Marie Antoinette Part I

Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France under the old regime and was one of the victims of the French Revolution.   She was of Austrian birth, the daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, and was christened Maria Antonia.  She was always intended for a diplomatic marriage… but her education did not prepare her very well for such a life.  Her education focussed on accomplishments but also on languages.. and she did not learn easily, though she was a talented musician.  When a small child, she met Mozart, then a child prodigy…
She was born in 1755 and at the age of 15 she was married to Louis, Duc de Berry, grandson and heir to Louis XV of France.  The French and Austrians had been habitual enemies but Maria Theresa wished to form an alliance against Prussia and Britain, which was becoming a great power.  France was in something of a decline, and the alliance was cemented with the marriage...
Maria Antonia was re named Marie Antoinette and went to France to marry him at Versailles.  Louis was a shy, awkward young man, not much older than his bride and sexually inexperienced.. Unlike most of the Bourbon males who usually tended to be rampant womanisers.
   He had been reared in a very religious manner and his father, the Dauphin had been a rather prudish and very religious man, reacting against the promiscuity and selfishness of his father Louis XV.  
The Duc of Berry was also in reaction against his grandfather, and preferred to spend his time at manual practical tasks, such as helping builders and craftsmen, and reading about practical skills… He was not a man of strong character, and knew little of politics.   He was prepared to love his young bride but he disapproved of the influence that royal mistresses had had on previous kings and he disapproved of frivolity and pleasure seeking.   So he had reservations about his new bride's light hearted rather silly nature.  In his diary, he made a brief record about the wedding night “Rien”… which signified that the marriage had not been consummated.
More to follow later....

Hortense Mancini

Hortense Mancini was a 17^th century aristocrat who was one of the less well known mistresses of Charles II.   She was born in 1646, in Italy and was the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, the chief minister of Louis XIV of France.   Her mother was the sister of Mazarin and her father was Lorenzo Mancini, an Italian nobleman.  She had several sisters and they were all considered beauties.   Her sister Marie was loved by Louis XIV when he was a young man and might have become his wife, had she been of higher birth. Hortense met Charles II on his travels abroad, before he was restored to the throne of England, and he proposed –but Mazarin felt that his niece could make a grander match, as there was no sign of Charles becoming King.

 However soon afterwards he was restored and Mazarin realised he had made a mistake. At the age of 15 Hortense was married to Armand De La Porte, a very wealthy French nobleman.   The couple had four children in quick succession but she realised that Armand was a religious maniac and very unstable.  He attacked priceless works of arts on the grounds they were indecent.   He was jealous of his beautiful young wife and made her life miserable by insisting on her devoting herself to religion and believing that she was unfaithful. 

Hortense was a determined young woman and she left him.  She had to leave her young children behind..  but her family protected her and helped her to escape.   Louis XIV gave her a pension and Armand was not able to get her back. She set up a home and made it a meeting place for writers and artists and she had an affair with the Duke of Savoy, who had wanted to marry her some years earlier.  However the Duke died and Hortense was left unprotected.    Her husband again intervened in her life and froze her financial assets.  Hortense was then helped by Ralph Montague, the English ambassador to France.  He hoped that the attractive woman might, if she went to England, manage to seduce Charles II, who was then deeply involved with Louise De Keroualle.

In 1675, she travelled to England, to visit her young relative, the Duchess of York... who was Italian.   Hortense was also attracted to women and enjoyed dressing as a man…

Charles was attracted to her. She was around 30 and very beautiful, and she was also lively and sexually adventurous. He granted her a pension, and she settled in England.   However she did not ever feel the need to restrain herself from wild behaviour.  She became involved with Anne, one of Charles’ illegitimate daughters, and caused another scandal when she fell in love with Louis, the Prince of Monaco...who was then in England. Charles was furious and cut off her pension but soon restored it. He returned to his affair with Louise, and broke with Hortense but they remained friends.
After Charles’ death, Hortense remained in London with her circle of friends, and wrote her memoirs.  It was unusual at the time for even an educated woman to do this, but she wanted to set out her reasons for leaving her unkind and insane husband.    She went on living under the protection of James II, whose wife was her relative. And then after James left, she stayed on, under the protection of William III.  She died in 1699 at the age of 53 having led a wild and adventurous life..albeit one that had had much suffering…

Jill Paton Walsh and Imogen Quy

Jill Paton Walsh was born in 1937 and is an English novelist.  She has written children’s fiction and adult fiction.  She is most famous for writing 4 novels based on Dorothy Sayers’ characters Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.  She first wrote a completion of Sayers’ last Wimsey novel Thrones, Dominations.  
Sayers started writing this story  in the late 1930s but abandoned it, and never returned to it, preferring to concentrate on writing plays that were mainly on religious themes.  Walsh wrote the novel, using Sayers’ chapters and plot in 1998 and followed up by another mystery novel in 2004, using excerpts from the “Wimsey papers”, a few pieces written by Sayers in wartime, about Peter… Paton Walsh then wrote 2 more original Wimsey novels...one based on Peter’s first case the Attenbury Emeralds, and another called the Late Scholar, set in an Oxford college.

She was born Gillian Bliss and educated at Oxford.  She married Antony Paton Walsh and later married another children’s writer and scholar, John Rowe Townsend... who died in 2014.   She lives in Cambridge...

My favourite of her works are the Imogen Quy Novels.  They are light detective fiction set in a Cambridge college.  Imogen is the college nurse of a fictional college, who finds herself involved in mysteries.   They cover something of the same ground as Sayers’ Gaudy Night, crimes committed for reasons peculiar to academic life, such as falsifying data or stealing other people’s research.  But Paton Walsh writes with a light touch. 
Her heroine is an independent and attractive young woman, who had a love affair which went wrong...  This led to her giving up her training as a doctor and qualifying as a nurse.   She has light romances, and shares her house with a variety of student lodgers, who get involved in problems.  There is enough science in them to seem realistic without being too heavy…

Imogen has a friend, Mike who is  a police detective in Cambridge.. as is usual for an amateur detective.  (Peter Wimsey has his friend Charles Parker).   She sometimes helps him by persuading students to talk to the police, and he tries to look out for her safety. 

Her novel “A Piece of Justice” is about a mathematician who has died.  Imogen’s lodger Frances,   a hard up graduate student, gets a job helping to write a biography of the man, Gideon Summerfield.   She finds that the dead man’s widow Janet is very odd woman, and she loses her temper with the young student so that Imogen and Frances become suspicious.  They find that other people who were engaged to write the man’s biography have disappeared or died and it seems there is a mystery.   
They also learn that Gideon was considered an oddity in that he was a fairly average scientist, as a young man, but in middle age produced  a piece of exceptional work which made him famous in the academic world.  Frances learns that the dead man had a mistress... and that he visited her once a week…- on the orders of his wife.  She then learns that often the weekly meeting was just a friendly chat, or a cover for another assignation with another woman...  

Imogen tries to find out what has happened to May Swann, who was one of those writers who had been engaged to write the biography before it went to Frances... 
She follows the trail to Wales, where she used to spend summer holidays as a child.  In the village, she is shot by a local farmer... and finds that he and his family had a beautiful quilt, a piece of craftwork...and that a strange woman had been harassing and threatening them, to persuade them to let her buy it.    He shoots at Imogen, thinking that she is the woman come back again and wounds her.   Imogen recovers from the shooting, and then finds that May Swann is dead...

 On her return to Cambridge, she speaks to Janet Summerfield -who is plainly a very unstable woman. And Janet confesses that she murdered her husband… because he was going to confess that he had stolen his mathematical work from someone…  Janet has lived her life as the “wife of a great scholar” and based all her self-esteem on the fact that her husband was a genius and that she had devoted herself to supporting him... like Dorothea Brooke with Casaubon…So when she learned that he had not done the work that he was famous for and wanted to tell the world, she killed him rather than let him confess.  Imogen learns that Janet had an accomplice who helped her to kill Summerfield and also his would be  biographers who might have ferreted out his secret. 

On her trip to Wales, having found out about the quilt, she finds that the mathematical pattern on the quilt was what Summerfield copied and based his maths work on, and that it was the work of the farmer’s wife... now a very old lady.   Janet’s accomplice tries to kill Frances and is arrested… and then Imogen meets the lady who made the quilt and the pattern.  It emerges that she was a scholar at Cambridge but left after she was attacked in a riot over the issue of granting women degrees… She married a farmer and moved to Wales and used her skills to make the quilt. Imogen arranges for her to receive her degree, many years later….

I hope to review another of Walsh’s books later….

Catherine of Aragon Part III

Catherine’s marriage to Henry had been by Royal standards a love match.  He had cared for her, as a young man and admired her abilities, making her Regent when he was away.  They had disputes at times over political issues… and he had not been entirely faithful but overall, by royal standards he had not had many mistresses. She had always tried to please him, and had been loyal to him. (Later Henry would tell Anne Boleyn to “shut her eyes” to his infidelities, as Catherine had done…)

However as she got older and the chances of their having a son diminished, the 6 year age gap began to matter more.  Henry was devout but Catherine was more so.  He was still eager for adventure, whereas she was now more inclined to lead a quiet life, planning the education of her daughter and at her devotions.

Henry worried about the fact that he had no son. His dynasty was a new one and was considered dubious by many.  His father had not been a popular monarch and had only left one living son.  Now Henry VIII faced the fear that he would not ever have a male heir and that Mary would be queen.  There had only been one queen regnant in England, so he was conscious that a female heir might not be accepted.  If Mary was married to a foreign prince, that prince would acquire sovereignty over England and the people would be hostile to the idea.  If she married an English noble, it would lead to jealousy and faction fighting among the nobility.

Henry considered marrying his daughter to the Emperor Charles, her cousin and Catherine’s nephew.  However the problem was still there and seemed insoluble.

Then in 1525 Henry met Anne Boleyn, the younger sister of his mistress Mary, and the niece of the Duke of Norfolk.  She was considered attractive, and an intriguing personality, but not a great beauty.  Neither was she very young- being around 25.   Henry became obsessed by her, and she refused to become his mistress, so he decided to marry her.  He clearly believed that he would have a good case for the annulment of his marriage to Catherine... and that marriage to another younger wife would also solve the problem of his not having a male heir.

However Catherine saw things differently.  She believed that she was truly and legally Henry’s wife, and that there was no case for annulling the marriage.  She pointed out that the dispensation granted by the Pope was valid and that she had never consummated the marriage to Arthur.  Henry was equally determined to end his marriage.  He convinced himself that the reason they had no male heir was because he had defied the bible text against taking his brother’s wife…