Hanna Smith and Stephen Taylor: Hephaestion and Alexander

[selenak]

Hanna Smith and Stephen Taylor: Hephaestion and Alexander: Lord Hervey, Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the Royal Favourite in England in the 1730s.

Which is an excellent, highly readable essay of about 30 pages succeeding in what sets out to do, put the Hervey/FoW relationship into context and drawing conclusion. The authors always make it clear when they're speculating, but also on what grounds they do so.

( On Good and Bad Royal Favourites )

The other important context the authors establish is that of the changing attitude towards same sex relationships.

( Old School Libertinism versus 300 Men on Trial for Sodomy )

Yet another context in which the Hervey and Fritz of Wales relationship plays out is that of the Royal Family.

( Why it's a bad idea to get tight with a mother and son at the same time )

( So why did they break up, and why did Hervey never get over it? )

Lastly: when they were close, how close where they?

( The warm Orestes to his dear Pylades )

In conclusion: how an erastes and eromenos relationship can go truly, badly wrong, even if it remained subtextual between them.

Chesterfields, Schulenburgs, and Kattes, oh my!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Related to this post, where Hervey claims that the Countess D'Elitz slept with G1, G2, and Frederick, Prince of Wales.

Act 1

Dramatis Personae

1) Melusine von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal: Related by marriage (but not blood, as far as we can tell), to the Kattes. Called Aunt Melusine by Hans Hermann. Mistress of George I. She and G1 had 3 daughters, (2) - (4) below.

2) Anna Luise von der Schulenburg, Countess of Dölitz: Or "d'Elitz," as Hervey spells it. Oldest daughter of G1 and Melusine. Mistress of G1, G2, and FoW, according to Hervey.

3) Petronella von der Schulenburg: 2nd daughter of G1 and Melusine. Possibly had an affair with visiting Hans Hermann in the 1720s, per a letter from Hans Heinrich to his brother. Married Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, aka the famous Chesterfield, in 1733.

4) Margarethe Gertrud von Oeynhausen: 3rd daughter of G1 and Melusine. I have no stories about her (yet).

5) Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield: The famous one. Married to Melusine's daughter Petronella. British envoy to the Netherlands in 1730. Helped Peter Keith escape to England.

6) Philip Stanhope: Modern-day protagonist of Zeithain. Fictional descendant of Petronella and Chesterfield, who in reality had no children together.

See also the family tree, which is missing Melusine's other daughters, because at the time I made it, I didn't know that one was of such interest to gossipy sensationalists. ;)

Scene 1
Philip Stanhope is so named because Melusine's daughter Petronella married Lord Chesterfield.

Scene 2
When Hervey writes, "Madame d'Elitz was a Schulemberg, sister to my Lady Chesterfield," it's because Madame d'Elitz is Melusine's oldest daughter, and Melusine's second daughter, Petronella, is Lady Chesterfield (as of 1733).

Scene 3
If Anna Luise has been sleeping with G1, G2, and FoW, or any combination thereof, those are her father, half-brother, and half-nephew.

Act 2

Dramatis Personae

7) Gertrud von der Schulenberg: Sister of Melusine. Wife of Friedrich Achaz von der Schulenburg, who is clearly related to her, although how closely, I can't say. Adoptive mother of (2) - (3), Anna Luise and Petronella.

8) Friedrich Achaz von der Schulenburg: Married to Melusine's sister. Related to his wife somehow. Adoptive father of Melusine's two oldest children by G1.

Scene 1
You might have been lured into thinking that Anna Luise and Petronella are von der Schulenbergs because their mother Melusine was a von der Schulenberg and they were illegitimate, but no, that would be too easy.

The reason Anna Luise (2) and Petronella (3) are von der Schulenbergs, while their younger sister (4) is not, is that the first two were adopted by their mother's sister, Aunt Gertrud, and it so happens that Aunt Gertrud had married a relative by the same last name. Whereas (4) was adopted by a *different* sister of Melusine, who had married a different man, and thus had a different last name.

Scene 2
So when Hervey writes, "Madame d'Elitz set out for England, where she now was with her aunt and sister, the Duchess of Kendal and Lady Chesterfield," it's because her aunt, the Duchess of Kendal, is actually her mother (you know, like all the popes and their "nephews"), and her adoptive mother is her real mother's sister.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: The Embassy Letters

[mildred_of_midgard]

selenak's write-up on Lady Mary's embassy letters:

This book, which was prepared for publication by its author but only published once she was dead - as she had intended - became an instant bestseller in the 18th century, and has remained in print ever since...Now that I've finally gotten around to reading her most famous work, I can say Lady Mary...is splendid writerly company to spend a few hours with, travelling across 18th century Europe to Turkey and back (after only a year, because her husband didn't work out very well as the British Ambassador, much to her regret, because Lady Mary adored Turkey).

The "Embassy Letters" - their most common title - aren't just a collection of letters written during those years, mind. Some of Lady Mary's actual letters were used for this book by her, with too personal information edited out, but she also drew on her diaries (which were burned after her death by hear daughter - one reason why the "Embassy Letters" manuscript had been given to someone else by her, since that action had been predictable - Lady Mary had been a hugely controversial woman all her life, and at the time of her death, her son-in-law was the new Prime Minister of England and respectability was of the utmost importance), and she redrafted everything so that the letters form a consistent narrative. (I.e. there is no repetitive information - despite the fact that the letters are to different correspondents, they tell a continuous tale.)

Of course, despite the fact this was the first "official" book of Lady Mary's, she'd been a de facto professional writer for most of her long life. She'd been born into privilege, the daughter of a future Duke - hence "Lady Mary" as her title after she gotten married to the title-less Edward Wortley Montagu - , and her father had been indulgent, but she'd been a nerdy child who got most of the education she craved not from her assigned teachers. According to legend, ten years old Mary developed such a passion for Ovid's Metamorphoses that she resolved to learn Latin 'with the help of an uncommon memory and indefatigable labour'. Hiding from her governess, with a Latin dictionary and grammar, she pursued this secret passion for as long as ten hours a day. By the time she was a teenager, she also wrote verses and prose and it soon became anything but adolescent. She became famous as a wit in writing and in the salons, but being a female aristocrat also meant publishing (and even worse, publishing for money!) under your own name was unthinkable; her writings were either circulated in hand written copies, or published anonymously, as when she wrote and edited a satiric magazine. Her family had sided with the Hannover dynasty even before Queen Anne, the last Stuart, had died (though her father also married her sister to a Jacobite, just to be on the safe side), and so her husband secured the Ottoman embassy job that provided the reason for Lady Mary's travels across Europe and Turkey in 1716/1717/1718. She was a young woman in her twenties, with a toddler son; in the year before she left England, she had, like so many others, fallen sick with smallpox and survived, but with heavy scarring. (Which none of her portraits reflect, any more than Mozart's portraits show his small pox scars.) This is important background to what she found in Turkey.

One reason why Lady Mary's travelogues are still so entertaining to read, aside from the historical interest, is that she's a witty writer, and she's also very curious about all she sees. Unusual for a great many later British tourists following in her footsteps, she's far more interested in modern accomplishments (stoves in Dresden and Hannover, smallpox inocculation in Turkey) than historic buildings, though she visits these, too. Most unusually, when noting down other customs, she doesn't always see England as the pinnacle of civilisation but encounters various examples of where the British, in her opinion, could learn something. (Not always something as important as inocculation. For example: she's a great fan of sofas when she encounters them as divans in Turkey - "I shall never endure a chair again".) Now, of course she was a privileged traveller, and most of the people she comes across in any given country long enough to talk intensely to are well off, too; she notes poverty, too, but the poor aren't the people she visits in their houses. But visit she does, and when she's in Turkey, she starts to learn Turkish and Arabic and wears local dresses, which she finds far more comfortable than the contemporary European style.

On the other hand, she's far from free of the prejudices of her day. The same Lady Mary who argues against the dissing of and condescension to the Turks in previous British literature sees nothing wrong with slavery. Alexander Pope, who was one of the correspondants of the Embassy Letters, turned from adoring and idealizing her from afar to viciously attacking her after her return to England, heaping every imaginable slur on her (including accusations of STDs), and when she counterattacked, she used ableism as freely as he did misogyny. She's not someone you can comfortably put in a pedestal. But what she's always: compelling, and speaking as vividly across the centuries as if she'd just dipped her pen into ink to write these letters. Have some examples underneath the cut.

( The sights that charmed the charming Montagu )