Marie Antoinette at Versailles, ornament available at zazzle.com

A few years ago I had the pleasure of visiting the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana in Geneva (a must-do for historical bibliophiles), where the eyes feast on marvels such as a full codex of the gospel of John and a Gutenberg Bible. Among the rare court documents that Martin Bodmer collected over his lifetime sits Elizabeth I’s Christmas gift list for her courtiers; names and gifts descend in order of rank. Looking at it, you have a glimpse into Elizabethan holiday ritual. It occurred to me as a French seventeenth-centuryist that I knew little about Noël at Versailles. I turned to the fountainhead of anecdote about the Sun King’s reign: the Duc de Saint-Simon.

Louis XIV’s outspoken courtier talks about the holiday several times in his 15-volume memoires of the court. Two mentions are incidental and occur because another important event he is describing happens to take place around Christmas. A third that briefly details holiday ritual (Chapter LXXI) is tucked into a description of the religious skepticism of Louis XIV’s brother, Monsieur, Le Duc d’Orléans. Saint-Simon sets his story of the prince’s ungodliness at midnight mass in Versailles’ chapel—three midnight masses to be exact—to which Monsieur accompanied the king. The memoires describe the beauty of the atmosphere as charmed, even for Versailles: music that surpassed the opera, magnificent decoration, and extraordinary lighting. Palace celebration, trimming and all, revolved around the mass.

In the midst of this “brilliant scene,” Monsieur sat reading what looked like a prayer book. A lady-in-waiting was moved by the vision of the Duc immersing himself in the spirit of the night and remarked on it. As Saint-Simon recollects it, the Duc responded, “You are very silly, Madame Imbert. Do you know what I was reading? It was ‘Rabelais,’ that I brought with me for fear of being bored.” So much for holy music and fabulous decoration. On Saint-Simon’s read, no manner of divine celebration could stop Monsieur from “playing the impious, and the wag,” not even Christmas at Versailles.

Christine A. Jones teaches French 17th/18th-century literature and culture at the University of Utah. She writes on fairy tales, porcelain, dance and wine.

By Lauren Renaud (Vanderbilt University)

A gleaming white smile represents youth and beauty. Today, pearly whites are achievable for many through regular visits to the dentist. However, in eighteenth century France, the dental field was just seceding from quackery. A new professional, the dentiste, was replacing local blacksmiths who remedied toothaches through extraction with bulky metal tools. Without dental hygienists and the knowledge that sugar leads to cavities, even French royalty couldn’t escape the blight of tooth decay.

The most visible of royal dental disasters afflicted French King Louis XIV. Ironically, the Sun King, known for visual extravagance, was toothless by age forty. Throughout the 1680’s Louis XIV experienced tooth decay probably catalyzed by his taste for candied fruits and sweetmeats. Although the decay necessitated numerous extractions, the royal surgeon refused to remove the king’s rotten molars because dentistry was considered a “mechanical” field. Instead, he summoned arracheurs de dents (itinerant tooth pullers) to perform the tasks.

The procedures progressed regularly until 1685, when one extraction merited mention in the Journal de santé [The Health Journal]. In this case, the extractor accidentally removed a large portion of the king’s jaw and palate in addition to the rotten tooth. The Sun King was left with a large hole in his mouth. After this incident, whenever the King took a drink, the beverage spouted out his nose in a fountain-like manner. A surgeon later cauterized the hole ending the embarrassment and the festering infection.

After experiencing the woes of tooth decay, Louis XIV appointed a specialist dental surgeon in 1712. Years later, Louis XV also grew concerned about tooth loss. He assigned an even greater importance to the dentistry by granting his personal dentiste, Jean-Francois Capperon, letters of ennoblement. This meant that, by royal decree, the dentiste was now a member of the nobility.

Tooth decay not only afflicted French commoners but also members of high society. For French royalty, who assigned utmost importance to their appearances, the services of the dentiste became necessary for preserving their smiles and the marriage potential of their children.

Footed plate for Louis XV’s “service bleu céleste.” Vincennes Manufactory. 1754-5. Boughton House.

Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, had a serious passion for porcelain. She took a leading role in patronage and artistic influence at the French manufactory at Vincennes, which produced the finest objects in the realm in the 1750s. The king provided the economic support to ensure that Pompadour and his court could overindulge in these luxuries. He purchased the manufactory, restricted the movement of workers, and entrusted direction to the head chemist at the Académie des Sciences, Jean Hellot. In return, the manufactory lavished the monarch and mistress with exquisite wares designed in their honor.

One innovation that charmed the court hailed from Europe’s leading porcelain manufactory at Meissen in Saxony. Meissen’s chemists had perfected a new form in porcelain—the plate—and hatched the novel idea of an entire service of cups, plates, and servers painted with the same pattern. Louis XV asked Vincennes to copy the new form and produce the first French dinner service. For the occasion, Hellot, who was a specialist in paint, experimented with a color never before seen on porcelain wares. He wanted an underglaze rich enough to cover a whole area of the vessel—color had formerly been too thin to coat a large area well and was reserved for small designs or trim. “Celestial blue” (bleu céleste) formed a bright heavenly orb in the center of the plate and proved worthy of special presentation.

Anecdote has it that one evening in February, 1755 the service sat waiting in boxes around the royal dining room. The king planned to unveil it ceremoniously by involving guests in the ritual. He gathered the nobility before the group of crates. Everyone in attendance was asked to open one and unwrap a celestial “masterpiece.” This spectacle of the marvelous dinner plate nicely captures the excitement around the art of the table when the full porcelain service first became the must of the fashionable dinner party.

Christine A. Jones teaches French 17th/18th-century literature and culture at the University of Utah. She writes on fairy tales, porcelain, dance, and, most recently, wine.

The defeat of Charles II by Cromwell’s forces at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651 set off one of the most astonishing episodes in British history – Charles’s desperate six-week odyssey to reach safety in France, which came to be known as the Royal Miracle because he narrowly escaped discovery and capture so many times.

Charles and his ragged and outnumbered army knew that all their hopes rested on the outcome of the day.  Their bloody rout ended the Royalist cause.  Once Charles had been convinced that the best he could do was survive, he fled as his supporters made a last ferocious stand, and legendarily dashed out the back door of his lodgings as the enemy entered at the front, slipping out the last unguarded city gate.

From that disastrous night until he finally sailed from Shoreham near Brighton on October 15, he was on the run, sheltered and helped by dozens of people – mostly simple country folk and very minor gentry – who could have earned the enormous reward of £1000 offered for his capture, but instead put their lives in jeopardy to help him.

For most of the time Charles was traveling, he was riding with a woman, and disguised as a servant.  It was an improbable scheme.  He was a noticeable man, six feet two and very dark, yet time after time he rode right under the noses of Cromwell’s soldiers without being recognized.

He was in grave danger of capture and death throughout his 600-mile journey (which can be recreated by following the Monarch’s Way footpath), but the experience was strongly formative.  After his restoration to the throne he told the story frequently for the rest of his life, and the hardships he endured gave him an understanding of the common people such as no other king had had.  If he hadn’t escaped, England’s history would likely have come out quite differently.

Gillian Bagwell’s novel The September Queen, the first fictional account of Jane Lane, an ordinary Staffordshire girl who risked her life to help the young Charles II escape after the Battle of Worcester, will be released on November 1.  Please visit her website, to read more about her books and read her blog Jane Lane and the Royal Miracle, which recounts her research adventures and the daily episodes in Charles’s flight to freedom.

By Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

In the summer of 1474 (only a few months after the acclamation ceremony I described in my earlier post), King Fernando met with miserable failure on the battlefield.  Upon returning to the court, according to the chronicler Juan de Flores, his wife, Queen Isabel, delivered a scathing harangue: “Using the courageous words of a man rather than those of a fearful woman,” she upbraided Fernando.  She said that as news reached her of the outcome she “had sat in the palace, with an angry heart, gritted teeth and clenched fists.”  She berated his temerity and weakness.*

Despite the fact that there are at least five contemporary chronicles of the monarchs’ reign, this account of the queen’s anger only appears in the one by Juan de Flores.  Only one other comments on Isabel’s emotional state, saying simply that she was saddened by the loss.

We should ask ourselves, then, what image of the queen does Flores’ account create?  At first blush we might think that he is criticizing her.  What right did she have to speak to her husband like that?  Conduct manuals of the day cautioned wives—even powerful ones—to be silent, circumspect, and obedient.  Curiously, Flores may thwart this dilemma by endowing her with manly attributes.  And he doesn’t limit himself to descriptions of Isabel.  In fact, this assertive Isabel is consistent with his portrait of another forthright personality of Isabel’s day, Beatriz de Bobadilla.  Beatriz, due to her husband’s illness, had periodically administered the city of Segovia.  According to Flores, she performed the necessary tasks “like a very discrete man and woman” and with a “shrewdness more intense than women customarily possess.”   Like Isabel, Beatriz conducts herself in a masculine fashion.

Flores’ contemporaries would have seen in his portrayals of Isabel and Beatriz familiar images of what they called a mujer varonil or manly woman.  It was also how a fifteenth-century Spanish biography described the cross-dressing warrior Joan of Arc.  This gender-bending category praised women not for feminine virtue, but for the transcendence of their womanly nature (perceived as weak) and the assumption of male qualities.  Thus, Isabel’s anger is not a liability, but rather an indication of her strength.

* All translations are my own taken from Flores’ Crónica incompleta de los Reyes Católicos.

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt is Professor of History at Cleveland State University.  She writes on the history of gender in Europe between 1400 and 1700 with an emphasis on Spain, queens, and convents.

Raoul-Auger Feuillet, Chorégraphie, 1700

If you pay attention to portraits of Louis XIV and compare them to those of his descendants you’ll notice a striking feature of his poses: his legs in tights are often visible. And this is no accident. Gifted with a capacity to learn complicated movements that set him apart from most in the 1680s, Louis used the ability to be steady, strong, and graceful on his feet to his advantage. Dance helped him craft the identity that he sought to project to his people as their absolute monarch.

Hyacinth Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701

Most importantly, as with everything else he did, the Sun King documented his dancing. Not only did his official dance master, Pierre Beauchamps, codify the kinds of steps he designed for the king on stage, he also named the five basic positions—“first position,” “second position,” etc.—and charted their succession in primitive notations on paper. In 1700, a student of Beauchamp’s named Raoul-Auger Feuillet made history by publishing a book that contained the steps to some of the court’s most famous ballroom dances. He called this conceptualization “chorégraphie”: Choreography, or the art of describing dance steps in characters, figures, and symbols. Modern dance notation, and with it the ballet, was born.

By the second half of the 12th century, great towers were becoming ever more architecturally exuberant. One famous example is the whimsical keep built in the 1160s by King Henry II (1154-89) on the Suffolk coast at Orford. Another is the tower built a decade or so later at Conisbrough by the king’s illegitimate brother, Hamelin. Conisbrough had been established soon after the Norman Conquest by William de Warenne. It had come to Hamelin, probably in 1164, by virtue of his marriage to Warenne’s great-granddaughter, Isabel, along with the rest of the Warenne inheritance and the title of Earl of Surrey.

Henry’s tower at Orford is polygonal, with round rooms on the inside, and is supported on the outside by three great buttressing towers. Hamelin’s keep at Conisbrough has similar round rooms and six exterior buttresses, while its exterior is completely cylindrical.

Historians were once inclined to interpret these features as experiments in military science, intended either to deflect missiles or to provide more angles from which to launch them. More recently, Orford has been shown as something altogether different: a playful exercise in geometry. Conisbrough would seem to be a building in much the same mold. Such towers, because of the thickness of their walls, had an inherent resilience, and therefore were of military value. But they were also homes for the super-rich, designed by masons who prized inventiveness for its own sake.

Excerpt from Castles - pages 74-75

About the author: Consulting editor CHARLES STEPHENSON is a historian and writer, whose recent military titles include: Servant to the King for His Fortifications; Paul Ive and the Practise of Fortification; The Admiral’s Secret Weapon; Fortifications of the Channel islands, 1941-45: Hitler’s Impregnably Fortress; and The Fortifications of Malta, 1530–1945. He is currently working on a history of the Italo-Ottoman War of 1911–12.

She was twenty-three years old when surprising news reached her in the city of Segovia in 1474.  Her half-brother, Enrique IV, the King of Castile, had died.  She was the lawful heir to his throne—the new sovereign ruler.  She was also married.  In 1469 she had wed the presumed successor to the kingdom of Aragon, Fernando.  She was, however, alone in the city of Segovia when she received the news of Enrique’s death; Fernando was traveling in Aragon.  In Castile Isabel faced a restless nobility and a competitor for the throne, Enrique’s daughter, Juana.  Despite her legal rights to the realm (Castile had nothing like the Salic Law of France that excluded women from succession to the throne), she had to contend with a culture that viewed the political power of women warily or even with outright hostility.  Many probably expected her to turn the reins of power over to her husband.

But she didn’t.  Instead, recognizing the power of swift, decisive action, she quickly staged an acclamation ceremony and did not wait for him to arrive and participate.  She dressed herself regally and processed through the streets of Segovia.  According to at least two chroniclers, she had a member of the nobility walk ahead of her, carrying an unsheathed sword, long-identified as the symbol of justice.  One of these chroniclers found this highly unusual, condemning her ostentatious presumption when such an action was more appropriately her husband’s prerogative.  The other defended her, saying it was her right.  Even if Fernando had been present, he argued, it was still appropriate that the sword accompany her, since she was sovereign ruler of Castile.

Her husband, Fernando, was less sanguine.  Upon hearing the news of the ceremony and her use of the sword, he reportedly remarked to one his courtiers how strange it was for her to employ such a “manly attribute.”  When the two were eventually reunited in Segovia, Fernando’s displeasure prompted a re-negotiation of their marriage contract.  Curiously, despite the fact that his anger had been the catalyst, Isabel retained significant rights and privileges in the kingdom she had just inherited.  The two would share some powers, but her precedence in Castile was clear.

In these battles for power, the reign of Isabel and Fernando reveals a curious mix of gender and politics that would continue to characterize their joint reign until her death in 1504.

I have lots of stories about the unusual political marriage of Isabel and Fernando—let me know in the comments if you’d like to hear more in future posts.

La Maison de Trianon, 1671-1687 (reconstruction)

By Christine A. Jones (W&M Contributor)

Not long after the construction of the legendary Taj Mahal, Louis XIV built a monument to passion, but it was not for his wife, Queen Maria Theresa. Over the course of his reign, he fell in love with other women who came to live at Versailles. His second paramour, the Marquise de Montespan, was a stunning social climber who caught his eye in 1666. Montespan’s penchant for excess was striking and earned her a dubious reputation at court. The king’s sister-in-law, the Duchesse d’Orléans, registered her distain in scathing descriptions. “[...] Montespan was a very capricious creature, who could never restrain herself in any way,” and “her ambition exceeded her debauchery.” Little wonder that Louis XIV adored her.

The king celebrated their passion in 1670 with an extravagant getaway built at one end of Versailles’ Grand Canal. Inspired by the Marquise’s taste for luxury, the King commissioned a richly exotic pavilion the likes of which Europe had never seen: its roof was covered in thousands of sparkling ceramic tiles and vessels done in the style of “blue and white” Ming china. Entering the “Trianon de porcelaine” was like walking into a porcelain universe. Inside, tiles covered the floors, painters finished white walls with cobalt blue motifs, and woodworkers contributed identically patterned furniture. Gardens were planted in such abundance that sometimes the scents were overwhelming. Architectural historian, André Félibien, recorded in 1673 that, “everyone found the palace enchanting.” It was a fairy-tale castle for a storybook romance.

But don’t look for it at Versailles today. During the 1680s, the aging king fell for the devoutly religious Madame de Maintenon, who turned him away from the wanton passions he had shared with the Marquise. Louis demolished the porcelain love shack in 1687 and built the Grand Trianon in marble to immortalize the glory of his reign, which, unlike his love, stood the test of time.

Christine A. Jones teaches French 17th/18th-century literature and culture at the University of Utah. She writes on fairy tales, porcelain, dance, and, most recently, wine.

That was one of the first questions I asked myself when I began thinking about writing my debut novel from the point of view of the queen’s only surviving child, her daughter, Selene. Plutarch gives us the most telling clue.

Unlike most Hollywood versions of her story, Plutarch says the queen did not kill herself right after Antony died. Instead, she negotiated with her conqueror – Octavian – for weeks before she reached for the asp. Weeks! And what did she negotiate for? The lives of her children.

In doing so, she had revealed her Achilles heel. Octavian took advantage of her desire to keep them safe and alive. Plutarch says he battered her “with threats and fears regarding her children…as by engines of war.” (Life of Antony, 82.4).

So then, why did she kill herself when she did? What happened to make her lose hope? Plutarch says that her first-born, Caesarion was murdered right after she killed herself. What if, I asked myself, he got the timing a bit off? (Plutarch wrote about the queen 90 or so years after her death.) What if, she’d learned that her eldest had been hunted down and murdered, despite her desperate efforts to save him? The grief of losing a child would make any mother inconsolable, queen or no queen.

She probably also realized that the only possible hope of saving her other children was to take herself out of the picture. Suddenly, the timing of her suicide made sense. I wondered, then, what life must have been like for the daughter of such a strong and passionate woman. Cleopatra’s Moon grew from there.

About the author: Vicky Alvear Shecter is the author of two biographies for children, Alexander the Great Rocks the World and Cleopatra Rules! The Amazing Life of the Original Teen Queen. Cleopatra’s Moon is her first young adult historical fiction novel. She is a docent at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta.

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