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Afterword

Jack Alden Clarke, Huguenot Warrior: The Life and Times of Henri de Rohan, 1579-1638 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966) is adequate as a biography, but certainly not brilliant. It has almost nothing to say on Rohan’s private life—it doesn’t even mention that Rohan had a daughter Marguerite, much less that she was his sole heiress. Pierre and Solange Deyon, Henri de Rohan: Huguenot de plume et d’épée, 1579-1638 (Perrin, 2000) contains a more up-to-date bibliography than Clarke’s work.

In some ways, the short sketch published by Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve in 1904 is more illuminating than Clarke, if a bit hagiographical and still less than forthcoming about Rohan’s marriage (C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the Seventeenth Century, Historic and Literary, New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1904). Auguste Laugel, Henry de Rohan, published in 1889, as customary with nineteenth-century biographical works, is stuffed with facts, but the author was a popularizer and, as he stated in the subtitle, only interested in “son rôle politique et militaire.”

More useful for social history is Jonathan Dewald’s online paper, “Rohan’s World: A Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century France,” which provides the reader with a rapid introduction to Rohan’s political ambitions, religious views, associates, reading habits, and hobbies. There is further information about the family’s economic status and internal relationships in Dewald’s Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550-1715 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

In regard to the “pen” rather than the “sword” aspect of Rohan’s career, several of his works on then-current events, political theory, and military tactics have been translated into English; many of them, in both French and in English translation, are now readily available either as e-books or by way of print-on-demand versions. Aficionados of seventeenth century warfare may enjoy The Duke of Rohan’s Manual: Or, a Guide for All Degrees of Officers, from a Subaltern to a Captain-General. Containing the Whole Art of War, . . . to . . . ..Translated by a Gentleman in the Army (Gale Ecco, Print Editions, 2018).

Academic scholarship thus far has not done well by Benjamin de Soubise or by the ladies of the House of Rohan. For the mother of Rohan and Soubise, who had already died in 1631, there is Nicole Vray, Catherine de Parthenay duchesse de Rohan: Protestante insoumise (Perrin, 1998), which contains some useful references to her daughter Anne de Rohan. A limited amount of Mademoiselle Anne’s correspondence has been in print since the nineteenth century as Lettres de Catherine de Parthenay, dame de Rohan-Soubise, et de ses deux filles Henriette et Anne, à Charlotte-Brabantine de Nassau, duchesse de la Trémoïlle (L. Clouzot, 1874) and is currently available via Google Books.

Most comments on the Rohan women that appear in general historical works are still dependent upon Gédéon Tallemant, seigneur des Réaux, Historiettes (Paris Société du Mercure de France: 4th ed., 1906). There are a lot of other editions of the Historiettes, but no English translations as far as I know. In our world, rather than in the 1632-verse, Tallemant’s younger sister Marie married Henri de Ruvigny (see below) in 1647, which is one of the reasons he knew so much gossip about the Mesdames de Rohan.

The only biography of Tancrède was originally published over two hundred and fifty years ago (1767). It is short and partisan. The author, Henri Griffet, took the position that the boy was definitely the legitimate son of the duke and duchess, eliding over all evidence to the contrary, and making the younger Marguerite the villain of the episode. The Histoire de Tancrède de Rohan has been digitized on Google Books and is also available in a paper print-on-demand version. There is also a fairly extensive and well-illustrated Spanish-language discussion of Tancrede online: http://retratosdelahistoria.blogspot.com/2011/11/tancrede-de-rohan-el-hijo-de-nadie.html.

To the best of my knowledge, the documents in the case are not available in published form. Griffet included only a few in a brief appendix to his pamphlet.


Some things in the material environment of this story, 1635-1637, are not precisely as they were in our historical time line for those years. For readers trying to orient themselves to the geography of Paris, I have the duchesse de Rohan and la petite Marguerite residing at what is now called the Hôtel de Sully in the Marais neighborhood, near what was then the Place Royale and is now the Place des Vosges. Part of a development project commissioned by the late Henri IV, this was a luxurious, modern, town house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hôtel_de_Sully), constructed between 1624 and 1630. In our history, Sully, father and grandfather of the two Marguerites, purchased it, newly finished and furnished, in 1634. The change I have made is to leave him resident in the country still as of 1635, so he has made it available to his daughter. The reason for this is that Rohan did have a quite nice city residence nearby, on the Place Royale itself, which had been built between 1605 and 1612, as the first of Henry IV’s urban renewal projects (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/551057704388052716/). However, Rohan’s townhouse contained multi-room apartments for his wife and daughter and ten or so extra bedrooms, but it simply was not quite large enough for some of the activities depicted in the book, such as a ballet rehearsal in the ballroom.


There is very little available in English for the other continental historical figures who play a significant role in The Trouble with Huguenots. For August von Bismarck, see pages 85-97 in Georg Schmidt, Das Geschlecht von Bismarck (Berlin, Verlag von Eduard Trewendt: 1908). It was, perhaps, ironic that in this case, Moscherosch got the descent right. As no detailed genealogy of the House of Bismarck had come through the Ring of Fire with Grantville, however, no one in the new timeline would ever know it.

In brief summary, after his father’s death, once he had outgrown private tutors, his oldest brother Ludolf studied at Helmstedt and so did his younger brother Georg Friedrich, so August may have spent a couple of years there also; about 1628, he went with his older brother Ludolf to the Netherlands for two years of military training; about 1631 he entered the Swedish army and remained in several different regiments until 1652. In the early to mid-1630s, he was serving in the “Weimarians”—the troops of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and subsequently in Erlach’s regiment in French employ.

His autobiography covering twenty-one years of service in the Thirty Years War, included by Schmidt, is direct and terse, but unfortunately rendered into nineteenth century standardized Hochdeutsch, so the reader can’t get an impression of how he expressed himself. It is not introspective, but in the style of: I served under X; we marched here; we fought there; I didn’t get promoted; they captured the horses and my servant so I had to go to Basel on foot; I transferred, but again without advancement; I got sick and recovered; I was wounded and recovered. It was a lot of pain, trouble, exhaustion, and bad luck as far as advancement went. I experienced a lot of strange and wonderful things; sometimes it went well and sometimes badly. Of all the men in the first company in which I served, only two of us are still alive. “In joy and happiness, in suffering and sadness, help me at all times, Christ the salvation of my life.”

The most comprehensive biography of Henri de Ruvigny, written in 1892, unfortunately does not have much to say about his life prior to the accession of Louis XIV. It’s available as an on-demand reprint: A. de Galtier de Laroque, Le Marquis de Ruvigny, député général des églises réformées auprès du roi, et les protestants à la cour de Louis XIV, 1643-1685 (Plon-Nourrit: 1892). A biography of his oldest son has a short (i.e. 26 pages) biography of the father: David Carnegie A. Agnew, Henri de Ruvigny, Earl of Galway. A Filial Memoir, with a Prefatory Life of his father, le Marquis de Ruvigny (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1864). For his later life, as representative of the Huguenots at the court of Louis XIV, see Solange Deyon, Du loyalisme au refus: Les protestants français et leur député général entre la Fronde et la Révocation (Publications de l’Université de Lille III, 1976).

One of the better discussions of Cinq-Mars is online as “Conspiration et mort de Cinq-Mars”: http://www.herodote.net/12_septembre_1642-evenement-16420912.php.


There is apparently no published biography of Katharina Juliana of Hanau-Münzenberg, by marriage countess of Solms-Laubach, nor has any of her correspondence, if it survives, been published in book form (I have not attempted to track her down through every possible article in the last two centuries of German local history periodicals). She is not even mentioned in Tryntje Helfferich, The Iron Princess: Amalia Elisabeth and the Thirty Years War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), a recent biography of her politically more prominent sister, Amalie Elisabeth, the landgravine-regent of Hesse-Kassel and a superb example of history written according to Leopold von Ranke’s principle of wie es eigentlich gewesen (although her husband rates a succinct description as “brother-in-law”). If she did not, in fact, suffer from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, I apologize to her, but the historical outcome of her disastrous second marriage in 1642 to Moritz Christian von Wied-Runkel, which produced only one daughter, born in 1645, makes it at least a plausible diagnosis.

Readers interested in how emotional conditions were perceived at a time when “psychology” meant the study of the soul and neither “sadness” nor “happiness” signified quite what those words mean to twenty-first century readers can start with a convenient textbook, Susan Broomhall, ed., Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (Routledge, 2016).

There is no complete edition of Amalie Elisabeth’s letters, although Edwin Bettenhäuser, ed. Familienbriefe der Landgräfin Amalie Elisabeth von Hessen-Kassel und ihrer Kinder (Marburg: Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Hessen, 1994) is useful. A few of her letters appear with English translations in Nadine Akerman, ed., The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II 1632-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2011). For the general nature of correspondence among women in the families of the German upper nobility of the time, I have utilized Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent, Gender, Power and Identity in the Early Modern House of Orange-Nassau (Routledge, 2016). Although the senior Orange-Nassau line of the family became Stadhouder in the Netherlands, the wider Nassau line was German. The same two authors have published three other books that are similarly useful.


For the “Scotch-Irish” Hamilton family, information is available as follows:

http://www.hamiltonmontgomery1606.com/Summary.asp

James Hamilton & Hugh Montgomery: The Founding Fathers Of The Ulster-Scots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hamilton,_1st_Viscount_Claneboye

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hamilton_

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/james-hamilton-161716181659-1st-earl-of-clanbrassil-and-2nd-vis


For Hamilton’s hapless tutor, see “The Covenanting Traills”

http://www.electricscotland.com/webclans/stoz/traill


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Framed