Celle, Dumfries, and a long line of Georges

Heartthrob of the Highlands, Jamie Fraser,
and his true love, Claire, 207 years his senior.

The details, as the saying goes, may well be the dwelling place of the devil, but so are many of the motivations for what keeps us engaged as the plague rages across the land.  I was able to come up with a dozen reasons to stop watching Outlander - too much violence, too much cheap dependence on the kissy-kissy - but the Scottish history grabbed hold of me early on, and I was able to use it to offset a bucketload of sloppy Hollywoodish features, particularly the story of Scotland’s early attempt to get out of from under English hegemony under the Hanoverian kings George I and II. (There was to be a third and a fourth before they stopped naming them all after their fathers, but let’s not get distracted.) When the allegedly bonnie (but clearly foolish) Prince Charlie pushed the effort to put the Catholic Stuarts back on the throne, he tragically overestimated the strength of his following, and got wiped out at the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness, in 1746, putting an end to the clan system and making the wearing of the tartans illegal. Scotland would continue as the junior partner of the United Kingdom into the present day, having to endure the world thinking of the United Kingdom as “England” as often as not. 

Born to binge, evidently, I find myself still up at 3 a.m. all too often. Last time was when I was unable to say no to “just one more” when streaming the seventy-two hours of Un Village Français. I love historical dramas and the way they give me a whole new purpose in life as I can’t help digging around online for more historical background. Who, exactly, was Bonnie Prince Charlie and where did he come from? How did Mary, Queen of Scots, fit into the picture? Where exactly was Culloden? What’s the connection between Henry VIII, who I remember was a Tudor, and the House of Hanover and the Stuarts? So much ground to cover. A real blast, in the end. Can't help myself; I'm so easily hooked.

And, as if I needed more motivation, two bits of trivia popped out at me and reminded me how tightly I am tied to the continent of Europe. One was the fact that the House of Hanover began with yet another George, the Duke of Brunswick (German Braunschweig)-Lüneburg, who was born in Celle in 1582, where my mother was born in 1915. And her father was born in Braunschweig. The other is that Sam Heughan, the lead actor in Outlander,  was born in Dumfries and Galloway, in Scotland, where my paternal grandfather was born in 1886.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, when the current Queen of England (why don’t we refer to her as the Queen of the UK? or at least as the Queen of Great Britain?) passes on, the throne will go to her son Charles, and then to his son William, and then to his son George, who, unless he does something really stupid, like convert to Roman Catholicism, will be the seventh George on the throne of the United Kingdom. Unless Scotland decides, of course, to make up for the loss of Scottish independence at the Battle of Culloden, and secedes from the United Kingdom, which might well lead to Northern Ireland’s seceding as well, in which case he might well be declared King George the First of the Rump State of England and Wales. (Not really. My guess is they would still call themselves the United Kingdom, even if reduced to just two wee little states.)

The socialist in me finds the fascination with the British royal family, particularly by Americans, tacky. Don’t wish anybody ill, and I enjoyed watching William and Harry grow up and Harry marry an American, but really, people, can’t you find something better to do? I ask this as I dig around and look for mnemonic devices to keep all the Charleses straight - the first one lost his head, the second was restored to the crown when the country got tired of the Puritans the way America got tired of Prohibition. And the Williamses and the Georges. How can I sneer when I wake up in the morning dashing for my computer to remind myself who William of Orange was, or William of William and Mary? It’s like an addiction, this need to dismiss and to know more simultaneously.

Maybe it comes from the time I was at the house of Pardon Tillinghast, the professor of intellectual history at Middlebury who used to play games at the dinner table with his two nerdy daughters. One of them would suddenly shout out “George the Fourth” and they’d go around the table naming all the monarchs in reverse order. I felt so out of place at Middlebury because it was filled with rich kids with private school educations and I came from a two factory employee household. Here I am nearing eighty and I’m still marked with a lifelong sense of class inferiority, now playing itself out in a whole new way as I binge watch Netflix and Amazon Prime.

I was spared this much mental masturbation while I was working. Had too much else to occupy my mind. But here we are now with all this time on our hands and I’ve got no defense against these curious obsessions.

I’m being too hard on myself. They are not obsessions. They are interests. And I balance them with lots of music videos, Alexander Malofeev playing Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos with Sandro Nebieridze, for example, which I watch at least once a month, often more frequently, again and again, and videos on Face Book of little doggies being rescued and fixed up by a vet and groomed and given forever homes.

Not obsessions at all. All good stuff. All wonderful ways of sitting out the Black Plague.

photo credit: two main characters in Outlander