The Favourite: Random Thoughts

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17th Century England, 17th Century Europe, Early Modern England, Early Modern Europe, Emma Stone, Interesting Women, Olivia Colman, Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz, Sarah Churchill, The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos

I am very sorry for the long delay in posting. This semester has been hellishly busy with seemingly endless rounds of exam grading and other work that have left no time or energy to do more enjoyable things like blogging. But I finally have a spare moment, so I figured I should finish up my thoughts about The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos). Sadly, I’ve forgotten a number of the things I wanted to say about it, so this post is going to be rather bullet-pointy.

 

• At the start of the film, Anne (Olivia Colman) is thinking about building a palace for Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and her husband. This is quite problematic. The film must be set after 1711, because Anne’s husband Prince George is dead (the film never touches on the fact that she must be grieving for him). But work started on Blenheim Palace in 1705 and by 1711 it was already quite advanced, although when Anne and Sarah had their final break in 1712 the building was still unfinished and Parliamentary funding for it got shut off until after Anne’s death.
• The same scene presents Anne as thinking that the battle of Blenheim meant that the war with the French was basically over. Sarah has to correct her, and the scene serves to establish that Anne is basically incapable of running the government and that Sarah is functionally Anne’s prime minister. This is simply untrue. Anne was not an intellectually-gifted woman, but she took her duties as sovereign very seriously and was actively involved in the day-to-day affairs of state. Her stubborn insistence on particular courses of action occasionally frustrated her ministers and advisors because they had no way to over-rule her when she put her foot down.
• Similarly, Sarah was not the driving force behind Anne’s government. The film suggests that she basically lived in Anne’s palace and ran the government consistently for a decade. Sarah certainly spent a good deal of time in Anne’s household, but she also spent an enormous amount of time at the Churchill family estates because, among other things, she produced seven children with her husband, all but two of whom survived into their late teen years or beyond. That means that a good deal of Sarah’s time was spent at home tending her family like any good early 18^thcentury woman was expected to do. She was also an astute manager of the family estates, which would also have occupied a good deal of her time and attention. And she was also occupied with the construction of Blenheim Palace. One of the reasons we know so much about these two women’s relationship is that they wrote each other letters constantly precisely because they weren’t always together. Anne certainly listened to Sarah’s ideas, but she often disagreed with them.
• One scene shows Sarah basically writing Anne’s parliamentary speech for her. This is certainly untrue. Royal speeches were written by the queen’s ministers. Drafts might go back and forth between the queen and her officials with revisions, insertions, and so on, but Sarah Churchill would have had only a minimal role in that process.
• The phrase “prime minister” gets used several times in the film, which two factions competing for the office. That office wouldn’t exist for about a decade at the time of the film. It evolved during the reign of George I (1715-1727), in part because George was also the ruler of Hanover and therefore did not reside full-time in England, thus making it necessary for him to have an official who exercised a greater degree of governmental oversight that had been traditional in previous reigns. The first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, held three offices that had traditionally been separate—First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of the Commons. This collection of offices made him the most powerful man in government. So the film is being anachronistic here, but only by about a decade or so.
• The last act turns on Abigail’s (Emma Stone) scheming. She drugs Sarah’s tea, so that when Sarah goes riding, she passes out, injures herself, and awakens in a brothel with a horrible scar on her cheek that she spends the rest of the film covering up with a lace veil. That is entirely invented. There is absolutely no basis for it at all.
• While Sarah Churchill was convinced that her fall from grace was caused by Abigail Hill displacing her as Anne’s favorite, there is little evidence that Anne considered Abigail anything more than a servant she liked. There is no evidence that Abigail had any meaningful influence with Anne over political matters or anything else substantive. Sarah’s fall was much more deeply rooted in Sarah’s own overbearing personality, which Anne slowly tired of as time went by, especially given Sarah’s tendency to bully Anne about political decisions that she disagreed with. When Prince George died, Sarah refused to wear mourning clothes, implying that Anne’s dramatic gestures of grief were faked, and Sarah ordered George’s portrait taken out of the queen’s bedroom, which Anne found profoundly cruel. The final precipitant for the break was an incident in which Sarah and Anne were riding to church in a carriage and got into a disagreement. As they reached the church, Sarah told Anne to be quiet lest the crowds hear them quarreling. Anne found Sarah’s shushing of her to be insulting and presumptuous.
• The whole “rabbits as substitute children” thing is made up.

I like The Favourite, but the longer I sit with it, the more I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something misogynistic about it. None of the women in it come across well: Anne is petulant, weak, and stubborn. Sarah is arrogant and presumptuous, although she insists she just loves the queen. Abigail is a liar and schemer who at the end of the film literally tortures a rabbit just because she can. The film punishes all three women with its conclusion: Anne has swapped lovers but she knows Abigail doesn’t really love her. Abigail has gotten power, but the price is sexually servicing a queen who despises and torments her. Sarah has fallen from grace, lost her best friend, been forced to go into exile because of an unjust legal charge, and lost her beauty.

Although in theory these women are struggling about political power, none of the political issues matter to the viewer at all, so it’s really just a three-sided cat-fight in which the weapons are sex, lies, and drugs, all traditionally weapons attributed to women. So while nominally feminist in its approach, the film falls back on traditional ideas about women as schemers, poisoners, and seducers. It’s great that Lanthimos made a film with three female leads, all of whom are richly complex characters. I just wish he could have made a film that actually liked its characters.

 

Want to Know More?

The Favourite is available on Amazon now.

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

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The Favourite: Was Queen Anne a Lesbian?

Tags

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.

The Favourite: First Thoughts

Tags

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

 Last week I got to see The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos), a movie about the cinematically-neglected Queen Anne of England (r.1702-1714). It’s a lovely film that focuses on Anne’s relationship with two women, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Hill, and there’s a good deal to say about it, so I’m going to give it two or three posts.

“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 much to spoil. There are no unexpected plot twists, so you can probably just keep reading.

At the start of the film in 1708, Anne (Olivia Colman) is well into her reign as queen, and Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) is her closest friend. Churchill is also the Keeper of the Privy Purse, meaning that she oversees the accounts of the royal household, and Groom of the Stole, meaning that she supervises the queen’s apartments. Anne is in poor health, using a wheelchair to get around, and she is fussy, sullen, lacking in self-confidence, and occasionally explosively demanding, which the film suggests is the consequence having lost 17 children (she keeps rabbits in her bedroom as substitute children). Sarah is self-assured to the point of arrogance, razor-smart, and adapt at managing the queen’s moods. She is Anne’s chief political advisor as well as her closest friend, and her decades of familiarity with Anne have trained her to be startling blunt with the queen. At one point she says “I will always tell you the truth. That’s what love is.” She is also Anne’s secret lover.

Olivia Colman as Anne

Early on in the film, Sarah’s cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) arrives at court. She is the daughter of a minor aristocrat who has fallen on hard times, and so she has been sent to court in the hopes that her kinship with Anne will secure her position in the royal household. Sarah appoints her to the kitchen, but Abigail is either plucky or scheming (Stone does a good job of making it unclear which is the case at the start) and manages to attract Anne’s attention by giving her an herbal remedy that improves her gout. She recognizes Anne’s profound maternal sadness and allows her to express it in a way that Sarah will not. As Abigail rises in the queen’s favor, Sarah becomes jealous, worrying about her place in Anne’s affections, and the result is that Abigail and Sarah become locked in a struggle to see which will be Anne’s bed companion and confidante. In the end, Abigail drugs Sarah’s tea just before Sarah rides angrily from court; the result is that Sarah falls unconscious during her ride and eventually awakens, injured and stuck in a brothel. This gives Abigail the opening she needs to complete her ascendancy. By the time Sarah returns to court, she has been replaced and is forced to leave court. So basically, it’s All About Eve if Margo Channing and Eve Harrington were both trying to sleep with the same woman.

The Favourite is a fun movie. It has a surprising sense of humor for a period drama; it entirely avoids the danger that many costume dramas fall into of being so serious that they become airless. All three of the leads do an excellent job bringing their characters to life as believable people. The film’s depiction of the relationship between these three women is well-handled (although the drugged tea is a bit over the top).

What makes this so much more than just a cinematic cat-fight is that Anne and Sarah are genuinely at the center of their political world; Sarah is married to the duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss), the queen’s key general in the war with France and a leading member of the Whig party. As Sarah focuses her attention on the war, the leading Tory, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult) works to use Abigail as a spy against Sarah. So this isn’t just a film about three women in a complicated relationship. It’s also a film about three women engaging in political maneuvering around each other.

(And if you want a very deep look at the costumes, Frock Flicks has an extensive look at the what the costume designer had to say.)

 

Anne’s Reign

Anne is one of the more obscure English monarchs, at least in the public consciousness. She is the last of the Stuart dynasty, the Scottish dynasty that inherited the throne after the death of Elizabeth I (who to judge from the number of movies about her, must have been the most important British ruler ever). Her father, James II, made the mistake of being the first openly Catholic ruler since Mary I at a time when the English population was pretty hostile to Catholics. In 1688, after three years on the throne, Parliamentary leaders invited the leader of the Netherlands, William of Orange, to come help them out. The result was the Glorious Revolution, a bloodless coup in which James fled the country, Parliament decided that he had actually abdicated, and James’ Protestant daughter Mary was put on the throne jointly with her husband, the afore-mentioned William. William and Mary (you’ve heard of their college, right?) had no children, so it was clear when they stepped up to the throne that Anne was their likely heir.

Rachel Weisz as Sarah Churchill (wearing men’s clothing for some reason)

This period saw the emergence of the first two political parties in English history, the Whigs and the Tories. To simplify some pretty complicated stuff, the Tories were the party of royal authority and High Church Anglicanism. They favored the power of the monarch over the power of Parliament, but they were also the champions of Anglican supremacy, meaning that they felt that no one except committed Anglicans should be allowed to hold public office. (So it was kind of problem for them when James II was trying to use royal authority to except Catholics from the laws barring Catholics from public office.) They were also insistent that the line of succession had to strictly follow the rules of inheritance, which they saw as expressing the will of God. That’s why they were willing to tolerate a Catholic monarch in the first place.

The Whigs, in contrast, favored Parliamentary authority and wanted to limit the monarch’s ability to function independently of Parliament. They were also willing to allow non-Anglican Protestants into office, but generally distrusted Catholics. The Whigs felt that Parliament should have the power to dictate the line of succession, skipping heirs who were Catholic, for example.

Sarah Churchill

Both factions worked together during the Glorious Revolution because both sides saw James as a threat (the Tories thought he was a threat to Anglicanism, while the Whigs thought he was a threat to Parliament. Again, I’m simplifying a complex story.) So they agreed to depose James while pretending he had actually abdicated by fleeing the country. They revised the relationship between monarch and Parliament to make the monarch dependent on Parliament in a variety of ways, thus essentially securing the dominance of Parliament and helping lay the foundations for modern democracy. The Tories weren’t fond of William because he wasn’t Anglican, whereas they quite liked his sister-in-law Anne because she was an absolute committed Anglican. They rallied around her as the focus of opposition to William (setting a trend that was to last for a century, in which the party out of power couched their opposition in terms of support for the heir).

When William died in 1702, Anne succeeded with no challenge whatsoever (her sister had already been dead since 1694). She immediately found herself caught between the Tories and Whigs, both of whom essentially argued that they had to have complete control of the major offices of state and that the other side couldn’t be trusted. The Tories argued that the Whigs didn’t support the monarchy, and the Whigs argued that the Tories were secretly plotting to put James’ Catholic son on the throne. Anne saw her role as sitting above the two factions (the very idea of political parties was barely a quarter-century old, so it makes sense that she didn’t see either side as completely legitimate) and tried to steer a path between them.

In particular, Anne was, as mentioned, a High Church Anglican and was more naturally inclined toward the Tory political philosophy. But her best friend Sarah Churchill and Sarah’s husband John, the duke of Marlborough, were both solid Whigs. This created a situation where Anne was constantly pressured by Sarah to favor the Whigs. To make things more complicated, England was involved in a war with France for virtually the entire duration of her reign, and Marlborough was her indispensable general. Anne could not afford to politically alienate Marlborough.

 

The Sources

Our best source of insight into Anne as a person are her correspondence with Sarah, her best friend for most of her life. The two women wrote each other constantly and discussed not only their personal feelings but also all the political issues of the moment. However, for some reason, Sarah was very insistent that the people she wrote letters to should burn those letters after reading them, so for the most part we only have Anne’s side of the correspondence. Often that gives us a sense of what Sarah had written, but it’s still a rather one-sided view of their relationship (although in a few cases, we do have Sarah’s side of the correspondence).

Emma Stone as Abigail Hill

Another extremely important source of information is Sarah’s memoirs. She published her first version of them in 1730, 16 years after Anne’s death, and a second version, essentially a heavily-revised second draft, in 1742. Because she was so central to the politics of the era, her take on the personalities and events of Anne’s reign has proven extremely influential, but her account is heavily colored by the gradual falling out that she and Anne had as Anne’s reign progressed. Sarah was a smart, lively, charming woman, but she also had a rather inflated sense of her own ability to assess the facts, a fierce temper, and, in the words of one historian, “an almost pathological inability to admit the validity of anyone else’s point of view.” Having fallen out with Anne, Sarah depicted Anne as a dull-witted, foolish woman completely at the mercy of those around her. That view of Anne shaped the way people viewed the queen for more than 2 centuries. When Sarah’s famous descendant Winston Churchill decided to write a massive four-volume history of John Churchill’s life, he relied quite heavily on Sarah’s memoirs. (Incidentally, Sarah is also an ancestor of Lady Diana Spencer, the famous and ill-fated Princess Diana.)

However, when professional historian Edward Gregg sat down to write a biography of Anne in the late 1970s, he came to a very different conclusion. He found Anne to be a shy, quiet woman, but one who quickly matured into a confident politician once she became queen. Rather than being manipulated by those in her court, she skillfully navigated their conflicting demands in pursuit of policies that rose above faction, although she was not always successful in achieving those goals. In Gregg’s view, her chief weakness was not being easily manipulated but quite the opposite; she was a profoundly stubborn woman who had trouble recognizing the need to make concessions.

Within a few years of becoming queen, Anne had developed a very different take on the political issues of the day than Sarah’s, and Sarah’s harsh judgment of her derives to a large extent from her inability to accept that Anne could have formed her own opinions that disagreed with Sarah’s. Anne also tired of Sarah’s presumptuous bullying of her and constant demanding that she appoint Sarah’s preferred candidates to various offices, so that her eventual estrangement from the duchess of Marlborough was largely Sarah’s own fault. Given the remarkable favoritism Anne showed toward the Marlboroughs early in the reign, Sarah generally comes off in Gregg’s version of events as grasping and overly entitled.

Gregg’s view of Anne has drastically altered scholars’ take on her and her reign. As Gregg points out, it was in Anne’s reign that England laid the foundations for the outsized role England was to have in 18^thand 19^thcentury international events. It was during Anne’s reign that England and Scotland were brought together into the United Kingdom, a far from foregone conclusion, given that after Anne’s death, Scotland could easily have wound up with Anne’s Catholic half-brother on the throne while the English wound up with her distant Protestant cousin George I. And Gregg sees Anne as playing an important role in those developments.

Why does this matter? The first draft of The Favourite was written by Deborah Davis, who has a bachelor’s degree in history (I think—she says she “studied history at university” and is described as an historian, but I can’t find anything more specific about her education). She found the story of Anne’s complicated relationship with Sarah interesting and did a good deal of research into the women as she wrote it. In interviews, she mentions three sources that she relied on: the surviving correspondence, Sarah’s memoirs, and Churchill’s biography of John Churchill. So the film’s take on who Anne and Sarah were as people and how they related is to a very considerable extent Sarah’s take on who they were. That means that the film’s version of things is rooted in a now old-fashioned take on Anne’s reign.

In the film, Sarah is certainly imperious toward Anne, but is driven much more by her love of Anne than by her inability to tolerate disagreements. Anne is emotionally erratic and in need of someone who will be more sympathetic to her than Sarah is willing to be, and Abigail is to some extent a schemer who steps into that hole and works to alienate Sarah from Anne. In reality, Sarah required no outside help to alienate Anne.

In my next post, I’ll dig into the film’s treatment of the historical facts.

 

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 curious about Winston Churchill’s take on the era, Marlborough: His Life and Times is available on Kindle quite cheaply. Churchill was a gifted writer and a rare example of a politician who truly appreciated history, but he wasn’t exactly a great historian.

Versailles: The Latréaumont Conspiracy

Tags

17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, Canal +, Chevalier de Rohan, Early Modern Europe, George Blagden, Latréaumont Conspiracy, Louis XIV, Versailles

The first season of Versailles features a running plot involving sinister men in black robes and masks, who skulk around Versailles slipping coded messages to people, threating to kill the Chevalier de Lorraine (Evan Williams), and generally being sinister. This all climaxes in the discovery that the Chevalier de Rohan (Alexis Michalik) is plotting assassinate Louis (George Blagden) and kidnap his son. It’s fun stuff and ends with a solid cliffhanger, which unfortunately gets wrapped up in about 5 minutes at the start of season 2. Is it based on anything?

Enter a caption

 

The Latréaumont Conspiracy

Yes. It’s a rather fictionalized version of a plot known today as the Latréaumont Conspiracy (which the internet seems determined to spell as “Lautreamont”). It centered around two men, Louis de Rohan and Gilles du Hamel de Latréaumont. Rohan was a close associate of the king’s, being his Chief Huntsman (Rohan’s mother was a cousin of Anne de Rohan-Chabot, one of Louis’ mistresses). Since Louis loved hunting, this office brought Rohan into regular close contact with Louis, which was one of the most valuable forms of currency at Versailles. It paid off when Louis made him Colonel of Louis’ Guards, another important office. But then Louis soured on Rohan. (Incidentally, if you have trouble keeping track of the players, most of the women I mention are discussed in more detail in this post.)

Rohan was a close friend of the Duc de Nevers, whose sisters were the five Mancinis, two of whom, Olympe and Marie, were mistresses of Louis. A third sister, Hortense, was romanced by Charles II while he was in exile after the English Civil War. Her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, rejected Charles’ offer to marry the girl, which meant that Hortense missed out on being Queen of England (and since she, unlike Charles’ eventual wife, was quite fertile, that marriage would have changed the course of English history). Instead, Mazarin arranged for her marriage to Armand Charles de La Porte de La Meilleraye, a very wealthy nobleman. But he was a terrible match for Hortense. She was free-spirited (and only 15), while he was violently jealous (he once reportedly knocked out a female servant’s front teeth so that men would not flirt with her). He seems to have been at least a little insane; when a fire broke out in one of his residences, he declared that trying to put it out was against God’s will, and he forbade wet nurses to nurse his children on Friday and Saturdays because those were Jesus’ death-days. That’s only some of his issues. (If you want to know more about their disastrous marriage, here’s a good post about it.)

Hortense (in the middle) with her sisters Olympe and Marie

 

Anyway, soon after the birth of their fourth child in 1668, Hortense had enough of La Porte’s abuse. She fled into the streets of Paris to Nevers’ house. Rohan helped her escape the city, dressed in men’s clothing, and get to Rome where her sister Marie was living. This angered Louis, and not long afterward, Rohan was forced to resign all his offices. Because the real reason was kept secret, rumors circulated that Rohan was having an affair with Marie or that he was making moves on Madame de Montespan. (Incidentally, Hortense eventually wound up in England, where she became Charles’ mistress. She took the Countess of Sussex as a lover until the two wound up brawling in St James’ Park in their nightgowns. After her death, La Porte seized her corpse and travelled around France with it until Louis ordered him to bury it. Someone needs to make a movie about her life.)

Gilles du Hamel de Latréaumont was a military officer from Normandy. In 1657, he had briefly plotted with the Maréchal d’Hocquincourt to seize control of Normandy. That resulted in Latréaumont going into exile in Normandy, where he met Affinius van den Enden, a philosopher and teacher. By 1672, Latréaumont was van den Enden’s student, along with the Comte de Guiche. All three of them were unhappy about Louis’ invasion of the Netherlands. They relocated to Paris, where van den Enden opened a Latin school in his lodgings. They approached Rohan, who was badly in debt, with a plot to kidnap the 11-year old Louis the Grand Dauphin while he was hunting in Normandy, hold him hostage and seize control of Normandy, which they would turn into a republic. Then they would assassinate Louis and put the Grand Dauphin on the throne as their puppet. Both the Dutch and the Spanish liked the idea and their agents were soon meeting with the conspirators at van den Enden’s little school.

Unfortunately, one of the king’s musketeers was renting a room in the school and got curious about why a bunch of nobles and foreigners were meeting with a Latin teacher, so he alerted Louvois, the king’s minister for war. Louvois passed the information to the Lieutenant General of the Police of Paris, Gabriel Nicholas de la Reynie, who promptly arrested Rohan at Versailles, caught Latréaumont at the Latin school, and then rounded up the other conspirators. They found some letters about the plot that Rohan had written anonymously. Eventually they got Rohan to confess by claiming that Louis was willing to pardon him if he made a full confession. Latréaumont died from wounds received during his capture. Van den Enden was hung, and Rohan and the other nobles were beheaded in 1674.

The Latréaumont Conspiracy was the only significant conspiracy against the state during Louis’ reign, and given how hare-brained it was, it never had much chance to succeed. It had no lasting repercussions.

 

The Conspiracy in Versailles

Large elements of the actual conspiracy appear in the show. Latréaumont is completely omitted in favor of focusing on Rohan as the ring-leader. Rohan is shown as Louis’ huntsman, and he did hold that office into 1669. Since the show opens in 1667, that’s basically accurate, but the show omits his fall from grace and maintains that he held Louis’ favor down into the 1670s, which is untrue. His motive is not anger at Louis for his fall and a need to clear his debts, but rather just a vague desire to overthrow Louis because reasons. Nor was Rohan the huntsman who lured the young Dauphin out in the woods. In fact, the kidnapping never happened at all because the plot was uncovered before it could be put into motion. Louis himself was never in any personal danger.

Michalik as Rohan

 

Fabien Marchel (Tygh Runyan) is basically a fictionalized version of La Reynie. He spends a good deal of time trying to chase down the mysterious letters that Rohan is passing to people and this is how the conspiracy gets uncovered (complete with an odd subplot about a cypher hidden in a book that Louis just happens to acquire). That’s untrue. The letters weren’t discovered until after the plot was found out.

The Comte de Guiche is entirely omitted, maybe because giving Philippe have two boyfriends would confuse the viewers, so instead the Chevalier de Lorraine is substituted, but instead of being out of favor like Guiche, he’s just been browbeaten into co-operating with Rohan. The entirely fictional Montcourt (Anatole Taubman) also gets some of Guiche’s story, being a disgraced nobleman who wants to get revenge on Louis. He eventually helps Marchal uncover the plot, so he’s also sort of a stand-in for the musketeer.

The whole ‘guys in black robes and masks sneaking around Versailles’ is totally made up and reads a lot like something from a novel by Victor Hugo. However, Versailles was actually pretty easy to get into. Whereas in the show characters are constantly being barred from entering rooms by guards with pikes, in reality, anyone at all could just walk straight into the palace. Even Louis’ personal apartments were open to everyone when he wasn’t in them. And Versailles does have secret passages.

So whereas the show significantly tones down the sexual escapades at Versailles, it’s wildly exaggerated the Latréaumont Conspiracy far behind the facts.

 

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

So far as I know, there’s no book in English about the Conspiracy or about Rohan or Latréaumont, apart from something published in 1845. In fact the only Wikipedia articles about these are on the French-language version of the site. When English Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on something, that’s usually it’s a real sign of obscurity.

 

 

Versailles: All the King’s Women

Tags

17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, Canal +, Early Modern Europe, Louis XIV, Louise de La Valliere, Madame de Maintenon, Madame de Montespan, Maria Theresa of Spain, Versailles

Versailles devotes a good deal of its time to exploring Louis XIV’s rather complicated sex life, so I thought a post on that would be in order.

The show’s first two seasons cover the period from 1667 to 1680, although you’d be forgiven for thinking that it only covered the period from perhaps 1667 to 1670, because none of the characters appear to age significantly. Even Louis’ son Louis the Grand Dauphin, who is perhaps 10 at the end of season 1 doesn’t appear to have aged more than a year or so by the end of season 2, even though 8 years have passed between the events of those two episodes. But Louis’s various relationships are complicated (and fun to read about) so I’m going to survey all the major ones, to give you a good sense of what’s going on. (Those who appear in Versailles have the actress’ name in parentheses.)

The Early Years

When Louis was fourteen years old in 1553, his mother, Anne of Austria decided that it was time for him to lose his virginity. She arranged for one of her ladies in waiting, Catherine Bellier, to spend two years sexually educating him, and then rewarded her by making her the Baroness of Beauvais. (IMDb tells me that Bellier appears in Versailles, but it must have been a very small and passing role, because I didn’t spot her at all.)

In 1654, while he was still sleeping with Belliers, Louis began a relationship with Olympe Mancini, one of the five nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, who, along with Anne, was running the government. That affair lasted until 1657, when she got married to the Comte de Soissons, but they resumed their relationship in 1660 for about a year. Her oldest son was born just six months after her marriage, raising the possibility that he was an unacknowledged bastard of Louis’. Her feelings for Louis seem to have been quite intense, because she repeatedly displayed jealousy toward his later loves.

In 1658, Louis turned his eye toward Marie Mancini, Olympe’s younger sister. He fell deeply in love with her, and gossip began to spread that he might marry her. This upset Anne, who wanted to arrange his marriage to Maria-Theresa of Spain, and it also, somewhat surprisingly, upset Olympe and Marie’s mother. As a result, Marie was sent home to Italy, where she got married in 1661. On her wedding night, her husband remarked that he was surprised to discover she was still a virgin, so apparently Louis’ interest in her somehow never got consummated. In 1658, Louis also had a brief fling with the unnamed daughter of a gardener, who gave birth to a daughter who was never recognized. (Incidentally, Hortense, a third sister of Olympe and Marie, managed to become the mistress of Charles II of England.)

In 1660, Louis married his first wife, Maria-Theresa (Elisa Lasowski). She was his double first cousin (her father was Anne’s brother, while his father was the brother of Maria-Theresa’s mother). He appears to have been faithful to her for about a year, but after that he had both brief flings and long-term affairs for the rest of her life. That didn’t stop him from producing six children with her, although she had the enormous misfortune to outlive all but one of them. Maria-Theresa had little choice except to tolerate her husband’s numerous infidelities, and she even managed to develop friendships with two of his mistresses.

Maria-Theresa of Spain

Henrietta and Louise

A year after Louis’ marriage, his brother Philippe married Henrietta of England (Noémie Schmidt), a rather attractive woman who became good friends with Louis. Rumors began to circulate that they were sleeping together. Even by the standards of the French court, this would have been a genuine scandal, because there was a considerable difference between a married man sleeping with an unmarried woman (which was considered simply fornication) and a married man sleeping with a married woman (which was considered adultery); additionally, it would have meant cuckolding his own brother. Since Henrietta was the sister of Charles II of England, a major scandal around her might well have had diplomatic ramifications. So although Versailles shows Louis and Henrietta being deeply involved and him getting her pregnant, most scholars think that this was just a rumor and that their relationship never moved beyond friendship.

To make Louis’ visiting Henrietta more acceptable, they asked Olympe, a close friend of Henrietta’s, to introduce Louis to one of Henrietta’s ladies, Louise de La Valliere (Sarah Winter), so that Louis could visit Henrietta while pretending to court Louise. The naïve Louise, not realizing that she was a pawn in this intrigue, fell in love with Louis and Louis found her sincerity and innocence so charming that he reciprocated her feelings. This relationship was the first of Louis’ affairs to have real legs. It continued until 1667 and produced five children, the last two of whom were eventually acknowledged, the other three dying in infancy. Louis kept the relationship a secret (at least formally) until 1666, when his mother died. At that point, he made the relationship public and Louise became his first maitress en titre, loosely translated as “official mistress”. Soon after Anne’s death, Louis took communion with both Maria-Theresa and Louise alongside him, a clear statement of Louise’ position.

Louise de La Valliere

Louise was deeply religious, and while she loved Louis, she felt tremendous shame over what she was doing. She disliked their relationship being so open. At the same time, however, she wanted her position and was jealous of his attention to other women, so she wasn’t quite so unwilling to be his mistress as Versailles presents it. She repeatedly fled to convents, and in 1667, after the birth of their fifth child, Louis essentially terminated the relationship, although he kept her on as maitress en titre. Eventually, in 1674, he permitted Louise to join a Carmelite convent. By this point, she had become good friends with Maria-Theresa, who presented her with her veil during the veiling ceremony at the convent and continued to visit her off and on.

Despite having a wife and a mistress, Louis’ eye still wandered. Olympe Mancini hoped that, if he could be pried away from Louise de La Valliere, Louis might return to her. So she schemed to put one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, Anne-Lucie de Mothe-Houdancourt, in his way, and it worked, at least briefly. Louis became quite infatuated with her. The queen employed Madame de Navailles to supervise the young ladies around them. Navailles went to extreme lengths to keep the young men of the court away from her charges, up to installing iron bars on the windows and chimneys of their rooms. Despite that, Louis climbed down a chimney to see Anne-Marie, and dismissed Madame de Navailles from court. But Anne-Lucie was interested in someone else, and apparently resisted Louis’ attentions. The Queen Mother became worried that Louis’ pursuit of Anne-Lucie would prove embarrassing to Maria-Theresa, so she ultimately dismissed Anne-Lucie from court. Louis consoled himself by briefly taking up with Anne de Conty d’Argencourt, one of his mother’s ladies in waiting. But she was also the lover of the duc de Richelieu, which irritated Louis enough that the affair didn’t last long.

Olympe Mancini

In 1665, Louis got interested in one of his wife’s ladies in waiting, Bonne de Pons. Unlike most members of the court, Bonne’s family was upset about the prospect of their daughter becoming the royal mistress, so they shipped her off to get married. Louis’ court had a very rigid formal hierarchy, based on the degree of biological relationship to the king and the age of one’s lineage. (To simplify, first cousins outranked second cousins and so on.) But there was a second hierarchy that scholars call the Shadow Hierarchy. This hierarchy was much more fluid and dependent on less tangible qualities such as appearance, wit, royal favor, and skill at intrigue. Louis’ mistresses sat very high in the Shadow Hierarchy, with the maitress en titre right at the top. Having the royal ear was a precious commodity at Versailles, because position in the Shadow Hierarchy depended to considerable extent at being able to get the king’s attention. Whichever woman Louis was sleeping with enjoyed the rare privilege of spending time completely alone with him, so women who had Louis’ attention became power-brokers at court, able to perform favors for others by mentioning their concerns to Louis. Additionally, Louis rewarded his mistresses and their families with estates, titles, and offices. So the decision of Bonne’s parents to send her away from court is quite unusual.

By this point, Henrietta of England had gotten thoroughly jealous of Louise de La Valliere, so Henriette threw one of her ladies in waiting at Louis. Charlotte-Catherine de Gramont was already married, but her husband discretely chose to go off and fight in a war. Louis broke off with her a few months later, but she continued having affairs with other members of the court until 1668, when her behavior scandalized the court enough that Louis ordered her to leave (although he let her return in 1672).

Madame de Montespan

In 1666, not long after things with Gramont ended, Françoise-Athenaïs, the Marquise de Montespan (Anna Brewster), began pursuing Louis. She was a married woman, with two children, but also strikingly beautiful, witty, well-read, intelligent, and cultured. She was also the cousin of Bonne de Pons, and the younger sister of Gabrielle de Rochechaurt, who may have briefly occupied Louis’ bed at one point. Quite a number of men were interested in her, but she wanted Louis. She wisely cultivated friendships with Louis the Grand Dauphin, Maria-Theresa, and Louise de La Valliere. When both women became pregnant at the same time, they made the mistake of asking Montespan to help them entertain Louis at private dinners, and that gave her the opening she needed. By the end of 1666, she was rapidly displacing Louise in the king’s affections, much to Louise’ frustration. What must have particularly galled Louise was that the king now used her as cover for his relationship with Montespan, a bit the way he had used her initially to cover his friendship with Henrietta. He moved Montespan into a room connected to Louise’ so that he could visit Montespan while maintaining the appearance of visiting Louise.

In 1667, Montespan became the maitress en titre, a position she held until 1681. Although Versailles shows them having only one child who dies in infancy, in fact she was the mother of seven of his children between 1669 and 1678, all but one of whom lived to adulthood and secured recognition from him. Unlike Louise, who did her best to stay out of the spotlight, Montespan openly vied with the queen as a rival. Although Montespan was legally separated from her husband in 1774, the fact that she was committing adultery led her to become the focus of opposition from the Catholic Church, and in 1774, a priest refused to give her communion at Easter. Despite Louis’ efforts to lean on the priest’s superiors, the Church hierarchy held firm and achieved a brief separation between the two. So the conflict between Bishop Bossuet and Louis in the show has a basis in fact, but Bossuet was not so foolish as to try to orchestrate a grand campaign against Louis, nor was the priest poisoned by one of Montespan’s allies.

Madame de Montespan

Despite Montespan’s considerable attractions, Louis still found time for a fling with Anne de Rohan-Chabot, the wife of the prince of Soubise. Louis met her in 1669 and had a short affair with her. They either resumed the affair in 1673 or else it continued at a low level throughout that period, finally ending in 1675. She had two sons that her husband recognized, although many at the court felt they were both Louis’. In that same period, Louis also had a fling with Lydie de Rochefort-Theobon, one of his wife’s ladies in waiting. He “amused himself“ with her (as one letter to the king of Prussia describes it) off and on from 1670 to 1673. Montespan tried to prevent this by having her transferred to the household of Philippe d’Orleans’ second wife, but Louis may have flung with her as late as 1676.

One of Montespan’s challenges was maintaining Louis’ attention during her numerous pregnancies (given that she had used exactly such an opening to get between him and La Valliere). Between 1670 and 1676, her solution to this problem was to offer him one of her ladies, Claude de Vin des Oeillets, as a substitute whenever she was pregnant. Given her jealousy, this was a surprising strategy, but she seems to have concluded that having Louis involved with a member of her household was less risky than him getting involved with someone she couldn’t supervise. Des Oeillets was low-born, the daughter of two actors, which probably reduced the risk as well. He fathered a daughter on her, whom he never acknowledged.

Montespan’s concern for holding Louis’ attention was well-warranted. In 1675, Louis had an affair with Isabelle de Ludres, yet another of his wife’s ladies in waiting. Like Montespan, she was ambitious and hoped to become the new maitress en titre. But Louis wanted their relationship to stay a secret (perhaps because he didn’t want to quarrel with Montespan). So when Ludres openly stated her intentions of displacing Montespan, Louis dumped her. He took up with Marie-Charlotte de Castelnau, a married woman who was the sister-in-law of Anne de Rohan-Chabot, as well as of the Comte de Guiche, one of Philippe d’Orleans’ paramours. He got bored with Marie-Charlotte quite quickly after Montespan gave birth to their last child. But in 1678, he had a short affair with Elizabeth Hamilton, one of Marie-Charlotte’s sisters-in-law, much to Montespan’s irritation.

By this time, Louis was beginning to tire of Montespan. Unfortunately for her, he became interested in her good friend Françoise de Scarron (Catherine Walker), a down-on-her-luck widow of a minor noble. Montespan asked Scarron to look after her bastard children, which brought Scarron to Louis’ attention, although he initially found her strict religious observances off-putting. But he paid her well for her services as a governess and in 1675 he rewarded her with the title Marquise de Maintenon, as a result of which she’s generally known as Madame de Maintenon. Montespan began to quarrel with her, ostensibly over the way the children were being raised, but quite possibly because she was beginning to get jealous of Maintenon. But Maria-Theresa liked her because she felt that Maintenon was a good influence on Louis, remarking that he was treating her far better than in the past when he was more involved with Montespan (who was deeply hostile to the queen). Nothing seems to have happened between Louis and Maintenon in this period, in part because her religious sentiments led her to oppose fornication, but Louis was clearly attracted to her.

Stiff Competition for Louis’ Attention

Apparently unable to decide between the two women, Louis suddenly took up with Marie-Angelique de Scorailles, who was described as being quite beautiful but “stupid as a basket”. She was a lady in waiting to the duchesse d’Orleans. At first the affair was kept quite secret, but then Louis appeared at court wearing ribbons that matched ones she was wearing; she was noticed wearing a cloak made from the same material as his. He became quite infatuated with her, throwing a string of parties for her and taking her to the ballet frequently. Montespan bitterly commented that Louis had three mistresses: herself in title, Scorailles in bed, and Maintenon in his heart. Montespan took her revenge by having a pair of bears let into Scorailles’ apartments, causing the young woman to flee in terror. Scorailles gave birth to a stillborn boy, and although Louis rewarded her handsomely for “being wounded in his service” by making her the duchess of Fontanges, he had already started to tire of her. She died not long after this, in 1681, at the age of 19, probably because of complications from her labor. But word quickly circulated that she had been poisoned, and Montespan clearly had the motive to do so. This was part of the infamous Affair of the Poisons, a major plotline during season 2 of Versailles, so I’ll do a whole column on it later on. However, if you’ll notice, the show does not include Scorailles as a character all. Montespan was deeply implicated in the Affair, although no solid proof of her involvement has ever surfaced. But it marked the end of her reign as maitress en titre, although Louis allowed her to stay at court until 1691. He does not seem to have believed that she was involved in the Affair. Scorailles was the last woman to be a sustained mistress for Louis. After her, his attentions shifted toward Maintenon and to brief affairs with women who soon bored him.

Marie-Angelique de Scorailles

Despite his infatuation with Scorailles, Louis also had a relationship with Montespan’s older sister Diane-Gabrielle. This doesn’t seem to have amounted to very much. He also had a sporadic relationship with Marie-Madeleine-Agnes de Gontaut Biron, who was rather plain-looking but quite good at court intrigue. She managed to get a good marriage out her relationship with the king, but not much else. He also had a short relationship with Jeanne de Rouvroy, a married woman, in 1681.

The same year, Louis turned his attention toward Marie-Anne de Wurtemberg. He bedded her briefly, but Montespan, who by this point was clutching at straws to revive Louis’ affections, persuaded Louis that Wurtemberg had once been the lover of a monk who was trying to find the philosopher’s stone. Since black magic was part of the Affair of the Poisons, even the hint that Wurtemberg was associated with the Parisian underworld scared Louis and he broke off with her.

Still trying to retain a hold on Louis, in 1681 Montespan pushed another of her ladies at him, Françoise-Therese de Voyer de Dorée. But after Louis slept with her, Montespan became jealous and Maintenon chided Louis for the affair, so he put Françoise-Therese  aside. There was also a quick fling with Marie-Antoinette de Rouvroy, but it went nowhere. The next year, there were brief affairs with Marie-Rosalie de Piennes and Madame de Saint-Martin.

In 1683, Louis became interested in Marie-Louise de Montmorency-Laval, who was a lady in waiting to his daughter-in-law. He got her pregnant, which required that she be dismissed from her post. Not wanting to legitimize the child, Louis had her quickly married off to the duc de Roquelaure, who accepted the girl as his daughter, wryly remarking at her birth “welcome, mademoiselle, I did not expect you so soon.”

Julie de Gueméné came from a family whose membership included Anne de Rohan-Chabot and the Chevalier de Rohan, whom I’ll discuss in my next post. The family had been losing its footing at Versailles (perhaps in part due to the Chevalier’s poor choices), so when she was 15, they maneuvered her into Louis’ attention, hoping that she might become his new maitress en titre. He did sleep with her, but nothing more came of the scheme.

Madame de Maintenon Triumphs

Gueméné has the distinction of being Louis’ last mistress. In the middle of 1683, Maria-Theresa fell ill and died. Louis mourned her, remarking that “this is the first chagrin which she has given me.” By this point, he was deeply involved with Madame de Maintenon, but she had probably resisted his efforts to get her into his bed. Montespan was convinced that she was holding out simply as a way to build Louis’ ardor for her, but it is more likely that it was her religious beliefs that motivated her to deny him. But Maria-Theresa’s death cleared the way. Some time between October of 1683 and January of 1684, Louis secretly married her. The marriage was never formally acknowledged, and she did not become queen. But their relationship was obvious. He gave her a lavish suite of rooms across the hallway from his own apartments, and he spent time with her every day from that point on.

Madame de Maintenon

Madame de Maintenon became enormously influential at court due to her hold on the king’s ear. He became increasingly religious because of her, and this probably contributed to his choice to cease taking mistresses, which helped consolidate her position. But it is also possible that he simply loved her enough that other women no longer interested him. After all, his marriage to Maria-Theresa was an arranged one and probably not one he found emotionally satisfying, so it is likely that his many affairs were efforts to meet his own emotional needs (as well as the more obvious physical ones). With de La Valliere, Montespan, and Maintenon, he clearly found women who struck a chord with him emotionally, and when Maria-Theresa died, he was finally in a position to build a permanent relationship with a woman he genuinely loved. At that point, he had no further need of mistresses. Or perhaps his libido simply cooled by the time he was in his forties.

By 1700, she was virtually his prime minister, even though she had no official role at court. Over the years, she persuaded him to replace several key ministers. She was very interested in women’s education, founded a girl’s school at Saint-Cyr, and authored a treatise on education that helped inspire a 1724 ordinance establishing compulsory universal primary education (although it didn’t have much effect). After his death in 1715, she retired to Saint-Cyr. She had no children, unlike so many of Louis’ other women, but she seems to have had some real attachment to Madame de Montespan’s children, encouraging Louis to promote them at court.

Versailles shows Louis’ relationship with four women: Maria-Theresa, Louise de La Valliere, Madame de Montespan, and Madame de Maintenon. It also apparently has a brief appearance by Catherine Belliers, and it makes up a mistress, Sister Hermione (Hannah Arteton) whom he runs into years after he ended the relationship and forgot her. It shows us two children, one of whom died in infancy. The actual total for the period covered by the show is more like 18 mistresses of varying durations (not counting his wife) and 21 children born alive. So, as it did with its depiction of Philippe d’Orleans’ relationships, Versailles substantially tones down the degree of Louis’ womanizing. I find it kind of refreshing to get to say “No, actually, it was much more than the show gives us.”

If you have a movie or tv series you’d like me to review, please make a donation to my Paypal account and if I can track it down, I’ll review it (as long as I think it’s appropriate for this blog).

Want to Know More?

One of the better guides to Louis’ mistresses is Partylike1660.com. It has a page on each of his known mistresses, as well as a host of other details about life at the court of the Sun King.

As with Henry VIII, Louis XIV has attracted the attention of a lot of non-professional historians who write popular history. An easy introduction to Louis’ affairs is Antonia Frazer’s Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. Frazer is one of the best popular historians, but always read her books with caution. Similarly, Lisa Hilton’s Athenaïs: The Life of Louis XIV’s Mistress, the Real Queen of France is popular rather than academic history, but it’s a good intro to this extremely important and interesting woman.

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Versailles: The Man Who Would Be Queen

Tags

Alexander Vlahos, Chevalier of Lorraine, Comte de Guiche, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Homosexuality, Louis XIV, Philippe of Orleans, Versailles

One of the things that really stands out in Versailles is its depiction of Louis’ brother Philippe, the duc d’Orleans (Alexander Vlahos), as blatantly and unrepentantly homosexual. So this post is going to look at how accurate that depiction is.

 

In the Show

Versailles’ Philippe lets it all hang out, so to speak. In the first episode, he makes out with his boyfriend, Philippe, the Chevalier de Lorraine (Evan Williams) as servants wander by. (To avoid confusion, I’ll refer to this Philippe as the Chevalier.) He openly flaunts the Chevalier in front of his wife Henrietta (Noémie Schmidt) and pretty much everyone else. He has a taste for group sex with men. Most startlingly of all, in one episode he comes to a formal event wearing a dress (well, skirts and a corset without a proper over-dress–thanks, Frock Flicks, for pointing that out!) and when someone sniggers about it, Philippe draws a knife and stabs the man in the eye.

Vlahos as Philippe, getting very unhappy that someone doesn’t like his outfit

The Chevalier eventually gets entangled in a plot to overthrow the king and gets sent into exile, but early in season 2 he’s back and being fabulous, making grand statements about which color is going be the winter color this year. At the same time, someone poisons Henrietta, who dies in bloody agony.

 

In Reality

The show’s depiction of Philippe is broadly accurate. If anything, it tones him down.

Louis and Philippe were the sons of Louis XIII, who had a great deal of trouble with his younger brother Gaston, who was Louis’ presumptive heir until the birth of his nephew Louis in 1638, just four years before the end of Louis XIII’s reign. That fact made Gaston the center of a great deal of intrigue and he twice had to go into exile for plotting against his brother. When the Fronde (a revolt of the nobility against the Crown) broke out, Gaston fought on both sides, and at the end of the revolt, he was sentenced to internal exile at Blois. As a result of this, Louis XIII’s queen, Anne of Austria, was extremely worried that Philippe might grow up to become a problem for her older son.

Philippe, duc d’Orleans

Anne feared that Philippe might some day challenge Louis or become a center of opposition to him, so she seems to have intentionally tried to cultivate a taste for feminine things in her son as a way to make him less threatening and perhaps even distasteful to the nobility. She referred to him as “my little girl,’ declared that he was “the prettiest child in the whole world,” and dressed him more as a girl than as a boy. That shaped him for life. As an adult, he was always comfortable in women’s clothing, and frequently attended balls dressed as a woman. He was noted for his love of ribbons, perfume, rouge, and high heels, although those things were not necessarily gendered female in the 17^thcentury. Both Louis and Philippe was quite short and wore heels to add inches to their stature. So the show could put him in women’s clothing a lot more than it does without distorting the facts. This is a rare case of the media toning down historical excess instead of exaggerating it or making it up.

That’s Philippe on the right

Anne was probably relieved when Philippe began to show a taste for men. In 1658, when Philippe was 18, rumors began to circulate that the duke of Nevers had “corrupted” Philippe with the “Italian vice”, and it was around that time that he first made contact with the Chevalier, with whom he formed a life-long, though hardly faithful, relationship.

Throughout his life, and regardless of his two wives, Philippe displayed a marked taste for handsome young men, whom he tended to shower attention and money on. He blew them kisses as he walked through Versailles, and much court gossip turned on the question of his favorites. Since Philippe was the king’s brother (and accorded the courtesy appellation of Monsieur, something the show leaves out), he was invariably an important political figure, although after the birth of Louis’ first son, his importance declined slightly. Who he was sleeping with was therefore an issue that could affect politics, especially in the intrigue-filled environment of Versailles.

The Chevalier de Lorraine

The Chevalier was, strictly speaking, not French, since Lorraine was outside the royal domain. He was described as being “as beautiful as an angel,” although portraits of him don’t apparently do him justice, at least not by modern standards, He was considered vain, arrogant, greedy, and manipulative, and Philippe was an ideal partner for him. The perception at court was that he could easily manipulate Philippe into doing what the Chevalier wanted, since Philippe loved him deeply.

The result of this was that Philippe’s domestic life was exceptionally complex, even by the standards of a Jerry Springer show. Philippe’s first wife, Henrietta, was understandably jealous of the Chevalier, who lived in the same household with her. Philippe told her that he needed the Chevalier’s permission to sleep with her. In 1670, she persuaded King Louis to first imprison the Chevalier and then exile him. But Philippe prevailed upon his brother to call the Chevalier back after just a few months. When Henrietta died a few months later, there were rumors that the Chevalier had orchestrated her poisoning, although an autopsy determined that she had died of peritonitis. (Note that the show gets both the order of events and the cause of Henrietta’s death wrong.)

Henrietta of England

In 1682, the Chevalier got in trouble again, this time for introducing Louis’ illegitimate son Louis de Bourbon to part of their circle. Philippe and the Chevalier had established a sort of secret club for men who liked men. This club met at taverns and brothels and had elaborate rules of a somewhat sacrilegious nature. When Bourbon was 15, the Chevalier introduced him to the club and required him to sign an oath of obedience to the club’s rules, an oath signed not in ink but in Bourbon’s semen, which the Chevalier helped him to collect. Eventually rumors of the club’s orgies reached the king, Most of the club’s members were exiled as a result, but Bourbon simply got sent to fight in the Netherlands, where he died the next year..

Back at court a few years later, the Chevalier got in trouble a third time for orchestrating the illicit marriage of Philippe’s son to one of Louis’ illegitimate daughters.

But Phillipe living with his wife and his boyfriend was just the start. He was also involved with another member of his household, Armand, the Comte de Guiche, who like the Chevalier was handsome, vain, and manipulative. Armand was Philippe’s lover, but he is widely thought to have been Henrietta’s lover as well. That apparently wasn’t enough for Guiche, because in 1665 he also tried to romance Louise de La Valliere, who was Louis’ chief mistress at the time. Louis exiled him in 1662 for plotting with Henrietta to break up Louis and Louise.

The Comte de Guiche

On top of all that, Philippe also found time for a relationship with Antoine Coiffier, a minor noble who served as his head huntsman (whose father, incidentally, may have been a lover of Louis XIII). He is also rumored to have had a mistress, who might have been the married duchess of Mercoeur, since he flirted with her in public.

That last one demonstrates that Philippe might have been bisexual. He definitely had a complicated relationship with his first wife, with whom he had four children, as well as two miscarriages. When he married his second wife, the German Elizabeth Charlotte, he remarked that her plainness meant it would be hard for him to make love to her, but he still managed to father three children with her, including his only surviving son. So while he clearly had a strong preference for men, he doesn’t seem to have been exclusively homosexual as the show presents it.

 

Philippe and Louis

The two brothers had a rather complicated relationship, something the show manages to capture. In the show, Philippe says on more than one occasion that he was raised to not be the ‘cloud that covers the sun’, and whether or not the real Philippe ever said that, it certainly does describe the way their childhood played out. Anne expected Louis to be a very studious boy, but discouraged Philippe from book learning and encouraged him to play and be frivolous. The duc de Saint-Simon, whose enormous memoires are our best window into life at court, says that as an adult, Philippe was weak of mind and body, excessively timid, obsequious to his brother, and loved to gossip, often making up rumors just to see what would happen. He was also quarrelsome. But despite that, he was well-loved and a central figure at Versailles. When he died of a stroke in 1701, he was deeply mourned and Saint-Simon says that the court felt lifeless and still.

Louis, perhaps following Anne’s advice, worried that Philippe could have become a threat to him and worked to keep him away from any real power, and generally ordered him to leave when it was time for Louis to conduct business. Despite that, Louis adored his brother, who was his only sibling and probably the only person who could really understand him. We might imagine that Louis envied Philippe a little the freedom that he had. Although Louis seems to have despised homosexuality, which was a capital crime in 17^thcentury France, he tolerated Philippe’s taste in men, although he was not willing to extend that tolerance to Philippe’s lovers when their other affairs became public. When Louis’ second wife complained that he needed to stamp out homosexuality at the court, Louis replied “should I start with my own brother?” That may explain why Louis was willing to turn a blind eye to the same-sex shenanigans at his court. He loved his brother too much to punish him, but punishing other examples of homosexuality at court would have made him look too much of a hypocrite.

To add further complexity to their relationship, Philippe was a far better soldier than Louis was. In 1667 he handled himself well during an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1677, he led the French forces at the Battle of Cassel against William III of Orange. He routed William and won the admiration of the court, but his victory irked Louis, who wished to be seen as a conqueror, and who may have worried that Philippe’s accomplishments were making him a threat. As a result, Louis never allowed his brother to participate in military matters again. What seems to have impressed people the most about Philippe’s victory was his intense bravery during the battle; it was joked that he was more afraid of getting sunburned or blackened from gunsmoke than he was of getting hit by a musket-ball.

Louis loved paintings that presented him as a conqueror

So overall, Versailles’ depiction of Philippe and his relationship with his wives, his brother, and the Chevalier all seem pretty reasonable. Although the show tones down some of the luridness of Philippe’s private life, I think it captures something of his complex relationship with Louis and with the Chevalier. Was he actually as frustrated with his situation as the show makes out? I don’t know, but it’s not an unreasonable take on him.

If you’d like me to review a particular film or show, please make a donation to my Paypal account and request one.

 

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

There’s not a lot available in English about Philippe. Nancy Nichols Barker’s Brother to the Sun King: Philippe Duke of Orleans is probably the best option. But it’s been criticized for a very negative depiction of Philippe’s homosexuality, so read it with care. You might also think about reading Saint-Simon’s Memoires, which are a remarkable and lively account of life at the court of the Sun King. Lucy Norton’s translation has been much praised for its style (although it is not the full text).

If you want to know more about homosexuality in Europe in this period, take a look at The Pursuit of Sodomy, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma. It has articles on a range of issues.

Versailles: The Queen’s Baby

Tags

Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Elisa Lasowski, George Blagden, Louis XIV, Maria Theresa of Spain, The Black Nun of Moret, Versailles

I’m a bit late to the party on this show, but I finally found the time to sit down and watch Versailles, the Canal+ series about the court of Louis XIV. I’d heard that the show was pretty wackadoodle, but as I watched the first episode, I didn’t see anything that I thought was outrageous. Then I got to the end of the episode and, yeah, ok, I see why some people think the show is over the top. There’s a lot for me to talk about in the first season, so you’re gonna get a number of posts on it. Hope you like the series.

The first season is nominally set in 1667, but in reality it covers events from that year down to about 1670 or a little thereafter. Instead of offering a look at Louis (George Blagden) as an somewhat jaded older man, as most film treatments of the subject tend to, it offers us a Louis of only about 30 who is still working to master his kingdom. In the first season he decides to turn Versailles from a hunting lodge into a grand palace (in reality, that project had already begun in 1661), and he offers his court a vision of Versailles as the cultural center of the universe. Naturally, for any story set at Versailles, literal palace intrigue plays a major role in the story.

Incidentally, if you want to know about the show’s visuals, the ladies at Frock Flicks have rendered their verdict on the costuming and it’s not bad, other than the poofy shirts the men frequently sport. I was very skeptical about the hair, since Louis’ reign was famous for men in wigs, but apparently the wigs were more of a fashion statement later in Louis’ reign and the hairstyles in the show are not unreasonable for the 1660s and 70s.

 

The Baby

At the start of the show, Louis’ wife Maria Theresa (Elisa Lasowski) is pregnant. She’s presented as a dark-haired Spanish beauty, instead of the rather plain-looking blonde woman she was (like all the Hapsburgs, she had a great deal of German blood). At the end of the episode she goes into labor and much to the surprise of the king and his physician, she gives birth to a black girl. The official word is that the baby was stillborn.

Lisowski as Maria Theresa

 

The physician offers the rather improbable sounding theory that Maria’s black dwarf jester Nabo played a joke on her and scared her so badly that it darkened the baby she was carrying. While that theory would be pretty bizarre if a modern obstetrician proposed it, 17^thcentury doctors were constantly offering that sort of guess because they believed that a mother’s emotional experiences during pregnancy could have a profound effect on the fetus (a theory that was still circulating at the end of the 19^thcentury). (And in fact the comment is based on something that Maria Theresa herself actually said.) Nevertheless, everyone who knows about the black baby assumes that the queen was getting it on with Nabo, and by the end of the second episode, Nabo turns up dead in a fountain.

In the third episode, Louis receives a visit from a Senegalese prince, and since he met the queen once before, it’s broadly hinted that he might be the real father. During the negotiations between Louis and the prince, Louis uses the baby girl as a bargaining chip of sorts, and the episode ends with the prince taking the baby with him.

So is there any truth to it?

 

Surprisingly…

Yes. Not much, but a little. First, it has to be said that the show takes liberties with the timeline (I know, shocking that an historical show would do that, right?). There is no way that Maria Theresa had a baby of any kind in the summer of 1667. On January 2^nd of that year, she gave birth to the king’s fourth child, Marie-Therese, who was very definitely white. She gave birth to their fifth child, Philippe Charles, on August 5^thof 1668. Even if Louis had knocked up his wife immediately after Marie-Therese was born, the baby wouldn’t have been born until October, and Louis would certainly have allowed his wife to recover for a few months before resuming intercourse with her. In 1667 he had two known mistresses, so it’s not like he was having trouble finding a date.

That being said, in 1664, Maria Theresa gave birth about a month prematurely to a baby girl named Marie-Anne, who died about a month later. Maria Theresa had been sick for more than a month before the birth and only recovered in January of 1665. Our best source of information about Marie-Anne was the duchess of Montpensier, a cousin of the king who is today remembered for her memoires, an important source of information about Louis’ court. Montpensier says that Philippe, Louis’ younger brother, told her that the baby was born with a very dark, almost violet complexion. If true, the cause of the baby’s coloration was probably a lack of oxygen. Maria Theresa was devoted to Louis, and also probably quite aware of the danger of cuckolding the king, since that would be treason punishable by death. So it is rather improbable that she had an affair with Nabo, or a visiting African prince, or anyone else. The fact that he remained married to Maria Theresa until her death in 1683 is perhaps the best evidence against the rumor that she had given birth to a black child. But the fact that the queen was quite fond of Nabo may well have helped trigger the rumor that he had fathered a baby with her.

But there’s another complication to the story. The same year that Marie-Anne was born and died, another black girl was born. This girl, Louise Marie-Therese, grew up to join the Benedictine convent of Moret-sur-Loing, and was known as the Black Nun of Moret. Although not a lot is known about her, she clearly had some connection to the royal court. Her portrait was painted by an unknown artist who also painted portraits of 22 French kings including Louis XIV. She is mentioned by at least six different authors with connections to the royal court, including Montpensier; one of Louis’s mistresses; and Louis’ second wife, Madame de Maintenon. The duke of Saint-Simon, another important memoirist about court life at the time, says that Louise once greeted Louis’ son as “my brother”. Louis arranged for a rather handsome pension for her. As a result, some have conjectured that Marie-Anne did not actually die but was smuggled out of court and dropped off at Moret.

Louise, the Black Nun of More

 

However, that scenario is probably untrue, because there’s a much better candidate for her parents. Louis had a Moorish (that is, black African) coachman who had a baby girl. Louis and Maria Theresa acted as godparents for the girl, a not-uncommon gesture for royal servants. After the coachman and his wife died, Madame de Maintenon arranged for the child to be placed in a convent as a favor to the parents. However, that’s not slam-dunk proof, because sometime around 1683, Maintenon secretly married Louis. Her claim that she had given this baby to a convent only dates from the period after the marriage, and it looks like it could be an effort to suppress the rumor that the unusual black nun at Moret could actually have been Marie-Anne. Could Maintenon have lied about the baby in order to help cover up the evidence that Louis was a cuckold?
It’s possible, but like I said, I doubt it. The best evidence points toward Marie-Anne being dark-skinned because she was premature and sickly. But it’s worth noting that what happened to Nabo is unknown. Maybe Louis did have him drowned in some fountain somewhere.

The up-thrust of this is that it’s wildly unlikely that Maria Theresa gave birth to a Senegalese prince’s son. But at least Versailles grounded its rather dramatic story in an actual rumor that was circulating at the time and didn’t just resort to making shit up whole cloth (cough Reign cough).

 

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

Louis XIV has been the subject of numerous biographies. Anthony Levi’s Louis XIV is well-regarded.

Tulip Fever: Love Amidst a Speculative Bubble

Tags

17th Century Netherlands, Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, Dane DeHaan, Early Modern Europe, Justin Chadwick, Tulip Fever, Tulipmania

Tulip Fever  (2017, dir. Justin Chadwick, based on the novel of the same name by Deborah Moggach) is a modest little movie set in Amsterdam (I think) in 1637. It tells the story of Sophia (Alicia Vikander), a young orphan married to Cornelis (Cristoph Waltz), a wealthy merchant. As usually happens when Hollywood presents May-December marriages, Sophia has an affair with a man closer to her own age, Jan (Dane DeHaan), a painter that Cornelis has hired to do a portrait of the two of them. What sets the film apart from every other iteration of this film are two things, the attempted resolution to the adultery and the fact that history’s first economic bubble, Tulip Mania, was happening at the time.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re thinking about watching this film, you might want to stop reading, since I give away a couple of big plot points.

 

The Plot

The set-up is, as I’ve already said, pretty familiar. You’ve probably seen a dozen films with that Spring-Winter love triangle. Sophia is Cornelis’ second wife, his first wife having died in childbirth along with the baby. After three years of marriage, Sophia has not produced a child and Cornelis is beginning to talk about divorcing her (which he could have, although realistically Dutch religious authorities only granted divorce in cases of adultery). When Sophia meets Jan, the two of them quickly begin an affair, with a little help from Maria (Holliday Granger), Sophia’s servant and confidante. But then Maria’s boyfriend gets her pregnant and disappears, leaving her staring down the barrel of social ruin. The two of them, aided by an unscrupulous physician, hatch a plot to solve all three problems at once. Sophia will pretend to be pregnant while they hide Maria’s condition from Cornelis. When Maria gives birth, the baby will be presented to Cornelis as his, but they will claim that Sophia died in childbirth, allowing her to run off with Jan. Needless to say, things don’t work out as planned.

The film offers a nice look at how all of those portraits that you see in museums were painted. Jan spends some time making sketches of the couple, and paints their faces onto canvas, but then uses stand-ins and manikins dressed in the subjects’ clothes to paint most of the rest of the painting. He makes multiple studies of their faces and other details before finally executing the commissioned painting. He also talks about the symbolism of the various objects included in the painting: a globe to hint at Cornelis’ occupation as a spice merchant, a pair of scales to indicate an awareness of God’s judgment, and a skull to demonstrate an awareness of mortality. 17^thcentury Dutch Calvinists were expected to show off both their economic success and their godliness, so an expensive painting could do both simultaneously. The portrait is intended as a way of saying “Look at me, bitches, I’ve got money, but I know it’s really just a temporary blessing from God.”

Unfortunately, the paintings that Jan does in the film look a lot more like an mid-20^thcentury portraits than 17th century ones. But let’s not quibble.

Jan deciding how to pose Sophia

 

Putting the Tulips in Tulip Fever

A key part of the story is the wild speculation into tulip futures that today is known as Tulipmania. Both Maria’s boyfriend and Jan get involved in speculating in the tulip market. Jan borrows heavily to purchase a rare bulb that he plans on selling to finance his intended life with Sophia. So let’s look at Tulipmania.

The Tulip was introduced into Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the mid-16^thcentury, and it became extremely popular in the Netherlands in the 1590s, owing to its deeply-saturated color. By this point the Netherlands was rapidly rising in wealth due to the strength of its maritime trade; in the 17^thcentury, the Dutch enjoyed the highest per capita income of any people in the world (one reason for all those Dutch paintings). The Dutch had a lot of money to spend, just like Americans in the 1980s, and the result was a thriving market for luxury goods like flowers. The most highly-prized were the ‘Breakers’, tulips that had a primary color broken with stripes of a different color, caused the Mosaic Virus. The most highly-prized were the ‘Bizarres’, which had yellow or white stripes on red, purple, or brown backgrounds. (The film gets this wrong, claiming that the most covered were white tulips with red streaks. I think they decided that red on white was either more striking on the screen or else that red on white had a nice symbolism for Sophia’s lost moral purity.)

Man with a wife and a tulip

 

In the 17^thcentury, the Dutch had perhaps the most sophisticated financial sector in the world, with a thriving futures market. By the early 1630s, a market developed for speculation in tulip bulb futures, in which prices for the more unusual Breaker bulbs rose rapidly, and by 1636, the market for unbroken bulbs also heated up, and tulip bulbs became the fourth-most important export of the Netherlands. In 1635, one sale of 40 bulbs netted 100,000 guilders; for comparison, a skilled labor might earn between 150 and 350 guilders a year. So these bulbs were pretty much worth their weight in gold.

At that point, the market got quite complex. Investors bought contracts for future bulbs and then turned around and sold them immediately. What was changing hands was not the tulip bulbs themselves (which were still in the ground), but the contracts for ownership of those bulbs when they came out of the ground in the summer. Most of the people who bought the contracts never saw the bulbs they technically owned. Trading was done in taverns, with a small fee charged on each sale going to pay for wine, and one can easily imagine that some degree of inebriation played a role in the rising prices.

But then, in February of 1637, the market abruptly crashed. A group of buyers refused to show up to a sale in Haarlem because of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city. The government declared that anyone could void a purchase contract by paying a 10% penalty, and as lawsuits occurred, judges concluded that these contracts were a form of gambling and thus unenforceable. And later in the month the Florists’ Guild decreed that those who held the futures contracts were not obligated to purchase the bulbs; in effect the futures contract became an option contract.

The Semper Augustus Breaker tulip

 

In 1841, the first modern account of Tulipmania was published by the Scottish author Charles Mackay. In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Mackay reported stories of mass irrationalities, lumping together the Crusades, dueling, fortune telling, and (most importantly for our purposes) economic bubbles. He identified Tulipmania as one of three major examples of speculative bubbles. An economic bubble arises when the trade price of something irrationally exceeds its intrinsic value. People buy the asset expecting the price to continue rising and then turn around and sell it, pocketing the difference between the purchase price and the sale price as profit. Eventually, however, the bubble bursts. People realize that the asset is over-valued and stop buying. That causes the prices to start coming down, and there’s a sudden scramble to unload the asset, generally at a loss. (The 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Housing Crash of 2008 are both examples of speculative bubbles.)

Mackay’s description of Tulip Mania presented it as a madness that caught a hold of the general Dutch population, with everyone from nobles down to chambermaids and chimney sweeps getting into the market. He reports a story in which a sailor mistakenly ate a rare bulb, thinking it was an onion. (The story is probably false because while tulip petals are edible, tulip bulbs are both unpleasant-tasting and poisonous to humans unless carefully prepared.) Contracts supposedly changed hands hundreds of times. When the bubble burst, thousands were left destitute and some supposedly committed suicide by throwing themselves into the canals.

Tulip Fever definitely presents this view. Maria’s boyfriend buys a batch of plain white bulbs, hoping to make a small profit, but gets lucky when one bulb turns out to be a red-on-white Breaker. He pays 18 guilders for the lot and sells the Breaker for 920 guilders, but then gets robbed. The Breaker’s buyer then donates the bulb back to the convent that grew it, enabling the abbess (an underused Judi Densch) to sell it to Jan, who goes deeply in debt to buy it. Buying it for 1200 guilders, he sells it for 8000. But his creditors refuse to let him leave to fetch the bulb, so he sends his drunkard servant (played by the always-annoying Zach Galifianikis) to pick up the bulb from the abbess, who jokingly tells him it’s an onion. On the way back, he eats the bulb, thus ruining Jan. The market inexplicably collapses the same day.

If you’re a fan of big ruffs, this is the movie for you

 

The film mis-presents what’s going on. Instead of futures contracts, it shows the actual bulbs changing hands. The buyer gets a contract that is redeemed with the grower, who hands over the bulbs. I suspect the decision to show it this way was made because futures sales are a fairly abstract concept that is likely to confusing many viewers. But it’s hard to understand how a bubble could develop the way the film shows, since bulbs obviously take time to grow, which would probably act as a brake on the market. It was the very intangeability of the bulbs as an asset that allowed the market to get overheated. Also, if the bulbs themselves don’t change hands, that key moment of Jan’s bulb getting eaten can’t happen.

Nor does the film connect Tulipmania to the growing prosperity the Dutch were enjoying in the 1630s. As in 2008, there was too much money chasing too few investments and people felt flush with cash. Detached from its economic setting the whole Tulip Mania element of the film just feels a bit silly.

 

More Importantly…

Mackay’s story of Tulip Mania is wildly exaggerated. Mackay was a great story-teller, but he wasn’t an historian. In the 1980s, economists began digging into the facts behind his narrative, and much of the story collapsed, its own kind of narrative bubble. Mackay drew on a number of pamphlets written by religious authors who were hostile to the idea of a futures market in tulips because they saw it as immoral. These pamphlets argued that the crash was due to an improper concentration on material things rather than salvation. There isn’t a whole lot of evidence for the movement of tulip prices; the vast majority of evidence comes from 1637, making it hard to say for certain that the prices were actually in a bubble. Contracts did not in fact change hands hundreds of times; the most-traded contracts changed hands five times, and usually much less than that. No one committed suicide over the crash.

More importantly, in contrast to Mackay’s claims, most of the evidence suggests that the people who were investing in tulip futures were wealthy merchants with excess cash to play with, not poor laborers hoping to get rich. Only 37 people are known to have spent more than 300 guilders on a purchase. Whereas Mackay claims that thousands were financially ruined, in actuality, it was probably more like 5 or 6 men who lost their shirts. In fact, most sales didn’t involve actual money changing hands (that wouldn’t happen until the final buyer actually picked up the bulbs in May or June), so unless someone had bought a contract on credit, they wouldn’t have lost much when the market crashed. The only people seriously at risk were those who were expecting to get paid for their bulbs. They still had their assets, but if they had borrowed money on the expectation of the sale, they could have been in serious trouble.

So while the price of tulips did suddenly crash in February of 1637, the scenario that the film presents is basically untrue, though not entirely without foundation. Overall, Tulip Fever is not a bad little film but it’s not exactly a great movie either, and it’s easy to see why it came and went last year without attracting much attention. Maria starts blackmailing Sophia, Jan doesn’t seem like a man likely to inspire adulterous passion, and Cornelis becomes quite sympathetic as the film goes on, leaving the viewer not sure who to root for by the film’s denouement. For a romantic drama, it has a surprising amount of humor, although Cornelis’ repeated struggles to get his “little soldier to stand up” get kind of creepy.

If you have a film or tv show you would like me to review, please make a donation to my PayPal account and request one.

 

Want to Know More?

Tulip Fever is available on Amazon. Deborah Moggach’s novel Tulip Fever is also available.

If you want to know more about Tulipmania, Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is still in print, and gets updated periodically. Or you could get Anne Goldgar’s scholarly study of Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, which debunks much of Mackay’s narrative.

The Girl King: How to Dress a Lesbian Queen

Tags

17th Century Sweden, Christina of Sweden, Early Modern Europe, Ebba Sparre, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Kings and Queens, Malin Buska, Sarah Gadon, Sweden, The Girl King

One of the standard clichés of royal biopics is the conflict between the monarch’s duties as sovereign and their desires as a private human being. Usually, the monarch yearns for their true love but then has to give that person up for the good of the kingdom. So we get this nice drama in which royal success is founded on royal misery. But occasionally we run into a monarch who goes off-script and chucks royal duty out the window.

Queen Christina of Sweden is one of the most unusual monarchs in history. Her father, Gustavus Adolphus, had made Sweden one of the great powers of Europe through his military leadership during the 30 Years War, but in 1632 he died on the battlefield when she was six, leaving her his heir. She was well-educated and proved to be a remarkably bright girl; by the time she was an adult, she had studied Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as philosophy and theology. She took a keen interest in the emerging sciences of the Scientific Revolution, as well as art and history. She corresponded with various artists and scholars. She invited the legal scholar Hugo Grotius to become her librarian but he died before taking up the job. More importantly, she corresponded with the great French philosopher Rene Descartes and invited him to organize a scientific academy, although when they met they did not hit it off and he only saw her few times.

Her biggest challenge, however, is that like Elizabeth I of England, there was enormous pressure on her to marry, and she had a deep distaste for the idea. She disliked feminine things and became known for her unkempt hair. All her life she comported herself in decidedly unfeminine ways; she was a tomboy as a child, insisted on riding astride rather than side-saddle, and enjoyed fencing and bear hunting. She favored men’s shoes. Later in life, she took to wearing a justacorps (the fore-runner of the man’s frock-coat), a cravat, and a man’s wig. At the end of her life, however, she had returned to wearing women’s clothing, including gowns with a scandalously low neckline.

Scholars have struggled to understand Christina’s sense of her own identity. In addition to her mannish habits, her style of dress, and her rejection of marriage, there is some evidence that she was attracted to women. She wrote passionate letters to Ebba Sparre, her lady-in-waiting, but that was a common style of letter-writing at the time; she also once introduced Sparre to the English ambassador as her ‘bed-companion’. But she seems to have disliked most of her other ladies-in-waiting, considering them overly feminine. However, in her late 20s, she socialized so freely with men, including Cardinal Azzolino, that there was much gossip about it, and she wrote passionate letters to him as well. In 1541, one of her subjects accused her of being a ‘jezebel’, which got him executed.

There is no actual evidence that she ever had sex. So historians have variously classified her as heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, asexual, and even intersex. (When she was born, she was so hairy that she was mistaken for a boy for several days.) It’s even been suggested that her refusal to follow social conventions might be evidence for Asperger’s Syndrome.

But Christina is most famous for her decision to abdicate her throne in 1654 when she was 28 years old and to abandon the Lutheranism she was raised in for Catholicism. Her interest in science seems to have led her to question Lutheranism, and long conversations with the Portuguese ambassador, a Jesuit, drew her to Catholicism.

Countess Ebba Sparre

Her decision to abdicate appears to have been the result of a complex set of issues. The constant pressure for her to marry and produce an heir was unpleasant for her. She slowly became more unpopular because of her decision to ennoble more than 300 families, all of whom had to be gifted with property to help them live a suitable lifestyle, and that property had to come from the Crown. Despite being a very hard-working monarch, she was accused of living a life of sport and indulgence. In 1651, she seems to have had a nervous breakdown from the stress of her office. And as queen she had to be a Lutheran. All of this fed into her decision early in 1654 to announce her abdication. She had already named her cousin Karl Gustav as her heir in 1649, so the transition was a relatively easy one.

She was granted a pension as well as revenue from a number of estates. She settled in Rome, although she undertook a number of visits to France, Naples, and Milan, as well as two visits to Sweden after the death of Karl Gustav. She contemplated trying to regain the throne, but was rebuffed because of her religion. She died in Rome in 1689 at the age of 62 and was buried in the grottos beneath St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Girl King

The Girl King (2015, dir. Mika Kaurismäki) follows Christina from her coronation to her abdication and does a reasonably good job of trying to condense the complexities of her story into a 90-minute film. Malin Buska’s Kristina is a strong-willing and highly intelligent woman whose free spirit is slowly choked by the demands of her situation. The film emphasizes her unconventional clothing, showing her frequently dressed in pants and men’s vests, although the historical Christina seems to have only adopted men’s clothing on a regular basis after her abdication. She fences, hunts, and regularly wears a sword.

Malin as Kristina addressing her subjects for the first time

The film is also interested in her intellectual interests. She acquires Grotius’ library after his death, plans to build a 500,000-volume library, and demonstrates her linguistic knowledge several times. The film claims that she became close friends with Descartes and that he helped lay the groundwork for her rejection of Lutheranism. As already noted, Christina and Descartes were not friends, and she didn’t agree with many of his teachings. But the film uses her friendship with Descartes as a short-hand for all the intellectual pursuits that undermined the faith of her childhood.

Any film about Christina has to decide what her sexuality was, and in this film she’s a lesbian. The moment she meets Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon), she is smitten by the woman, and as the film goes on she falls more in love with her. She declares Ebba her ‘bed-warmer’ and flirts with her increasingly. When Chancellor Oxenstierna (Michael Nyqvist) gives her several dresses as a way of trying to get her to marry his son Johan (Lucas Bryant), Kristina gives them to Ebba as an excuse to have her undress. Eventually, Ebba reciprocates her love, but just as they consummate their passion, Johan stumbles onto them. Jealous of Ebba, he kidnaps her and pressures her into marrying her long-time fiancé. The film suggests that Ebba’s choice to marry was such a deep betrayal of Kristina that it set in motion the queen’s choice to abdicate. This is going far beyond what the historical evidence will support, but it presents a coherent narrative out of the rather confused and indeterminate evidence of Christina’s complex motives.

Gadon as Ebba

The film certainly oversimplifies. Although it acknowledges a decade passing by, it still manages to compress the events of Christina’s reign into what seems like 18 months; no one in the film ages perceptibly.

And despite its deviations from fact, the film does an impressive job with a lot of little details. For example, the dress that Kristina gives Ebba is identical to one in an actual portrait of Ebba Sparre (compare the two images of Sparre above). Kristina seduces Ebba by showing her the Codex Gigas, the so-called ‘Devil’s Book’, supposedly written by a medieval monk in one night, with the aid of the Devil. The film references Descartes’ interest in the pineal gland and correctly shows foreign ambassadors encouraging Christina’s interest in philosophy as a way to seduce her from Lutheranism (although in this film, it’s the French ambassador, not the Portuguese one). So although the film gets a lot of things wrong, it makes an effort to include a lot of small details that are true.

The film also does a nice job with Christina’s sexuality. Its portrait of a young lesbian fumbling her way toward her first love at a time when lesbianism was taboo is sensitive, not sensational. It presents her desires as natural but still acknowledges that her society cannot accept them, while avoiding exploitation of the subject matter. So if you only see one movie about a lesbian, cross-dressing queen, make it this one.

Want to Know More?

The Girl King is available on Amazon.

There don’t seem to be any scholarly works on Christina that are both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. Veronica Buckley’s Christina Queen of Sweden is probably your best bet. Buckley isn’t a scholar, but she’s been praised for a very readable style.

The Admiral: Lots of Naval Battles

Tags

17th Century Netherlands, Charles Dance, Charles II, Derek De Lint, Early Modern Europe, Freeedom, Johan de Witt, Michiel de Ruyter, Military Stuff, The Admiral, The Four Days Battle

In my previous post, I summarized a lot of 17^th century Dutch history so I could make a post about The Admiral (aka Michiel de Ruyter, 2015, dir. Roel Reiné, Dutch with English subtitles). The film in question follows the career of Michiel de Ruyter (Frank Lammers) both as a naval commander and as a figure in 17^th century Dutch politics. Because de Ruyter’s career is to some extent tied to the political career of Grand Pensioner Johan de Witt (Barry Atsma), the film also looks at him a good deal.

The film, which opens in 1653 with the Battle of Scheveningen during the First Anglo-Dutch War, gets the basic Dutch political tensions correct. De Witt and therefore de Ruyter are correctly shown as representing the Republican position and therefore being in conflict with the Orangists. It’s clear that the Orangists want Prince William (Egbert-Jan Weber) to have more power in government, but the film never really gets at what is at stake for these two factions beyond which group will run the country. The film makes only the briefest allusion to the conflict between the strict Calvinist and tolerant Calvinists when de Witt says during a speech that his country is free because every many is free to decide how they will worship God. This is, in fact, a loosely correct expression of de Witt’s actual position, and it’s nice to see a historical film that actually explains what it means by ‘freedom’ (cough Braveheart 300 cough).

It likewise gets the basic facts about the Dutch conflicts with England correct. It makes it clear that commercial rivalry played a significant role in these wars, although it doesn’t connect de Witt’s party to the wealthy merchants who stood to benefit the most from long-range trade. Perhaps because de Witt is allied to de Ruyter, the focus of the film, de Witt’s motives are presented as being entirely good and without self-interest while the English and the Orangists other than Prince William himself as shown to be more self-serving and malicious. Charles II (a well-cast Charles Dance) at one point tried to bribe William by offering to make him king of the Netherlands, an offer William indignantly rejects.

Ever wonder what Ron Jeremy would look like if he were a 17th century Dutch admiral? Wonder no more

The film is particularly proud of the Netherlands’ Republican history. It opens with the false claim that the Netherlands is the “only republic in the world”. This ignores the fact that Venice was also a republic throughout the 17^th century (and had been for centuries), and that in 1653, England was a republic as well. Given that Charles II is a key villain in the story, the film-makers probably decided to ignore the story of England’s unsuccessful experiment with republicanism simply because explaining why England is a republic at the start of the film but a monarchy a few years later would be a distraction from the main story.

Not only does William refuse to subvert the Republic, de Witt orders the execution of an Orangist who was plotting with Charles. This is a reference to Johan Kievit, but in the film it’s not Kievit who does the plotting, because Kievit (Derek de Lint) is, along with Charles, the master villain of the piece. Throughout the film, Kievit malevolently scowls at de Witt, plots to remove him in favor of Prince William, supports Tromp against de Ruyter, and orchestrates the murder of the de Witt brothers. His motives are never explained beyond general villainousness.

Kievit (de Lint) and Prince William (Weber)

The film also plays fast and loose with chronology. Although Prince William was only 3 years old in 1653, he’s an adult in the film. The film covers 23 years of actual history, but no one ages. De Ruyter’s children are still children at the end of the film. The film repeatedly compresses events, giving the sense that the First Anglo-Dutch War, the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Third Anglo-Dutch War all took place over the course of perhaps a year, instead of the 20 years they actually took. Charles II signs of the Peace of Breda (1667) and then immediately schemes with Louis XIV to invade the Netherlands, even though that happened in 1672. This makes no sense at all, since he signs the Peace of Breda because he’s lost his whole fleet and therefore cannot continue fighting.

One of the better elements of the film is that it works hard to make naval combat intelligible. It shows a half-dozen battles, and frequently cuts to a bird’s eye view so the viewer can get a sense of how the ships are maneuvering. It spends a great deal of time on the Four Days’ Battle, showing crewmen doing a wide range of jobs and demonstrating just how terrible a problem wooden shrapnel was in naval combat. If you’re looking for a movie about wooden ships and what it takes to run them, you’ll like this movie.

Unfortunately, it also takes substantial liberties with the facts of the battles. For example, the film collapses the Four Day’s Battle and the St. James’ Day Battle into one event, moving Tromp’s decision to break the line and pursue the English from the latter battle to the former and making that decision the reason that de Ruyter lost the Four Days’ Battle, when in fact the Dutch more or less won that. In the film’s version of the Battle of Texel, de Ruyter orders Tromp to break the line, thus tricking the English into sailing too close to the Dutch coast, which causes the ships to haul over to one side, leaving them vulnerable to Dutch cannon fire and giving the Dutch a decisive victory that forced the English out of the war. That bears little resemblance to the actual Battle of Texel, which was more like a stand-off. The Raid on the Medway involved several days of cannon fire and a large group of marines, not a midnight sneak up the river with a handful of men.

So from a historical standpoint, the film is something of a mixed bag. It gets the big picture broadly correct, but fudges a lot of the details in the name of a simpler narrative. It also smacks a bit of Braveheart-style nationalistic chest-thumping, but without the histrionic speeches. However the topic is refreshing. How many movies about 17^th century naval warfare have you seen?

Want to Know More?

The Admiral is available on Amazon.

I couldn’t find anything on Michiel de Ruyter, but if you want to know more about Johan de Witt (who was an important philosopher and mathematician as well as politician), take a look at Johan de Witt: Philosopher of ‘True Freedom’