What Did the Old Pretender Pretend?
Prince James Francis Edward Stuart studio of Alexis Simon Belle. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery. (NPG348)
The story of England's Glorious Revolution is generally summarized as follows:
In 1688, the Protestant nobility of England, outraged by attacks on their constitution, rose up against the man usually described as the last Stuart king, James II, and offered his throne to his daughter and son-in-law, William and Mary of Orange.* James fled to France with his wife and infant son, James. For the rest of their lives, James Francis Edward Stuart and his son Charles Edward Stuart, known as the Old Pretender and the New Pretender**, attempted to regain the British throne. I've always assumed that the title Pretender referred simply to their efforts to reclaim the throne. It turns out the story is a little more complicated, as is so often the case.
The first thing you need to remember about James II is that he converted to Catholicism before he became the king of England. Today that would be a matter of personal choice, but in seventeenth century England it was a red flag. Popery and absolute monarchy were linked in the public's imagination and neither were popular. Got it?
In 1673, James, then the Duke of York and heir presumptive to the British throne, married the (Catholic) Italian princess Mary Beatrice d'Este. She was his second wife and, at fifteen, only four years older than his oldest daughter, Mary. *** In 1676, she gave birth to a son who lived only a few days. For the next twelve years, the couple remained childless****--a fact that reconciled English Protestants to his succession to the throne in 1685. After all, Catholic James would be succeeded by the devoutly Anglican Mary and her Calvinist husband William.
In 1687, Mary Beatrice visited the spa city of Bath, not yet the popular resort it would become in the Georgian period, and took the waters. Late that year, the royal couple joyfully announced the Queen was pregnant. The popular reception was mixed. English Catholics were elated. English Protestants were not; if the Queen gave birth to a healthy son it would mean a new Catholic dynasty on the throne. Bath's PR people credited the waters with restoring her fertility. English Protestants began to comment on Bath's then reputation for licentious behavior and began to murmur about the "suppositious baby". Rumors spread that James was not the father. Others said the Queen was not even pregnant. In Holland, James' daughter Mary was convinced that it was a plot to trick her out of her inheritance.
After the Prince of Wales was born, an even wilder rumor took hold. James' opponents claimed that a male baby was smuggled into the Queen's chamber in a warming pan to replace her stillborn child. Witnesses to the birth testified before a Privy Council meeting, but the rumors continued. As far as Protestant England was concerned, the "warming pan baby" was a pretender to the throne.
In order to avoid such questions in the future, the Home Secretary attended all subsequent royal births until that of the current Prince of Wales.
* Technically, William and Mary were Stuart rulers and so was their successor, Queen Anne, but these little details are often lost in the synopsis version of history.
** Aka Bonnie Prince Charlie
***James introduced his daughters to their new step-mother saying, "I have provided you with a playfellow."
**** Not for want of trying. Between the death of her first child in 1676 and the birth of the Old Pretender, Mary suffered miscarriages, still-births and the death of four additional infants.
The Birth of the West
Several weeks ago I mentioned a Big Fat History Book that had me gasping at my own ignorance. I left you dangling, but now that the review has appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers, I can share the details with you.
The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century resembles the world that it describes. Former priest Paul Collins' broad-brushed history is fascinating, complicated, messy, occasionally confusing and dominated by a fundamentally Catholic world-view.
Collins chronicles both the dissolution of order after Charlemagne's death and the first steps toward its return. He begins with an Irish monk's fears of Viking attacks in the mid-ninth century, ends with widespread apprehension at the close of the first Christian millennium, and offers few peaceful moments in between. Tenth century Europe was under attack from within and without. Charlemagne's empire collapsed into political chaos as his descendents fought for control over smaller and smaller kingdoms. The Latin church was both a unifying force in a troubled world and a political weapon for ambitious princes and warlords. Viking, Magyar, and Saracen invaders were a constant threat to what little stability existed.
The first three sections of the book are a historical page-turner. Two-thirds of the way through, Collins abandons his action-packed account of state-building, backstabbing, and political and religious intrigue and makes a thematic and stylistic detour to discuss everyday life in tenth century Europe. Several chapters later, he returns to politics and religion, this time focusing on two major figures from the end of the century: Gerbert, later Pope Sylvester II, and Holy Roman Emperor Otto III.
Structural problems aside, The Birth of the West is an engaging account of an often-overlooked era.
Road Trip Through History: Cahokia Mounds
My Own True Love and I have put in thousands of miles over the years on I-55, the highway that leads from Chicago to Saint Louis. We've stopped at many historical sites--along the way and off the path. One of my all time favorites is Cahokia Mounds--the site of North America's first city.
Our first visit to Cahokia was an eye-opener. Between 800 and 1400 CE, when Europe was struggling to find its way out of the Middle Ages, the area around modern St. Louis was the center of a great American civilization that neither of us had heard of. How had we missed something so important? *
The Mississippian culture was the most sophisticated prehistoric culture in the Americas north of Mexico. Mississippian sites have been found from Minnesota to Florida, but the culture's heart was the settlement at Cahokia Mounds**, eight miles east of downtown St. Louis. At its height, around 1250 CE, Cahokia had an estimated population of 20,000 people, larger than London at the same time. The next North American city with a population that big was Philadelphia, 500 years later.
The Mississippians settled the area for the same reasons that European settlers built St. Louis. The convergence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers created a rich flood plain with good soil for farming and a wealth of hunting and fishing. The network of small waterways that fed into these rivers made travel easy. Three surrounding ecosystems--the Ozark Mountains, the prairies and the Eastern woodlands--provided a variety of raw materials.
Because they had a stable food supply, the Mississippians of Cahokia were able to support skilled craftsmen and trade for material and goods they could not make for themselves. Artifacts found at the site show craftsmanship well beyond the level of common household goods: stone statuettes in human and animal forms, dramatic effigy bottles and bowls and engraved copper plates of great beauty. In addition to local resources, artists had access to exotic materials traded over long distances: copper from the upper Great Lakes, mica from southern Appalachia, and seashells from the Gulf of Mexico.
The most obvious features of the Mississippian culture are the monumental earthen mounds. (This comes as no surprise, right?) Because the Mississippians had no draft animals, laborers carried the earth in baskets on their backs, 50 to 60 pounds at a time. Most of the mounds at Cahokia were flat-topped and served as the base for temples, chieftain's houses, sweat lodges, council houses and charnel houses for the bones of rulers and heroes. Monks Mound*** is the largest of these, covering fourteen acres and rising in four terraces to a height of 100 feet.**** That's roughly fifteen million baskets of earth.
Cahokia began to decline after 1250 CE, shrinking in both population and area. By 1400 CE, the city had been abandoned. Excavations show no signs of epidemic, invasion, or natural disaster to explain the city's demise. As archeologists David Rindos and Sissel Johannessen describe it, "Cahokia didn't collapse, it evaporated."
The not-fall of Cahokia didn't mean the end of Mississippian culture. When Fernando De Soto landed at Tampa Bay in 1539, he found flourishing Mississippian chiefdoms from Florida to the upper Tennessee River valley. The southeastern chiefdoms were decimated by European illnesses, but not destroyed. As late as the 1700s, the Natchez tribe of Louisiana lived in a village centered on a ceremonial plaza, with mounds at both ends and a temple containing the bones of its rulers: Mississipian-lite.
If you're interested in American prehistory--or history in general--add Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site to your must-see list. (Don't take my word for it. In 1982, Cahokia Mounds was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982, joining the ranks of the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and the Grand Canyon as a world-class destination.)
* The same way we missed all kinds of historical stuff. Even at their best, our schools don't do a good job of teaching us about history that doesn't lead directly to us. Luckily we have the rest of our lives to poke around and fill in the gaps.
**Named after an Indian tribe who lived in the area in the seventeenth century. We don't know what they called themselves because they left no written records. From a writer's point of view, it's a little dispiriting to realize that you can build a sophisticated culture without a written language.
***Named after French Trappist monks who gardened on the mound in the early 1800s. The danger of leaving no written records is that you get misleading names attached to your stuff.
****Roughly the height of a ten-story office building. The Great Pyramid at Giza covers thirteen acres and was 480 feet tall before erosion whittled it down.
Photographs courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site.