. Claude is simply a decent man trying to survive his unusual circumstances, while Philippe is a leather-clad sadist barely able to control himself. Rosalind Knight has a number of brilliant scenes as his desperate, put-upon wife Helene that tell us more than we want to know about Philippe’s sexual habits. “You said we weren’t going to do the Choir Boy and the Monk any more! You said you wanted to do the Woodchopper and the Shepherdess! How many costumes do you expect me to pack?” (Apparently, that costume required her to pack a small flock of sheep.)

Poor Helene!

Start the Revolution Without Me shares a number of qualities with another comic gem from the same period, 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Both are nominally historic films with the stars playing multiple roles. Both borrow liberally from literature but without much concern for accuracy. Both employ parody of historical documentaries in which the narrator is killed by a character from the documentary he’s narrating, and neither film has a conventional ending. As a result, both wind up using the instability of genre conventions as a key comic tool. It would not surprise me to learn that Revolution helped inspire Holy Grail.

But where Holy Grail is fundamentally absurdist, Revolution is essentially slapstick. There’s a great deal of pratfalling and mistaken identity. The film culminates in a comic chase in which the Coupe brother are trying to flee the palace along with Princess Christina and Claude’s fiancée Mimi (as well as a charter of reform they’ve persuaded Louis to sign), while the de Sisis are trying to sneak into the palace to kill Escargot. At the same time the revolutionaries are trying to storm the palace and Louis and Marie are just trying to survive.

The slapstick element of Revolution hasn’t aged as well as the absurdism of Holy Grail, which is perhaps the reason that the former has faded from the popular mind while Holy Grail has become a classic. But if you’re in the mood to revisit Wilder’s career, you should give it a look; it’s available on iTunes. Even though I’ve seen the film numerous times, re-watching it last night gave me a number of laugh-out-loud moments that reminded me of what a joy Gene Wilder’s best work really is.

Goodbye, Mr. Wilder. Thank you for giving me so many laughs.

If you like this review, please consider donating a buck or two so I can expand the range of films I cover.

 

Want to Know More?

Start the Revolution Without Me is available on Amazon. While you’re at it, pick up Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory too. There’s also his lovely memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger. 

Quills: Doing the Nasty

Tags

18th Century Europe, 18th Century France, Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard, Charenton Asylum, Early Modern Europe, Geoffrey Rush, Joaquin Phoenix, Justine, Kate Winslet, Marquis de Sade, Medical Stuff, Michael Caine, Quills, Stephen Moyer, The Enlightenment, The French Revolution

When Quills (2000, dir. Philip Kaufman, based on the play of the same name by Doug Wright) came out, it was received quite well by critics, who praised Geoffrey Rush’s performance as the Marquis de Sade, and it earned Rush his second Academy Award nomination. But it wasn’t so popular with historians, who pointed out its many historical inaccuracies. In particular, Neil Schaeffer, author of The Marquis de Sade: A Life, published a scathing critique of the film as being both inaccurate and simplistic in its depiction of the notorious pornographer. So the movie, like De Sade himself, was quite controversial. Sounds like fun!

 

De Sade’s Life

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a minor French noble born in the mid-18^th century and the poster boy for everything wrong with the 18^th century aristocracy. By the time he was 23, he had begun sexually assaulting prostitutes and employees of both sexes egregiously enough that the police began paying serious attention to him, no small accomplishment at a time when the aristocracy enjoyed substantial legal prerogatives. When he was 28, he hired a woman to be his housekeeper, but then tied her up, and repeatedly tortured her with knives and hot wax. Four years later, in 1772, he and his man-servant were convicted of sodomy and poisoning and fled to Italy to avoid a death sentence.

During all this, his mother-in-law had obtained a lettre de cachet, essentially an extra-judicial order of imprisonment. In 1777, he was lured back to Paris and arrested under the lettre and imprisoned, although he managed to get the death sentence overturned.

The Marquis de Sade

By 1789, when the French Revolution was brewing, he was being incarcerated in the notorious Bastille prison, and nearly triggered the Storming of the Bastille two weeks early when he shouted out a window that the prisoners were being murdered. Just days before the Storming liberated the inmates of the Bastille, de Sade was transferred to the Charenton asylum. But a year later, he was released when the National Assembly invalidated all lettres de cachet. At this point his long-suffering wife divorced him.

He managed to get himself elected to the National Convention and spent several years as a politician before getting on Maximilien Robespierre’s bad side and being arrested. But before he could be executed, Robespierre fell from power and he was released.

He had already begun producing the pornographic works he is famous for during his first imprisonment. In 1801, Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author of the anonymous paired pornographic novels, Justine and Juliette, and eventually the works were traced to de Sade and he was arrested and imprisoned once again. In 1803, his family arranged for him to be declared insane, and he was sent back to the Charenton Asylum, where he remained until his death from natural causes in 1814.

 

The director of Charenton was the Abbé de Coulmier, a Catholic priest known for his liberal attitudes toward the inmates in his charge. Coulmier rejected many of the harsh treatments that were popular at the time, such as the physical restraint of patients and the practice of dunking patients head-first in water. Instead, Coulmier favored therapies such as self-expression, diets, and purges. In particular, he believed that allowing patients to express themselves in writing, theater, and music was helpful.

Because of this, Coulmier allowed de Sade to stage popular French plays, using the inmates as actors, for the viewing pleasure of the Parisian public. But in 1809, police orders required de Sade to be put in solitary confinement and forbidden to write. This confinement turns out to have been not so solitary after all, because in 1810, he began a relationship with Madeleine LeClerc, the 14-year-old daughter of an employee at Charenton. He died in his sleep 4 years later.

The chapel at Charenten

 

De Sade’s Writings

Although de Sade is today mostly remembered as a pornographer and as the man who gave his name to ‘sadism’, he was more complex than that. Not all of his work was obscene; he wrote both political treatises and conventional plays, and he deserves to be ranked as a figure of the Enlightenment. And even his pornographic work is highly intellectual. His paired novels Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and Juliette, or The Rewards of Vice tell the stories of two sisters raised in a convent. But whereas Justine strives to remain virtuous, Juliette comes to believe that morality, virtue, and religion are meaningless. Justine experiences a series of personal disasters, including becoming the unwilling sex-slave of a group of monks. Every good deed she does results in a further sexual assault, humiliation, or other catastrophe, and finally she is struck by lightning and dies, after which her corpse is sexually assaulted. But Juliette willingly engages in the most perverse behaviors possible, indulging in orgies and repeatedly murdering people. Her various accomplices commit rape, murder, incest, and cannibalism. She is ultimately rewarded with an audience with the pope, and the novel ends with another long orgy.

Despite the repulsive content, de Sade has a point to make. Several in fact. Like many 18^th century intellectuals, he rejects conventional religion, and aggressively satirizes it; the clergy in his stories are often the most debauched characters. Given that the clergy enjoyed legal prerogatives as extensive as the nobility’s at this time, including immunity from taxation and most law courts and a strangle-hold on public religious life and education, de Sade’s attacks are remarkably bold and in favor of the separation of Church and State. Some have seen de Sade as challenging God to prove His existence by punishing de Sade’s blasphemies.

 

These two novels demonstrate the idea that virtue and vice are not neatly rewarded and condemned in real life, and the novels represent an effort to build an essentially atheistic moral paradigm celebrating the pursuit of pleasure as the only meaning in life. Nature consistently triumphs over the forces of civilization and restraint. (At least, that’s all assuming you read them seriously, and not as satire, as some scholars do.)

And de Sade’s slow corruption of Juliette, who gradually moves from simple sexual pleasures to full-blown sexual sadism of the most extreme sort, can be read as a challenge to the reader. How far are you willing to take your sexual fantasies? Will you at some point put the book down because you feel it is no longer titillating but rather disgusting, or will you allow the novel to corrupt you as it corrupts Juliette? These books may be deeply disturbing, but they’re also far more thought-provoking than most modern porn.

Nor was de Sade the only author in this period to intermingle pornography with philosophical musings. As the great intellectual historian Robert Darnton has pointed out, philosophical pornography was an extremely popular (if illegal) genre in 18^th century France. Quite a few authors used obscene stories as a way to attack the French clergy and the French political system. De Sade’s novels are the most extreme, but he’s by no means the only author of the day to tell stories of priests fornicating in the confessional and monks debauching nuns during the Eucharist. He’s just the one we still remember.

 

So What Does Quills Make of All This?

The movie opens in 1794 with de Sade apparently writing a story about a woman who is guillotined during the French Revolution and then jumps to ‘years later’ with de Sade in the Charenton asylum. Instead of being sent there for having written Justine, he has written the novel and had it smuggled out of prison by Madeleine (Kate Winslet). Napoleon orders a stop to his publishing, and dispatches Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to Charenton to force Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) to crack down on de Sade’s privileges. Whereas Coulmier is gentle and believes in art therapy, Royer-Collard is old school and favors water-boarding patients. He also has a child bride Simone (Amelia Warner), whom he rather sadistically has sex with on their wedding night.

Geoffrey Rush as de Sade

 

Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard is a real person. In 1806, he was appointed chief physician at Charenton, where he became convinced that de Sade was sane and ought to be in a conventional prison. But his function here is to be the catalyst for everything going wrong at the asylum. Prior to his arrival, de Sade and Coulmier are friends, with de Sade seeking to express his disturbed thoughts on paper.

But Royer-Collard’s attempts to restrain de Sade trigger a contest of wills between the two men, with Coulmier caught in the middle. Royer-Collard’s harsh treatment of his young wife becomes gossip that reaches de Sade’s ears, so de Sade stages a play that is a thinly-veiled sex farce of the marriage. Simone, who sees the first part of the play, becomes interested in de Sade’s writings and secretly tracks down a copy of Justine. Corrupted by it, she runs off with a young architect, played by Stephen Moyer.

Furious at this, Royer-Collard leans on Coulmier, forcing him to gradually restrict de Sade’s privileges. When he takes away de Sade’s writing implements, de Sade figures out how to write with red wine on his bed sheets. When the bed is taken away, he writes in blood on his own clothes. Coulmier states the whole point of the film when he says to de Sade, “The more I forbid, the more you’re provoked.” De Sade points out that Coulmier finds it arousing to have so much power over him.

Joaquin Phoenix as Coulmier

 

Finally, naked and with nothing in his cell, he arranges to dictate a story to Madeleine through a chain of inmates, like an obscene game of Telephone. But one of the aroused inmates intentionally lights a fire, and in the confusion, another inmate rapes and murders Madeleine. Coulmier, who has fallen deeply in lust with the woman thanks to de Sade’s corrosive influence, apparently has sex with her corpse, and then has de Sade’s tongue cut out after water-boarding him. Chained in a cell, de Sade continues writing, using his own feces as ink. He dies in Coulmier’s arms, rejecting the crucifix the priest offers him.

The movie ends with Coulmier now imprisoned in de Sade’s old room, begging a visitor for paper and quill so he can write. He finally understands de Sade’s compulsion to write.

Hopefully from this summary, it should be clear that the film starts off somewhat shaky on the facts, since de Sade didn’t write Justine in prison, because that’s what he was imprisoned for. But it rattles along in the right general historical direction until, in the last hour, the train jumps the track and goes veering off into Crazyland at full speed, bearing its passengers to a world of hurt none of them bought a ticket for.

De Sade is somewhere between a full-blown lunatic with a sexual fixation and a martyr for the cause of free speech. The film can’t quite decide what’s really motivating him. On the one hand, his erotic writing appears to be a symptom of some mental illness; he is literally incapable of not writing, despite the increasing misery it’s causing him. And by the end of the film, he’s infected both Coulmier and arguably Madeleine with his madness.

Coulmier, about to do the literal nasty with Madeleine’s corpse

 

But on the other hand, he’s engaging in a willful defiance of Royer-Collard’s efforts to silence him. The two men fall into a chess match; each action by Royer-Collard to stop de Sade from writing elicits a response from de Sade in which he seeks to demonstrate the doctor’s ultimate impotence to control him. It is Royer-Collard’s efforts to still de Sade’s pen that triggers the next round of outrageous writing, and the marquis’ writings that trigger the next crack-down.

De Sade’s ideas corrupt everyone around him, driving them to lust, in the case of Coulmier, Simone, and the architect, or madness, in the case of the inmates who participate in his telephone game of dictation. Madeleine craves more stories from de Sade and is ultimately killed by the process of dictation, as is de Sade himself. The only character not corrupted by de Sade is Royer-Collard, who is already more of a sadist than de Sade. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea if your martyr for freedom of the press is a man whose writings literally corrupt and destroy those who read them.

Michael Caine as Royer-Collard

 

From a historical standpoint, the problem with Quills is that it too readily accepts the idea of de Sade as a charming madman and barely entertains the possibility that perhaps de Sade was actually trying to actually say something. And it soft-pedals the more literally sadistic elements of his writings. From the snippets of his stories that we hear, de Sade likes to talk about penises and vaginas a lot, and he readily mocks Christianity, but there’s only faint hints that he was also writing about rape, murder, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, and a host of other disturbing things.

So for me at least, Quills doesn’t really work. It fails to grapple effectively with what the historical de Sade was trying to say, and it fails to offer a coherent message about who this man was and why he wrote such outrageous things. In a way, watching the movie feels a bit like reading Justine; instead of sympathizing with any of the characters or being turned on by its decadence, I just wanted to take a shower and put the whole experience behind me.

 

Want to Know More?

Quills is available on Amazon.

If you’d like to learn more about the Marquis de Sade, start with Neil Shaeffer’s The Marquis de Sade: A Life. If you want to sample de Sade’s writings, both Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford World’s Classics)
and Juliette are readily available. But be warned: they are pretty much as hard-core as pornography gets, and they’re not for the easily offended or disgusted.

The Madness of King George: The Regency Crisis

Tags

18th Century England, 18th Century Europe, Alan Bennett, George III, George IV, Helen Mirren, Kings and Queens, Nigel Hawthorne, Rupert Everett, The Madness of King George

Last week I looked at the illness of King George III as it is depicted in The Madness of King George (1994, dir. Nicholas Hytner, based on Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III, adapted by Bennett for the film). (Incidentally, there is a myth that the title change was due to Americans thinking that the film was a sequel. In reality, the producers worried that the audiences wouldn’t understand that this film was about a king.) But I only touched on the film’s other half, which examines the Regency Crisis that broke out around the king and his son Prince George.(Because there are two Georges here, I’ll capitalize ‘King’ and ‘Prince’ to help the reader tell them apart.)

In my discussion of The Duchess I talked about the Regency Crisis, but it’s worth going over again. The British Government of the period was conceived of as The Crown in Parliament, meaning that the King ran the government, but that Parliament played a dominant role in the legislative process, so that the king had to operate through his ministers in Parliament rather than just issuing decrees on his own. Thus the king was a vitally important figure, unlike in modern England, where the monarch mostly plays a ceremonial role. The king had considerable control over which ministers served in government, he controlled appointments to many lucrative positions in government and within the royal household, and he had to assent to the laws passed by Parliament in order for them to take effect.

English politics was divided into two broad political parties, the Tories and the Whigs. The Tories favored a strong monarchy that operated by its own rights, as well as a traditional Anglicanism that included privileged political status for Anglicans and a degree of hostility toward Catholics. The Whigs favored a weaker monarchy that operated within limits set by Parliament, significant political reforms to what they saw as a corrupt political system, and toleration of religious minorities, including political rights for Catholics. Although they were generally opposed to the king’s power, only a minority of them were Republicans. The Whigs had been in political ascendency for much of the early 18^th century, but when George III came to the throne, he quickly threw his political support to the Tories, which pushed the Whigs out of power and fractured them into several factions based around different politicians.

George was a loving husband and father, but very strict and pious. He expected his children to be disciplined and virtuous, and he grew increasingly disappointed with his oldest son, George Prince of Wales, as he reached adulthood and proved to be a rather dissolute young man. Prince George favored a lavish lifestyle (later on as king, he was an important patron of art, architecture, and fashion), and indulged in heavy drinking, excessive gambling, and wild parties, and so he quickly fell deeply into debt, despite the very substantial income he received from both his father and Parliament. The Prince’s behavior disgusted the King, who was very critical of his son’s ways and refused to pay his debts. The Prince, for his part, felt his father was excessively strict and was frustrated by the King’s failure to give him any significant duties. The father-son hostility that developed between the two men was a replay of the conflicts between previous generations; George I had disliked George II, and George II and his wife had loathed their son Frederick, being somewhat relieved when he died young, leaving the future George III as his heir. The Prince’s quarrels with his father meant that he supported the Whigs, many of whom clustered around the Prince as the inevitable future ruler of the kingdom.

George IV

When, in the fall of 1788 it was realized that George III was mentally incompetent, the initial assumption was that he was about to die, and thus the Prince would become king soon. But after a few weeks it became clear that the king was not physically in decline and a messier problem emerged, which historians call the Regency Crisis. The British system required a monarch who could actually perform his duties, and so it was necessary for Parliament to appoint a regent, who realistically would have to be Prince George. But the question was on what terms would he become regent?

The question had political as well as constitutional significance. Since the Prince clearly favored the Whigs, he could be expected to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger (so named to distinguish him from his father, who had previously served as Prime Minister as well, but also a nod to the fact that he was the youngest man ever to serve as Prime Minister, an office he took over at 24). Pitt governed by a decent majority in Parliament, but his position was dependent on the Whigs being disunited and on the support of the king. If Prince George took over as regent, he could be expected to offer the Prime Ministry to Charles James Fox, one of the leading Whig politicians. The Whigs hoped that the Prince would appoint them to lucrative government offices and support their desires for political and legal reforms.

So the Whigs dearly wanted the Prince to receive a strong regency, while the Tories wanted him to receive a limited regency. This led to a bizarre inversion of the normal Tory and Whig positions. The Whigs who normally championed the power of Parliament to limit the Crown suddenly began insisting that the Prince automatically had full authority by his own rights, while the Tories, who normally championed royal rights argued that Parliament had the power to dictate the terms on which Parliament granted the regency. The Whig position was that George III would not recover his wits and was therefore functionally dead; so the Prince was legally king in all but name already and therefore deserved all the powers the king enjoyed. In contrast, Pitt asserted that the king was only temporarily indisposed and would recover, so Parliament had the legal right to decide which royal powers would be delegated to the Prince of Wales.

William Pitt, looking decidedly younger

A key figure in this was Edward Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor. This was a key office in government; the Chancellor acted as the presiding officer in the House of Lords, the controller of the Great Seal, and the leader of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. Thurlow was a Tory, but he disliked Pitt, and so the Whigs hatched a plan to win his support for their cause by promising that he would continue as Lord Chancellor during the Regency, an offer that Thurlow appeared receptive to. His defection from the Tory cause could well have fatally undermined Pitt’s position.

Fortunately for Pitt, the Whigs proved incapable of taking effective advantage of their window of opportunity. By coincidence, Fox was in Italy when the Regency Crisis broke out, and when he finally returned, he was slowed by illness. This bought time for one of his allies, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, to insinuate himself with the Prince of Wales and shape the Prince’s ideas of what he would do; ultimately this meant that Fox had little control over the Whig strategy, despite being its most prominent leader in the House of Commons. Sheridan disliked Charles Grey, another of the leading Whigs, and persuaded the Prince to promise Grey an insultingly minor office, which alienated Grey. The political philosopher Edmund Burke, an important Whip MP, initially supported Fox, but later on became disgusted by his willingness to compromise on principles and alienated many other Whigs. Behind th scenes, Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, struggled to organize her party but was unable to get them to overlook their personal rivalries and disputes. When Fox finally appeared in Parliament, he gave a very ill-advised speech in which he declared that Parliament had no right to impose limits on the regency. Pitt immediately attacked this as contradicting nearly a century of political practice. This proved the critical turning point in the Crisis, because after these speeches, it was clear that Pitt had gotten the upper hand and Parliament would dictate the terms of the regency. Soon after, Pitt persuaded Thurlow to continue supporting him.

Charles James Fox

Throughout this whole affair, the Prince of Wales had been a central figure, but he handled the situation increasingly poorly. Initially he had shown a great deal of concern for his father’s well-being, weeping so much his doctors decided that he needed to be bled to restore his emotional balance. But as Whig politicians like Sheridan and Grey courted him, the Prince, who had almost no real experience with politics, let the attention go to his head and became impatient to receive what he felt were his legal rights. Despite Sheridan’s advice, he began staying out late, drinking and gambling scandalously. At one card game, he announced, “I will play the fool”, when he threw down one of the kings. One evening, he drove his carriage through the city so wildly that he broke several street lamps. These actions helped increase public support for the King, who was already quite popular, and made it harder for the Whigs to demand the Prince’s rights.

Pitt wisely recognized that he needed to play for time, so he stretched out the negotiations for the Regency Bill. The Bill would have granted the Prince a very limited regency, according him a veto over the making of peers and the granting of life-time offices, and awarding complete control over the king, the royal family, the king’s property, and the offices of the royal household not to the Prince but to Queen Charlotte, who firmly supported Pitt. The Prince protested that denying him control over his father was an insult to his character, since it implied that he could not be trusted with the king’s life and health. The Whigs fought the Bill the whole way, thus foolishly playing into Pitt’s strategy of delay when it was clear that Pitt had a solid majority that the Whigs could not hope to overcome. Then, on February 20^th, a few days before the Bill would have been presented to the House of Lords and been passed, it was abandoned. The King had recovered from his illness and the Regency Crisis had passed.

The Regency Crisis in The Madness

The film presents the Regency Crisis somewhat differently. It establishes early on that the King (Nigel Hawthorne) and the Prince of Wales (Rupert Everett) dislike each other. The King calls his son “The Fat One” (a somewhat unfair charge, since the Prince only became corpulent in later life), and the Prince ridicules his father. At one point he tells his mother that he would have thought she would be glad to take a break from bearing so many children. She accuses him of laziness, to which he retorts that he is given nothing to do.

Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren as George III and Charlotte

The film presents Prince George as the central villain of the film. He loathes his father for what seem like minor reasons, and he schemes to push his father into a public breakdown so that he can become Regent. The film downplays his father’s physical assault on him to make it less serious, and it assumes that the Prince’s shows of concern for his father are an act rather than a genuine expression of filial concern. While it is not impossible that the Prince’s public concern was faked, it seems more likely that his initial concern was genuine but the political situation wore down his somewhat weak character.

Rupert Everett as Prince George, with his largely useless younger brother Frederick

The film also shows the Prince taking control of the king’s person and using that to isolate him from the queen, who is denied access to her husband until finally one of her attendants, Lady Pembroke (Amanda Donohoe), seduces the king’s equerry, Greville (Rupert Graves), so that the queen can get last minute access to the king to warn him of the impending regency bill. The film suggests that the king’s separation from his wife was emotionally traumatic and harmful to him. The Prince gives his physician, Dr. Warren, control of the king’s treatment, with the understanding that it is Warren’s best interests if the king doesn’t recover. In reality, the situation was the opposite. Throughout the Crisis, Pitt and the queen controlled access to the king. It was the Prince who was denied access during the illness, except for one brief meeting rather late in the crisis. It was the queen who arranged for Dr. Willis to treat the king. So the film is clearly demonizing the Prince as a way to increase the tension in the film.

The Parliamentary situation is also mis-represented. Pitt, Fox, and Thurlow are shown as the key figures in Parliament; Sheridan, Grey, and Burke are entirely absent from the film, and Fox is shown as being in London throughout the whole process. That’s a minor detail, but a more serious problem is the film’s depiction of the Whigs as being largely unified, plotting effectively, and gradually increasing the pressure on Pitt by winning Thurlow over to their cause.

The Regency Bill is fundamentally misrepresented. The film presents the political debate as revolving around whether or not there will be a Regency at all; Fox and the Prince are pushing for a Regency, and Pitt is fighting a slowly losing battle against one. Initially he wins a vote on Regency by 30 votes, but later on Fox wins a vote to demand a Regency Bill by 3 votes. At this point, the desperate Queen Charlotte (Helen Mirren) hurries to Kew and gets access to George, warning him that he is about to be pushed aside by his son. The king recovers and Thurlow, having seen that the king is well, changes sides and frantically races back to London as Parliament debates the Regency Bill. He hurriedly tells Pitt that the King has recovered, and Parliament abruptly ends its debate (during a speech by a member of Parliament played by Alan Bennett) and rushes outside in time to see George getting out of a carriage, obviously well. The Prince signifies his defeat by fainting.

Thurlow presenting King George to the members of Parliament

The film’s vision of the Regency Bill is that it would have inaugurated a permanent shift in government. It would have perpetuated Prince George’s control over the king’s person, which would have enabled the Prince to keep the King locked up in perpetuity, thus effectively making the Prince Regent a functional king. This is false; the Regency Bill would have had effect only as long as the King was incapable of fulfilling his duties, and the regency would have ended as soon as the King was well again.

The film  suggests that the Regency Bill represented everything the Whigs wanted, when in fact the Bill represented exactly what they didn’t want. The film offers no suggestion that Pitt has any alternative to a full regency and that he was on the losing side in the debate. The actual political issues are presented wrong. And, in true cinematic fashion, the defeat of the Regency Bill is a matter of high drama and a narrowly-timed victory that would have failed if a flock of sheep had taken more time to get out of the way of Thurlow’s carriage.

So while the very basic scenario of the Regency Crisis is true (the King’s illness had political ramifications, the Whigs and the Prince schemed to get the Regency, a Regency Bill was presented to Parliament for a vote), almost all the details are wrong and the historical situation is almost entirely inverted; early in the Crisis, the Whigs and the Prince lost their opportunity to get what they wanted, largely through Fox’ disastrous speech, and Pitt had the upper hand from that point on.

Julian Wadham as Pitt the Younger

If the film has a deeper message, it is about political cynicism. The Prince and Fox have no political principles whatsoever beyond a lust for power. Lady Pembroke seduces Greville not because she is actually attracted to him but because it is the only way to get the queen in to see the king; when Greville later makes an advance on her, she shoots him down. When the king haltingly apologizes for his inappropriate behavior toward Pembroke, Pembroke offers the polite lie that she has no memory of anything inappropriate and that his behavior was always proper.

Throughout the crisis Greville has been loyal and supportive to the king, while another equerry, Fitzroy, has betrayed the king by passing information to the Whigs. At the end of the film, Greville is ordered to fire the king’s loyal attendants, and then he himself is dismissed, while Fitzroy is promoted. This is untrue; Greville remained in service as an equerry until 1797; after his dismissal, he was eventually promoted to the more prestigious position of Groom of the Bedchamber. The message here that kings have no loyalty to those who see their weaknesses, while treachery like Fitzroy’s can get one advancement.

This all fits in with the film’s rather negative view of court protocol. The film emphasizes a variety of what to modern eyes are rather bizarre and nonsensical rules. People are not supposed to look directly at the King, and even his personal physician is not allowed to ask questions directly to the king or examine his body. People sit only when the King grants permission for them to, and he rarely does. During one scene, the King and Queen sit to listen to a concert, while the rest of the court struggles to keep standing. The King denies a pregnant woman the right to sit down, and the court quietly groans when George declares he wants to hear the concert a second time. When the king and queen leave, the whole court immediately collapses into every available seat.

These rules are presented as part of the cause of George’s problems, and what he needs a dose of being treated like everyone else, being forcibly restrained until he can learn to control himself again. So the re-establishment of these protocols when the King apologizes to Lady Pembroke and she lies to him signals a return to a morally corrosive situation.

What the film doesn’t want to admit is that its criticism of the Crown has a lot in common with the Whigs’ opposition to the Crown. The Whigs generally championed the power of Parliament over the hereditary rights of the king, and felt that the system of patronage that the Crown used to win support was legalized corruption, and they wanted to restrict it. Fox was an advocate for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of religious toleration. Fox’ branch of the Whigs gradually laid the foundation for the reform-minded Liberal Party of the 19^th Century. In 1832, Charles Grey was finally able to introduce a Reform Bill that dramatically expanded the voting franchise, abolished rotten boroughs (which were essentially the private ownership of a seat in the House of Commons), and generally restricted legal opportunities for bribery. So while the film quietly ridicules the system that the Tories supported and the Whigs opposed, it makes the Whigs the bad guys by simply never explaining what the deeper political issues of the day were.

Obviously explaining 200-year-old political debates to an audience that no longer sees the relevance of the issues is a tough act, and it’s easy to understand why Bennett chose to simplify the political issues. King George is his hero, and that makes the decision to cast the Prince and the Whigs as the bad guys rather obvious. The real problem is Bennett’s decision to moralize the king’s illness and emphasize it by showing the monarchy as governed by corrupt protocols, because not only is it false to the facts of the time, but it also undermines the film’s point that the king’s illness wasn’t psychological but rather metabolic. The film’s triumphant return of the King to mental health and political power is undermined by the emphasis on the resumption of court protocols that were supposedly responsible for the king’s illness in the first place.

Perhaps that’s Bennett’s way of hinting to the audience that the King eventually went mad again in 1810, after the death of his youngest daughter Amelia. Already virtually blind, he never recovered his wits and died blind, deaf, and insane in 1820, after years of wandering Windsor Castle, talking to angels like some deranged Biblical patriarch. The Prince got his regency and eventually the throne. The Whigs eventually got their political reforms. But the film doesn’t acknowledge any of that in its epilogue text. Instead it settles for the short-term happy ending of the King’s recovery in 1789, rather than revealing the true complexity of the overall situation. But as Peter S. Beagle once wrote, “There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.”

By the Way

A Royal Affair is about George’s sister Carolina Matilda, who became Queen of Denmark.

Want to Know More?

The Madness of King Georgeis available on Amazon. The screenplay, The Madness of King George,is also available.

If you want something on the Regency Crisis, you don’t have a lot of options. John Derry’s The Regency Crisis and the Whigs 1788-9is about half a century old, but still a good study of the fracturing of the Whig Party. E.A. Smith’s George IV (The English Monarchs Series) seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of this poorly-regarded king. I found his brief section on the Regency Crisis to be quite helpful in writing this post. Finally, you might take a look at Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana – Duchess Of Devonshire (available in paperback and Kindle edition). She examines the duchess’ behind the scenes role in the Crisis quite nicely.

The Madness of King George: Blue Urine and Bondage Chairs!

Tags

18th Century England, 18th Century Europe, Alan Bennett, George III, Helen Mirren, Ian Holm, Kings and Queens, Macalpine and Hunter, Medical Stuff, Nigel Hawthorne, Porphyria, The Madness of King George

Viewing Dragon Knight while I was sick left me a little mentally imbalanced, and I needed something to help me recover. So I turned to a film about another man seeking help with mental illness, The Madness of King George (1994, dir. Nicholas Hytner, based on Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III, adapted by Bennett for the film). Fortunately, the film proved to be the right treatment, because by the end of it, I felt my wits returning just like King George’s.

What Was the Madness of King George?

The film examines an important incident in English history generally known as the Regency Crisis. The Crisis happened in 1788, when King George III experienced a bout of insanity. George’s symptoms were varied: a brief stomach ache at the start, obstructive jaundice, hypomania (euphoric or irritable moods, physically energetic behavior, extreme talkativeness, and bursts of creative ideas), howling like a dog, hearing voices, and, most unusually, blue urine. His speech bordered on totally incoherent, he became violent toward members of his family, including his wife Queen Charlotte and his oldest son Prince George, and it was necessary to physically restrain him on numerous occasions.

Exactly what was wrong with George has been a subject of debate among both historians and medical specialists. At the time, the consensus was manic depression, although one physician diagnosed it as “flying gout”, suggesting I think that George’s gout had gone from his leg to his brain. Historians for the next 150 years followed the consensus and suggested that his mental illness stemmed from his dissatisfaction with his marriage. He had never particularly wanted to marry Queen Charlotte (a German princess he met for the first time on his wedding day) and while the marriage was a happy one, it was clear that George was a much more highly-sexed man than his wife was. His religious nature meant that he was unwilling to take a mistress, so historians suggest that his sexual frustrations eventually led to his mental breakdown.

George III

But in the later 1960s, a mother/son pair of psychiatrists, Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, put forward a very different diagnosis, porphyria. Porphyria is a very rare metabolic disorder that produces various neurological symptoms including abdominal pain, vomiting, hypertension, tachycardia (elevated heart rate), and muscle weakness; it can also produce psychiatric symptoms including anxiety, confusion, and hallucinations. It also often causes the feces and urine to turn purple (hence the name, which is Greek for “purple”). Macalpine and Hunter suggested that the key to understanding George’s symptoms lay in his blue urine, and that his madness was not psychological at all but rather metabolic.

Macalpine and Hunter’s claims provoked considerable debate in the medical community, which seems to have focused entirely on whether the symptoms they had focused on would constitute porphyria rather than on whether the historical record supported such a diagnosis in all details. Over the course of the 1970s and 80s, the Porphyria Theory pushed out the earlier diagnosis of manic depression to the point that many historical organizations, such as the National Gallery and Kew Palace (where George was treated), asserted the veracity of the diagnosis. As a result, it’s come to be accepted as a ‘fact’. By the 1980s, professional historians had generally accepted the diagnosis. Alan Bennett, who studied and taught history before turning to writing plays, assumed the diagnosis of porphyria when he wrote the play.

However, the Porphyria Theory has never actually been proven, and in fact it has some significant problems. First, not all in the medical community had agreed with Macalpine and Hunter in the first place. Second, porphyria is hereditary, and since George III was the grandfather of Queen Victoria, there are numerous generations of the royal family (not to mention other descendants of his 15 children—I told you he was highly-sexed) who might have shown signs of porphyria; but no solid evidence of the disease has shown up among them.

More seriously, Macalpine and Hunter have been accused of cherry-picking their evidence from across George’s lifetime. The claim that he suffered from muscle weakness is contradicted by the reports of his energetic physical exertions and by the violence with which he assaulted his attendants on some occasions. Macalpine and Hunter exaggerated the extent of his abdominal pain, and failed to mention that his vomiting had been induced with a medication.

Most importantly, George’s urine was not consistently reddish-purple (more properly blue, in George’s case) at all. There are only four times when blue color was reported in his urine; on one occasion Macalpine and Hunter point to a report of blue urine, but fail to mention that on six occasions in the previous weeks, his urine was reported to be clear or yellow. Even more importantly, three days before the blue urine was reported, his doctor gave him a medication containing gentian extract, which is known to cause blue urine. So in the opinion of one scholar, Macalpine and Hunter did not just get the diagnosis wrong, they intentionally misrepresented the facts to make their case.

Urine from a porphyriac

Finally, recent analysis of George III’s numerous letters by Peter Gerrard and Vassiliki Rentoumi has suggested that his vocabulary and writing style during his attack mirror patterns seen in modern patients suffering from bipolar disorder (as manic depression is termed nowadays). During his attacks, his sentences may contain 400 words and 8 verbs, for example.

There are serious problems with trying to diagnose medical and psychological conditions in historical figures. Historians are rarely qualified physicians and I doubt more than one or two of them have ever been skilled at differential diagnosis (what House does in every episode of his tv show). Conversely, physicians are rarely skilled at historical research or aware of all the relevant documents (which seems to be the reason why Macalpine and Hunter’s argument persuaded some physicians).

Furthermore, historical diagnosis relies very heavily on the observations of people from the historical figure’s own time; George’s physicians may have failed to notice or failed to remark on certain symptoms that modern scholars might spot (such as the shift in his vocabulary that Gerrard and Rentoumi found) or may spot symptoms that they failed to make sense of (such as failing to recognize that George’s blue urine might have been caused by gentian extract).

Unless a historical figure’s body is available for forensic analysis, it is impossible for there to be any sort of examination by a modern medical specialist. In cases where this is possible, medical analysis can help scholars sort out legitimate clues in historical sources from lies and gossip. A good example here is the recent discovery of King Richard III’s body, which enabled scholars to confirm that he was in fact a hunchback, while disproving the not-very-serious gossip that he had a tail.

What this means is that modern historians have to move very carefully when they attempt to answer a question like what George III suffered from. The Porphyria Theory seems very shaky, and Gerrard and Rentoumi’s work would support a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but it cannot conclusively prove it, especially given the notorious issue of psychologists trying to diagnose patients they have not spoken with. But bipolar disorder was essentially the diagnosis made by George’s own physicians, and since it seems to fit with the available facts more readily than porphyria does, that’s the one I’m going with in my look at the film.

 

How the Film Deals with the Symptoms

Bennett wrote his play in 1991, when the Porphyria Theory had become dominant. I have no information about how Bennett researched the play, so I don’t know if he looked at genuine historical documents about the king’s illness or if he relied on Macalpine and Hunter’s papers on the subject. Nor do I know how substantially Bennett revised the medical details in his original script for the film. But the film works to establish many of the symptoms of porphyria.

The first medical symptoms George (Nigel Hawthorne, reprising his performance from the debut of the play) has are an inability to fart followed by an intense abdominal pain that causes Queen Charlotte (Helen Mirren) to call for help. The film suggests that he continued to have fits of pain at the height of his illness, but once he begins to recover they are not shown again. This would seem to follow Macalpine and Hunter’s misleading claims that he suffered from abdominal pain almost continuously, when in fact he suffered only one attack right before his more dramatic symptoms appeared.

In the film his mood shifts erratically from enthusiastic to angry to overwhelmed and miserable. His violence toward the queen is not shown, but his infamous physical assault on Prince George is shown, although the film presents it as an assault intentionally triggered by the power-hungry prince in which he chases the prince around a room beating him with his hat; in fact it was a spontaneous outburst in which he choked the prince into near-unconsciousness. Since Prince George is the villain of the play, the facts have to be massaged a little to keep the audience from accidentally sympathizing with him.

George (Hawthorne) chased by his attendants early one morning

The film makes repeated references to his urine and feces. Early on, one attendant points out that the urine is blue, but the king’s physicians insist it is a meaningless symptom. Dr Pepys (Cyril Shaps) is obsessed with the quality of the king’s stools, but Dr. Warren (Geoffrey Palmer), the prince’s physician, ridicules this. At the end of the film, one attendant notices that the king’s urine has turned normal again and comments that the urine was blue throughout the whole episode. This is the film’s way of suggesting that the king’s doctors had all missed the central symptom that should have told them it was porphyria (which was first diagnosed more than 2,000 years earlier). This claim is completely false; as I’ve mentioned, it relies on Macalpine and Hunter’s apparently deliberate misrepresentation of the actual facts.

There is also some discussion of the king’s pulse, which is extremely high. Dr. Warren comments that it’s irrelevant because his pulse varies too much. This is obviously the tachycardia associated with porphyria. Nothing I’ve read on the king’s illness has mentioned tachycardia at all, so I’m unsure if this was actually one of the king’s symptoms or if it was added by Bennett to strength the case for porphyria.

The two major symptoms mentioned by Macalpine and Hunter that the film omits are the king’s blindness (which only happened many years later and so is irrelevant in this film), and his muscle weakness. Muscle weakness plays a major role in Macalpine and Hunter’s argument, and I suspect that Bennett omitted it for the same reason that I’ve already mentioned; it doesn’t fit with the reports of the king’s physical struggles with his attendants. Those struggles are important moments; they dramatize the king’s problems and often serve to generate sympathy for him as we see him being humiliatingly manhandled by Dr. Willis’ orderlies. So the struggles have to stay, and that would make muscle weakness almost impossible to present in a coherent fashion.

 

Isn’t Modern Medicine Wonderful?

A central theme of the film is the comparatively primitive medical knowledge of the time. In the first portion of the film three doctors attend George, Drs Warren, Pepys, and Baker (Roger Hammond). They spend much of the film arguing about which of his symptoms are important and which are incidental. Warren, as already noted, insists that neither his pulse nor his urine are important, while Pepys is obsessed with the quality of his stools. This is played for mild humor; the audience is intended to be amused by Warren’s inability to realize that the pulse and urine matter, and Pepys’ interest in George’s stools is almost farcical. But Warren’s disinterest in these symptoms is quite unrealistic. Taking the pulse was an important procedure from before the time of the Greeks, just as it is today. Physicians of the day routinely examined both urine and stools (as is evident from the fact that George’s doctors noted the quality of his urine quite a lot).

At the same time that Warren ‘s skepticism represents modern amusement about 18th century medical practice, he also represents what today would be considered barbaric medical treatment. He insists on blistering the king (applying heated glass cups to the skin to draw fluids to the surface and then lancing the resulting blister to drain the fluid). It was an extremely painful process, as the film shows, and serves to horrify the audience and increase their sympathy for George.

Blistering cups

Baker is dithering and ineffectual. At the start of the crisis, rather than examining the king directly, he questions the king’s equerry, because protocol forbids speaking to the king about his symptoms. Again, we’re supposed to be amused and appalled by the poor quality of the medical treatment given to George.

When Dr. Willis (Ian Holm, reprising his role from the debut of the play) arrives, he is presented as being a different kind of doctor. Indeed, Warren sniffs that he isn’t actually a legitimate doctor (although the real Willis had his medical degree from Oxford). He approaches George’s problems from a completely different direction. He takes the position that George’s inability to restrain his speech and actions are caused by the fact that George has never actually had to restrain himself, because the court indulges his whims and cossets him at every turn. In other words, George’s sickness is moral rather than medical. What George needs is to learn restraint through a process of being restrained whenever he misbehaves. George is immediately tied down to what today would be considered a bondage chair and gagged with a leather strap. He is also kept in a straight jacket. As he shows self-control, he is increasingly permitted to live more comfortably, but whenever he acts out, Willis immediately forces him into the chair. Gradually, George learns to go into the chair voluntarily when he misbehaves, and then learns to self-correct whenever Willis says something or even just looks at him. By the end of the film, George has returned to his old demeanor and no longer needs Willis standing in a corner clearing his throat as a reminder.

Holm as Willis

There is some truth to all this. Willis did employ restraints in alternation with more gentle treatment. But he also employed blistering, which the film associates with Warren instead. He also employed manual labor, which isn’t shown either.

 

The Problem with the Film

The film sets up Baker, Warren, and Pepys to represent ‘old’ medicine as quackery and ineffective, and Willis as ‘new’ medicine, which is both more effective and more humane. It encourages the audience to be both amused and horrified by how terrible medicine was in the past, and thus implicitly glad that we have come so far from those ‘bad old days’.

In an epilogue text, the film tells us the color of the king’s urine suggests he was suffering from porphyria, thus explaining the significance of the references to the king’s urine. So it asserts that we now know what was wrong with the king, even if they didn’t know it back then, and we are encouraged to assume that if George III were alive today, he would receive much better treatment. The film is flattering us for being so much smarter and more enlightened than our ancestors were in the late 18th century.

This is a common problem with historical movies, which often operate by establishing an implicit position of moral and intellectual superiority toward the past. Such films often tell us that we are smarter than or morally superior to our ancestors because we no longer do X, with X being whatever the film is about. (See my thoughts on Gladiator and its depiction of gladiatorial combat for another variation of this.)

The problem is, as I frequently tell my students, we are no smarter than our historical ancestors were. We know more and we have better technology, but we’re not actually smarter than they are. What looks to us as stupidity and barbarity is actually just a different culture acting on different assumptions and different bodies of knowledge than we use. In 200 years, I have no doubt that film audiences will be told to marvel at how ignorant and barbaric 21st century Americans were because they still believed something that 23rd century science has disproven. Who knows, maybe 23rd century epigenetics will disprove the ridiculous notion that bacteria cause disease. So someday a film make will show moronic, hidebound 21st century physicians –gasp!—giving syphilis patients antibiotics rather than gene therapy. My point is that we have no way of knowing what facets of current society our descendants will be embarrassed or horrified by. So it would be best to get out of the habit of gawking at our ancestors like they were a freak show before we ourselves get trundled out as the next exhibit by our great-grandchildren.

And, in fact, The Madness of King George demonstrates this problem quite well. Bennett relied on the Porphyria Theory when he wrote the play and revised it for the screen. But as I’ve already noted, the Porphyria Theory is probably wrong. The king’s urine was probably occasionally blue because of a medication he was taking, and his other symptoms have to be aggressively manipulated and misrepresented to fit such a diagnosis. If the actual problem was bipolar disorder, then the modern film is wrong and George’s doctors were actually right. The consensus at the time was that George was suffering from a mental illness, not a physical one, So they probably got it right and Macalpine, Hunter, Bennett, and the film got it wrong.

 

The Deeper Problem with the Film

Bennett’s story does a wonderful job of dramatizing George’s plight, and the film itself is loaded with great performances, especially Hawthorne and Holm’s. But the film doesn’t realize that there is a major problem with its presentation of the medical issues.

The foundation of the play medically is that George was suffering from a metabolic disorder. Even though that’s probably wrong historically, it’s a valid approach, especially since at the time the play and the film were produced, many scholars had accepted the Porphyria Theory. So we can’t blame Bennett for following the roughly accepting thinking of the day on the issue.

But Bennett doesn’t actually approach George’s cure as a question of treating a metabolic disorder. Willis’ treatment is entirely in the realm of morality. He adopts a moral theory of what is wrong with George, proposes a course of treatment based on moral re-education, and achieves results. This would be as problematic as if George’s underlying medical problem were a brain tumor. No amount of teaching George self-restraint could possibly cure his porphyria, because good manners don’t qualify as an effective treatment for metabolic disorders.

Hawthorne and Mirren as the king and queen right at the end of the film

The film hints at this in the epilogue text when it says that porphyria is “periodic, unpredictable—and hereditary”. The film essentially says “oh yeah, the story we just depicted is bullshit because what helped George was actually his disease going dormant, not anything that we just showed you.” So the film is trying eat its cake and have it too. We get a heartwarming story of how modern democratic values (as represented by Willis’ refusal to abide by court protocols) help cure a king whose problem is that no one will tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear, and then the film winks at us and tells us to disregard what it just showed us. The film unfortunately perpetuates the myth that mental illness is mostly a matter of lack of self-control. In doing this, it falls right in line with people who tell someone suffering from depression to “just snap out of it” or who condemn alcoholics for their lack of self-control. Even as it wants us to sympathize with George III’s sufferings, it’s also blaming him for his turmoil because he was too weak to keep himself in line. So in an odd way, the film too is suffering from its own mental disorder, schizophrenically saying mutually contradictory things and expecting us to believe both of them at once.

Want to Know More?

The Madness of King Georgeis available on Amazon. The screenplay, The Madness of King George,is also available.

Janice Hadlow’s A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of King George IIIis a well-received study of George’s private life that examines his rather unpleasant childhood, his relationship with his wife and children, and his mental illness. She’s not a professional historian, though, so read it with a bit of caution. It’s only available in hardcover or Kindle editions.

The Duchess: What We Don’t See

Tags

18th Century England, 18th Century Europe, Amanda Foreman, Charles Fox, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, Interesting Women, Keira Knightley, London, Regency Crisis, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Saul Dibb, The Duchess, Whigs

In my last post, I explored how The Duchess (2008, dir. Saul Dibb) translated Amanda Foreman’s 1998 biography Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire from a historical biography to a historical drama. The previous post focused on what the film chose to include from the book, which was mostly the details of her rather unconventional marriage to William Cavendish and her ill-fated affair with Charles Grey.

However, the film removes some very important facets of Georgiana’s life entirely, excising more than half of Foreman’s narrative. Georgiana’s romantic life is, in my opinion, in many ways the least interesting part of her life story.

When Georgiana married Duke William, she instantly became one of the most socially prominent women in British society. Fortunately for her, her natural social gifts allowed her to adapt to that position, and she quickly became perhaps the leader of the London ton, the glamorous people of the day. She was charming and gracious and good at putting people at ease.

In particular, Georgiana had a remarkable gift for fashion, and in modern terms, she was a trend-setter. One example that Foreman gives is the way that Georgiana elaborated the fashionable hairstyle:

“Women’s hair was already arranged high above the head, but Georgiana took the fashion a step further by creating the three-foot hair tower. She stuck pads of horse hair to her own hair using scented pomade and decorated the top with miniature ornaments. Sometimes she carried a ship in full sail, or an exotic arrangement of stuffed birds and waxed fruit, or even a pastoral tableau with little wooden trees and sheep…women competed with each other to construct the tallest head, ignoring the fact that it made quick movements impossible and that the only way to ride in a carriage was to sit on the floor.”

When Georgiana adopted an ostrich feather worn in the front of her forehead, it instantly became an in-demand fashion accessory, despite being rare and extremely expensive. When she posed for a painting in a wide-brimmed hat with drooping feathers, the Devonshire ‘picture hat’ was immediately in demand across the country.

The Duchess of Devonshire in the original ‘picture hat’

The film explores this, but more in the attention it pays to Georgiana’s (Keira Knightley) clothing than through any dialog. She is routinely shown in different outfits, some of them quite striking visually, but none of them include the towering hairdos with decorations. So the film essentially elides Georgiana’s role as a fashion leader and leaves it to the viewer to recognize that her fashion sense was remarkable.

Knightley in a toned down version of the ‘picture hat’

It’s clear from Foreman’s book that Georgiana, like many of her contemporaries (including her own mother) was addicted to gambling. On some occasions, Georgiana actually turned Devonshire House, her London residence, into a casino. She could stay up very late playing cards in what to modern eyes looks very much like a compulsive habit. The film does show gambling in several scenes, but there is little sense that Georgiana had a gambling problem. The historic Georgiana also shows signs of alcoholism and perhaps a mild addiction to laudanum. Foreman goes so far as suggest that her late nights, constant drinking, and drug use may have been the reason for her miscarriages.

This is the most elaborate her hairdos get in the film. Not bad, but not quite Georgiana.

One of the central themes of Foreman’s book is how much Georgiana struggled with money. She enjoyed a remarkable income by the standards of her day; at a time when a gentleman could live comfortably on £300 a year, Georgiana’s allowance was about £2000 a year. However, her tastes in fashion, her lavish parties, and her gambling habit meant that she was perpetually short of money. She feared telling the duke just how badly she was in debt, and instead evaded and flat-out lied to him about the size of her debts. At one point, William agreed to cover her debts, assuming them to be perhaps £1000-2000; he was shocked when she confessed to owing £6000, and in fact the real total was considerably higher than that. Throughout her late 20s and 30s, Georgiana was constantly borrowing money from anyone who would loan to her, signing promissory notes to various craftsmen and bankers, and making the gambler’s fallacy of trying to win back money she had lost, only to get further into debt when she lost again.

This seedier side of Georgiana is entirely absent from the film. The only time that money is discussed at all is when the duke pays her a bonus for the birth of their only son, an entirely fabricated detail designed to further the vilification of the duke. She is once shown drunk and passing out at a party, after being raped by the duke, but the suggestion is that these things were a temporary response to what the duke has done, not an issue that may have plagued her much of her adult life. Omitting these details seems largely intended to preserve Georgiana’s character as a victim of circumstances for the viewer. It is hard to empathize with this facet of the real Georgiana’s character, unless you’ve struggled with compulsive spending or gambling, perhaps, but it is also a flaw that makes her more human; stripping it out makes her more sympathetic, but less a real person.

Georgiana’s social importance meant that she was a magnet for criticism both gentle and harsh. The most famous piece of satire directed at her is Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal, in which she is Lady Teazle, the young, spendthrift wife of Sir Peter Teazle. Sheridan was, in fact, a friend of hers, but Foreman feels that his satire probably cut a little too close to home for her, given her constant fears about her spending.

Her Role in Politics

All of that is interesting, but it doesn’t really address why Georgiana matters historically, except perhaps as a footnote to fashion history. Georgiana’s husband belonged to the Whigs, one of the two major political factions of the day. As a result, when Georgiana became the leader of London social world, she also effectively became a central figure among the Whigs. The wives of 18^th century noblemen were almost automatically political hostesses, but Georgiana forged close relationships with a number of the Whig party’s leading figures, including Charles Fox, Sheridan (who was a politician as well as a playwright), Charles Grey, and Prince George (the future George IV); developed her own political opinions; and gradually emerged as one of the dominant figures in the party, despite having no formal office. Indeed, she was probably a greater influence on the Whigs than her husband was, despite his being a member of the House of Lords.

Charles Fox

The Whigs were essentially the anti-royalist party. They saw themselves as the guardians of traditional English liberty against what they saw as the Crown’s autocratic efforts to control the government, and they championed religious toleration for non-Anglicans (particularly Catholics, who had few political rights at the time). The Whigs had dominated English politics for much of the early 18^th century, but when George III came to the throne in 1760, he quickly began to support the Tories, who championed royal power and conservative Anglicanism. This forced the Whigs into opposition, a rather unfamiliar situation for them, and for much of Georgiana’s lifetime they struggled to develop the organizational unity that could lead them back into power. The Hanoverian dynasty had a deep-seated tradition of mutual loathing between father and son, so when George III threw his support to the Tories, his son Prince George quickly gravitated toward the Whigs (which protected the Whigs against charges of being opposed to the monarchy itself).

Prince George, c. 1781

In 1780, Richard Sheridan decided to pursue a seat in Parliament. Lacking the finances that political candidates traditionally needed, he adopted a novel strategy of asking the Duchess of Devonshire to use her high public stature to draw attention to him. Charles Fox, one of the Whig leaders, went further and invited Georgiana to appear with him at a campaign rally. This was an incredibly bold move in a society in which politics were the prerogative of men, and the press remarked on it. Fox was a powerful orator and won the election easily, as did Sheridan, and the Whigs had learned a lesson; the Duchess of Devonshire was a powerful political weapon.

In 1782, the Tory Prime Minister Lord North resigned after the British loss in the American War of Independence, and George III reluctantly invited the Whigs to form a coalition with another Tory leader, so Fox became Foreign Minister. According to the rules in operation at the time, this required Fox to stand for immediate re-election to confirm that his constituents wanted him. Fox turned to Georgiana again, and asked her to not simply appear on his behalf, but to lead a formal female delegation during the campaign. The election campaign was a great success, and Fox remained in his ministry for the next two years.

In 1784, however, George III and William Pitt the Younger formed a conspiracy of sorts to pull down Fox’ coalition and nominated Pitt for Prime Minister, at 24, the youngest man ever tapped for the office. Fox was able to block Pitt’s nomination and the king dissolved Parliament. In the ensuing election, Pitt won a handy majority, forcing the Whigs back into opposition. During this electoral rout, Fox’ seat of Westminster was fiercely contested, with a very real possibility that Fox could be ousted from Parliament entirely.

George III, the Whigs’ main enemy

In the ensuing campaign, Georgiana canvassed aggressively on Fox’ behalf, and the most lively portion of Foreman’s book is her description of the campaign. The polling period lasted a full six weeks, and Georgiana and several other Whig ladies worked tirelessly to persuade residents of Westminister to vote for Fox. They paraded through the streets, paid personal visits to shops and private houses, and occasionally let voters ride in their personal coaches to get to the polls. Georgiana was reputed to have caressed and even kissed men to win votes. In one unfortunate incident, she was reported to have gone into a house to debate with several drunken supporters of one of Fox’ opponents, who would not let her leave until she had kissed every man present. The press found particular amusement in the fact that she had several times to walk down a street with a number of notorious brothels on it.

Pitt’s supporters made much of these claims, and embellished them further. She was accused of granting sexual favors in return for votes, and rumors circulated that she and Fox were lovers (a charge that Foreman acknowledges can not be either proven or disproven). The whole thing was exhausting for Georgiana, emotionally and physically, and two weeks into the campaign, she left London to recuperate. But the Whigs, particularly the duke’s brothers, begged her to return, saying that her absence was being taken as a sign that she no longer supported Fox and causing a drop in his polling. Less than a week later, she returned to the campaign. Her absence had clearly had an impact on the voting, and her return reversed Fox’ slide; Fox eked out a win by less than 250 votes out of more than 18,000.

“The Devonshire, or most approved method of securing votes”

In all of this, it is clear that Georgiana’s unique gifts were key to her influence. Her high status and popular acclaim meant that people paid attention everywhere she went. Her ability to put people at ease extended all the way to tradesmen and their wives; she had recently given birth to her first child, and so could talk with women about the challenges of caring for babies. Her economic clout with clothiers enabled her to sway many tradesmen simply by promising to purchase their products or, more darkly, threatening to blacklist them. Since anything Georgiana wore in public immediately came into general demand, a promise to buy a hat or muff carried real value. And Georgiana understood the political issues well enough to debate them intelligently when it came to that.

Thanks to Georgiana, the 1780s saw the first emergence of women into British politics in a direct way, and it is not unreasonable to say that she may well be the first female activist in British history. Women directly engaging in polling activities was unprecedented, and she was successful at it. By the 1790s, however, opinion was beginning to swing against such things, and noble women, including Georgiana, were gradually forced back into their more traditional roles as hostesses only.

But that did not actually sideline Georgiana as a political figure. Instead, she gradually emerged as one of the party’s strategists and an unofficial ‘whip’. She used her parties and banquets to woo wavering politicians and court those who were undecided. She worked to build bridges between the various fractious figures in the party. Her personal letters and diaries are important historical sources today for what they reveal about internal Whig debates, particularly during the Regency Crisis.

The Regency Crisis

In October of 1788, George III suffered a bout of insanity and became incapable of fulfilling his role as monarch. In such a situation, it would be necessary to appoint Prince George as Regent until his father recovered, but it was not clear just how much power he ought to be given, and so a heated debate erupted turning over the question of whether Prince George had an automatic right to assume full power or if Parliament could stipulate the powers he would receive. The Tories, assuming that the king’s madness was temporary, felt that Parliament could specify the grant of powers, while the Whigs, assuming the king’s madness was permanent and that the king was therefore functionally dead, felt that the Prince should have unlimited access to royal power as if he had inherited the throne. This debate turned the normal Whig and Tory positions on their head and confused the whole situation.

A political cartoon satirizing Sheridan’s opportunism during the Crisis

From the Whig perspective, the whole thing played out like a bad political farce. Fox was out of the country when the Crisis began, and by the time he returned, he had come down with dysentery and could not play his normal leadership role right away. In the vacuum, Sheridan stole a march on him and began representing the Prince, who immediately demanded full authority and made a public show of mocking his father’s illness. Georgiana’s lover, Charles Grey, was hoping for a high political office, but Sheridan disliked Grey and persuaded the Prince to insult him with a promise of a minor office. When Fox finally got into the fray, he was unable to counter Sheridan’s position with the Prince, and when he appeared in Parliament, he gave a disastrous speech that seemed to repudiate the whole Whig philosophy and opened the Whigs up to charges of rank hypocrisy and power-hunger. Pitt managed to drag the whole affair out until the king began to recover, and the lasting result was the fracturing of the Whigs into squabbling factions who were unable to mount an effective response to the Tories for more than a decade.

Georgiana was a die-hard Whig her entire adult life. She was an intelligent politician who wielded considerable influence within her party. Her tragedy, in some ways, is that her allies were beneath her. Fox, for all his importance, was in many ways inept and was much better in opposition than in power. Georgiana believed in him whole-heartedly and was never able to recognize his faults and move beyond him. Sheridan was a weasel with a gift for speech-making and deception that enabled him to cause trouble but not actually solve it. The Prince was a sullen, childish man who let real opportunities slip away because he was too petty to swallow his hatred of his father, although in part his actions were due to a lack of political experience. (Georgiana was a reluctant witness to his illegal and secret marriage to a young Catholic widow, Maria Fitzherbert. As Prince it was illegal to marry without his father’s permission or to marry a Catholic, but George courted total disaster and removal from the line of succession to pursue an infatuation; a decade later he dumped her to marry legally in part because the Crown would pay his massive debts of £600,000 the day he wed. By acting as witness, Georgiana put herself in legal danger to please her friend.) Had Georgiana had better allies to work with, she might have wound up with real influence in the British government instead of influence with the powerless opposition.

Georgiana in blue and buff, the Whigs’ colors

The Duchess does acknowledge Georgiana’s involvement in politics, but in a very watered-down way. She meets Fox (Simon McBurney) at a banquet and proceeds to debate the virtues of liberty with him (something of a misrepresentation, since Fox’ deepest political principles were religious toleration and opposition to slavery). Similarly she is friends with Sheridan (Aidan McArdle), who is presented as nothing more than a playwright. In three or four scenes, she is shown making brief political appearances, because Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper) has asked her to do so, not Fox. There is absolutely no discussion of the political issues of the day, or only the faintest hint that Georgiana is interested in politics for any reason other than her friendships. The raucous campaign of 1784 is receives no particular attention, and there is no suggestion that Georgiana was a key figure among the Whig leadership.

On the one hand, the excision of Georgiana’s politics makes some sense, given that the film is focused on her romantic relationships. Explaining 18^th century politics to a modern audience would take some work and would detract from the personal relationships that are key to the film. But on the other hand, making a biopic about Georgiana and minimizing her political activities in favor of her troubled marriage does a tremendous disservice to her. It would be like making a biopic about Hillary Clinton and focusing entirely on her relationship with her husband while omitting her legal career or her political activities and then ending the film shortly after the Lewinsky Affair. Technically, the film would be accurate, but it would be giving a very distorted view of who she is and minimizing her historical importance.

Georgiana Cavendish was an important figure in Britain in the late 18^th century. Key events, such as Fox’ re-election and the Regency Crisis would probably have played out quite differently had she not been involved. Had Fox been defeated in 1784, the politics of the following decade would certainly have been altered. In an age in which women participate in politics in a very substantial way, surely there is an audience for a film about an early female political activist?

A Few Other Omissions

The Duchess also omits other important details that are at least worth mentioning here, such as Georgiana’s close friendship with the ill-fated Marie Antoinette and several other French nobles. The French Revolution was a major event in Georgiana’s life; during her time on the Continent following the birth of Eliza, she had to deal with the dangers of the Revolution. But the film’s only acknowledgement of the Revolution is Grey’s ominous prediction that a revolution is brewing in France.

Just as the film has no interest in Georgiana as a politician, it also has no interest in her as an author. Georgiana wrote a number of surviving poems, as well as two short novels, one of which, The Sylph, she published anonymously to some acclaim. She also wrote a couple of travel narratives later in her life. She frequently invited authors to her parties, Sheridan being only the most notable.

In later life, Georgiana was also an amateur scientist, being particularly interested in geology. Her brother-in-law Henry Cavendish was a noted chemist, and she worked with Thomas Beddoes, a prominent physician, to establish a brief-lived scientific institute, chiefly noted for its work with nitrous oxide.

In all these fields, Georgiana’s accomplishments were minor. None of her writings have deep literary significance, and she herself was not a real scientist. But they demonstrate that Georgiana was woman of complex interests that went well beyond fashion and romance.

All in all, The Duchess is a good film, but ultimately unsatisfying. The performances are uniformly strong; Ralph Fiennes does an excellent job bringing just enough humanity to a rather unlikable man. The film is gorgeously shot, and the costuming does a good job of suggesting the fashions of the time, even if the film doesn’t really explore Georgiana’s influence on fashion. It does at least acknowledge her involvement in politics. But both through its omissions and through its distortions, I think the film fails to capture the true Georgiana. It takes a complex and historically important woman and largely reduces her to the victim of an unfortunate marriage. Both Georgiana and the film’s audience deserved a more complex portrait than it delivers.

Want to Know More? 

The Duchess is available in a variety of formats on Amazon. As I noted, it’s based on Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, which won the Whitbread Prize and is extremely readable, drawing quite heavily from the duchess’ surviving letters. I found reading the book after watching the film quite eye-opening about Hollywood’s ability to make fabrication seem like historical truth.

Georgiana’s most important literary work, The Sylph (European Classics)is available. It’s perhaps most useful as a window into the British aristocracy of the period. It’s an epistolary novel, a fairly obscure genre today but quite popular in the 18th century in which a story is told through a series of letters.

The Duchess: What We See

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18th Century England, 18th Century Europe, 2nd Earl Grey, 5th Duke of Devonshire, Bess Foster, Charles Grey, Dominic Cooper, Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, Hayley Atwell, Interesting Women, Keira Knightley, London, Ralph Fiennes, Saul Dibb, The Duchess, William Cavendish

Keira Knightley has garnered considerable attention for her performances in period pieces both serious—Pride and Prejudice, Silk, Atonement, Anna Karenina, The Imitation Game—and more action-oriented—King Arthur, the various Pirates of the Caribbean films. One of her more notable roles was Georgiana Cavendish, the 18^th century Duchess of Devonshire, in The Duchess (2008, dir. Saul Dibb). The film was based on the 1998 international best-seller Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography. The book and the film are quite different from each other in some key ways, so for the next couple of posts I’m going to explore Georgiana’s life as it appears in the film and the book.

Georgiana’s Life

Georgiana (pronounced “Jhor-JAY-na”) was born into the Spencer family, one of the major noble families of 18^th century England. (Her brother, George John Spencer, 2^nd Earl Spencer was the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Diana, Princess of Wales, so he’s also the one-more-great ancestor of the presumably future king of England William.) On her 17^th birthday in 1774, she married William Cavendish, the 5^th Duke of Devonshire, who came from a sprawling noble family of major political importance; his father had already served as Prime Minister and his brother-in-law the 3^rd Duke of Portland would hold the office later on.

While the marriage made good sense politically, Georgiana and William were not well matched to each other personally. She was a charming, vivacious young woman who soon became known for her beauty, fashion sense, and skill as a hostess, while he was a taciturn man mostly known for his love of his dogs and his disinterest in socializing. Georgiana had been lavished with affection by her parents, while William’s upbringing had been rather cold. It was once remarked that William was “the only man in England not in love with the Duchess of Devonshire”.

The Duke was automatically, by virtue of his noble title, an important figure in English society, and when she married him, Georgiana became a major figure in London society. Georgiana’s natural, unforced charm, her ability to chat easily with almost anyone, and her understanding of etiquette all combined to make her almost instantly one of the leaders of the ton, as British high society was becoming known. In addition, she had a remarkable sense of fashion, which was backed up by her husband’s seemingly limitless wealth (at a time when a minor noble could live comfortably on an annual income of £300, he had a reported annual income of around £60,000). This enabled her to become a trend-setter in fashion, a position she held for many years.

Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire

Unfortunately, Georgiana struggled with one of the most important duties of an 18^th century noblewoman, the obligation to produce a male heir. In the first decade of her marriage, she suffered a number of miscarriages, and then gave birth in 1783 and 1785 to two daughters, Georgiana (nicknamed “Little G”) and Harriet (called “Harryo”). Her failure to provide the duke with a son was clearly a source of considerable tension and embarrassment to her. Nor was the fault obviously the duke’s; when they married, he already had an illegitimate daughter Charlotte. In 1780, Charlotte’s mother died, and Georgiana insisted on essentially adopting the girl, raising her virtually as her own, a somewhat uncommon gesture in an age when illegitimate children were generally deposited with distant relatives or entirely unrelated commoners to avoid scandal.

In 1782, the duke and duchess traveled to Bath, the popular British spa town, hoping to treat his gout and her fertility problems. Almost immediately, they encountered Lady Elizabeth Foster, the daughter of a bishop and the wife of John Foster, a member of the Irish parliament. Bess (as she was known) had two children by her husband, but their marriage had irretrievably broken down and he had insisted on a complete separation (in an age when divorce was exceptionally hard to get). John had insisted on custody of the children, which was his legal right, and refused to pay her any support at all, a highly unusual choice that suggests that he had proof that she had been unfaithful to him.

Despite her rather scandalous and lower-class background, Bess and Georgiana became close friends, and the destitute Bess latched onto the duke and duchess like a lamprey. In Foreman’s biography, Bess Foster comes across as an unpleasant and deeply manipulative woman who figured out how to play upon Georgiana’s insecurities and William’s need to be doted on. By 1784, she had succeeded in becoming the duke’s mistress, while still managing to remain Georgiana’s best friend. Despite being disliked by most of the people around them, including Georgiana’s mother and sister, Bess became a permanent fixture of their household, apart from a two-year period when she was sent to Italy to give birth to the duke’s illegitimate daughter Caroline (which she did in an Italian brothel).

Elizabeth Foster and Georgiana Cavendish

The Cavendishes and Foster lived as a triad until Georgiana’s death in 1806. Their domestic life was remarkably complex. Georgiana finally gave birth to her only son, William, in 1790, two years after Bess had given the duke a son, Augustus (a name she must have been fond of, because her second son had the same name). Bess had numerous affairs, including with two English dukes, an Irish Earl (whom she may have had a son with), a Swedish count, and an Italian cardinal.

Georgiana, for her part, had an affair with a leading politician of the day (and future Prime Minister), Charles Grey, 2^nd Earl Grey (after whom the tea is thought to be named). They met sometime in the late 1780s because they were both major figures in the Whig Party. In 1791, she became pregnant. To avoid scandal, she and Bess rented a house in southern France, where little Eliza Courtney was born. Georgiana reluctantly turned the baby over to the Grey family, who raised her in ignorance of her true parentage, presenting her as one of their children (and thus she grew up thinking her father was her brother). Throughout this period, the duke was furious with Georgiana and forbade her to return home to England, but also refused to support her, so she and Bess spent two increasingly poor years in Italy before he finally recalled them.

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey

After this crisis, the triad achieved a lower level of unorthodoxy by living together relatively placidly for the rest of Georgiana’s life. In 1796, Georgiana suffered some sort of severe infection of her right eye. The region around her eye swelled up and an “ulcer” formed on the cornea and then burst. Her doctors treated her with leeches and other unpleasant therapies, as well as opium, and eventually the swelling went down. She lost most of the sight in her right eye, which now drooped, marring her celebrated good looks.

A decade later, in 1806, she fell ill with an abscessed liver, a condition that the doctors of the time were unable to diagnose or treat, and she died, surrounded by her husband, Bess, her mother, and her two legitimate daughters. Her death was mourned by a huge crowds of Londoners, her political friends, and even her husband William.

William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire

 

The Duchess

It seems clear that a decision was made early on in the adaptation process to target the film primarily to female viewers. This choice shapes the film in a couple of key ways, as we will see.

The film opens in 1774, with Georgiana (Knightley) as a 17-year-old flirting with Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper). This is wrong; they would not meet for almost another 15 years. Her mother (Charlotte Rampling) negotiates with William Cavendish (Ralph Fiennes) for the marriage, and the duke agrees that she will be financially rewarded when she gives birth to a son. While not an unreasonable detail for the period, this too is fabricated; Foreman makes no mention of any such arrangement. The purpose here is to establish that the duke is primarily interested in an heir more than a wife.

Keira Knightley as Georgiana

So within the first couple of scenes the film has established three of its four main characters (Georgiana, William, and Grey), positioned Charles as a potential love interest for Georgiana, and demonstrated that William doesn’t really care about her as a person. The viewer strongly suspects that the marriage will turn out poorly because Georgiana is like a modern woman in wanting a husband who is also an emotional companion, while William is like a pre-modern man in wanting a wife to be a baby-maker. This version of Georgiana and William is not unreasonable; the shift toward companionate marriage (the modern model in which spouses are emotional companions) had already begun, and Georgiana was among the first generation of women raised to hope for such a marriage (in this, she’s rather like another Knightley character, Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice). But it was not until the 19^th century that companionate marriage truly began to displace the older model of marriage as a political and economic alliance between families. William was nearly a decade older than his wife, and his upbringing would have prevented him from thinking of marriage in this new, rather radical fashion.

Ralph Fiennes as the Duke of Devonshire

The marital mismatch becomes clear almost immediately. They travel to London and her maids undress her. The duke comes into her room and she stands in front of him, naked, while he is still clothed, emphasizing both their power differential and how vulnerable she is. They have sex rather dispassionately after he undresses. Then the film moves to G (as she was nicknamed) talking to her mother, who tells her that once a son is born, she won’t have to have sex so often. G complains that he won’t talk to her, and Lady Spencer comments that they have nothing to talk about. Later, it becomes clear that he is sleeping with the servants.

The next scene shows the couple dining at opposite ends of a long table. During the meal, a young girl is brought in and Georgiana is introduced to Charlotte, who will be staying with them. When G asks why, the duke says that her mother is dead and then admits that he fathered the girl. The whole scene is played to appeal to the modern audience’s sense of outrage that our heroine is being asked to raise her husband’s bastard daughter. This is unfair. As already noted, Georgiana was quite happy to have a surrogate daughter to raise, and as a noblewoman she must have had at least some awareness that noblemen frequently had illegitimate children. While modern audiences would find the duke’s request appalling, it seems unlikely that Georgiana found it so.

Georgiana gets pregnant and gives birth to Little G while the duke demonstrates his lack of concern for her by playing with dogs and by leaving once he learns that he does not have a son. Then the film leaps forward 6 years with the duke and duchess taking their trip to Bath. By this time G has had her second daughter and then several miscarriages, and is happily mothering the three girls. The film has altered the facts here. Her miscarriages came before Little G’s birth, not after. By re-writing the details of her births, the film highlights the duke’s callous disregard for anything but a son. Georgiana can clearly have children so the whole problem is that the duke simply doesn’t care about them at all. The fault in the marriage, from the film’s perspective, is entirely his. In reality, there must have been considerable anxiety about whether G was capable of having children at all, because she lost her first several pregnancies. Nor does the film address the fact that in the context of her day, much of the blame would have fallen on Georgiana, especially since the duke had already proven that he could father children.

In the film, the couple meets Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell) after their first two children have already been born, but in reality, Little G was only born after Georgiana had already known Bess for about a year. The duke may have taken up with Bess in part because of his growing frustration over G’s difficulties giving him any children at all, but in the film he is clearly rejecting her because she is only giving him daughters.

The film treats Bess Foster much more sympathetically than Foreman’s sense of the woman. Bess is presented as a quiet but decent woman whose husband has taken a mistress, beats her, and is refusing to let her see her sons. John Foster had publicly admitted to sleeping with one of the servants, but there is no evidence that he was violent toward his wife, and there is no mention in the film that Foster may well have cheated on him.

Hayley Atwell as Bess Foster, with Georgiana

The only sign of Bess’ ability to manipulate the couple comes after Georgiana realizes that Bess has begun sleeping with the duke. Bess explains that the duke may be able to use his influence to pressure John Foster into letting Bess see her children. This scene is interesting for two reasons. It allows the viewer to sympathize with Bess rather than hating her as an interloper, and thus it makes clear why Georgiana was able to remain friends with her husband’s mistress. But it is also a very rare example of a mainstream film in which a woman’s romantic choices are presented as a means to achieve a laudable goal. Normally when a woman has ulterior motives for sex, she is seen as an evil woman using her sexual charms as some sort of honeytrap or to gain revenge. But here, Bess sleeps with William because it will get her access to her children. Perhaps she doesn’t really love the duke at all. (The film also has one scene that briefly alludes to the possibility that Georgiana and Bess may also have been lovers, a fact that cannot now be confirmed but which seems plausible.)

And, in fact, this strategy pays off. Bess is reunited with her three sons (having apparently picked up a third one somewhere), and Georgiana gets to watch the duke interact with the boys in a way that humanizes him slightly, and suggests that perhaps the duke is a different man with her than he is with Georgiana. In reality, this never happened, and it’s far from clear in Foreman’s biography that Bess had strong maternal instincts; she seems to have cheerfully handed off her illegitimate children to distant contacts and made little effort to see her sons until rather late in life.

After all this, Georgiana begins to fall in love with Charles Grey. At breakfast, she proposes a deal to her husband. She will permit his relationship with Bess if he in turn will permit her to have a relationship with Charles. The duke refuses angrily and when G leaves the room, he angrily storms after her and rapes her. This rape leads her to get pregnant and give birth to their son, after which he rather coldly gives her the promised financial bonus.

Dominic Cooper as Charles Grey

This is entirely invented. There is no evidence that Georgiana ever attempted to arrange such a deal, which would have been highly abnormal by the standards of the day, and there is no evidence that William ever raped her. The purpose here, again, is to recast events for a modern audience, who expect husband and wife to have equal control over the relationship; if William gets to have a mistress that he genuinely cares for, it is reasonable that Georgiana should get a lover as well. The duke’s fury and assault on his wife reinforce how unreasonably G is being treated, and the invention of the cash payment for giving birth to a son reinforces the duke’s callousness for the audience.

After the birth of their son, Charles Grey shows up at their estate while the duke is away, saying that he has been invited. The film doesn’t clarify who did the inviting, but it seems to be a tacit acknowledgement by William that Georgiana has earned some happiness. They begin their affair and are indiscrete about being together at Bath. At this point, the duke and Lady Spencer show up and tell her that she has to break off the affair because she is being careless. She refuses, and he tells her than she will not be allowed to see her children, a threat that leads to her breaking things off with Charles. But she’s already pregnant.

From this point, the films moves quickly to its conclusion. Georgiana and Bess go away (apparently somewhere in Britain rather than southern France) and the baby is born and reluctantly passed off to the Greys. She returns home, and the duke briefly opens his heart to her, saying that he knows that she thinks him a harsh man, but that he wishes to find some sort of calm normality with her from here on. He watches the children playing and wistfully remarks “How wonderful to be that free.” She bumps into Charles at a party and he tells her that he is engaged and that he has a young ‘niece’ who is doing quite well.

The film ends with an epilogue text. “Georgiana re-entered society and continued to be one of the most celebrated and influential women of her day. Charles Grey became Prime Minister. Georgiana, Bess, and the Duke lived together until Georgiana’s death. With Georgiana’s blessing, Bess went on to marry the Duke and became the next Duchess of Devonshire. Georgiana frequently visited Eliza in secret. Eliza named her daughter Georgiana.“ This accurately sums up the rest of Georgiana’s private life, but, as we will see in my next post, the film has in fact glossed over or omitted quite a lot of Georgiana’s life. Her unorthodox home life is actually only one of the reasons Georgiana was an interesting woman. Amanda Foreman’s book makes a good case that her historical importance goes much further than this film suggests.

Want to Know More?

The Duchess is available in a variety of formats on Amazon. As I noted, it’s based on Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, which won the Whitbread Prize and is extremely readable, drawing quite heavily from the duchess’ surviving letters.

If this has gotten interested in Bess Foreman, one of her descendants has written a rather positive biography of her, Elizabeth & Georgiana: The Duke of Devonshire and His Two Duchesses, drawing off of Bess’ journals. I’d recommend reading Foreman’s book first.

A Royal Affair: Enlightenment and Adultery in 18th Century Denmark

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18th Century Europe, A Royal Affair, Alicia Vikander, Caroline Matilda of Denmark, Christian VII of Denmark, Johann Struensee, Kings and Queens, Mads Mikkelsen, The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment

The 18^th century is a critically important period in the history of modern Western civilization. Politically, it was characterized by absolute monarchy almost everywhere except England and the Netherlands. To summarize a complex political system, absolute monarchy was based on the principle that all legitimate political power came from the king, who recognized only God as the limit to his political powers. In theory, the king had the power to run the state at his will, legislate as he saw fit, and enforce or waive laws as suited him.

The reality, of course, was more complex. While kings were supposed to rule in person, they typically depended on royal councils and bureaucracies to manage the state for them, and this meant that they had to compromise with the various other powers in their states, particularly the clergy and the nobility. Kings were more absolute in theory than they were in practice, and in some situations it took a truly determined absolute monarch to overcome resistance to the changes he wished to enact.

The 18^th century was also the Age of the Enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution, which had gotten going in the previous century or so, had encouraged the growth of rationalism and a demand for scientific evidence for ideas about how the world worked. As Western society began to accept the existence of the laws of physics, it naturally began to occur to intellectuals that rationalism could be applied to human society. Intellectuals, often called philosophes, began to develop a rational critique of Western society in a movement that they saw as paralleling the Scientific Revolution. These men and a few women began searching for the laws of human society, the principles upon which society ought to be based. Broadly speaking, philosophes opposed anything they saw as irrational or arbitrary, such as laws that give the nobility legal privileges simply for being nobles. Many, such as the great thinker Voltaire, accused the Catholic Church of teaching not religion but superstition, while Montesquieu called for legal reforms and a more rational balance of powers in which executive, legislative, and judicial branches enjoyed separate spheres of power that mutually limited each other branch’s powers. Sound familiar? It should; this is the period that gave birth to American democracy.

Denmark in the late 18^th Century

From 1766 to 1808, Denmark was ruled by Christian VII, at least in name. The Danish kings were, like all other kings except the English ones, absolute monarchs. But Christian VII was a rather poor monarch. He was a smart and sensitive man and seemingly quite talented, but he was the victim of a personal tutor who physically and emotionally terrorized him while growing up, and of a group of courtiers who provided him with a steady string of prostitutes and mistresses. The result was an emotionally unstable man who may have suffered from some form of schizophrenia. He was given to sudden outbursts of emotion and fits of anger, moments of paranoia, and perhaps even self-mutilation.

Christian VII

As a result, instead of Christian ruling personally, control of the government was in the hands of the nobles who controlled the royal council. Public opinion also had a remarkably strong role in Danish politics in this period, such that one historian has declared it “absolutism driven by opinion”. The details of government bored the young king, and he often ignored his responsibilities for days on end, which only strengthened the control of the royal council.

In 1766, in addition to becoming king, Christian married his cousin Caroline Matilda, the younger sister of George III of Great Britain. However it was a very poor match. Christian publicly declared that it was “unfashionable to love one’s wife”, and instead continued carrying on with a string of mistresses and prostitutes. They consummated the marriage long enough to have a child, the future Frederick VI, and then apparently stopped sleeping together.

Caroline Matilda was an intelligent and well-educated woman, by the standards of her day; she spoke four languages. But whether she might be considered an intellectual is by no means clear; it is unlikely that she was deeply exposed to the ideas of the Enlightenment. She may also have had a taste for men’s clothing and riding astride rather than side-saddle, although this might be political slander from later in her life.

Caroline Matilda

In 1770, Christian went on a tour of Europe, and when he returned home he brought with him a new German physician, Johann Struensee, who proved remarkably adept at managing Christian’s erratic mood swings. This gave him a great deal of control over the young king. Struensee was a man deeply sympathetic to the Enlightenment critique of government and society.

As a result of his influence over the king, Struensee was able to displace the royal council and essentially took over the running of the kingdom. Initially he had the king sign documents, but eventually the king signed off on a law allowing Struensee’s signature to count as his own. For three years, from 1770 to 1772, he produced an explosion of new legislation, averaging three new decrees a day. In accordance with Enlightenment principles, he centralized the government in a cabinet with himself at the center; replaced the senior officials (who mostly represented the land-owning nobility) with bourgeois bureaucrats; abolished censorship, torture, noble privileges, and the compulsory labor of the lower classes; restructured the state’s finances to the disadvantage of the landowners; reformed the university and the army; found a way to keep grain prices stable; and banned the slave trade, among other things. He also introduced vaccinations for small-pox, persuading the king and queen to permit their infant son to be vaccinated.

Johann Frederich Struensee

Struensee also reputedly began an affair with Caroline Matilda. I’m not an expert on 18^th century Denmark, so I don’t know what the actual evidence for the affair is. None of the information I could find online seems conclusive to me; Caroline Matilda became a more powerful figure at court during Struensee’s period, he had a bedroom in the royal palace, and in 1771 Caroline Matilda gave birth to her second child, Louise Augusta (who was acknowledged by the king as his child).

Regardless of whether Struensee had an actual affair with the queen, in January of 1772, Christian’s step-mother Dowager Queen Julaine-Marie organized a coup against Struensee with the help of various disaffected nobles. She appears to have been seeking to promote the position of her own son, Christian’s half-brother. The king was persuaded to sign an arrest warrant, and in the middle of the night, Struensee, an associate Enevold Brandt, and Caroline Matilda were all arrested. Struensee was accused of usurping the royal authority (which, to be fair, he had), and of adultery with the queen. The fact that the adultery charge was so perfectly convenient politically leads me to be suspicious of it. But it was treated as serious at the time, and Struensee, after considerable torture, confessed to the charge.

Struensee and Brandt were both publicly executed, an action Christian later regretted. Caroline Matilda was divorced and imprisoned. After a while, pressure from George III led to her being shipped off to Hanover, George’s continental state, and she lived under loose house arrest in Celle, since George was reluctant to allow his sister to return home. She died suddenly in 1775, of scarlet fever, while she was in the middle of a conspiracy to overthrow her ex-husband in favor of her son.

However, while the Dowager Queen and her faction were able to return to power, they were unable to roll the clock back on the fundamental shift that had occurred away from the power of noble landowners. Danish agriculture underwent drastic reforms over the next two decades that modernized it and permitted small Danish farms to begin farming not just for subsistence but for the export market. That in turn increased their influence in society and prevented a return to a pre-Enlightenment status quo.

In 1784, a young Prince Frederick and a group of more liberal-minded nobles forced the Queen Dowager’s faction out of power and rather than governing by decree, found ways to incentivize the liberalization of the both the economy and the political system. In some ways, this was the beginning of modern Denmark’s social evolution.

So Is There A Movie Involved, or Was This Just an Excuse to Prattle on about 18^th century Danish Politics?

Yes there is. A while ago, I was looking for movies about Scandinavian history on Netflix, and I stumbled across A Royal Affair (2012, dir. Nikolaj Arcel, Danish with subtitles). I’d never heard of it, but I knew just a little bit about its subject matter, so I watched it. It turns out to be a romance, but one with a rather strong interest in the politics and intellectual currents of the period, and far from the worst film I’ve seen on Early Modern Europe.

A Royal Affair

The film is told from the point of view of Caroline Matilda (Alicia Vikander). It opens with a framing device, a letter she supposedly wrote to Frederick and Louise Augusta as she was dying of scarlet fever. This letter establishes that she is not being allowed to see her children, and then the movie turns into a straight-forward narrative of the events mostly from her perspective. The film gets all the major facts right, and assumes that Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen) and the queen did have an affair.

Struensee and Caroline Matilda

The film does a reasonable job of trying to depict Struensee’s reforms and the complexity involved. Having revoked the censorship law, he is eventually shocked to learn that the press can be used against him, and he reluctantly has to re-instate it. His economic changes require financing, and once he starts paring back the government subsidies to the nobility, they begin to resist his changes. Indeed, the film claims that Struensee was betrayed by a noble who had previous been a friend that he refused to help out of debt. Juliane-Marie successful subverts the palace guard by pointing out to their captain how the reforms are negatively affecting the Danish army. So the film spends a fair amount of time exploring both the business of running an 18^th century kingdom and the extraordinary challenge of introducing major changes to an established system.

What the film gets wrong is that it combines the story of the affair with the story of Struensee’s political reforms. The film asserts that Caroline Matilda was intellectually interested in the Enlightenment and political reforms; indeed that is one of the things that draws her to Struensee in the first place. The film also claims that Christian (Mikkel Folsgaard) was interested in reform but was too emotionally weak to act on those desires until Struensee helped him find his strength of will. While Christian and Caroline Matilda feel no attraction to each other, they become friends through a shared interest in Struensee’s projects and the three of them form the nucleus of a group of reform-minded people at court.

This is unlikely. There doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence that Caroline Matilda was part of Struensee’s intellectual circle, nor does there seem to be much evidence that Christian was truly interested in political reforms. But linking the two major issues of Christian’s reign is an intelligent decision, because by getting the viewer to care about the relationship, it also gets the viewer to care about the politics.

What dooms both the affair and the political reforms is Struensee’s inability to keep a hold over the king. His relationship with Caroline Matilda and the enormous effort of running and reforming the government lead him to neglect his friendship with the king, which creates the opening that allows Juliane-Marie to drive a wedge between them and ultimately sink her hooks into the king. Thus the film extends the linkage between the romance and the political reforms by showing how the one essentially doomed the other.

Overall, the film does a nice job of presenting what is probably to most English-speakers a fairly obscure period, both culturally and intellectually. Given that there aren’t many films about the Enlightenment, I’d have to recommend it as an easy way to learn a little about it.

Incidentally, Caroline Matilda seems to have become the focus of a number of romance novels.

This one looks particularly…interesting

Update: Caroline Matilda was the sister of George III, who is the subject of The Madness of King George

Want to Know More?

A Royal Affair (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon.

Sadly, there’s a dearth of serious works on Carolina Matilda or Christian VII, and the only things I’ve found on Struensee are in German.