A Gift Horse

Giver: Louis XIV (1638–1715)

Recipient: King Karl (Charles) XI of Sweden

In the Box: 12 prize horses

France’s Louis XIV is a monarch widely associated with opulence, and his Palace of Versailles remains a testament to his love of lavishness. But what differentiated “the Sun King” from other self-indulgent kings was his understanding of how to strategically share his vast wealth and penchant for grandeur with other powerful people. French writer Voltaire wrote that “what gave [Louis] the most splendor in Europe was the generosity that had no model.” Louis left behind not only monuments to excess, but lasting national accomplishments, most notably a centralized and unified French nation.

Many surmised that he learned the deft use of gifting from Cardinal Mazarin, who served as his chief minister and had been France’s de facto ruler during the years Louis occupied the throne as a child. During a period when France’s kings angled to rein in the nobility’s autonomy, lavish gifts went a long way in securing allies. As Louis began to flex France’s reach abroad, gifting was a helpful tool in flattering other leaders to aid his causes.

The Art of Giving

Royal generosity was such an integral part of Louis’s reign that an entire office was dedicated to keeping records of his gifts. A study of these chronicles relates that the precious gems given in the king’s later years alone take up no less than six bound volumes, listing inventories of diamonds, pearls, rubies, aquamarines, amethysts, topazes, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones.

Louis’s gifts took many forms. To one especially loyal courtier, he awarded a 174-acre estate with a magnificent home named Chateau Gontier. In his efforts to convince Florentine mathematician and scientist Vincenzo Viviani to dedicate his work in France’s name, Louis apparently gave him so many gifts that Viviani needed an entire home dedicated to holding them. Ultimately, Louis’s efforts paid off, and Viviani became one of the founding members of France’s Royal Academy. For his service, Louis granted him a pension of 100 doubloons per annum.

Centerpiece

One of Louis’s most strategic gifts was a set of 12 choice thoroughbred horses sent to King Karl (Charles) XI of Sweden in 1673.

Each horse came with a unique set of accompanying gear, including velvet saddle blankets, golden stirrups, a set of pistols, and a hunting musket. Louis had never met the 18-year-old Karl, but knew he was a sportsman from reports of the hunting trips he shared with France’s ambassador, Isaac Manasses de Pas, Marquis de Feuquieres.

As Louis had hoped, Karl was duly impressed. De Feuquieres reported back to Louis about the Swedish monarch’s excitement upon seeing the horses, writing that, “He immediately devoted them the greatest admiration and did not neglect to express how grateful he was to Your Majesty.” The letter also speaks of how fond Karl’s mother, Queen Dowager Hedvig Eleonora, was of the gift, “She did not cease patting the horses and there was not one that she did not praise and kiss several times, as docile and gentile as they were.”

The French horses were housed in the royal stable and a few of them gifted to high-ranking Swedish nobles.

Karl thanked Louis effusively for the present, writing, “I have not received any token of esteem which has moved me more greatly than those bestowed upon me by Your Majesty,” adding that he now bore a “debt of gratitude” to the French monarch. He pledged to give “real evidence” of this gratitude “at every opportunity.”

Strings Attached

Such a response was welcome in Louis’s court. At the time, Louis was in search of allies to join him in a war against Holland in what became the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78). As Louis had hoped, Sweden joined France’s anti-Dutch confederation. While commanding his army at the Battle of Lund, Karl rode a white horse named Brilliant, which is assumed to have been one of those gifted by Louis.

While the 12 horses have long passed on, many of the accoutrements given with them remain housed in a Stockholm museum and the trove is still called the “French gift.”

Titles Abound

Kings have long conferred gifts and titles to secure their reign, but for the embattled Charles I of England, elevating nobles became part of a failed fight for survival.

Giver: Charles I (1600–1649)

Recipients: Powerful nobles

In the Box: Titles and positions

The Art of Giving

Charles’s standoff against Parliament, which evolved into the English Civil War (1642–1651), necessitated quick use of his powers, but currying favor through generosity was already in the family.

His father, James I, had made gifting part of his ruling philosophy. Rewards were a common way for him to incentivize nobles around the country to follow and enforce royal preferences, necessitating an office to handle requests for “bounty,” and a “Book of Bounty” defining the rules and guidelines of royal gifts. In response to Parliament’s criticism of James’s liberal gifting, his treasurer, Lord Robert Cecil said, “For a king not to be bountiful were a fault.”

While James certainly maximized his royal prerogatives to consolidate his rule, his son Charles found himself in a far more precarious situation.

With Catholic sympathies in both religious practice and belief in the “Divine right of kings,” he clashed with the decidedly Protestant-minded Parliament. Over several years of conflict, Charles became aware of the need to win allies in England’s governing houses.

His reign began with standard expressions of beneficence. After his coronation he designated the Bishop of Moray to throw silver pieces to the crowds that came to participate in the event.

Centerpiece

As dark clouds gathered over Charles, he began making overt attempts to secure friends and make new ones by bestowing noble titles.

One such recipient was Thomas Howard, a royalist member of the House of Commons, who was made a baron in 1621 and Earl of Berkshire five years later.

Sir Francis Seymour was another such benefactor. For years he had been an open critic of the king in Parliament, refusing to pay taxes he deemed arbitrary and comparing life under Charles to “the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt.” As time went on, he became less vocal in his attacks on the crown, labeling himself a “constitutional royalist,” and arguing for a more moderate approach than the increasingly radical parliamentarians. For this he found himself named Baron Seymour of Trowbridge and increasingly favored by the king.

Charles’s bets on these two paid off. When his fight with Parliament led to war, Berkshire and Trowbridge sided with the king and joined his reestablished court in Oxford.

Strings Attached

His judgment in this regard, though, was hardly perfect. As tensions rose, Charles elevated a set of his opponents to the privy council (the king’s official advisors) and while some remained loyal, more would go on to be leaders in the movement against his rule.

Charles’s limited success in expanding his circle of defenders did not help him in the long run. The Royalist cause was ultimately defeated. Charles was tried and beheaded, leading to England’s 11-year departure from monarchy under Oliver Cromwell.

Even as Charles’s cause ended in execution, the titles he awarded stuck through Cromwell’s rule and the Restoration that followed. Both Trowbridge and Berkshire regained positions of power after Charles II retook the thrown and the newly created peerages were passed down to their own children.

Elephants and the King of Siam

Those looking for quirky facts about America’s Civil War or early US diplomacy with the Orient might come upon a tale that the king of Siam offered Abraham Lincoln elephants to fight the Confederacy. The story, as woven through the ages, is amusing and gives way to questions like how the huge jungle animals could have changed cavalry charges. Is the story true? Sort of.

Giver: King Mongkut (1804–1868)

Recipient: President Abraham Lincoln

In the Box: Elephants 

The Art of Giving

At the time of the Civil War, Siam (modern-day Thailand) was ruled by King Mongkut, titled as Rama IV. A former Buddhist monk and scholar, Mongkut initiated programs to modernize his country and engage in more diplomacy with western nations. Part of that was a set of warm communications between the far-off kingdom and the United States.

In 1861, Siam was visited by an American naval vessel, the USS John Adams, a long-serving ship first commissioned in 1799. According to a letter Mongkut sent back on the ship, he learned from its captain that America has no elephants. Noting that the United States is in the process of settling its western lands, the king offered to send elephants for breeding in the nation’s forests until they grow to “large herds” that could “bear burdens and travel through uncleared woods and matted jungles where no carriage and cart roads have yet been made.” He acknowledged that Siam had no way to send the animals, but theorized that if camels could be transported, so could elephants.

At the time the letter was penned, Abraham Lincoln had been in office for a few weeks. Yet due to slow communications that fact was not yet known in Siam and the king addressed his offer to Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan.

It was not the first time Mongkut missed a president. His last letter to the White House had been to President Franklin Piece but arrived on Buchanan’s desk.

The John Adams did not leave Siam for another four months and Lincoln would not receive and respond until February 1862, a year after the king drafted his letter.

The Centerpiece

One can only imagine the look on Lincoln’s face when he received the king’s offer. It was likely a welcome source of comic relief amid the war which at that point was not going well for the Union. According to an unverified legend, the President asked his Secretary of State, William Seward, what elephants could be used for and the latter responded that perhaps they could “stamp out the rebellion.”

Lincoln and Seward sent Mongkut a letter politely declining the offer saying that “this Government would not hesitate to avail itself of so generous an offer if the object were one which could be made practically useful in the present condition of the United States.”

However, they explain that America “does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant” and that “steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce.”

The President, however, warmly thanked the king for other items sent on the John Adams, “a sword of costly materials and exquisite workmanship; a photographic likeness of Your Majesty and of Your Majesty’s beloved daughter; and also two elephants’ tusks of length and magnitude such as indicate that they could have belonged only to an animal which was a native of Siam.”

Lincoln also takes time to clarify that as President he cannot “receive these rich presents as personal treasures” but that the items have been accepted as presents to the American people to be kept in government archives.

Strings Attached

The largely fictional twist that the elephants were offered to help Lincoln defeat the Confederacy grew in several steps. It was first implied in a book written in the 1880s which contains Seward’s above-mentioned response. That was compounded by a line in a 20th century musical, The King and I, which tells the story of Mongkut and an English governess he hired to teach his children.

President Lyndon Johnson did his part to obscure history. While toasting a visiting Thai diplomat, he referenced the story saying, “who can say tonight what the effect would have been if — in 1861 — on a foggy morning in the rolling Virginia hills, the Army had advanced behind a screen of charging Thai war elephants.”

Mongkut did find other nations willing to take up his elephant offers. France took two who were housed in Paris’s zoo for a decade.

The US elephant offer remained a theme of Thai-US relations.

When Mongkut’s descendent, King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) addressed Congress in 1960 thanking America for an aid program, he referenced the elephant offer saying it was made “with no other objective than to provide a friend with what he lacks.”

Alms for the Poor

In medieval England, a combination of tradition and religious belief transformed royal charity, or almsgiving, into a formal function, sometimes labeled largesse or “the king’s dole,” distributed on specific occasions or when the king traveled

Giver: Edward I (1239–1307)

Recipients: The poor of England

In the Box: Money and food

The Art of Giving

Fortunately for the poor, displays of pomp were usually accompanied by generous giving. At a coronation feast, after the King’s Champion rode into the banquet hall, declaring his readiness to take on anyone who contested the king’s sovereignty and receiving a gold goblet as payment for his tribute to the new monarch, he declared, “Largesse, largesse, largesse,” calling for the distribution of funds.

After William II visited a town following his 1087 coronation, a contemporary recorded his impressions (in Middle English), writing that the king “freelie spent in large gifts and all kinds of prinselie largesse.”

The practice continued for centuries. Elizabeth I (1558-1603) gave largesse to some two thousand people on a holiday in the first full year of her reign.

Many kings presumably distributed alms out of the feelings of compassion and desire to show mercy on their people. Yet in an age where Christian belief dictated much of public life, royal charity was largely thought of as a means to benefit the king’s soul and sometimes those of his immediate family (living, or more often dead). Henry III explicitly dedicated some distributions and meals for clerics for the welfare of the soul of his mother, Isabella of Angouleme.

Other monarchs used almsgiving to excuse their own misdeeds. King John, mostly known for his historic role in the Magna Carta and fictional role in the Robin Hood story, took full advantage. As a self-imposed fine of sorts, he regularly fed hundreds of indigents to make amends for hunting on “holy days” when the church forbade sport. Likewise, John habitually ignored fast days, choosing instead to provide meals for as many as 1,000 paupers.

Largesse was such a central function of the medieval monarchy that it demanded a formal office. This role was filled by an appointee titled the almoner, the first of whom was likely named by Henry I in the 1100s. As part of their role was to advertise the king’s generosity, almoners where typically dressed in royal garb that made it clear to all they were handing out money, food, or clothing to the poor on behalf of the monarch.

Centerpiece

During Edward I’s reign, the almoner was assisted by two staff members, a clerk and servant. In the late medieval period, almoners were almost always selected from among the king’s chaplains. In Edward’s day this was not yet the fixed practice. His first almoner, whom he inherited from his father Henry III, was a cleric identified in records as Friar Ralph. Later in his reign, a lay courtier, Henry of Blunsdon, filled the role. Both received generous compensation for their jobs. Almoners and their staffs were also supplied with daily supplies of bread, meat, beer, and wine.

Records show that Blunsdon lent Edward money later in his reign, but he likely had other sources of wealth besides his almoner salary. In addition to payment, almoners won social prestige as a result of their access to the monarch.

As the king’s almsgiving was a means of showing how the overflow of royal wealth was shared with the poor, almoners’ tasks were not limited to collecting and distributing money. One contemporary gave a detailed account of the almoner’s duties in Edward’s day.

He is to gather up the fragments diligently every day and distribute them to the needy; he is to visit for charity’s sake the sick, lepers, the captives, the poor, the widows and others in want and the wanderers in the countryside and to receive cast horses, clothing, money and other gifts bestowed in alms and to distribute them faithfully. He ought also by frequent exhortations to spur the king to liberal almsgiving, especially on saints’ days, and to implore him not to bestow his robes, which are of great price, upon players, flatterers, fawners, talebearers or minstrels, but to command them to be used to augment his almsgiving.

As implied, a good deal of the food almoners distributed to the poor were drawn from the copious leftovers of the king’s own table, but was also supplemented from other sources.

The number of recipients fluctuated under Edward’s reign. In his first years, he kept up his father’s practice of feeding one hundred paupers daily. That number would dip significantly years later, but by the end of his rule, over 650 were provided with meals on a weekly basis.

Edward’s distribution of monetary alms also rose through his reign, even as his own court experienced financial strains. At its height, his almoner regularly kept over 1,000 paupers on the king’s dole.

Strings Attached

Edward’s charity did not extend to the Jews in his kingdom. Beginning early in his reign, he began placing restrictions on Jews’ ability to lend money to gentiles, which had been their major source of income and value to a nobility that saw their presence as an affront to Christian faith. In 1279, hundreds of Jews were arrested and some 300 executed, allegedly for clipping coins. Those who remained free were made to pay heavy fines and attend sermons by Christian clerics. Edward’s crusade against England’s Jews came to an end in 1290, when he issued an Edict of Expulsion, banishing all Jews from the county.

Much of the information for this section came from Royal Charities, Helen Farquhar, British Numismatic Journal and The Pious Practices of Edward I, Charles Hedley David Christopher Farris.

I Beg Your Pardon

If there’s one gift that underscores a monarch’s power, it is the gift of clemency. Kings and other rulers throughout history have used pardons to impose their will over the conclusions of the justice system. It is one of the few truly monarchical aspects that leaders of democracies largely retain.

Givers: Richard II (1367–1399), Charles II (1630–1685)

Recipients: Rebellious peasants and Roundheads (those who opposed Charles I in England’s civil war)

In the Box: Clemency for treason

The Art of Giving

For kings of England, pardons evolved from pious acts and opportunities to show their sense of mercy into multifaceted tools to expand or secure their power.

In medieval times some pardons were framed as acts to benefit the soul of a departed royal. In 1204, King John ordered the sheriff of Dorset to free “all prisoners, whatever the cause for which they may have been detained, whether for murder, felony, or larceny, or breaking the forest laws, or for any other accusation brought against them whatsoever” to benefit the soul of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Exempted from John’s generous pardon were Jews and captives from a recent war against France.

As the practice became known, those in legal trouble appealed to royals to assist them as an act of kindness to their deceased loved ones. A 1290 record contains a petition by a group of merchants whose goods had been seized asking that their merchandise be returned to benefit the late queen. During the 11th and 12th centuries, records show English kings received around 40,000 petitions for pardons.

A decade later, Henry III’s liberal pardons would lead to conflicts with courts and parliament who felt the monarch was subverting justice.

Another route toward royal pardons came from a folk custom that if a king saw a convicted felon on his way to execution or passed through the place where he was due to be imminently punished, the prisoner was freed as an expression of the monarch’s goodwill.

As with almsgiving, celebrations were a common occasion for pardons. When Edward III turned 50 in 1362, a general pardon was issued. To mark the occasion, a leading bishop delivered a speech connecting the occasion to the Torah commandment to free slaves at the end of the Yovel (Jubilee) cycle.

Centerpiece

Richard II used pardons as a political tool through his reign. In 1381, he faced the Peasants’ Revolt, where some 100,000 disenchanted laborers marched on London, taking the king by surprise. The rebellion was eventually put down and the ringleaders executed, but after calm was restored, Richard issued a general pardon to all others involved, partially as a means to regain their allegiance.

The pardon proclamation read as such:

Considering that the lieges and subjects of his said realm, from the time of his coronation until the said insurrections and uprisings, had conducted themselves well, governed themselves peaceably, and shown him favour and good will in all his needs and affairs…and also to the end that the same subjects should be the more strongly inclined to remain faithful and loyal in future, as they were before the said uprising; of his special grace he has pardoned the said commons.

Later in his rule, Richard lorded pardon power over his enemies. In the late 1390s he faced a rebellion from a group of nobles who set up a rival parliament they called the Lords Appellant. After the group was quashed, Richard subjugated several of the participants by making them attach payments to their requests for clemency as means of reasserting his authority.

Richard again used his pardon privilege to bolster his position in 1392. In what sounds like a choreographed scene, the king stopped outside Westminster while settling a quarrel with residents of London, where his queen, Anne, followed through on a promise to intercede on behalf of the Londoners. Richard accepted her plea together with a symbolic gift from the townsmen and delivered a lecture to those present about the dangers of wealth before pronouncing his pardon and reinstating their special privileges. The encounter ended with the crowd cheering, “Long live the king.”

In 1660, Charles II used his power of pardon to reassert his royal power, win over skeptics, and usher in a new era.

Since the execution of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell’s establishment of the Commonwealth, England had effectively been without a monarch, with the deposed king’s son living in exile on the continent. After 11 years as a quasi-republic, during which Richard Cromwell succeeded his father, the government collapsed and Charles Stuart was invited to reclaim the crown and become Charles II.

Yet the civil war that ousted his father and the tensions that drove it left no shortage of apprehension about what a restored monarchy would mean. At the top of these questions was what would become of the many powerful men who had fought against the monarchy, what would become of the copious amount of property that had been seized from Charles I’s supporters and redistributed, and would Charles II continue his father’s disregard for power-sharing with Parliament that triggered the rebellion against him?

Charles II’s response to these uncertainties was the Declaration of Breda. In it, he granted “a free and general pardon” for all those who chose to accept his rule within a 40-day period. It covered everyone no matter “how faulty soever.” The only people who would be excepted from this pardon were those who Parliament deemed undeserving of clemency. This served two valuable purposes for Charles. Firstly, it demonstrated his regard for England’s political balance of powers, and secondly, it created an avenue to still punish those directly involved in his father’s execution.

Strings Attached

The Declaration worked in all directions. Charles followed through on its promises to refrain from mass vengeance on those who fought against the crown or were part of Cromwell’s government and not to confiscate property. Likewise, many of those who indeed had a direct hand in Charles I’s execution were either exempted from the pardon and prosecuted or later arrested on other charges and removed from public life.

A Gift Back to Its Giver

Ever wonder how the “Resolute Desk,” in the Oval Office got its name? The answer has nothing to do with the resolute nature of the weighty decisions and addresses that generations of presidents have made from behind it. Rather it relates to a unique symbol of gratitude from one of Britian’s most consequential monarchs, Queen Victoria.

The tale of how the leader of a nation whose army burned the White House’s early permutation (in the War of 1812) came to gift its best-known piece of furniture began with a pair of failed Arctic missions and ended with a most creative present.

Giver: Queen Victoria (1819–1901)

Recipient: President Rutherford B. Hayes 

In the Box: Presidential Desk

The Art of Giving

In 1845, explorer Sir John Franklin set out on a mission towards the North Pole in search of a navigable passage to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. His crew got caught in the ice and was never heard from again. After it was missing for several years, pressuring the British government to search for his crew became a cause célèbre. Beginning in 1848, a series of missions were sent to search for Franklin and his men. Starting in 1850, one of the ships that carried out several of these unsuccessful missions was the HMS Resolute, one of the British Navy’s few vessels equipped for Arctic sailing. After deftly navigating treacherous conditions and playing a part in rescuing other lost missions, in 1853 the Resolute also became trapped in ice and was abandoned. Its crew was rescued by other ships on the mission.

In 1856, the Resolute was found drifting close to 1,000 miles from where she was abandoned, by an American whaling ship. The whalers boarded the ghost vessel and brought it to port in Connecticut. The good condition in which it was found testified to the strength of its heavy oak and mahogany construction.

The mid-1850s was ripe for goodwill gestures towards Britain as some feared a series of disputes over fishing and territorial rights could lead it and America towards war. Congress purchased the Resolute for $40,000 and financed its repair at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

An American crew sailed it to Portsmouth, England. The returned Resolute was boarded by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who officially accepted America’s magnanimous present. The reoutfitted ship still had many of its original items and Congress paid to replace what it lacked down to new guns, telescopes, and navigation tools.

The Resolute continued to serve Her Majesty’s navy for over twenty years but never returned to the Arctic.

The Centerpiece

In 1879, the Resolute was decommissioned and set to be deconstructed. It is not clear whether repurposing part of the ship as a gift originated with Victoria or the Admiralty, but a competition was launched for furniture makers to submit plans for a desk that could be given by the monarch to then President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes. One of the more elaborate entries suggested carving portraits of Victoria and Hayes and arctic scenes featuring flags from both nations in the background. Victoria opted for a simpler design.

In November 1880, the 1,300-pound desk arrived at the White House in crate. Attached to it was a brass plaque briefly recounting the story of the Resolute and saying that the desk “is presented by the Queen of Great Britain & Ireland, to the President of the United States, as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the ‘Resolute’.”

Hayes and most presidents that followed him used the desk in some capacity in rooms located in the White House’s second floor. In 1945, a panel was added to the front bearing the Presidential coat of arms. The Resolute Desk was used for a short time by President Dwight Eisenhower, but during his administration it was put into storage and fell out of use.

In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy found it under protective wraps while scouring the mansion for historic items that would enhance her efforts to redecorate the White House. She had the desk moved to the Oval Office where the iconic picture of President John Kennedy at work while his young son plays under it was taken.

After Kennedy’s assassination, it was removed from the Oval Office, used by some presidents and not by others. President Bill Clinton had the Resolute Desk returned to the Oval Office on the first day of his presidency in January 1993 and it has remained there since.

Strings Attached

President Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, said she wanted to move the desk while helping design the new administration’s offices, telling an interviewer, “I wanted everything Trump had touched out of there.” Yet the Biden administration’s hopes to replace it with Franklin Roosevelt’s Oval Office desk were rejected by the latter’s presidential library and Biden would also use the timbers of the Resolute during his time in office.

The desk remains a symbol of friendship between America and Great Britian. In 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the White House and presented President Barak Obama with the Resolute’s original commission, and a pen holder fashioned out of wood taken from a vessel that began service the year the storied ship was decommissioned.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1079)