Written in History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Henry’s love dovetailed with his conviction that his entire marriage to Catherine was incestuous and that divine displeasure was the cause of his lack of sons. He therefore ordered his ministers to secure an annulment from the pope. But the Catholic Church would deny Henry’s wishes in his Great Matter, which would lead to England’s decisive break with Rome and the establishment of the Church of England; and in turn this allowed him to marry Anne in 1532. When Anne produced a daughter, the future Elizabeth I, but no sons, Henry turned on her: she was executed in 1536.

  My mistress and friend: I and my heart put ourselves in your hands, begging you to have them suitors for your good favor, and that your affection for them should not grow less through absence. For it would be a great pity to increase their sorrow since absence does it sufficiently, and more than ever I could have thought possible reminding us of a point in astronomy, which is, that the longer the days are the farther off is the sun, and yet the more fierce. So it is with our love, for by absence we are parted, yet nevertheless it keeps its fervor, at least on my side, and I hope on yours also: assuring you that on my side the ennui of absence is already too much for me: and when I think of the increase of what I must needs suffer it would be well nigh unbearable for me were it not for the firm hope I have and as I cannot be with you in person, I am sending you the nearest possible thing to that, namely, my picture set in a bracelet, with the whole device which you already know. Wishing myself in their place when it shall please you. This by the hand of

  Your loyal servant and friend

  H. Rex

  Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, undated

  Frida Kahlo’s love letters to her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, are filled with the bold colors and wild passions of her art—and her life. Born of a German father and a Mexican mother in 1907, she was almost crippled by polio and was then terribly injured in a near-fatal bus accident in 1927. An iron rod had penetrated her uterus. She spent three months in a full-body cast and endured thirty operations and a lifetime of pain. While recovering, she started to paint and encountered Diego, already famous; both were leftists and they met through the Communist Party. Diego became her artistic mentor. Rivera had lived in Paris, traveled in Italy, and evolved his own style of murals, bold in color, his figures almost Aztec in their simplicity, all telling the history of Mexico and its revolution. Diego and Frida became lovers: he was forty-two, she twenty.

  Kahlo and Rivera married in 1929, but the marriage was tempestuous. He was foul tempered and an enthusiastic womanizer, and she had affairs with men, including the Russian revolutionary leader in exile Leon Trotsky, as well as with women such as the French-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker. Neither her health problems nor the conservative Catholicism of much of Mexican society prevented her developing her artistic vision, her elaborate colorful costumes showing her mixed-race heritage, her liberated love life. Kahlo’s dramatic artistic style, a flamboyant mix of fantastical and realistic, magical and folk, was inspired by both Mexico itself and her own extraordinary life. All of this is revealed in her letters to Rivera, in which physical love and emotional turbulence are often expressed in the colors of a painter: “the silent life giver of worlds, what is most important is the nonillusion. morning breaks, the friendly reds, the big blues, hands full of leaves, noisy birds, fingers in the hair, pigeons’ nests a rare understanding of human struggle simplicity of the senseless song the folly of the wind in my heart = don’t let them rhyme girl = sweet xocolatl [chocolate] of ancient Mexico, storm in the blood that comes in through the mouth—convulsion, omen, laughter and sheer teeth needles of pearl, for some gift on a seventh of July, I ask for it, I get it, I sing, sang, I’ll sing from now on our magic—lo.” She describes their love in terms of Mexican landscape and even fruit: “it was the thirst of many years restrained in your body….There was all manner of fruits in the juice of your lips, the blood of pomegranate, the horizon of the mammee and the purified pineapple. I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated my book through the tips of my fingers. Smell of oak essence, memories of walnut, green breath of ash tree. Horizon and landscapes, I trace them with a kiss….I penetrate the sex of the whole earth, her heat chars me and my entire body is rubbed by the freshness of the tender leaves.”

  They divorced in 1939. For a long time, she was known mainly as Diego’s wife—but now the paintings of Frida and the huge, exuberant murals of her husband form the national art of Mexico. As for their volcanic relationship, she put it best: “only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.”

  Diego:

  Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

  Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 12 October 1786

  He is the American ambassador to Paris. She is “a golden-haired, languishing Anglo-Italian, graceful…and highly accomplished, especially in music.” He is forty-three, she is twenty-seven. He is a widower, she is married. Jefferson, born in Virginia, was a wealthy landowner who, in 1776, had drafted the Declaration of Independence of the new nation of America. Born near Florence in 1759, Maria Cosway was the daughter of an expatriate English innkeeper and the wife of an eccentric painter. In Paris, during autumn 1786, Maria and Jefferson have spent an intense month in each other’s company.

  When she leaves, Jefferson writes her this extraordinary letter in which one of the reigning intellects of Western history applies himself to the dilemma of love, to heartbreak, and to human nature. To be in love, to drink the elixir of loving, he argues, is worth the inevitable heartbreak. And America would not have been liberated without the passion of the heart. His conclusion? “We have no rose without its thorn.” They never meet again, but correspond for the rest of their lives. Soon after Maria leaves, Jefferson is joined in Paris by his daughter and her mixed-race slave companion, Sally Heming, sixteen, with whom Jefferson begins a relationship that would produce at least five children. In 1790, Jefferson returned home to become the first secretary of state in President Washington’s cabinet and was elected the third president in 1801. Here is this very special letter that expresses the agonies and dilemmas of any man or woman unsuitably in love.

  Seated by my fireside solitary and sad, the following dialogue took place between my Head and my Heart.

  * * *

  Head. Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.

  * * *

  Heart. I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings. Overwhelmed with grief, every fiber of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear.

  * * *

  Head. These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us. You confess your follies indeed: but you still hug and cherish them; and no reformation can be hoped, where there is no repentance.

  * * *

  Heart. Oh my friend! This is no moment to upbraid my foibles. I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief! If you have any balm, pour it into my wounds: if none, do not harrow them by new torments. Spare me in this awful moment! At any other I will attend with patience to your admonitions.

  * * *

  Head. On the contrary I never found that the moment of triumph with you was the moment of attention to my admonitions. While suffering under your follies you may perhaps be made sensible of them, but, the paroxysm over, you fancy it can never return. Harsh therefore as the medicine may be, it is my office to administer it….

  * * *

  Heart. May heaven abandon me if I do!…


  * * *

  Head. I wished to make you sensible how imprudent it is to place your affections, without reserve, on objects you must so soon lose and whose loss when it comes must cost you such severe pangs. Remember the last night. You knew your friends were to leave Paris today. This was enough to throw you into agonies. All night you tossed us from one side of the bed to the other. No sleep, no rest….To avoid these eternal distresses, to which you are forever exposing us, you must learn to look forward before each step which may interest our peace. Everything in this world [is] a matter of calculation. Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand. Put into one scale the pleasures which any object may offer; but put fairly into the other the pains which are to follow, and see which preponderates. The making [of] an acquaintance is not a matter of indifference. When a new one is proposed to you, view it all round. Consider what advantages it presents, and what inconveniences it may expose you. Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it. The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which he is beset. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness….

  * * *

  Heart. And what more sublime delight than to mingle tears with one whom the hand of heaven hath smitten! To watch over the bed of sickness, and to beguile its tedious and its painful moments! To share our bread with one to whom misfortune has left none! This world abounds indeed with misery; to lighten its burdens we must divide it with one another….When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science, to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take you the problem: it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their control. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not science. That she gave to all, as necessary to all: this to a few only, as sufficing with a few. I know indeed that you pretend authority to the sovereign control of our conduct in all its parts: and a respect for your grave saws and maxims, a desire to do what is right, has sometimes induced me to conform to your counsels….If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of a bayonet had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman’s. You began to calculate and to compare wealth and numbers: we threw up a few pulsations of our warmest blood: we supplied enthusiasm against wealth and numbers: we put our existence to the hazard, when the hazard seemed against us, and we saved our country: justifying at the same time the ways of Providence, whose precept is to do always what is right, and leave the issue to him. In short, my friend, as far as my recollection serves me, I do not know that I ever did a good thing on your suggestion, or a dirty one without it. I do forever then disclaim your interference in my province. Fill paper as you please with triangles and squares: try how many ways you can hang and combine them together….We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.

  Catherine the Great to Prince Potemkin, c.19 March 1774

  This is the letter that reveals one of the most successful romantic partnerships and political alliances in all of history. Catherine was brought to Russia as a young German princess to marry the poxy heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter, an inadequate bully who made her life hell. She was clever, cultured, passionate, and ambitious. Desperately lonely, she was supported personally and politically by a series of lovers. When it had become clear that her husband, as Emperor Peter III, was both a disastrous tsar and a dangerous man, she overthrew him with the aid of her lover, Orlov, and made herself Catherine II. Peter III was strangled. In danger of being murdered herself, Catherine was scarcely helped by Orlov. When their relationship foundered, his replacement was an intellectual nonentity named Vasilchikov, who made her even more unhappy. She needed the support of an equal, and she knew Grigory Potemkin already. Brilliant, flamboyant, and masterful, he was already in love with her.

  Now she falls in love with him, knowing he has an intellect as superb as hers. In their letters, they call each other “twin souls,” writing day and night. Sometimes her letters are like texts: “Me love general, general love me,” but their ambitions are imperial. Physical passion dovetails with political acumen and changes Russia’s history: together they expand into Ukraine, annex Crimea, and found a Black Sea fleet as well as new cities from Odessa to Kherson.

  In this letter, Catherine, nicknaming Potemkin “my hero,” “a Cossack,” and a Muslim Tatar (a “giaour”), admits that even at dawn, after a row in which she decides to break up, she cannot live without the charismatic Potemkin: she is overcome with love and lust—what has he done to the cleverest woman in Europe?

  Darling, really now, I suppose you thought I wouldn’t write to you today. You’re quite mistaken, sir. I awoke at five o’clock, it’s now after six—I should write to him [Vasilchikov]. But only so much as to speak the truth, and kindly take heed what sort of truth: I don’t love you and don’t want to see you anymore. You won’t believe it, my love, but I can’t abide you at all. Yesterday we chatted till twelve o’clock, and then he was sent away. Don’t be angry—indeed, as if one couldn’t do without him. The dearest thing of all that came from that conversation is that I learned what they say among themselves: no, they say, this is no Vasilchikov, this one she treats differently. And he is indeed worthy. No one is surprised, and the affair has been accepted as if they have long been expecting it. But no—everything must be otherwise. From my pinky to my heel and from these to the last hair on my head, I have issued a general prohibition today against showing you the least affection. And my love is being kept in my heart under lock and key. It’s awful how cramped it is in there. With great difficulty it squeezes itself inside, so mind well—it might just pop out somewhere. Now see here, you are a reasonable man, could so few lines contain more madness? A flood of foolish words has sprung from my head. How you can enjoy spending time with such a deranged mind I do not know. Oh, Mister Potemkin, what strange miracle have you performed in so thoroughly deranging a head that earlier was considered by society to be one of the best in Europe?

  It’s time, high time indeed to start acting sensibly. It’s shameful, it’s bad, it’s a sin for Catherine the Second to allow this mad passion to rule over her. Such foolhardiness will make you loathsome even to him. I’ll begin repeating that last verse to myself often, and I hope this alone will be enough to lead me back onto the true path. But this won’t be the final proof of your great power over me. It’s time to stop or I’ll scribble a complete sentimental metaphysics that will finally make you laugh, though this will be its sole benefit. Well, my nonsense, off you go to those places, those happy shores where my hero dwells. If, perchance, you don’t find him still at home and are carried back to me, then I shall toss you directly into the fire and Grishenka won’t see this extravagant behavior, in which, however, God knows, there is much love; but it would be much better if he didn’t know of this.

  Farewell, giaour, Muscovite, Cossack. I don’t love you.

  James I to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, 17 May 1620

  This is a love letter from the married King James I to his adored male favorite. James had a history of intimate relationships with handsome young men. From the moment James saw George Villiers in 1614, aged twent
y-one, he was dazzled by the youth’s physical beauty, and he turned out to be intelligent, too, if not especially talented. Appointed the king’s cupbearer, he was swiftly promoted all the way up the peerage to duke of Buckingham (1623)—and effectively chief minister as Lord High Admiral—making him the most hated man in the kingdom. James publicly kissed and caressed George, whom he lovingly called “Steenie” because St. Stephen had “the face of an angel,” and he admitted in 1617 to the Council “you may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else….I wish…not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.” There was probably some sexual relationship: Buckingham reminisced in a letter to James “whether you loved me now…better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog.” James called Buckingham his wife: “God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear father and husband.” Remarkably, Buckingham also managed to become best friends with James’s son and heir Charles I. He remained on top after James’s death. But in 1628, he was assassinated by a disgruntled officer. In this letter written at the height of his power, James has helped him make a rich marriage to Lady Katherine Manners, but even after the wedding, he still praises Buckingham’s “white teeth.”