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| Raffael's "The Crowning of Charlemagne" |
"Charlemagne served as a source of inspiration for such leaders as Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), who had visions of ruling a unified Europe".
1805
Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and advocate for some of the
worst stupidities ever adopted by the human race, born today in Paris. What were those stupidities, I mean idealisms:
Egalitarianism
Populism
Liberty
Individualism
Laissez-Faire
Gathered together under the umbrella known as Democracy, that battle of vested-interest groups for short-term power so
that they can place the executive inside the legislature
and determine its agenda, rather than keeping it separate, and as the
afterwards of the legislature, and then use that short-term power to serve the
best interests of their vested interest groups, even if that is damaging to the
nation as a whole ... surely it is time that we woke up to
its stupidity and replaced it with something more intelligent.
It was John Evelyn's grandson, also named John Evelyn, and his wife Mary Boscawen, who brought her up; Mary's brother Captain Edward Boscawen of HMS Dreadnought would become Fanny's husband in 1742, renting a London pad at 14 South Audley Street, and purchasing a rather grander mansion called Hatchland Park, near Guildford in Surrey; though not yet grand enough; when hubby was called back to naval duties - he eventually made it to Admiral and is remembered for his victories at the Siege of Louisburg in 1758 and the Battle of Lagos in 1759 - she brought in Robert Adam, first to set the house as a model of upper middle class chic, then to make a tomb for Edward when he was suddenly taken by typhoid fever in 1761.
Long was society o’er-run
By whist, that desolating Hun;
Long did quadrille despotic sit,
That Vandal of colloquial wit;
And conversation’s setting light
Lay half-obscured in Gothic night.
At length the mental shades decline,
Colloquial wit begins to shine;
Genius prevails, and conversation
Emerges into reformation.
The vanquish'd triple crown to you,
Boscawen sage, bright Montagu,
Divided, fell; - your cares in haste
Rescued the ravag'd realms of Taste
They met (notice that I have dumped the silky grey font in favour of the woolly blue; I shall explain why in a moment), starting in the the 1750s, in the London homes of three fashionable hostesses: Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and Frances Boscawen. Guests included anyone who had something worthwhile to contribute, which meant, on the women’s side, such celebrated dames-de-cervaux as the scholar and classical translator Elizabeth Carter, the novelist Fanny Burney, the writer and dramatist Hannah More (a close personal friend of William Wilberforce so you can imagine the political agenda), and the artist Frances Reynolds; and on the men’s side the critic and writer Samuel Johnson, politician Horace Walpole (why didn’t he host them at Strawberry Hill?), philosopher Edmund Burke, and Frances Reynolds’ brother Sir Joshua. Inter alia (that’s Latin for entre autres).
And why Blue Stockings? Fashion at that time put men of the
gentry in grey silk stockings. But one afternoon, when the salon was being
hosted at Elizabeth Montagu's, the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet was guest
speaker, but he arrived straight from the potting shed, where blue woollen
stockings, the denim jeans of his day, were expected of those not yet in senior
management. The ladies were delighted at the breaking of convention - it was,
after all, what their salons epitomised. Someone made a joke about it; someone
else reported the amusing incident to someone else afterwards; and soon enough
the name went viral, as a way of derogating pseudo-cultural and
psuedo-intellectual women who had failed to understand their proper place in
life.
The painting at the top of the page is Richard Samuel's 1779 masterpiece “The Nine Living Muses”; only one of these was also a
hostess, but all nine were clearly the sort to get 9 A* GCSEs today, and then take 5
A-levels: left-to-right Elizabeth Carter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Angelika Kauffman, Elizabeth
Linley (Sheridan), Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith,
Hannah More, and Charlotte Lennox.
Nor did they restrict themselves to the idle chatter of
cultural and intellectual elitist snobbery; almost every one of them also
wrote, editing women’s journals, publishing advice books, poetry, literary and
historical criticism, and even that earn-quick of the materialist classes, novels. And yes, intellectual women at that time may have come from narrow social circles, but by
definition they do not have narrow minds, and it took little time before
discussion of Greek drama or Italian poetry metamorphosed into discussion of
the inferno that was the social environment of far too many of their fellow men
and women. By the 1770s what started in London had found venues throughout the
land, and by the 1780s the bluestockings were proselytising for the development
of both charitable and educational institutions.
Read her translation of Epictetus here; or a minorly emended version here; or Higginson’s version “based on” her translation here; or Percy Ewing Matheson’s 1916 translation here; but all admitted that hers was still the closest to definitive).
More
Next, Catharine Sawbridge, later Graham,
but she is remembered by her first married-name, as Macaulay,
and as the author of one of the finest works of English history... but wait a
moment, wasn't that Thomas Macaulay?
Well, yes, he wrote one too, Thomas Babington Macaulay
in full; he published his in 1848 (click here to read it), a full eighty years after her "History of
England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line" came out, in eight volumes between 1763 and 1783 - was his title a steal from hers, or simply a homage to her?
Probably both. And yes, he was a descendant of the same family.
“Of all the various models of republics, which have been exhibited for the instruction of mankind, it is only the democratical system, rightly balanced, which can secure the virtue, liberty, and happiness of society”
No surprise then that she was a supporter of both the American and French revolutions, and wrote a vitriolic response to fellow salonista Edmund Burke when he attacked the latter: you can read her “Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, in a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope (London: C. Dilly, 1790)” here.
Alas I am unable to find a free online copy of her "History" - but you can buy the complete 8-volumes here for a mere US$2,396.80 (plus US$4.11 for shipping to the UK)
