Publication date:
07 November 2017Length of book:
528 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9780810896154
In 1613, a beautiful Stuart princess married a handsome young German prince. This was a love match, but it was also an alliance that aimed to meld Europe's two great Protestant powers. Before Elizabeth and Frederick left London for the court in Heidelberg, they watched a performance of The Winter's Tale. In 1943, a group of British POWs gave a performance of that same play to a group of enthusiastic Nazi guards in Bavaria. Nothing about the story of England and Germany, as this remarkable book demonstrates, is as simple as we might expect.
Miranda Seymour tells the forgotten story of England’s centuries of profound connection and increasingly rivalrous friendship with Germany, linked by a shared faith, a shared hunger for power, a shared culture (Germany never doubted that Shakespeare belonged to them, as much as to England), and a shared leadership. German monarchs ruled over England for three hundred years—and only ceased to do so through a change of name.
This extraordinary and heart-breaking history—told through the lives of princes and painters, soldiers and sailors, bakers and bankers, charlatans and saints—traces two countries so entwined that one German living in England in 1915 refused to choose where his allegiance lay. It was, he said, as if his parents had quarreled. Germany’s connection to the island it loved, patronized, influenced, and fought was unique. Indeed, British soldiers went to war in 1914 against a country to which many of them—as one freely confessed the week before his death on the battlefront—felt more closely connected than to their own. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished papers and personal interviews, the author has uncovered stories that remind us—poignantly, wittily, and tragically—of the powerful bonds many have chosen to forget.
Miranda Seymour tells the forgotten story of England’s centuries of profound connection and increasingly rivalrous friendship with Germany, linked by a shared faith, a shared hunger for power, a shared culture (Germany never doubted that Shakespeare belonged to them, as much as to England), and a shared leadership. German monarchs ruled over England for three hundred years—and only ceased to do so through a change of name.
This extraordinary and heart-breaking history—told through the lives of princes and painters, soldiers and sailors, bakers and bankers, charlatans and saints—traces two countries so entwined that one German living in England in 1915 refused to choose where his allegiance lay. It was, he said, as if his parents had quarreled. Germany’s connection to the island it loved, patronized, influenced, and fought was unique. Indeed, British soldiers went to war in 1914 against a country to which many of them—as one freely confessed the week before his death on the battlefront—felt more closely connected than to their own. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished papers and personal interviews, the author has uncovered stories that remind us—poignantly, wittily, and tragically—of the powerful bonds many have chosen to forget.
Biographer Seymour, granddaughter of diplomat Richard Seymour who served in Berlin under Queen Victoria, captures the tumultuous relationship between England and Germany in this ambitious exploration of the period from 1613–1945. She opens with the union of Prince Frederick and Elizabeth Stuart—'marriage of the Thames and Rhine'—and runs through the 1840 match of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that culminated in WWI. Long before the indelible scars created by 'the pity of war,' Seymour illustrates how intellectual attraction drew the two cultures together, sketching a series of illustrious Englishmen—for example, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Friedrich Schiller’s translator) and William Thackeray. Most compelling is the minor royal who played a role in what might be called the family feud: Daisy, Princess of Pless—née Cornwallis-West—who in 1891 married into the German aristocracy. Daisy’s position afforded her a close view of the antipathy between Kaiser Wilhelm, Queen Victoria’s irascible grandson, and his Uncle Bertie, the Prince of Wales. Seymour draws on Daisy’s private papers, which foretold the inevitability of WWI, and interviews with her son Hansel, which revealed her own uncomfortable position during the conflict. Every family has its differences but Seymour lays out why this particular family’s intrigue is so irresistible.