We may think of our ancestors as prudes when it comes to sex, but that’s not the case. A decent percentage of women were pregnant on their wedding day. People like Benjamin Franklin wrote guides on the best ways to have sex. Lewd ballads and jokes spread around the court.
The most prominent example of this is the royal mistress. Often young and beautiful, these women would service the king in ways he may not get from his wife. They would provide wit, charm and companionship. In France, a mistress could become Maîtresse-en-titre, an official appointment that would bring her her own apartments. It’s less official in other countries but these women were the most prominent ladies of the court after the official royals.
Let’s dive into the world of royal mistresses.
Why a mistress?
Royal marriages were alliances. As a rule, love would come after the wedding, if it all. Factors of a match included wealth, geography, religion, security and chances of children. Compatibility rarely factored into it. The brides were often in their early teens, sometimes younger, with their husbands sometimes a lot older. You met at the aisle or just before. It didn’t matter if they weren’t attractive or the right age- you married them.
With love out of the question, a king would turn to a mistress in order to have companionship. They’d be able to enjoy the sex they had with them as well as just being around someone they’re on good terms with.
A lot of the time, it was expected that a king would have a mistress and would be regarded as odd as he didn’t. A king could love and care for his wife but take a mistress either out of lust or obligation. For most of their marriage, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon were pretty happy, yet he had mistresses. George II cared for his wife Caroline of Ansbach but still took lovers. On her deathbed Caroline asked him to remarry, but George replied that he’d only have mistresses. To love one’s wife was seen as unfashionable and having a mistress was seen as a sign of masculinity. George III being a loving, faithful husband to Queen Charlotte and spending time with his children was seen as rather odd.
Who were the mistresses?
Mistresses could come from all walks of life, from working-class girls to the highest nobility, though the latter was much more common. It tended to be easier to meet women of their own social standing. They were sometimes already known to the king or perhaps caught his eye at court. A particularly ambitious family might introduce their daughter in hopes of reaping the awards.
Beauty was almost always universal, but looks aren’t always the key factor. It was said that James II’s mistresses Arabella Churchill and the Countess of Dorchester were not beautiful. Instead these women were lively, intelligent, witty and charming. They were there not just to sleep with the king but to be companions. They’d attend parties together and have a drink after dinners. These women tended to be well educated and from political families which meant that they could hold their own. The most powerful mistresses would have political influences.
Marital status and virginity would not matter. Kings chose virgins, unmarried women, married women and widows. The husband of a mistress may well have been paid off and given handsome positions, sometimes they were sent away from court. Some were happy, others ambivalent or even angry. Either way, there wasn’t much they could do. They were the husband, but the king was the king.
Despite the strict sexual norms of the era, families of mistresses were often delighted that their daughters and sisters were chosen. The families of mistresses received new titles, positions and land. Thomas Boleyn, already a competent courtier, was showered with responsibilities as Henry VIII fell for Anne. Arabella Churchill’s family was thrilled for her, as she was considered extremely plain and even ugly.
What were the benefits of being a mistress?
In France, the Maîtresse-en-titre was an official title and position. The mistress would have her own apartments. She would often substitute for the queen if she was pregnant or ill.
Mistresses who weren’t Maîtresse-en-titre or even French would also be kept in luxury. They would receive money along with jewels, clothes and other luxurious gifts. Their families would also not be the only ones to receive titles and responsibilities. The mistresses themselves would receive new titles. Barbara Villiers, one of Charles II’s many, many mistresses, was made Duchess of Cleveland in her own right. Another was made Duchess of Portsmouth. Both also had other titles along with pensions and allowances.
Unmarried mistresses would often be given advantageous marriages, either as a gift or a parting present. Bessie Blount, Henry VIII’s mistress and the mother of his illegitimate son, was married to an Earl after her service. Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, mistress of Francis I of France, was married to a man whom the king created a Duke.
The politically-minded mistress might seek to influence. A close mistress who had the ear and the bed of the king would be their most powerful counsel. Those seeking to speak to the king often went to the mistress in order to get their foot in the door. A mistress could close or open the door to anyone, a gatekeeper in a way only a queen could match. Madame de Pompadour, famous mistress of Louis XV, was extraordinarily powerful. She would appoint and fire ministers along with other responsibilities. Barbara Villiers, lover of Charles II, and Diana de Poitiers, lover of Henry II of France, both used their influence politically.
If a mistress had a child that was acknowledged by the king as his, then there was a chance that child would be given titles and good marriages. Some illegitimate children even married royalty. They would be given prominent positions in the military and clergy.
What were the drawbacks of being a mistress?
Being a mistress wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. A mistress was dependent upon the whims of the king. On tiring of her, he could cast her aside without giving her a husband or monetary assets. Plenty of mistresses, even the popular ones, would be cast aside at a moment’s notice.
You also had the reputation of being either a fornicating or adulterous woman. Many noblemen and royals had mistresses, but it was the women who were blamed. There were also reasons for the mistress to be concerned. They would become unpopular if they were seen as taking advantage of the king or supporting the wrong causes. Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III, was a young woman accused of manipulating an older king still mourning his beloved wife. Jane Shore, lover of Edward IV, was forced to do public penance.
There was also little choice. Some mistresses tried to attract kings from the very beginning whilst others were pursued. Louis XV’s lover Louise de La Vallière was an extremely pious Catholic who felt awful for having unmarried sex with a married king. She felt so terrible that she entered a convent after she’d had their fifth child. Louise was reportedly an extremely kind and naive woman who never asked for special treatment.
If you had a child with the king and he did not recognise the baby, then you had a bastard child on your hands. If you were married then the husband would automatically assume fatherhood, whether he was the actual father or not. If you were unwed then there was a chance you were seen as damaged goods, ruining marital prospects.
What did the queen think?
Unfortunately for the king’s wife, she had basically no choice. He would have mistresses whether she liked it or not. She would likely have been raised with the understanding of mistresses and if she didn’t then she would soon learn. The queen, of course, would not be allowed to take a lover of her own. Queens who did or were accused of having lovers were exiled, or even executed in the cases of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
Kings were expected not to flaunt their mistresses too openly around their wives, but they would definitely be aware of their existence. Queens would often have them as ladies-in-waiting, either by choice or by the command of their husband. Catherine of Braganza, the tragic and unfortunate wife of Charles II, was forced to accept Barbara Villiers in her court. Catherine tried to protest but Charles put his foot down. She was so angry that she threatened to return to Portugal, to which Charles responded by sending her courtiers home. He did eventually soften and treated Catherine with much more respect in their marriage, mistresses aside. Charles would side with her over mistresses.
Madame de Pompadour was always friendly and respectful of Queen Marie, who in turn liked her. This was a sharp contrast from previous mistresses who had been openly hostile to their queen. George II’s wife, Caroline of Ansbach, cleared his mistresses before he took up with them. Interestingly, George was close to Caroline and likely only took mistresses because it was expected of him.
At the end of the day, queens tended to have one security- they were the legitimate wives under law. Their sons-or daughters- would be the monarch one day. Even the most libertine of kings knew they had to spend time with their wives.
That is not to say all queens were so tolerant. Eleanor of Aquitaine got so sick of her husband’s adultery that it was part of the reason she tried to remove him from the throne. Anne Boleyn flew into a rage when she saw Henry VIII and Jane Seymour together, despite the fact that it was how she’d managed to become Queen.
Probably the most notable rebellious Queen was Isabella of France, wife to Edward II. Isabella was only a child of twelve when she landed on English shores to marry the twenty-four year old Edward. At their wedding feast, Edward sat with his likely lover Piers Gaveston. He also gave Gaveston jewellery that was meant to be Isabella’s. Isabella was furious and complained to her father, who interceded on her behalf.
While Isabella would come to accept Gaveston, Edward’s next favourite would become her enemy. Hugh le Despenser was initially exiled after becoming too powerful, but soon returned. He effectively ruled England with Edward and was a tyrannical man. Isabella returned to France and raised an army with her lover Roger Mortimer. They were supported by the barons, who despised the Despenser family. Hugh le Despenser the Younger and his father were executed. Edward was forced to abdicate and locked in a castle; he soon died under mysterious circumstances. His and Isabella’s son Edward took over, with the Queen as his regent. Three years later, Edward III had Mortimer executed and Isabella was imprisoned for two years.
The history of the royal mistress is a fascinating one. These women (and men) have attained glory and privilege as well as despair and derision. Some would provide their king with more children than the queen did. Others were fleeting. Some would become Queen themselves. All in all, there were more to royal mistresses than sex and lust.
-
Men and Women, Mods and Rockers
In previous articles, I’ve been too harsh on the people who want to define a woman as ‘an adult human female’, and probably too harsh on people who genuinely want right-wing ideas to flourish. This time, I want to focus on the beliefs of the modern left and rather than attack them outright, provide an analogy that hopefully makes things easier for the right to understand where they’re coming from – I’ll leave the attacking to you at that point.
Despite the refusal of this publication to use a certain word, a refusal I helped in writing and a refusal I still stand by – when words are created or used there’s often a reason for it. The speaker, at the very least, feels a need to distinguish this specific thing from the stuff that came before it. And there is something different about the modern left than the left of the past – although the difference is one of intensity, rather than of content. The trend of Western societies from the French revolution onwards has been an insistence on a harsh dualism between the external material world, and the internal world of the self. The material, by its nature, has no moral character. Few Western societies today affirm a creator, and in insisting on that creator: a rhyme and reason to the way the world is. After all, if God exists and designed our world – the fact there is day and there is night suggests that some ultimate Being who judges us had a reason for creating such a cycle, and we can go from observations in the material world to moral statements by resolving those statements to that Being.
The secularism of modern life has fairly resolutely burned that bridge. Today, we rely on appeals to notions of reason to affirm or deny moral statements. This marks a change not just in how we consider the nature of morality, but the nature of our very existence. Whereas before there was some notion of the absolute which subsumed not just the material world, but each subjective experience of that world. Now there is just a sterile material reality, with internal projections of order onto that reality that we call morality. In the former case, limitations on the subjective experience with reference to the material are to be expected. After all, both are facets of a wider design. In the latter case, limitations on the subjective experience with reference to the material are not only absurd, but denials of the necessarily free internal world of the self.
Perhaps this is all too philosophical and abstract. Perhaps it is easier for me to refer to sentiments you’ve likely heard before. One such sentiment would be the notion that being a woman means different things to different people. Another would be that being a woman is nothing more than identifying as a woman. Both of these presuppose the aforementioned harsh binary between a physical, material, world that (in and of itself) tells us nothing about how it should be described, and an internal world of the self that projects descriptions onto it. We can provide descriptions which allow us to make predictions, and that’s what we call science – but what exactly we ought to predict, and the emphasis we place on those predictions is not something that can be resolved to the material world.
For example, nothing about the fact we can describe the human species as male and female for the purposes of reproduction suggests that human reproduction is good (this is what anti-natalists believe,) or that we should assign clothing, roles, attitudes, separate changing rooms/sports and beliefs to those categories (this is what Queer Theorists believe.) With this disconnect, gender becomes something that has no coherent reference to the material world. We can associate them if we please, but nothing about that association is absolute. At best, it’s the general aggregate of behaviours that come about due to biological impulses – which would suggest that anyone who imitates those behaviours and makes themselves resemble the biological makeup of who they wish to be, is in effect whatever they want to be.
When understood this way, it’s more accurate to understand the conception of gender from the modern left as being closer to a subculture than an unmoving category that one falls into and cannot escape. You can become a woman as easily as you can become a goth. Wear the right things, act the right way, listen to the right music and call yourself a goth and what right does anyone else have to deny you of that? The same is true in modernity of womanhood. A woman is whoever says they are a woman, and just as a goth remains a goth when they listen to classical instead of metal, when they wear no make-up instead of eyeshadow, or take out their piercings instead of wearing them: a woman remains a woman without wearing dresses, acting feminine, or having certain body parts.
Of course, this is me speaking from the perspective of the modern left – but it also demonstrates the convenience of wants between the modern left and capital. It’s easy today to find an endless number of businesses selling masculinity as a product, but why stop there? With an ever-increasing number of genders, there’s plenty of business to be had in creating unique modes of dress for each new grouping. The term “transtrander” got some usage for a while, but missed the mark. People don’t just become trans because being trans is trending, but because transitioning is a trend in and of itself.
The Boomers spent their time transitioning from being a hippy to being a mod, the zoomer transitions from queer, to genderfluid, to man, and back to woman. Each one has their own flag, set of styles, and modes of dress and ways to act and behave. In many respects, this is self-expression taken to its most extreme end, a self-expression which demands not just to express an unchanging identity, but to express the changing nature of identity itself as an extension of self-expression.
“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”
Alexis CarrellIf modernism was the recognition of man as sculptor and creator, and the affirmation that there is no ultimate sculptor and creator to guide his hand, post-modernism is the recognition of man as both marble and the sculptor, and extends the unbounded freedom of self-expression not just to the individual, but to the nature of individuality said person emerges from.
-
Avatar: The Way of Water Review (Magazine Excerpt)
It has been almost 12 years since the release of one of the highest grossing films of all time – that being 2009’s Avatar, James Cameron’s sci-fi epic.
There has been a running meme for the last couple years that despite the first Avatar film’s wild success in the box office, it isn’t a memorable film. The characters aren’t memorable, the storyline is a copy and paste of 1990’s Dances With Wolves, and that its success hinged on the technological breakthroughs in CGI and 3D film that were a staple feature of the film.
In retrospect, the running joke isn’t far from the truth. Avatar is a film that hasn’t held up for casual viewers on its own merits, but rather through nostalgia of a time that has long passed – a time before the insanity of the last 10 years in the social and political scene, where most people were more concerned about the film’s core messages; that being a deeply environmentalist film, a critique on colonialism, and the insatiable appetite of human discovery wreaking havoc on innocent and more noble creatures.
While there are aspects of the original film I enjoy, such as the detailed world-building that Cameron is known for, and the cutting edge visual effects, it still failed to resonate with me the way it has with many other viewers.
The preaching was exhausting when I watched it the first time in 2009, and it is still exhausting today. I get it. Humans are bad, save the trees, the military industrial complex is so evil, etc, etc.While the second installment Avatar: The Way of Water certainly delves a little deeper into the lore and ups the stakes for the protagonists, it still carries the same bare-bones environmentalist sermon that has become all too exhausting in this day and age, especially when we have Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil cronies ruining fine art and causing general inconvenience to all those around them in our current reality.
This is an excerpt from “Provenance”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
-
The Internet as Mob Rule
The ancient Greeks believed political constitutions repeated in a pattern called kyklos (“cycle). The idea first occurs in Plato’s Republic, gets elaborated by Aristotle in his Politics, then reaches its apogee in Polybius’ Histories.
Unlike modern theorists of cyclical rise and fall of civilisations, such as Oswald Spengler, the kyklos doesn’t have a zenith or golden age. It’s rather a waxing and waning of stable society types, followed by unstable society types. What characterises a stable society is that the ruling class and citizens both strive towards the common good, conceived as the objective purpose of human beings, which results in their happiness and flourishing. Society becomes unstable when its members stop having the common good in mind, and instead strive after their selfish private interests to the detriment of other citizens.
Kyklos then presupposes several things. First, it isn’t culture specific. Its objectivist outlook means it applies equally to all political human groups, always and everywhere. Second, the engine that drives history is human virtue and vice, and not economics, class struggle, or war. These are secondary factors resulting from the characters of human beings. Healthy economies, contented class structures, well-won peace and just wars all result from virtuous people. Third, the stable government types are various. Kyklos defends neither monarchy, nor aristocracy nor a republic exclusively. It isn’t a Whiggish or utopian theory of history, that says if and only if a certain group are in power all will be well. Rather it claims that whatever group are in power, they must be virtuous to rule well. Vice immediately leads to disorder.
Simplifying in the extreme, the kyklos model runs as follows. Rule can be by one person, several, or many. When these rule for the common good, they are just, and are called monarchy, aristocracy and republican respectively. When they rule for their private interest to the detriment of society, they are tyranny, oligarchy and democratic respectively.
It’s important to note that by “democracy” I don’t mean here a system of popular representation or voting. The virtuous form of this is called a polity or republic in classical thinking. In the latter, bonds of authority and specialised expertise remain. In the former, absolutely everything is sacrificed for the sake of equality of the masses (see below).
A good monarch rules with benevolence. His successors are unjust and become tyrants. The nobility removes them, creating an aristocratic state. These in turn degenerate into oligarchs as they grow decadent and self-interested and begin to oppress the poor. The people rise up and remove them, creating a republic where all citizens have a say. But the mass of citizens loses the bonds of political friendship, grows selfish, and the republic becomes a democracy. Democracy eventually deteriorates to a point where all bonds between people are gone, and we have a mob rule. The mob annihilates itself through infighting. One virtuous man seizes power, and we return to monarchy. The cycle begins anew.
With these preliminaries out of the way, I come to my point. I believe the present age we are forced to live through is highly ochlocratic. Of course, it’s not a pure mob rule since we have non-mob elites and a rule of law. I also think our age is oligarchic (dominated by elites swollen with pleasure). But it’s more ochlocratic, I contend, than it was a few centuries ago, and enough that mob behaviour characterises it.
The defining trait of unstable regimes, as I’ve just said, is vice. However, vice doesn’t just happen spontaneously as though people awake one morning deciding to be selfish, spoilt, and cruel. Evil people, as Aristotle notes, often believe they are good. Their fault is that they’ve mistaken something which is bad for what is good. For example, the man who hates the poor falsely believes money is the same as goodness. The man who mocks monks and sages for their abstinence believes all and only pleasure is good. Even when we know what is good for us, ingrained habit or upbringing might make the illusion of goodness overpowering. A lifetime of cake-gorging can condition one to the point it overrides the knowledge that sugar is bad for health.
I think the Spanish thinker Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) unwittingly echoes Plato when he points to the faults of the democratic “mass-man” of the twentieth century. All human societies need specialised minorities to function. The more demanding and specialised a field, the more those who do it will be a minority of the population. Further, all societies, to function, need sources of authority which aren’t decided by a majority vote. Modern democracy has created the illusion that the unspecialised mass is sovereign and has no reliance on anybody. It has achieved this mirage through artificial liberation: creating unnatural freedoms through constant government intervention and technocratic engineering.
This in turn has supported vices out of unthinking habit. The mass-man accepts his lack of qualifications and is proud of this absence. He isn’t one deluded about his knowledge. Quite the opposite. The mass-man is someone who openly declares he knows nothing but demands to be listened to anyway because he’s a member of the sacred demos. In short, according to Ortega y Gasset, the ideology of the mass-man is: “I’m ordinary and ignorant, and so I have more of a say than those who are specialised and learned.”
The internet is a democratic medium par excellence. This isn’t to say that its members are all egalitarian and individualist, rather, its very construction assumes egalitarian and individualist ideas, and these force themselves onto its users whether they be willing or not.
Here we can extend the criticisms that Neil Postman makes at television in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) to the web. On the internet, all information is available to everyone. Anyone can create it, and anyone can opine on it. The medium doesn’t distinguish for quality, so the greatest products of human civilisation sit alongside the basest, on the same shelf. There are no filters online for expertise or experience, indeed, any attempts to create such filters are decried as “gatekeeping”. As a result, the internet has no difficulty settings (to use a metaphor). Getting through the easier levels isn’t mandatory to reach the harder ones. You can skip ahead, so to speak, and mingle with the pros as their peer.
Someone might object here that I’m exaggerating, since online communities monitor themselves all the time. I can indeed post my amateur opinions onto an internet space for astrophysicists, but these will mock and exclude me once I become a nuisance. However, this isn’t an answer. The internet is built on the assumption of mass wisdom, and the only way to enforce hierarchies of value on it is by banding a mob together. The space around remains anarchic. Yes, there are communities of wise people online, but these exist in an ocean of communities of fools. The medium presents them all as equally valuable. Which communities grow powerful still depends on the wishes of the mass.
When the internet produces a rare fruit of quality, this is because by sheer accident, the wishes of the mass have corresponded to reality. It isn’t an in-built feature.
The result is that the internet functions like a classic mob regimen or ochlocracy. The medium has no sensitivity to quality, but rather responds to will, provided enough people are behind it. Those who wield influence online do so because the mob will has selected them. They are our modern versions of Plato’s Athenian demagogues, or rabble-rousers of the French Revolution. A mass of ignorant and desperate people swirls around equally ignorant and desperate demagogues who promise them whatever they want. Demagogues rise and fall as the mob is first enamoured then bored of them. As the internet has grown to encompass our whole lives, this ochlocracy has spilt out into the real world.
In this space, truth entirely drops out. It’s a common fault of the ignorant to confuse desire with truth since desires are often hotly felt and what is very vivid seems real. Our egalitarian internet machine therefore is wont to magnify desires rather than realities. And because it magnifies desires, these ever more get confused with reality, until mob wishes would replace the common good of society. I believe a good example of this is how the online demagogue-mob relationship works. When internet personalities, especially political and social influencers, fall from grace, it’s usually because their followers realise they can no longer get what they want out of them (seldom do demagogue and mob cordially separate because each has become wiser). The power lies with the followers and not with their purported leader.
Which brings me back to kyklos. A classic Greek political cycle resets when a virtuous individual takes the reigns from the mob and establishes a monarchy. He recreates justice through his personal goodness. This was more likely, I think, in ancient societies where religion, community and family were stronger, and so the pool of virtuous people never entirely depleted. If our ochlocratic internet is indeed a stage in a kyklos (or a component of an ochlocratic stage), and it ends, I think it will end with one demagogic idiocy imposing itself on the others by force.
A population conditioned by the internet to think mass-appeal as equivalent to truth will readily accept a technocratic whip provided it claims to issue from the general will. Which idiocy gains supremacy is a matter of which can capture the greater part of the mass in the least time, to form a generation in its own image. This is why I don’t think the current trend of the internet becoming more regulated and censored is good. The regulators and censors come from the same debased crop as those they regulate and censor.
Enjoying The Mallard? Consider subscribing to our monthly magazine.
