So lots of people have followed me in the last 12 hours, I guess because of my Tsaritsa Sophia post? Which has more notes than anything I have ever posted to Tumblr before.
That makes me nervous (performance anxiety!) but also makes me think, well, people seem to like the wacky history, how about some more? Here’s one I prepared earlier, which is to say, it’s based on a blog post I did a year ago.
So what we have here in the picture above is proof positive that, about five minutes after white people arrived in America, they were wearing war bonnets and being culturally appropriative. History: it mostly consists of different ways of people being awful.
The appropriative lady in question is another Sophia, Sophia of Hanover. Her parents were the rulers of Bohemia for about five minutes, but she was also a close relative of Charles II, the deposed king of England (remember when England was a republic? Such a good time, except for everyone who wasn’t a Puritan), and the rest of his wacky, dysfunctional royal family. You know how it’s illegal for a Catholic to marry the heir to the British throne? We can thank James II and his passive-aggressive conversion for that. Not to mention Queens Mary and Anne and their sincere belief that Catholics were in league with Satan. Protestants, eh?
Sophia of Hanover mostly stayed out of all that, though, on account of how she and her sisters were better than everyone. Except, obviously, when they were posing like hipsters in war bonnets.
For one thing, that portrait was painted by Sophia’s sister Louise. She wound up running away to join a Catholic convent, so I guess she had that wacky Stuart sense of humour after all. But convents were pretty handy if you were a woman who wasn’t so keen on getting married, especially if you happened to be aristocratic and literate. Louise wound up running the joint.
Meanwhile, their other sister, Elizabeth, was BFFs with Descartes. You know, “I think, therefore I am” guy. She was widely respected for her intellect, and also wound up running a convent. Sorry, an abbey. No conversions here; Elizabeth was Protestant all the way. She gave sanctuary to a lot of people being persecuted for their religious or political beliefs.
I don’t know much about Henriette Marie, except this book I read (The Stuart Princesses by Alison Plowden) said she was a confectioner, which seems like an odd occupation for a royal. I mean, I’m wholly in favour of hereditary monarchs and their families going out and getting jobs, but it’s not something you expect to see in the seventeenth century. Anyway, Henriette Marie got married and died in childbirth, which is really sad, and was all-too-common, and maybe she should have stuck to candy.
And what did Sophia of Hanover do to distinguish herself? Well, she had a large family, and became a prolific letter-writer. A lot of our knowledge of the various European royals in this time comes from her letters, which were terribly clever and full of wonderful family gossip. This isn’t just great to read, but it marks one of the periods where our history comes from a woman’s pen.
Oh yeah, and she sort of became heir to the throne of England? Because Queen Anne had no living children (seventeen pregnancies, though!), and her nearest relatives were Catholic. So she named Sophia as her heir.
Sophia died just before Anne did, though, and so her son George became king. He was pretty boring, actually, and I don’t just say that because I’m bitter we didn’t get a Queen Sophia.
IN CONCLUSION, European history is pretty great once you dig into it. If year 10 history had been more about the Stuart women and less about Cromwell, I might have … no, I got really high marks in that class. BECAUSE HISTORY. Never mind.
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