Delightful Ladies

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy, which was…long. Almost three thousand pages altogether. Slogging through it felt a little like this. The book is about the birth of modern empiricism–when science ceded to alchemy. It’s also about the birth of modern finance. Because many scientific discoveries involved new ways to travel, navigate, or blow things up, they and the scientists who discover them are fascinating to various monarchs. For similar reasons, financiers also attract attention. There are three main characters:

Daniel Waterhouse, whose narrative life starts with Cromwell and ends with King George I. He’s a scientist but more properly a chronicler and politician; he watches over brilliant minds, but doesn’t consider himself one. He has a long and conflicted relationship with Sir Isaac Newton.

Half-Cocked (literally) Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds. He starts out at the Siege of Vienna and spends most of the trilogy haring all over the place stealing fortunes and getting them taken away. He’s in love with

Eliza, who starts out as an odalisque in Ottoman-controlled Vienna, and ends up as a Marquise. She’s brilliant with money, and wise with politics, and spends most of the book involved in court intrigues.

I’m not going to try to synopsize the hydra-headed plot. At some point, Eliza makes friends with the Electress Sophie of Hanover, and spends some time at Brandenburg with her, Sophia Charlotte, and Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Brilliant women all four, they go for walks in the garden. During one of them, they’re met and distracted by the future King George I, who per Stephenson is not the brightest penny in the marble fountain:

It had become apparent to all that Sophie was very angry, and so her words lanced out into a febrile silence. “The blood of the house of Plantagenet flows in these veins,” she said, exposing a milky wrist, “and in yours. The little Princes in the Tower died, the Houses of York and of Lancaster were united, and six perfectly delightful ladies sacrificed themselves on the bed of our ancestor, Henry VIII, to make it possible for us to exist. The Church of Rome was cast out of Britain because it was an impediment to the propagation of our line. For us, the Winter Queen roved across Christendom as a Vagabond through the Thirty Years’ War. All so that I could be born, and so that you could. Now my daughter rules Prussia and Brandenburg. Britain shall be yours. How did it all come about? Why do my children rule over the richest swath of Christendom, not his?” She pointed to a gardener shoveling a wheelbarrow of manure, who rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“B-because of that divine ichor that runs in your veins, Mummy? answered the Prince, with a nervous glance at the wrist.

“A shrewd guess, but wrong. Contrary to what your sycophants may have been telling you, there is nothing ichor-like and certainly nothing divine about the contents of our veins. Our line does not endure because of eldritch contaminants in our blood, or anything else hereditary. It endures because I go for walks in my garden every day and talk to your sister and your future daughter-in-law, just as my mother, the Winter Queen, did with me. It endures because even in the fifteenth year of war I exchange letters almost every day with my niece Liselotte at Versailles. You may–if it pleases you–flatter your vanity by phant’sying that riding across the countryside in hot pursuit of vermin is a kingly pastime, and makes you fit to one day rule a dominion that stretches to Shahjanabad and to Boston. I shall allow you that much folly. But never shall I suffer you to trespass upon what keeps our line alive down through plagues, wars, and revolutions. I say that you are guilty of such a trespass now. Get out of my garden. Never again interrupt us at our work.”

This is why I loved these books, and why I spent a month reading about them. These women are the main female characters; there are half a dozen others. They are smart, eloquent, and endowed with a healthy sense of self-preservation. They conduct all their affairs, including the intimate ones, with self-possessed lucidity. As Stephenson makes clear, it is their patronage, their interest, and their perspicacity that proves vital.