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Eighteenth-Century Life 27.3 (2003) 31-52



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"Men, Women and Poles":
Samuel Richardson and the Romance of a Stuart Princess

Patricia Brückmann
Trinity College, University of Toronto


Although my title rephrases Richardson's list of principal characters in Sir Charles Grandison (1754)—"Men, Women and Italians"—I begin with an important event that occurred six years before his birth, the siege of Vienna in 1683. This battle, which drove out the Turks, created the fame of John III Sobieski, King of Poland and grandfather to a princess who later married James Stuart, pretender to the English throne. I want first to examine the story of Maria Clementina Sobieska (1702-35) and the uses to which it was put by propagandists of the Jacobite cause. By virtue of her parentage, her adventures, and her marriage, Clementina became a prominent figure in Jacobite and European imaginations. Her prominence suggests that we ought to ask whether when Richardson called the Italian heroine in his last novel "Clementina," he was joining in Stuart propaganda or invoking a figure of popular imagination to give resonance to a character for whom he had sympathy? Let me begin with Vienna.

As one modern commentator observes, in an essay written during the tercentenary of the battle, "there is probably no book on the general history of Europe that does not record [the] events" of the siege of Vienna. 1 [End Page 31] During the summer a large army of Ottoman Turks advanced upon this chief city of the Holy Roman Empire. On the edge of the emperor's terrain (the city is much farther east than one thinks), Vienna had special significance; to lose it to the Turks would have been a major calamity, not only for the emperor, but also for the ill-defended lands outside his domain in what was still known as Christendom. 2

While there had been peace with the Turks for nearly the whole century up to 1683, stereotypes in restoration and eighteenth-century literature reflect the old opposition between Turks and Christians. 3 Laying waste all before them, the Ottomans were terrifying warriors. The victory of 1683 generated renewed interest in Turkish history, 4 as well as portraits, festivals, and monuments and, in every century thereafter, commemorative celebrations. Esin Akalin has recently studied this fear of the Turk in eighteenth-century drama. 5 We know what one of Mrs. Centlivre's characters meant when she prayed not to fall "into the Hands of Turks and Tartars." 6 "Jews, Turks and Infidels" are all one in The Man's Bewitch'd, 7 as they are in the contemporary collect for Good Friday in the Book of Common Prayer. 8 Turkish women not confined to seraglios (there is an uncommon amount of female interest in these) 9 were represented as tyrants of special cruelty: such was the empress Roxana, source of the name that titles Defoe's last novel. This Roxana wears, it will be remembered, a notable Turkish costume that eventually reveals her identity.

English views are made clear in contemporary documents. On 17 September 1683, the Duke of York writes to the Prince of Orange, "I see you had had the good news of the entire defeat of the Turks before Vienna.... [A]ll good Christians . . . ought to thank God for so great a deliverance... the Turks . . . will hardly be in a condition of troubling Christendom for some time." 10 On 28 January 1783, a hundred years later, Horace Mann writes to Walpole, "from a couch with the smallest touch of the gout I ever had . . . which . . . hinders me from going to . . . see the siege of Vienna extremely well represented in a dance." 11 These ballets, says a contemporary Roman journal cited in the Correspondence, "have received universal acclaim. The first represents the war of 1683 between the Austrians and the Turks, and the second, the siege and liberation of Vienna" (360-61, n.6).

Contemporaries and succeeding generations hailed John III as the last European crusader. He rode out on 15 August, a Marian...

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