#commonwealthposting

Brought to you by a conversation I was having with @elucubrare and also by me currently reading Ann Leckie’s Radiant Star, which is not fantasy, but AL has always got me when I need political complexity. Is the Radch a monarchy? That’s an etymologically loaded question. But the Republic of Two Systems certainly isn’t.

Theories I consider when there is kings:

The author is an actual monarchist. Are you literally Tolkien? If not, I have a weird sticker to sell you.

The author is not really that interested in their world’s political system and kingship just feels like the default, unmarked case for the genre. They are probably not wrong about that. But why is it the unmarked case? And why not make something of your world’s political system? Or if you truly just need a vaguely powerful figure to send your heroes on quests why not at least call them the Consul or the President of the Council or something? Well, possibly because…

The author thinks it feels more historical. Subtypes: The author thinks the only options for political systems are Stereotypical Medieval Europe or Contemporary American Democracy, in which case read more history, and The author is specifically modeling their world after a specific historical kingdom, in which case I hope you are portraying all its problems too. If you are doing medieval England for instance you do not have an absolute monarch, you have one afflicted with Barons. So many barons. If you do not have barons in rebellion every five seconds you are not doing medieval England. So in this case also read more history. It is full of fun plot material.

The author does not want to create like 50 different government characters instead of 1 all-powerful king. I do kinda sympathize with this if your main characters are not interacting with the government very much. But you could also just have them talk to one government spokesperson for narrative convenience. The Minister for Dragons or whatever. On the other hand, if your main characters are deeply involved in government, then possibly…

The author wants the problems of the realm to be caused by and/or solvable by one single person. Narratively attractive but unrealistic. I wish things worked like this. Related/possibly overlapping:

The author is not sure how to write government by collaboration, compromise, or consent; autocracy, or even palace intrigue, is easier. It’s complicated. What do politicians talk about? How do they get things done? Do they ever? In our world, they often don’t. But can’t fiction give us the opportunity to think through alternatives? I say this as someone who can’t really write committees or debates or palace intrigue. But I like all of them as a reader. Not just palace intrigue around an autocrat. I see the appeal of that: you are a writer, you are good at making characters matter, the king’s character matters. But I have faith in you, writer. I have faith that you can write characters who matter without any one of them having to be The Character Who Matters.

The author thinks kings are glamorous. I have basically no respect for this but also I am clearly not the target audience. Things are allowed to not interest me. Next.

The king is the bad guy and we are doing a Rebellion. Hurrah! What are we rebelling for? I know what we’re rebelling against. Yes it is very oppressive. What are we rebelling for? We have a goal right? Even if it’s just “bread.” What are we going to put in place when we win? The characters may not have thought that far (rebels often don’t - but sometimes they do - or gather around an existing alternative institution like Parliament in the English Civil War) but surely you the author have? Right?

Bridget Ireton was born in 1650, so she was just a baby (in England with her mother) when the news of her father's death in Ireland reached them. The next year, 1652, her mother married General Charles Fleetwood, who was another of Cromwell's close associates--I suppose her social circle consisted largely of Parliamentary generals. Little Bridget would have grown up knowing her grandfather as Lord Protector of England, then briefly her uncle Richard; then her stepfather, General Fleetwood, attempted to steer the state. But Bridget was only ten when all this fell apart at the Restoration.

If she saw the impaled heads of her recently dead grandfather and the father she never really knew, this gory sight seems to have made Bridget not frightened but furious, judging from her later life. She lost her mother a year or two later, in 1662, and lived with her stepfather in his enforced country retirement (and he got off lucky) until 1670. Then, at the age of twenty, she married twenty-five-year-old Thomas Bendish, who doesn't appear to have been anybody in particular. Bridget and Thomas moved to Norfolk, where Thomas owned a saltworks. They had at least three children, and despite her family's brush with greatness, Bridget lived a fairly ordinary life after this, widowed in 1707 and dying in 1726, aged 76.

A fairly ordinary life, with a few exceptions. What fascinates me is that she's another of these post-Restoration commonwealths...people... who just didn't get the memo that it was the Restoration Period and they were meant to stop now. (Because, of course, no one sends these memos! Periodization is imposed by historians in retrospect! And the Good Old Cause of the republic in particular is always dying and never dead: this was the subject of my MA thesis.)

So in 1683 Bridget (along with practically every other republican and republican-adjacent and radical Whig in England) seems to have been up to her neck in the Rye House Plot, which you'll remember from my posting about Algernon Sidney when I had the flu. She was never arrested or tried--likely at least partly because women's political activities were taken less seriously and therefore examined less closely (a pattern I've observed, although I'm not saying it was definitely true of Bridget). Her brother Henry was arrested for his involvement, and Bridget helped him to escape from prison. He was later recaptured and accused of high treason, but eventually pardoned.

Bridget evidently supported William and Mary's overthrow of James II (the "Glorious Revolution"), and in 1694 she met and was promised a pension by Queen Mary, but it never materialized owing to the queen's death. You have to wonder how exactly Bridget introduced herself--the Whig party's relationship to their proper-republican forebears at this time is fascinatingly mixed.

And Bridget, throughout her life, was very much proud of her own regicidal parentage. Wikipedia describes her as "always determined to defend her family heritage," and paraphrases a description left by a local dissenting minister (dissenting = Puritan heritage = culturally sympathetic if not exactly ideologically aligned) who knew her in her later life. He described her as

a rigid Calvinist of uncertain temper, with a strength of will and physical courage rarely paralleled. ... she labored incessantly in her own household, on her husband's farm, and at his saltworks, yet was always noted for dignity of mien and the charm of her conversation. She was reputed to bear a physical resemblance to her grandfather, of whose reputation she was an ardent champion.

The same source tells a story:

Bridget was traveling to London in a public coach when a fellow passenger, in conversation with a companion, spoke lightly of Oliver Cromwell. Bridget not only inveighed against the offender for the rest of the journey, but on landing in London snatched another passenger's sword from its sheath and challenged the slanderer to fight her there and then.

And she looked like Oliver too. Must have been terrifying for that poor coach passenger, who thought they were just casually badmouthing an unpopular figure several decades dead, only to encounter his spitting image in the form of a tough red-faced lady who really, really wants to hit you with a sword.

The Porcupine by John Carswell, a life of Algernon Sidney. There's a longer, more complete biography of Sidney by Jonathan Scott, but Carswell's is the most readable I think. Scott's is more of a reference.

Free-Born John by Pauline Gregg, a life of John Lilburne, the great Leveller. I used to have a sticker of Lilburne on my laptop. I put it over the manufacturer's logo. I made it myself. I haven't made a Lilburne post yet, partly because it's been ages since I read this, but I'd like to. Maybe I'll reread it. Honestly this should be a joint biography of John and his wife Elizabeth, and nearly is.

The Tyrannicide Brief by Geoffrey Robertson, a life of John Cooke, the prosecutor at the trial of Charles I. I read this one on the recommendation of @suzannahnatters some years ago!

Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson by Lucy Hutchinson. This one obviously isn't a modern biography, she's contemporary to the period; and it's a little weird that it's easier for me to find a biography by than about a seventeenth-century woman. But her biography of her husband is also very much about her own experiences. And she's fascinating.

And not all historical novels are Royalist-leaning. Rosemary Sutcliff's The Rider on the White Horse is about Thomas Lord Fairfax, from the perspective of his wife. It's quite good.

which is a reproduction of a 1793 pack of cards which replaces the Kings, Queens, and Jacks with Geniuses (as in the Latin word genius, "guardian spirit"), Liberties, and Equalities. Genuinely so cool. (On the page I linked you can see better pictures than I can get of my copy, and also read [in French] about its history and the design choices made in the reproduction process to make it playable today!)

I especially enjoy this souvenir because of the travails I endured to acquire it. No one will be interested in this story but I am going to tell it anyway. I saw it on almost the first day we were there, in the gift shop of the museum of the Conciergerie. I had already been extremely irritated by a bunch of Marie Antoinette souvenirs, so I was particularly taken with this pack of cards. But I did not buy it because it is bad policy to spend your souvenir money on the first day. But I did not find anything else I liked more, and I kept thinking about the cards. The thing is that we weren't in Paris for the whole trip; we stayed there and then visited other places; but we were there again for one last night just before leaving, because that's where we flew out of. So fortunately Mr Latinist had taken a picture of the cards and I was able to find the people who make them, and their list of stores that carry them. I had a phone conversation in French just to find out that one of them was out! But I found one that had them. It closed about half an hour after our train from Amiens got in. So when we arrived back in Paris, I left Mr L with the bags and set off on a Jet Lag The Game style race to the RER. I made it! Just! I asked the shopkeepers if they had the cards. One of them said no, sorry, they had the 1830 ones if that would help...? With all respect I did not want the 1830 ones. I thanked her and prepared to leave. Then her colleague said no, wait, and got the keys and UNLOCKED THE WINDOW DISPLAY and sold me the SINGLE LAST REMAINING COPY of the souvenir I had now invested an amazing amount of time and trouble in. And €16. I have not really conveyed it but it was an amazing odyssey for me at the time.

What, my hot-headed warm-hearted long-winded aristocratic exile, defendant in a disgracefully rigged trial with ludicrously inadmissible evidence? How could I not put him with Six?