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:::Part of the misunderstanding regarding the art patronage section has arisen because of LlewelynII's stupid retitling in 2016. Originally it was titled "Self-promotion through the arts" and added to the biographical understanding of the Duke through the way he (and his allies) used art patronage to further their court policies. The pernicious change of title tended to obscure this fact, although the text makes it perfectly obvious, and therefore gave rise to the impression that [[WP:UNDUE]] emphasis was being given to the unrelated field of the Duke's patronage of the arts. The emphasis is rather on his self-interested use of such patronage to further his career, which is therefore a perfectly legitimate part of the entire drift of the article. The only part that does not fit is the final paragraph, which was added later by someone else - perhaps PBS himself. If he likes to remove that as irrelevant, he is welcome! [[User:Sweetpool50|Sweetpool50]] ([[User talk:Sweetpool50|talk]]) 18:09, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
:::Part of the misunderstanding regarding the art patronage section has arisen because of LlewelynII's stupid retitling in 2016. Originally it was titled "Self-promotion through the arts" and added to the biographical understanding of the Duke through the way he (and his allies) used art patronage to further their court policies. The pernicious change of title tended to obscure this fact, although the text makes it perfectly obvious, and therefore gave rise to the impression that [[WP:UNDUE]] emphasis was being given to the unrelated field of the Duke's patronage of the arts. The emphasis is rather on his self-interested use of such patronage to further his career, which is therefore a perfectly legitimate part of the entire drift of the article. The only part that does not fit is the final paragraph, which was added later by someone else - perhaps PBS himself. If he likes to remove that as irrelevant, he is welcome! [[User:Sweetpool50|Sweetpool50]] ([[User talk:Sweetpool50|talk]]) 18:09, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

::::I agree that the original, ''"Self-promotion through the arts"'', section title seems to more accurately reflect the section text as it stands; as presented, it appears that Villiers' interest was more in how the arts could support ''him'' rather than vice versa.
::::As to the last paragraph, ''"During the Duke's short tenure ..."'', perhaps it might be better placed in ''[[George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham#Legacy|§ Legacy]]''.<br>
::::A fellow editor, --[[Special:Contributions/75.188.199.98|75.188.199.98]] ([[User talk:75.188.199.98|talk]]) 19:59, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Revision as of 20:00, 18 November 2017

Untitled

This article, as currently written (3/2/06), is quite, quite bizarre. It commences by stating that as a youth Buckingham was noted for his beauty, was introduced to King James, and then proceeds to catalogue Buckingham's astonishing rise to fame and fortune as if it all happened for no reason, apart from him being perhaps a pretty presence at Court. Someone could read this and go away without the slightest idea that Buckingham's fame and fortune rested on one shining fact: a king fell head over heels in love with him. Otherwise he would have remained a forgotten commoner. -- KitKat.


I agree completely, and a reference to a love between them is made elsewhere in wikipedia - the article Disciple whom Jesus loved contains the following:

"Meaning of the phrase

While many readers of John interpret the phrase 'disciple whom Jesus loved' to mean that he was particularly close to one of his disciples, others find evidence in the phrase of a romantic relationship. For example, King James I of England justified his relationship with the Duke of Buckingham by saying Jesus had his John and I have my George. However, the Greek word for love used in the Gospel is not erotic, and no early Christian commentators made this claim."

If the quote from James in that article is verifiable, it certainly seems relevent both to this article and to that on James! -- Saluton

I concur with the above statements and would add, for the sake of accuracy, that Charles was not the Duke of York when they went to Spain. He became the Prince of Wales in 1616, a few years after his brother Henry's death. ---Paddy

Pronouncing the surname

The surname has been changed from /ˈvɪljərz/ to /ˈvɪlərz/ ("villers"). This seems to be well within the poster's field of expertise so, rather than disfigure the lead with a {{fact}} request, may I ask here for the source? --Old Moonraker (talk) 09:30, 25 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Added. --Old Moonraker (talk) 15:42, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

War with France

I have removed the following "This prompted Buckingham to declare war on France, putting him into conflict with the Bourbons of France and the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria, by far the two most powerful dynasties in Europe." I'm not sure that Buckingham was in a position to "declare war on France". Perhaps someone could rewrite it. Rjm at sleepers (talk) 10:35, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Apethorpe Hall

Simon Thurley states unambiguously in the episode of the television series English Heritage about Apethorpe Hall that it is unknown what the room linked to the king's bedroom at Apethorpe was used for. He also suggests that it might have been a closet, and it suitable for conversion to a bathroom. It seems rather unlikely that a duke would have slept in a room of the size and lack of grandeur that closet and bathroom imply. It should also be emphasised that there are passages and doors connecting rooms in most if not all large houses of this era: corridors were almost unknown in English architecture until the 18th century. The existence of this passage in only seems significant if one doesn't know what these houses were usually like. Thus the story put about by some media outlets that this is proof that they were sleeping together is very shaky. It is flimsy speculation/wish-fulfilment presented as fact, so I have removed it. Alex Middleton (talk) 20:33, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The room may have been for the keeper of the stool. Jimmie I would more likely have had a 'pusher of the stool'. The letters are a give away, in the same fashion as the love letters between Mary Stuart and Sarah Churchill. Most of the significant events in English history seem to revolve around gay trists and triangles.220.240.250.122 (talk) 12:01, 10 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

L3 Header "War with Habsburg Austria, France, and Spain"

This header is for a one-sentence paragraph dealing with Buckingham's escape from impeachment. I hesitate to remove it, because it's been deleted and reinstated once already. Views? --Old Moonraker (talk) 07:30, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Afterthought: The "War with France" topic, above, may explain the background. --Old Moonraker (talk) 07:32, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nuke it. 24.246.76.76 (talk) 13:42, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

English expedition in La Rochelle and Saint-Martin de Ré

Though i have not permitted myself to modify the article, i'm pretty horrified by what i understand to be a complete false statement:

Seven english warships indeed participated in the event of Saint-Martin-de-Ré : Lord Buckingham and his troops actually sieged the french fortress in this town, and were aided in this matter by several hundred "huguenots" from La Rochelle. It was never a matter of so-called betrayal from Richelieu, since no alliance had been passed between France and England on the french internal religious crisis.

In fact, english troops came to destroy this fortress (and failed, driven back in the end by an army led by Marechal Schomberg), then came back later to help out the town of La Rochelle, sieged by french army. And then again, the warships failed in rescuing the besieged townspeople, and later faced heavy damage from french navy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.37.212.185 (talk) 12:48, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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Short citation without a date

I have just been through the citations homogenising them on short inline and long citation in the References section. Most of the existing short citations did not contain a year/date parameter. This causes problems and does not fail safe when a person adds another book with the same author unless additional information like volume name is added. But that is not fail-safe if another edition is added. This is what has happened with the citations to Lockyer in this article (see here). The list of inline cations includes:

  1. Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 Lockyer, Roger; Longman 1981 ISBN 0-582-50296-9, p.22
  2. Lockyer, Buckingham, 250-4; 266
  3. Lockyer, p.460
  4. Tudor and Stuart Britain 1471–1714, by Roger Lockyer, 2nd edition, London 1985, Longman.
  5. Robert Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, London 2014, p.458

There is also a long ciation in the References section:

  • Lockyer, Roger (1981), Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628, London

This means that inline citation (1) is the same source as that in the references section. So far so good. But citation (2) could be to either (1) or (5) as they are different editions of the same book. (3) could be to any of the thee long citations. If one does not have access to the sources. the only way to find out which long sources are coupled to the short two short citations is to check the edit history at least the took Wikipedia:WikiBlame speeds up the process!

The citation "Lockyer, Buckingham, 250-4; 266" was added with Revision as of 00:53, 25 November 2016 by 149.12.6.70, this was one of a series of edits by that IP address] that also added the long citation to the References section so the full short citation is "Lockyer 1981, 250-4; 266".

The second citation is a problem it was added by user:Jgrantduff on 26 November 2016. All four long citations were already in the article so there is no way to tell which long citation the short one relates.

-- PBS (talk) 19:02, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have decided to move the information section "Patronage of the arts" into a new article and reduce the information here to a summary (see Wikipedia:Summary style. Following presidents the lead of Art patronage of Julius II I am calling the new article Art patronage of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham.

The reason for this decision is that there is a lot of interesting information in the article and anyone interested in the history of art will find the article interesting. However it is a specialist area of knowledge which although complementing the biography article is not central to it as Buckingham is well known for his political and military careers, and his assassination and his art patronage is secondary to that. Before the information is removed the articles is about 46k in size, after removal it will be about 32k without a summary in place (ie about 15k will be removed). That means the the current size of the art section (with its citations) is about 32% of the article.

This is not an unprecedented thing to do as the article Art patronage of Julius II (16k) and the biography Pope Julius II (36k) about 44%.The article on John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough is about 111k in length the article on Blenheim Palace is about 61k (about 20k of that is not about the Duke's involvement so about 40k of it could have been in his article). In the biography article Blenheim Palace it takes just a few lines. In the section Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington#Titles and tributes 30k+10k+8k=48k the size of the Biography article is about 132k so those articles come to about 36% of the main article.

-- PBS (talk) 08:16, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging user:Mzilikazi1939. I have just traced the main contributor to the section "Patronage of the arts" (originally called "Self-promotion through the arts") to an edit you made at 13:03, 11 January 2015 (diff) -- PBS (talk) 09:49, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I was aware of the art section creating a certain imbalance but decided not to make it a separate section since so much of it illustrated aspects of Buckingham's biography. Simply removing it and leaving an uninformative stub in its place did not make its significance at all clear. I therefore amplified the note there and have given it some historical context. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 14:51, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I was hoping that someone with more knowledge would would put in a better summary paragraraph than my initial attempt. -- PBS (talk) 15:08, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've only just seen this, but it seems a bad idea to me. Let's face it, you can only find ONE precedent, the really terrible Art patronage of Julius II, which is certainly capable of enormous expansion. The article was and is not so long that reduction is necessary, and the section was well down the page. Your reasons seem to be that you are not interested in art history, and the history of British collecting, but you are interested in the polituical history of the period. Johnbod (talk) 02:58, 3 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Btw, if Art patronage of Julius II, which I and others have tried to make less awful, were not still so bad, it would have been merged to the bio (also pretty poor) long ago, since J2 is clearly now best known for this, which I wouldn't claim can be said of Villers. Johnbod (talk) 14:17, 3 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I've only just noticed the renewed discussion and now understand the reason why Johnbod put a tag on that section. If the art-patronage precedent is so poor, then I certainly agree that the transferred section should be reinstated for the reasons I suggest above. The art patronage dovetails with and is illustrative of details in Buckingham's life. I'll wait a bit and see if there is further discussion and then think about bringing that section back from its obscure exile. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 00:20, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have reverted the recent re-insertion of the information (see WP:UNDUE). user: Johnbod you write "and the history of British collecting, but you are interested in the polituical history of the period." See the articles biography articles:
  1. Gardiner, Samuel Rawson; Yorke, Philip Chesney (1911), "Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of" , Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 4 (11th ed.), pp. 722–724
  2. Lockyer, Roger (May 2011), Villiers, George, first duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), 28293 The first edition of this text is available at Wikisource: "Villiers, George (1592-1628)" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
Neither of the older biographies mention his interest in art. Now that could be a matter of fashion (so let's not put too much weight on those). The ODNB 21st century article is about 11,500 words long (excluding the list references etc). Of that there is a paragraph (and a quote by Sir Balthasar Gerbier about his interest in art) is 227 words long (including the 62 words in the quote). This means that Roger Lockyer, the author of the biography devotes about 2% of the biography to Villier patronage of the arts. -- PBS (talk) 10:21, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Mzilikazi1939, Johnbod, Sweetpool50, y'all may wish to review and discuss recent changes to § Patronage of the arts made by myself and PBS.
A fellow editor, --75.188.199.98 (talk) 13:15, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

And I've reverted you back. I agree the biography as it now stands could be considered somewhat lop-sided, but this is because the political sections are too short and weak - look at the lead for example (which still doesn't mention art). That one important aspect of his life is given higher-quality coverage is no reason to just remove it. You tried putting it in another article without discussion (and without summarizing it here), but this was argued against and overturned by consensus. So you just remove it, deleting it from WP entirely??!!! There probably is an element of "fashion" here - academic interest in the history of collecting has been a strong growth area in the last 50 years. Even so, if two older short encyclopedia biographies really don't mention his activities in this area at all, that is a rather astonishing omission, as the basics have always been we known. You don't mention any book-length biographies. Equally the politics of the early Stuart period were a major preoccupation for a long time until a few decades ago, but are now rather out of fashion. I might add that there is a major exhibition in London next year on Charles I's collecting, which will no doubt increase interest. The art section is at the end of this not very long article, and does not bother those who aren't so interested in it (except for you of course). There will be no consensus for this typically high-handed deletion, of an area already under discussion. On no account try it again without having obtained consensus first. It is a general trend that over time the interest in posterity in a political figure who was also an important patron and collector will gradually shift away from the politics towards the arts. Johnbod (talk) 14:41, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)

  • PBS, earlier while sorting out stranded refs[1] I noticed that contrary to my previous impression[2] you had in fact mass reverted 14 edits (13 by me + 1 by Sweetpool50) ... I hadn't initially caught the "14:50"/"15:04" distinction[3] (perhaps overlooked in part due to both time-stamps coincidentally having all the same characters—just in different order).
So it now seems likely your primary intent was to revert Sweetpool50's 14:50 edit so as to restore the unilateral section move—discussed in preceding comments—you'd made previously. Apparently my efforts in between were just seen as inconsequential inconveniences to be brushed aside as collateral damage in attaining that goal; the convenience to you of using automated mass reversion apparently took precedence over dirtying your fingers with some manual editing to preserve those of my efforts which were unrelated to the #Patronage of the arts section. In particular, I find some irony in this edit having been removed under a banner of WP:UNDUE as the 'weighting' of the captions—as indicated in edit summary—was precisely what I was attempting to address. In the future, please take more care to parse and examine edits before reverting them en masse. In other words – while wagging finger and looking up at mop bearing eminence – "Don't to step on the wp:Gnomes!"
A fellow editor, --75.188.199.98 (talk) 15:05, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
(following from Johnbod above) As of now the section has been restored in full by Johnbod. Which seems to be where consensus leans at present, certainly it's clear that there's no consensus for PBS' original move to a freestanding page, both as indicated by discussion above and by edit activity. Though I'll note that I just became aware that User:Mzilikazi1939 = User:Sweetpool50, so there's one less editor actively involved than I originally thought.
Regardless, at this point I, call me 'Fellow Editor' if you like, feel inclined to 'throw-my-hat-in' with Johnbod and Sweetpool50 and endorse keeping the section here in full. I initially came across this article as a reader casually wiki-surfing and I found the section interesting and informative; its presence helped flesh-out an overall impression of the individual under consideration. So I endorse it as useful from a reader's perspective. However, while I find the information useful and notable within the context of a biographical article covering the life of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham I'm not so sure that it is so interesting and notable as to warrant an individual article covering such exclusively. Are there off-wiki sources which focus on the topic of his art patronage in isolation (or at least emphasize it as a primary topic above other biographical concerns)?
A Fellow Editor, --75.188.199.98 (talk) 16:48, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Part of the misunderstanding regarding the art patronage section has arisen because of LlewelynII's stupid retitling in 2016. Originally it was titled "Self-promotion through the arts" and added to the biographical understanding of the Duke through the way he (and his allies) used art patronage to further their court policies. The pernicious change of title tended to obscure this fact, although the text makes it perfectly obvious, and therefore gave rise to the impression that WP:UNDUE emphasis was being given to the unrelated field of the Duke's patronage of the arts. The emphasis is rather on his self-interested use of such patronage to further his career, which is therefore a perfectly legitimate part of the entire drift of the article. The only part that does not fit is the final paragraph, which was added later by someone else - perhaps PBS himself. If he likes to remove that as irrelevant, he is welcome! Sweetpool50 (talk) 18:09, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that the original, "Self-promotion through the arts", section title seems to more accurately reflect the section text as it stands; as presented, it appears that Villiers' interest was more in how the arts could support him rather than vice versa.
As to the last paragraph, "During the Duke's short tenure ...", perhaps it might be better placed in § Legacy.
A fellow editor, --75.188.199.98 (talk) 19:59, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]