pollywiltse

[pollywiltse]

I've gone down a temporary Musk and Amber/A. E. W. Mason rabbit hole which has gotten me (re)reading things like Konigsmark and Clementina on the one hand (good) and Cry to Heaven on the other (very very bad and I'm really tired of people whitewashing horrible historical child abuse and misogyny just because someone put rainbow stickers on it).

But anyway this is absolutely Frances Scoble. (Though given what she's like, I should probably apologize to Mary de Cardonnel for using her picture as my mental image for the worst character in the book.) Now if only I could find a painting that was absolutely Julian. (Actually my private joke is that Julian looks like a much younger Samuel Roukin, because once you get past the crazy eyes and the blood and the terrible first season wig, he actually has a very beautiful turn-of-the-century pre-Raphaelite-influenced-angel face. I continue to be surprised that he doesn't get cast as Lucifer semi-regularly. But I can't really see him as Julian. Though there's also a joke about Simcoe's voice being very appropriate somewhere in there...)

(More relatedly to André, I found a couple books in my dad's house about the relationships between Loyalists and Patriots in Revolutionary War New York, one of which looks like it focuses on the DeLanceys, which he let me take back with me because he had forgotten he owned them. (Unsurprising, frankly.) Though tbh I was hoping to find Hall's Tallmadge bio hidden in a corner somewhere, because there are literally like 20000 books in that house, but I was disappointed.)

[pollywiltse]

Ghost stories are traditional for Christmas, so partly-written ghost stories are appropriate for not-yet-Christmas, right?

Later she thought he had been there since Philadelphia, at least, though she hadn’t realized it. He would have been a timid ghost then, too newly dead to realize that the proprieties of the living no longer applied, and she had mostly kept to her bed, and he had been so much in her mind that if, when she left her room, she had felt him nearby, she would have thought it was her own madness and not his spirit. She thought of him more in those days than she thought of her husband, alive and in New York. They said that he had died bravely, that he had gone to his death with as little fear as he would have gone to a ball, but if she closed her eyes she saw him with the same look as her little son, when he thought they had left him alone in the dark.

The distance between them now was greater than it had ever been before, but now there was a chain that bound them stronger than their boy-and-girl love affair, and, she was afraid, stronger than the gold band that bound her to her husband.

She hadn’t known it was him in New York, in the fall, when every room seemed to shrink and become a prison cell and every footstep was a guard’s and her mind sketched a gallows against the bright blue October sky. Even when someone said - it had been a year since he died - and saw her and fell silent, she hadn’t known.

It was in London when she knew it was him.

”Peggy, look!” She was in her bed alone, and the room was empty. She was in her bed, but she was awake and not dreaming and not mad, and she heard his voice in her ear the way she'd heard it in Philadelphia, not so many years ago, bringing her home from a ball in the small hours - “Peggy, look!” - up at the sky, clear and frozen after a snowfall, the stars bright enough to make shadows on the ground - and his hand was in hers again, tugging, and she followed him to the window, and it was cold bright early morning that made everything clean and the sky was pink and gold and luminous gray and he was there beside her. She couldn’t see him, but she could feel his hand, and she could feel his mind against hers. He was glad and relieved and it was all so beautiful, and she couldn’t be scared until later, that she could hold the hand of a man she couldn’t see, who had been dead for two years.

[pollywiltse]

I realized that the reason the scenes with Simcoe being sick and wounded make my skin crawl is because they accidentally gave him a mullet.

[pollywiltse]

Wait, has archive.org finally stopped smoldering? My login through Google button is back.

[pollywiltse]

There were a lot of other things I was going to say and then I got to the end and WTF? That wasn't an ending. You only get away with that abrupt an ending if you're not making people pay for the sequel.

Haha what someone wrote a novel where John's sister Mary somehow ends up in America and becomes Agent 355? I might have to take a Benadryl and get over my allergies to Agent 355 and encouraging bad self-published writers and read this. (Somewhere, Andre: "Oh, you have an allergy to encouraging bad self-published writers? Must have developed after you went and bought Colors of the Times and The King's Fuzileers.")

And Tallmadge is a character and I think it's a romance so I hope this is Tallmadge/Andre's sister I will die. I love crack!pairings.

I'm disappointed it's not Louisa, though. She's my favorite of his sisters because in the miniature in the Ronald bio, she has a very elaborate hairstyle and an expression like she has one nerve left and you're getting on it. Her resting bitch face isn't quite Grodnertal doll level, but it's getting up there. (It's not the demon-possessed Victorian little girl dolls you actually have to worry about stabbing you in your sleep. It's the early 19th century Grodnertals who aren't possessed by anything, they're just sick of your bullshit.)

I think Louisa in the miniature might knee Tallmadge in the Ralph Earl painting in the balls though, so I don't think they'd work out.

There's also a miniature of Mary in the Ronald bio, but it's the worst of the family and she just looks like a dark blob on top of a light blob with two little dark blobs in the middle. Ann(e), who is the third sister, also has a resting bitch face that's not quite as epic as Louisa's.

One of the things I hate about the Ronald bio is that he doesn't talk about what happened to any of John's siblings afterwards. Like I know he was in contact with the family because that's how he got pictures of the miniatures. He could have done more with the rest of John's family.

[pollywiltse]

Actually on second thought the Ralph Earl painting of Mary Floyd Tallmadge also looks like she'd be perfectly willing to knee her husband in the balls if required, so maybe Louisa André/Benjamin Tallmadge would have worked out.

(Mary: "The reason he looks so pleased with himself in his portrait is because he got me pregnant eight times. The reason I have resting bitch face in my portrait is because he got me pregnant eight fucking times."

Ok, to be fair, I think they were at number three when the Ralph Earl portraits were taken and they probably had a very happy marriage, actually.)

Anyway, I remembered I had a digital credit for letting Amazon deliver my tiny chunk of beeswax in three days instead of overnight, so I bought the book.

It is 100% Benjamin Tallmadge/OFC Turn fanfic, and if you want Tallmadge/OFC you can probably get something just as good on AO3 without paying for it, maybe even with André and Simcoe cameos.

I wasn't sure at first, because she's not super great at describing people's looks and for some reason André was blonde, which JJ Feild is not, and she didn't mention Simcoe having a weird high-pitched voice. I briefly thought I was wrong about her ending up with Tallmadge and it was going to be Mary André/Simcoe, but.

And then Mary ended up with the Continental Army for....reasons, and Caleb and his anachronistic beard showed up. Definitely Turn fanfic. Especially when Caleb and Ben start talking about their childhood friend Anna. (I mean, maybe that beard was real, and it was perfect for the character, but the vast majority of 18th century men were clean-shaven so it's anachronistic until proven otherwise. Ok, technically they only shaved every couple days so they were slightly stubbly but the goal was clean-shaven.)

And then they're like, "What's your name?" and Mary's like, "Mary - uh - Floyd. Yeah, that's it, Mary Floyd." And I loled.

And then she comes back to Philadelphia and Simcoe reveals his true socially awkward excessively stabby Turn-self. It was a bit weird having André and/or Mary be upset about Simcoe bayoneting American soldiers in their sleep. Like, Paoli? Baylor?

Ok, to be fair, the level of massacre at Paoli seems to have been significantly exaggerated. Also Charles Grey seems to have gone AWOL. I like to think he eloped with Peggy Chew, since she's not around either. As usual. André's one true love is Peggy Shippen, also as usual.

William is also inexplicably back in England, though I do like the idea that André thought he was shipping his brother out to America and ended up with a sister instead. ("Yes, but I bought him the commission.") Though I think she's supposed to have come out earlier than William did, but I'm not sure if that makes sense logistically. Mary is also way too young. Find-a-grave has her born in 1752, which makes her the oldest of his sisters and also absolutely not "less than twenty" or "almost twenty" or whatever in 1777. She may have ended up the real Mary Floyd's birth year? (Though Ann André's find-a-grave has her born in 1754, which conflicts with Ronald claiming she was baptized in 1753, but I might believe the gravestones more than Ronald. Also how come John seems to be the only kid without a middle name? Mary Hannah, Ann Marguerite, Louisa Catherine, William Lewis, John Two Names? What, Are We Made Of Money?. Actually he might have a middle name but no one talks about it. I though one of the modern biographers actually quoted his baptismal record, and it was just "Jean André", but I checked and they don't.)

Also, weirdly, Peggy Shippen is at the Meschianza and neither she nor André are participating in the tournament. The author might think it was like a Renn Faire, I'm not sure. Actually I'm not sure Mary wouldn't be participating in the Meschianza if she was there. She does steal André's Wharton-house-decorating gig. André gets too much credit for the whole thing as usual. He and Montresor might be the only two managers? So I assume there was this Highlander there-can-only-be-one thing going on in the background and André has already killed the other three/four in single combat. (Actually that might explain why the names of the managers don't quite match up in the two contemporary accounts - three are the same but the fourth is different. Unless I'm misremembering.)

Mary's case of "not like the other girls" is frankly tedious. Please stop whining about how all the other rich girls only talk about frivolous boring things and author please stop making all the other upper class women timid and narrow-minded and being shocked at Mary going out and asking soldiers what's going on. Having Peggy Shippen be the only nice rich girl is a new one. (Ok, actually it's a very old one; it's a (probably unintentional) throwback to 19th century André fanfic, where Peggy is the female mc's sweet and innocent bff, though in those books André and Peggy aren't in love with each other.)

Also writers stop doing the thing where you get like one cool girl other than the mc if that and then every other woman is a bitch and most of her friends are guys. And I say this as someone most of whose friends are guys, but that's because I work in a majority male field, not because women suck. And actually it's become more evenly split since I moved to a less male office. (The camp followers are maybe marginally better portrayed than the upper class women, in that they're not completely useless, but they're still all total bitches who don't help her at all even though she shows up with nothing except a horrible leg wound and then think she's a whore when Tallmadge buys some frying pans for her, except for one woman who's nice. Stop. Doing. This. Having your mc and maybe her one friend be Strong Female Characters isn't feminist if you make the rest of the women suck, especially when you can somehow manage to have multiple sympathetic male characters who all have different personalities.)

Mary's entire personality is "I don't want to be a mere ornament for men", which you'd think would make her sympathetic except it's her entire personality, so it's annoying. Also, while André the anachronistic feminist would make me throw things and I'm sure he actually did going around feeling like men should protect women from the more sordid parts of life, he's a little too one-note protective older brother who doesn't take his sister seriously. Which is bad from a technical standpoint, but I suspect it's not accurate for André specifically either, because the women his name has been linked with were not stupid or submissive women when we know anything about their personalities, and I suspect the women of his family weren't either. (My crackpot theory based entirely on that one line from Edgeworth's memoir is that André's major non-financial dating problem was that he kept being attracted to girls who were too smart for him.)

It's not clear why she goes around randomly spying on the British Army for her own personal amusement, because that's a really weird hobby, but the author completely ignores what that might say about her, and it seems to exist entirely so that it can come in handy when she meets Tallmadge. It's also weird that Tallmadge finds out that she has a ton of papers with very detailed information about the British Army and immediately assumes she must be a British spy come to find out information about the Americans. Why would a British spy be carrying information about the British Army?

Ok, I actually can think of some reasons, but the most obvious conclusion is still that she's not a British spy. This is just Tallmadge holding the Idiot Ball so he and Mary can have extra conflict before they realize they're in love with each other. At least it's not as contrived and stupid as the André/Peggy conflict in Turn?

Though Tallmadge's weird anti-British prejudice is contrived and stupid because it seems like the officer classes of both sides went around being "more in sorrow than in anger" about their opponents (ok, the British also went around being "lol peasants"), and hatred tended to be directed toward specific British officers that had a specific reputation for brutality, not random British girls who showed up with massive leg wounds. Also Tallmadge was a gentleman. He's not going to be jerk to a lady, or even probably a mere woman. Though I realize I'm talking about the real Tallmadge and not Turn!madge.

It's also weird - and someone on Goodreads pointed this out too, but then they also complained that she didn't have PTSD which annoyed me because most people who experience trauma don't develop literal PTSD - how she just randomly decides to spy for the Americans for basically no reason, and she's not supposed to be a bored sociopath who decided to betray her brother for the lulz. This book would be a lot more interesting - and possibly make a lot more sense - if she was. Like I realize she gets almost raped by deserters from the British Army, but they were deserters. That makes it especially easy to be all #notallBritishsoldiers, plus her brother and most of the men she knows are in the British Army, plus all her friends are Loyalists. Plus it's not like deserters from the American side would be nicer. Why's she totally ok with the idea of potentially getting her brother and most of the men in her social circle killed? Why does she seem more worried about the Americans even when she's known them for only a month, the women are jerks, and Tallmadge flips out at her at the least provocation? Because a couple of deserters attack her? Oh yeah, and she walks in on her brother having a drunken hooker party and one of the guys thinks she's a prostitute, and then Simcoe promptly descends on him like the fist of angry God? And then André goes "bUt mEn hAvE nEeDs", which is terminally annoying but it's more likely to drive you to knee the speaker in the balls than to go over to the enemy which also thinks mEn hAvE nEeDs. Like these do not seem adequate reasons to betray your country, especially when it's going to put the lives of people you know at risk. At least Benedict Arnold wanted a shitton of money.

(Also re: André's drunken hooker parties, given that his idea of a fun party IRL seemed to involve him reading satirical essays about reincarnation, I have questions about accurate Turn's portrayal of his extracurricular activities are, exactly. "God I'm so drunk-*vomits in the fireplace* "-wanna hear some poetry?")

TBC unless I get distracted.

Haha what someone wrote a novel where John's sister Mary somehow ends up in America and becomes Agent 355? I might have to take a Benadryl and get over my allergies to Agent 355 and encouraging bad self-published writers and read this. (Somewhere, Andre: "Oh, you have an allergy to encouraging bad self-published writers? Must have developed after you went and bought Colors of the Times and The King's Fuzileers.")

And Tallmadge is a character and I think it's a romance so I hope this is Tallmadge/Andre's sister I will die. I love crack!pairings.

I'm disappointed it's not Louisa, though. She's my favorite of his sisters because in the miniature in the Ronald bio, she has a very elaborate hairstyle and an expression like she has one nerve left and you're getting on it. Her resting bitch face isn't quite Grodnertal doll level, but it's getting up there. (It's not the demon-possessed Victorian little girl dolls you actually have to worry about stabbing you in your sleep. It's the early 19th century Grodnertals who aren't possessed by anything, they're just sick of your bullshit.)

I think Louisa in the miniature might knee Tallmadge in the Ralph Earl painting in the balls though, so I don't think they'd work out.

There's also a miniature of Mary in the Ronald bio, but it's the worst of the family and she just looks like a dark blob on top of a light blob with two little dark blobs in the middle. Ann(e), who is the third sister, also has a resting bitch face that's not quite as epic as Louisa's.

One of the things I hate about the Ronald bio is that he doesn't talk about what happened to any of John's siblings afterwards. Like I know he was in contact with the family because that's how he got pictures of the miniatures. He could have done more with the rest of John's family.

[pollywiltse]

Haha what someone wrote a novel where John's sister Mary somehow ends up in America and becomes Agent 355? I might have to take a Benadryl and get over my allergies to Agent 355 and encouraging bad self-published writers and read this. (Somewhere, Andre: "Oh, you have an allergy to encouraging bad self-published writers? Must have developed after you went and bought Colors of the Times and The King's Fuzileers.")

And Tallmadge is a character and I think it's a romance so I hope this is Tallmadge/Andre's sister I will die. I love crack!pairings.

I'm disappointed it's not Louisa, though. She's my favorite of his sisters because in the miniature in the Ronald bio, she has a very elaborate hairstyle and an expression like she has one nerve left and you're getting on it. Her resting bitch face isn't quite Grodnertal doll level, but it's getting up there. (It's not the demon-possessed Victorian little girl dolls you actually have to worry about stabbing you in your sleep. It's the early 19th century Grodnertals who aren't possessed by anything, they're just sick of your bullshit.)

I think Louisa in the miniature might knee Tallmadge in the Ralph Earl painting in the balls though, so I don't think they'd work out.

There's also a miniature of Mary in the Ronald bio, but it's the worst of the family and she just looks like a dark blob on top of a light blob with two little dark blobs in the middle. Ann(e), who is the third sister, also has a resting bitch face that's not quite as epic as Louisa's.

One of the things I hate about the Ronald bio is that he doesn't talk about what happened to any of John's siblings afterwards. Like I know he was in contact with the family because that's how he got pictures of the miniatures. He could have done more with the rest of John's family.

[pollywiltse]

It's always funny when people write André as acting like he thinks he's hot shit because from what people said about the real guy, one of the things that everyone found so charming about him was that he didn't act like he thought he was better than everyone else.

I was flipping through Finishing Becca again. I really desperately want to know where that characterization came from.

Though speaking of batshit characterizations I need to find that girl on Goodreads again who thought André was a deeply religious Christian and also possibly gay* (he is in her novel but idk if she believes that or just thinks it's hot) and see if she's read any of André's actual biographies yet because boy is she in for a surprise when she finds out there's no evidence for André being either gay or religious. They were all on her to-read list last time I checked. Which didn't stop her from including him in her novel.

She posted a part of her in-progress novel where André finds the main character (who might also be a slash fic character?) making paper crosses and the mc is embarrassed and André's like, "No, it's ok, my one true love is actually Jesus like my mother taught me and I'm just in denial about it and going to all these wild parties to repress my deep love for Jesus" and then he picks up one of the crosses and starts making out with it. It was definitely a take.

Also for someone whose Protestant ancestors were driven out of their home by Catholics, her version of André is really chill around Catholics. Like regardless of whether he was a religious Huguenot (she thinks) or a borderline Deist Anglican (I think), I'm pretty sure he'd hate Catholics.

*Because she's clearly a repressed slash writer and also I'm pretty sure she picked it up from Donna Thorland's awful awful romance novel where André's a sociopathic spy master in Philadelphia and his one redeeming characteristic is his true love for Caleb Cope the 17-year-old youngest son of the Cope family, which is fascinating because their oldest son, John, was 12 when André was in Lancaster, so having their youngest son be several years older than their oldest son would take some doing, and also Peggy Shippen is a dumb bitch who can't tell André can't stand her and who everyone hates even the people who were historically enchanted by her and there's this whole thing where she somehow manages to have André's baby but pass it off as Arnold's even though she didn't marry Arnold until nearly a year after the British army left Philadelphia and she couldn't just wander around being pregnant and unmarried that whole time (also there's this whole thing where André inexplicably makes birth control the sheltered 17-year-old girl's problem even though he claims he didn't want to get her pregnant) and way too many people are convinced this is historically accurate because Donna Thorland has a background in history but frankly after reading this book I'm now worried about what exactly was going on in the part of the Peabody Essex Museum up in Salem where she worked because this book is not winning any prizes for historical accuracy, unless maybe it's a literary equivalent of the Razzies. Also I kind of think Thorland is one of the people who thinks straight men are masterful and dominant and aggressive and their relationships with their one true loves are really kind of antagonistic, and that's why André ended up being gay, because a man who is nice to women is inherently sus. This is of course very depressing because my ideal man isn't Petruchio and of course the people who think like this don't believe in lesbians either. I'm not sure any of the women in that Thorland novel even liked each other platonically, let alone romantically. But to be fair I didn't read most of the book, because it also wasn't that interesting. I was just there to see if she had, in fact, made André Chester the Molester who gets handsy with the 12-year-olds. (I still think she meant Caleb Cope to be John Cope, she just slacked on the research. Caleb was John Cope's father and none of the other kids in the family were named Caleb. The youngest at the time André was in Lancaster was Jasper, who was like a year, so presumably not having a torrid affair with André. This is A Record of the Cope Family by Gilbert Cope, p 32 of whatever edition Google has scanned.) This version might be worse, honestly, because it's sexist but with plausible deniability.

I think Goodreads Jesus girl might have assumed he was from a deeply religious family because the Huguenots were religious refugees, but just because you're from a religious disapora doesn't mean you're super religious and in fact he seems to have been the only child to have been baptized in a Huguenot church and from his oldest sister's birth they were going to Anglican churches because they seemed to care more about social climbing than Jesus, and I'm not even sure how religious the average Huguenot refugee was. There was also this story that a copy of "The Hiding Place" in his handwriting was found in his coat pocket after his execution, but the source seems to be Roger Lamb repeating a story that he heard from someone else who he just says is a "respectable person, a native of America" and no idea how they knew, especially since they're incorrectly crediting André as the writer and even Sargent the Victorian thinks it's nonsense. The actual evidence for André's religious belief suggest that he didn't have very much, though I sort of assume he vaguely believed in Christian mythology on the grounds that you might have had to care a lot more than I think he did about religion to believe in something else if you were from a Christian background living in 18th century England.

[pollywiltse]

Um, you guys all know that "intimate" and "intercourse" in the 18th (and 19th) century didn't have sexual connotations, right? Because I was assuming everyone likes the "intimate intercourse" quote because "lol it sounds like they were hooking up even though we know that's not what it actually means but it's still funny because we all like Tallmadge/André", but now I'm suddenly less sure.

I've just read a blog post by an actual published writer who thinks that if two guys are fighting about who owes who how much money and one of them says, "Pay for your servants? I'm not going to pay for your servants! Why don't you ask me to pay for your horse's hay and your friends' hookers while you're at it?" this is a sign that he's jealous about the other guy sleeping with women because they're secretly - or maybe not so secretly? - into each other, so now I'm doubting everyone's reading comprehension.

[pollywiltse]

I think I was going to write a post about this but never got around to it, and you'd think I'd remember because I went and looked through my old posts but it was a couple days ago and now I've forgotten.

Anyway.

What is supposed to be a lock of hair that André gave Peggy Shippen is in a museum in England called The Keep Military Museum (blog post; scroll down for pic), which is about the history of the Dorsetshire Regiment which is partly descended from the 54th Regiment of Foot. I'm actually not sure if they were given the lock of hair because André was in the 54th or because the descendant of Peggy Shippen's step-grandson who donated it had coincidentally served in the Dorsetshire Regiment.

Text says (because it's annoyingly small on my computer): Lock of Major André's hair

Given by him, an unsuccessful suitor, in 1778 to Margaret Shippen who married Benedict Arnold in 1779. Her daughter married Colonel Pownoll Phipps, whose grandson by another wife, Lt. Col. P. R. Phipps, late Dorset Regt[,?] presented the lock 1929.

I have some questions about it. The obvious issue it presents is that it's blond, which John André was not. (Yale also has a lock of André's hair, which is dark, though it was, amusingly(?), taken from what was left of his body when it was dug up and shipped back to Westminster Abbey in 1822 and you can see what looks like clumps of dirt, so to be fair who knows how the color might have changed from years of being buried, but it corresponds better to the paintings and descriptions of him from his lifetime. Also his immediate family were all dark.)

So the options are that it faded, it's not his, or he actually did have a little dumbfuck blond braid like Turn gave him. I prefer to dismiss the last option out of hand, because it's stupid.

So, it not being his - Peggy's daughter Sophia Matilda was the second wife of Pownoll Phipps, and they had five children. After she died in 1828, Phipps married in 1834 a woman named Anna Smith. Their oldest child was Pownoll William, who's the author of The Life of Colonel Pownoll Phipps, which is my source for this information, assuming I'm reading the family trees at the back correctly. This is also the source for Van Doren claiming that "one of her grandsons" (not quite) wrote "Poor André was in love with her, but she refused him for Arnold [actually she met Arnold months after André left, so that's probably not quite how it went down], keeping a lock of hair, which we still have." (198 in Van Doren, 88 in Phipps), which Ronald then quotes via Van Doren and repeats his mistake of referring to Pownoll William Phipps as Peggy's grandson because of course he does (192).

Pownoll William's youngest child was Pownoll Ramsay, who was a captain in the Dorset Regiment at the time the book was published in 1894, but seems to have been promoted by the time he retired, since this is presumably the Lt. Col. P. R. Phipps who donated the lock of hair. The branch of the family which is our source for the lock of hair never actually knew Peggy's daughter (though they did know her kids, though her kids were between 14 and 7 when she died), so there's potentially a gap in how this tradition - and the lock of hair - got passed down.

(Since Sophia Matilda had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood, two of whom had multiple children, and one of whom was alive in 1894, I'm not sure why the lock of hair ended up with a different wife's descendants, other than maybe Pownoll William was the one who cared about family history.)

As for it being faded, there's a lot of hair jewelry that's that old or almost that old that doesn't seem to have faded anywhere near that badly, but of course that depends on how it's stored and I think hair used in a lot of hair jewelry had to be treated in some way so it would stay put, which also might affect fading. It looks maybe slightly darker around the tie holding it together, but that could just be shadow, and I've only seen pictures.

On the other hand, if it's not his, why would they have assumed it was? If they just had a random unlabeled lock of hair floating around, even if they knew it came from Peggy, why was André the first person that popped into their minds? Regardless of color, since Peggy was blonde (and so were at least some of her family members) and Arnold was dark. I'm also not sure first of all that most people in England thought that much about André after like the 1820s and second that the story about André and Peggy having a love affair was all that common in the 19th/early 20th centuries. Just because the American professional fanfic I've read about him from the 19th/early 20th century tends not to have them in love with each other, and Americans cared more about him than the British did since the Victorian era. Books from the 40s do, and presumably you were starting to see it in the 30s because Van Doren talks about it like it's a thing in 1941, but the one André fanfic I have from the 30s - The Painted Minx - doesn't have him in love with her. He's doing the eternally faithful to Honora thing in that one. And actually there's a movie from the 50s which I haven't watched called The Scarlet Coat where both André and not!Tallmadge are both in love with the same (fictional) woman and Peggy's not even a character, so André/Peggy Shippen may not have been the assumed default until the late 20th century.

Which is one reason I tend to give a little more credit to the Phipps' family's story about André being in love with her and giving her a lock of hair - I don't think they were repeating a story that was popular at the time, so I think they had to have gotten it from an internal family tradition. Also I feel like the questions raised by it not being his are less answerable than the questions raised by it being his. (Ok, also and I want it to be.)

[pollywiltse]

They're doing a gingerbread house decorating party on the 12th, and I assume Andre's ghostly gingerbread house is going to be epic.

So I follow the Old '76 House on other social media (because that's what Mabie's Tavern is now called), and evidently they occasionally have paint and sip nights, and the mental image of Andre's ghost hanging out in the back with a glass of wine and an easel, amusing himself by following along with the teacher is what's going to keep me warm these cold, overly air-conditioned summer nights.

[pollywiltse]

An actual reenactor has told me that most people were wearing their own hair at this point (unless you were old or bald) and they didn't wear wigs over long hair, so no, André should not be wearing a wig.

So there are several pieces of media that have André wearing a wig some of the time, and I'm really curious whether men in the 1770s who wore their hair long ever did wear wigs, because that actually seems like more of a pain in the ass than just having your servant do your actual hair. Like with women's really high hairstyles, sure, you could shove, like, mid-back or waist length hair up under one of those wigs easily, or maybe put it in a bun/curls in the back. (Though actually I think a lot of those ridiculous formal hairstyles were actually your real hair over padding, possibly combined with extra hair pieces if you needed it, not wigs.)

And obviously if you had your head shaved, like a lot of men, it's pretty easy to put a wig on that. But men's wigs weren't actually that high, so you don't really have all that much room to shove long hair under it without looking weird and packing it flat isn't going to be all that quick even if it's possible (also people who may or may not know what they're talking about on the internet are claiming 18th century wigs couldn't go on over long hair because they wouldn't stay on unless they fit perfectly).

The other thing with André specifically is that his hair was so gorgeous that even one of the eyewitness accounts at his execution mentions it. (Seriously, someone was talking about how he's up on the wagon and he takes his hat off, "revealing a long and beautiful head of hair", like, "I know the man's about to die in five minutes, but can we talk about what conditioner he uses?" I don't think this is Thacher, I think it's someone else, but I could be wrong.) Why would he put a wig on it?

[pollywiltse]

The absolutely crazy-making thing about the Ronald bio is that he constantly says that his focus is exactly what I want in an André bio - his background, his family, the world he lived in, because that gives you a sense of who he was as a person, and one of the frustrating things about the other André bios is that they tend to not give you the sense of someone who lived surrounded and influenced by other people, which is bad in any biography because everyone is, even misanthropic hermit cranks, but it's especially absurd when we're talking about John André, the most social human being in the entire Western Hemisphere.

And then you see the nonsense Ronald actually goes around peddling. Fffffffuuuuuuuccckkkk.

[pollywiltse]

You know, when I said it was good to have an André biography from a British perspective, I meant because the author would have access to sources that it's harder for Americans to get to and because they would be less focused on the Revolution, and especially the Arnold plot, which is honestly less than a third of his life and hopefully more focused on his time before he came to America, about which less is known. I didn't mean "because the Brit would contort him into a Young Hero that bears minimal resemblance to the real John André and then claim his version like that because it was unaffected by American biases (and intellectual integrity, evidently)".

It's especially obnoxious because Flexner and Hatch, despite their issues (Flexner especially needed to chill. out) really did seem to be trying to write fair and intellectually honest biographies about André that weren't solely focused on the Arnold plot. And Flexner's book is actually a joint bio of the two of them, so he could be excused for not caring much about André outside of his time in America. But actually if you look in JSTOR at reviews of The Traitor and the Spy from when it was first published, while the reviewers don't seem terribly impressed about the Arnold sections (they don't think they're bad, just not anything new), they do talk about how Flexner found a significant amount of info about André's early life, including correcting the year of his birth. (I would say you can see this yourself from reading the Sargent and Tillotson biographies, but the Tillotson bio is so pointless I actually can't remember what it was like.)

Also the dude interviewing him is living down to my preconceptions about how little every historian who didn't specifically study André can be trusted when they talk about him.

Starting to listen to this podcast and already wanting to put my head through drywall. Good lord, Ronald, he was a desk jockey. He was an admirable, competent, intelligent person who was also a desk jockey because he was good at it and the army needs people who do paperwork too. (Also I have a feeling that he hated working in the family business because he didn't want to be a merchant, not because he hated paperwork.) He doesn't have to be a super spy to be "worthy of respect". (Honestly, managing to make friends with Henry "Paranoid and Hates Everyone" Clinton is probably a feat more worthy of respect than anything he could have done in battle.)

Also, the fact that he royally screwed up when it came to meeting Arnold doesn't mean that he wasn't generally intelligent and competent. (He evidently did have enough of a reputation for intelligence and good judgement that on the rare occasions he did do something silly, there are contemporary quotes from people going, "......Did he wake up and take stupid pills this morning?") He was doing something he had no training in and evidently not much natural aptitude. He's not required to be magically good at everything or be considered forevermore a pathetic loser. Especially because I suspect most people are not naturally good at what he was being asked to do.

I am so tired of people going "Well this person wouldn't be cool if they were like what they actually were like, so I'm going to make them completely different", especially since a lot of times what that person was actually like is perfectly worth reading about.

Also it's irritating that when he talks about "Monody for Major André" at the beginning he leaves out that Anna and John were really close friends for at least part of John's life (I suspect he did continue to write to her while he was in America), and she wasn't coming in from nowhere to make it all about her. (Also nice sexism there, especially since I don't think it was just her and her womanly lack of knowledge about war going "hdu hang him Washington you barbarian" - see also the inaccurate report of André's last words in whatever English paper it was that claimed he said his execution reflected badly on Washington. André Would Never, but a lot of people on the British side thought it.)

[pollywiltse]

Starting to listen to this podcast and already wanting to put my head through drywall. Good lord, Ronald, he was a desk jockey. He was an admirable, competent, intelligent person who was also a desk jockey because he was good at it and the army needs people who do paperwork too. (Also I have a feeling that he hated working in the family business because he didn't want to be a merchant, not because he hated paperwork.) He doesn't have to be a super spy to be "worthy of respect". (Honestly, managing to make friends with Henry "Paranoid and Hates Everyone" Clinton is probably a feat more worthy of respect than anything he could have done in battle.)

Also, the fact that he royally screwed up when it came to meeting Arnold doesn't mean that he wasn't generally intelligent and competent. (He evidently did have enough of a reputation for intelligence and good judgement that on the rare occasions he did do something silly, there are contemporary quotes from people going, "......Did he wake up and take stupid pills this morning?") He was doing something he had no training in and evidently not much natural aptitude. He's not required to be magically good at everything or be considered forevermore a pathetic loser. Especially because I suspect most people are not naturally good at what he was being asked to do.

I am so tired of people going "Well this person wouldn't be cool if they were like what they actually were like, so I'm going to make them completely different", especially since a lot of times what that person was actually like is perfectly worth reading about.

Also it's irritating that when he talks about "Monody for Major André" at the beginning he leaves out that Anna and John were really close friends for at least part of John's life (I suspect he did continue to write to her while he was in America), and she wasn't coming in from nowhere to make it all about her. (Also nice sexism there, especially since I don't think it was just her and her womanly lack of knowledge about war going "hdu hang him Washington you barbarian" - see also the inaccurate report of André's last words in whatever English paper it was that claimed he said his execution reflected badly on Washington. André Would Never, but a lot of people on the British side thought it.)

[pollywiltse]

I just had this epiphany which I hope to God I'm wrong about. Please please please tell me that D. A. B. Ronald did not logic out that André and Anna Seward must have met at a Shakespeare masquerade ball where John went as Falstaff from The Merry Wives of Windsor and Anna went as Julia from Two Gentlemen of Verona because of the bit in one letter where John tells Anna that he's worried that what he's just written will remind her of Falstaff's letters to Mistress Ford and Mistress Page and the fact that he calls her "Julia" in all of his letters respectively.

Because absolutely nothing about that paragraph had sources, and Ronald claims that those parts of André's letters are references to the supposed masquerade ball, even though I know that Falstaff bit is definitely not, because that letter is readily available online and I've read it, and also I am at least that familiar with The Merry Wives of Windsor to understand his actual reference. (And you can be too, if you spend five minutes reading the Wikipedia summary. But also people in my high school Shakespeare class did the scene where the title characters are like "lol Falstaff sent us the exact same love letter. Let us troll him elaborately".) (Also I swear to God I read somewhere that "Julia" was not an André-specific nickname for her and it was from a Rousseau novel, but I can't for the life of me remember where, so it may also have been from a batshit insane source.)

As hilarious as the mental image of a delicate nineteen-year-old dressed up as Falstaff of all people is.

The Daigler book sucked, incidentally.

[pollywiltse]

Oh lordy, based on the Google books preview of the Daigler book and checking what I think is the bit in Randall he's claiming as the source (p391-392), the "ample documentation to show that André and Peggy were socially close and probably friends but without any apparent romantic or physical interplay[30]" (Daigler, p 152-153) is Randall saying that André wasn't serious about any of the girls in Philadelphia (uncited) and he liked spending time with Peggy Shippen (uncited), "But when Peggy stepped out for the evening, it was more often on the arm of Royal Navy Captain Hammond, who later said, "We were all in love with her" .[35]

The source for note 35 is "Quoted in Flexner, Traitor and the Spy, 203." The pertinent sentence on page 203 is "Lord Rawdon considered her the handsomest woman he had seen in America, and Captain A. S. Hammond of the Roebuck remembered, "We were all in love with her"." This is the only citation for any part of that section. (The party on the Roebuck immediately following and also uncited is Flexner page 204 though.) There is no source for Peggy usually going out with Hammond, and I checked the indexes of Flexner and Hatch for him just to make sure it wasn't in there but uncited by Randall. It's not, and I'm not doing any more of Randall's homework for him because I also don't think there's any evidence about the claims he's making about André's or Peggy's feelings one way or the other (depending on how seriously you think the last Peggy Chew poem was meant).

(Also let me point out that Randall may be under the impression the only reason a man and a woman don't date is because the man isn't interested, but if Peggy was regularly going out with Hammond, that doesn't necessarily mean André wasn't into her. He may be nearly a real life Gary Stu, but that didn't stop him from falling in love with a girl who didn't reciprocate before. .......Who was also a beautiful and intelligent blonde 17-year-old who then went on to marry an older widower with several children. Type?

I'm not actually suggesting André went around suffering from deep unrequited Peggy Shippen-love since I don't really think he did. I'm just pointing out that the evidence Randall is citing doesn't actually show what he's claiming. Especially because he's not citing any evidence.)

But anyway, this is in no way, shape, or form "ample documentation" proving anything about André and Peggy Shippen's relationship and if this is what Daigler thinks counts as "ample documentation", I suddenly understand why everyone thought there were WMDs in Iraq.

Ok, fine, I think it's pretty clear the first part - they "were socially close and probably friends" - has supporting evidence (though he really could have just said friends). It's the second bit that's the problem, and also based on the comment on JAR I remember seeing (but I can't find again so maybe I'm insane), he was claiming there was ample documentation for that. Which there is not.