Lady Suffolk and Her Circle!

Our book today is the 1924 volume Lady Suffolk and Her Circle by Lewis Melville, a wonderful and indefatigable hobby-historian who achieved his full writing powers in the all-too-brief Edwardian era and produced a shelf-full of great, meaty works of biography, letters, and history. Like everybody else, he wrote a book about Nell Gwyn (although his had the benefit of deep familiarity with the world of the theater, since that was his day job), and his Victorian Novelists is - or rather was - a classic. His Farmer George was the first readable biography of King George I (and it's still the most readable, not that it has much competition), and his "Life and Letters"-style studies of William Beckford, John Gay, William Cobbett, Mary and Agnes Berry, Lawrence Sterne, and the Duke of Wharton were the fruits of enormous industry and taste and are in most cases any researcher's starting-point on their various subjects. He wrote a biography and two very genial studies of his beloved Thackeray, several subject-histories of the Regency period, and an odd and extremely endearing book called Some Eccentrics and a Woman.

All of these books are extremely good - none of them deserves to be out of print for all eternity - but perhaps the warmest and wittiest of them all is this big, stuffed "Life and Letters" study of Lady Suffolk and the bright, sharp-tongued courtiers, politicians, and poets who made up her circle. You'd expect the bright and lively Henrietta Hobart, daughter of a baronet, sister of the future first Earl of Buckinghamshire, to have such a circle of attendants and followers. But the future Lady Suffolk's circle was much larger than it would otherwise have been, because she was the long-time mistress of a stout, coarse, near-buffoonish ignoramus named George Lewis, who instead of becoming Elector of Hanover and drinking himself into an early grave became, through circumstances known (and regretted?) best to God, King of England as George II. Among common readers, the Hanoverian Georges are the least-known of all the rulers of England (except of course for George III, and even he is remembered mainly because he lost America and went insane - other details of his enormous reign are now completely forgotten), and with good reason - George II had an ill repute right from the start, with court gossip maintaining that he only ever truly hated three people: his father, his wife, and his son.

Still, he certainly didn't hate Henrietta Hobart - quite the opposite: he quickly came to depend on her enormously. Her social and political cache was enormous - possibly eclipsing his own (as has so often been the way with royal mistresses throughout the ages), as Melville writes:

The social interest, however, is abundant, and from the letters Lady Suffolk wrote and received the Court of George II, both as Prince of Wales and as King, can be reconstructed. Not to know Lady Suffolk, first at Leicester House and Richmond Lodge, then at St. James's and Hampton Court, and finally at Saville Row and Marble Hill, was to argue oneself unknown to political circles; and, therefore, in the correspondence all the notabilities of the day make their bow. Three Prime Ministers wrote to her, Pelham, Grenville, and Pitt. Lord Peterborough, who was really old enough to know better, made "gallant" love to her. Pope and Arbuthnot were devote to her; as were Lord Bathurst and Lord Chesterfield; while Gay and Swift sought her influence with the King.

[caption id="attachment_4121" align="alignleft" width="215" caption="the king and his lady love, by kitty shannon"][/caption]

She had a rival in George's actual queen, Caroline, who was also well known to dominate the King - to the extent that she came in for some public joking on the subject, as in the poem that circulated:

You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain:

We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign -

You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.

Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,

Lock up your fat spouse, as your Dad did before you.

As Melville writes:

George read the pasquinade, and was furious. He showed it to Lord Scarborough, who admitted he had already seen it but, when the King asked who had shown it to him, he refused to say, telling his Majesty that he had passed his word of honour, even before reading it, not to mention from whom it came. "Had I been Lord Scarborough in this situation, and you King," said his Majesty wrathfully, "the man would have shot me, or I him, who should have dared to affront me, in the person of my master, by showing me such insolent nonsense." "I never told your Majesty that it was a man," said the Master of the Horse dryly.

On page after page of Lady Suffolk and Her Circle, there are juicy anecdotes like this one, and judicious historical insights, and the whole bustling, decadent, fascinating world of the Georgian England that thrived and strived and revelled an entire generation before what most people think of when they think of "Georgian" at all. And at the heart of this portrait is the lady herself, proud but sensible, sharply intelligent but oddly non-manipulative, very human and very, very funny. History has largely forgotten her as it has her royal lover, but in the pages of a book like this one, she lives again.

The Noble Revolt!

Our book today is John Adamson's 2007 tome The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I, another addition to our roster of very good very long books (it's so long that one rather wimpy soul, upon seeing it, kept mechanically blurting out “It's the longest book in the world!” over and over again)(but it's not). It's the natural follow-up to the Kevin Sharpe's equally-massive, equally fantastic 1994 tome The Personal Rule of Charles I (Sharpe's book is actually 100 pages longer, but don't tell that to the aforementioned wimpy soul); both are about that most problematic of English monarchs, Charles I, a man so punctilious that he'd refuse to eat a meal if the place-settings were even slightly wrong, and a man who brought that ironclad sense of entitlement especially to his rule – and at one of the worst possible moments in English history.

Charles I had the misfortune to believe completely in the indivisible divine right of kings at just the time when large numbers of his subjects were beginning to feel real power for themselves. His great noblemen and merchant princes had long since begun to bridle at his thoroughly medieval views of what was due him, and matters weren't helped by the fact that Charles himself was not a commanding presence – personally, he was far more fit to be a local deacon or perhaps an overweening schoolmaster than to be king; he was physically tiny, possessed of a shrill, high voice, and prone to mincing. Mentally, he was one of those sticklers-of-pointless-detail whose own friends often want to punch them in the face. Even his dogs preferred to take their food from someone less apt to make pointers on their chewing methods.

Little surprise, then, that Charles I tussled with his Parliament often, and the title of Sharpe's enormous book refers to the King's idea of a solution to that friction: his infamous period of 'personal rule,' where used sub rosa foreign loans to render himself free of Parliament's financial support and so rule without them. Such an approach for a mightier king in mightier times, but a great many of the men in Charles' Parliament not only wanted more of the power they'd begun to accrue to themselves, they wanted more of that power to be specifically over the King himself. Rudely, awkwardly, the idea of the figurehead monarch – an expression and relic of pomp, possessing little or no real power – was being born. The Stuarts were the last English kings to hold vast monarchical powers personally in their hands, and they naturally fought to keep it.

Adamson's enormous book chronicles that fight in a minutely detailed virtually day-by-day fashion, and his prose is throughout so clear and forceful that, believe it or not, the reader is swept along. Adamson is perfectly aware of the larger societal forces at play over his vast canvas, but he never forgets that his is an intensely personal story – people always come first in his accounts, and he's very talented at delineating them, as in the case of Thomas Wentworth, the much-maligned Earl of Strafford, when the anti-monarchy forces of Parliament were baying for his blood:

This outward confidence and good humour, a facade seemingly maintained with immense emotional and physical effort, had defined Strafford's public performance from the moment the treason accusations had first been made. Although granted the favour of legal counsel to assist with the preparation of his case, a privilege usually denied to those accused of treason, Strafford's command of law and factual detail was nevertheless formidable. Ignoring his physical infirmities (he had been suffering acutely from the stone since the previous spring), he brought the full force of his intelligence and his devastating powers of sarcasm to bear against his accusers. He mastered his brief and had a command of detail and a quickness of repartee that repeatedly confounded his slower-witted opponents. To cite but two examples: his retort to th chart that using soldiers to enforce decisions of the Irish Council amounted to 'levying war against the king' (a long-established treason) is characteristic of his style: 'These be wonderful wars if we have no more war than such as three or four men are able to raise. By the grace of God, we shall not sleep very unquietly.'

Historians who can make politics this interesting are rarer than you might think – Adamson is to be commended all the more that he maintains the great tension of his story (whose famous outcome even most historical neophytes already know), shifting from broad-view to the specific personal details he clearly enjoys so much:

with the two Houses locked in immovable stalemate, it was becoming clear that the struggle for supremacy within Parliament would be determined not inside, but outside the Palace of Westminster; above all, by what happened on London's streets. For those vying for power, violence and coercion had once again become an indispensable element of their political calculus.

When it came to control of the capital, Charles believed that he started with one pre-eminent advantage over his enemies: Sir Richard Gurney, the City's fussy, elderly, but devoutly royalist Lord Mayor …

And because The Noble Revolt is so long, the reader gets to experience not only the momentousness of this unprecedented struggle but all its peaks and valleys, all the moments when the whole contest seemed to teeter on the edge of mob violence, or sudden unexpected reconciliation. It's a prolonged, enormously complicated chess match between Charles I and the men in his three kingdoms who were gradually, almost unwillingly coming to realize that their efforts could have only one end result, and it certainly wasn't Charles living in comfortable exile somewhere near the Hague.

I admit it: I absolutely delight in massive histories like this one (and Sharpe's). I want a historian to do the gigantic amount of work necessary to make the past live again, the gigantic amount of work necessary to present the whole of their mammoth subject, not just the banner headlines. Adamson's 200 pages of end-notes amply demonstrate that he's just that kind of historian – they're practically worth the price of admission all by themselves. In them, we see the infinite care he took in his researches:

I use the term 'protege' in the relatively strict sense of someone who received the protection of a peer, whether formally a member of the nobleman's household or not. Thus, for example, Calybute Downinge was 'protected' by Warwick and allowed to reside for a time in his country seat, even though (so far as I have been able to establish) he was never formally one of the earl's household chaplains.

How I'd love to see volumes this vast on a whole shelf of vital historical subjects! Every time one surfaces (and two very promising examples are expected later in 2011), I dive into it with avid joy – not only because I'm an enthusiastic fan of historical writing, but also for the reason that started off this whole epic digression: I love losing myself in a good book.