Transgender chess
From the mid to the latter half of the 18th century, a trend emerged for Western intellectuals and proto-revolutionaries to gravitate, either in person or by correspondence, towards the courts of enlightened despots, such as Prussia’s Frederick and Russia’s Catherine, both equally Great. The latter has been portrayed with aplomb by Elle Fanning in the recent, occasionally accurate, TV series The Great, second only (in my opinion) to Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit series in its televisual impact.
Doubtless these peripatetic intellectuals and political free thinkers were motivated by the conviction that, by focusing on the seats of despotic power, they could change the world for the better. Thus, the Venezuelan Francisco Miranda, one of the early liberators of the native populations from the Spanish Empire of Latin America, made his way to St Petersburg, at first, reputedly, attracted by the legends that Catherine served a first course of precious jewels to all her dinner guests. Miranda graduated from this apocryphal and somewhat simplistic ambition, to becoming the precursor of Simón Bolivar in striving to liberate Venezuela from the yoke of the Hispanic Imperium.
Voltaire spent some time at the court of Frederick II in Potsdam, as did the greatest chess master of the day, André Danican Philidor, who, according to the chess-loving Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, was engaged in various games against Prussian officers in 1751. Voltaire departed Potsdam on becoming alarmed by what he described as “Greek practices” among Frederick and his closest associates in the military camps. As Voltaire himself said, most states have an army, but, in Prussia, the army has a state.
Philidor was naturally attracted to any location where chess was popular. As it turned out, the great apostle of French chess, the theorist who anticipated the French Revolution by asserting that the humble pawns are the soul of chess, spent much of his life in London. Philidor’s letters from the British capital contain much useful information about London life, particularly the chess life of the day, and also his views on the increasingly combustible political situation on both shores of the Channel.
I am indebted to leading chess historian Richard Eales, author of Chess: The History of a Game, for alerting me to the following aperçus by Philidor on the political climate in both London and Paris.
Among this rich epistolary material, it is Philidor’s political insights which are the most interesting. As 1789 dawned, Philidor was writing about the crisis in England (George III’s latest attack of madness, plans for a possible regency, rumours that Pitt the Younger was working with the Queen to pretend the King was still competent in order to rule in his name).
When the parallel revolutionary crisis in France developed, Philidor was initially optimistic, thinking that it would lead to a constitutional monarchy on the British model; many others had the same hopes at the time. Then, of course, things rapidly deteriorated. Philidor’s letters get fewer and thinner, presumably cautious about making direct political comments, for fear that the letters might fall into the wrong hands. Philidor’s family in Paris may even have destroyed any correspondence which they thought compromising.
Meanwhile, the revolutionary calendar is introduced, then elaborate arrangements have to be made to send letters (and especially money, which Philidor remitted to Paris to support his family from London, but which might well have been thought suspicious) through an intermediary in Switzerland. Finally, after returning to London in May 1793, although he went with a passport, not as a refugee, he was listed as an émigré and never managed to reach home before his death, in August 1795. Although he fully expected to obtain the travel permits, his last known letter in 1795, rather sadly, explains what were his plans and ambitions after his longed-for arrival in Paris, which never took place.
Another chess enthusiast, who traversed the courts and chancelleries of Europe, was that singular character, the Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont. He was a man not short of Christian names, nor of variegated vocations: Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont (1728–1810), French diplomat, lawyer, a cavalry officer, swordsman, lady-in-waiting, and part-time nun.
These job descriptions appear to be incompatible: “nun” and “cavalry officer, for example, seem mutually exclusive. So was he a man or a woman? Originally qualifying as a doctor of jurisprudence, d’Éon often dressed as a woman and in 1755, while on a clandestine mission for Louis XV, he rose to become a confidante of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia. The following year he returned to St Petersburg, in the guise of the diplomat brother of his former female incarnation. In 1763, following the peace treaty which terminated the Seven Years War, he was appointed minister-resident and plenipotentiary for Louis XV in London. D’Éon, although detested by the King’s favourite mistress Madame de Pompadour, clung on to his diplomatic post, conducted an extravagant lifestyle and incurred huge debts. At this time, sums totalling more than £120,000, a colossal amount for the time, were wagered as to the true nature of his gender.
According to the authoritative The Oxford Companion to Chess: “When Louis XV died in 1774 the author Beaumarchais was sent to London to negotiate with d’Éon to give up state papers and cease acting as ambassador. In return d’Éon was well paid and pensioned but had to agree to dress as a woman. In June 1777 the Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont’s name was listed as a subscriber to Philidor’s new edition, but in July 1777 the high court, in a trial brought by a gambler, decided, in d’Éon’s absence, that he was a woman. In August d’Éon turned up at Versailles in his old uniform of Captain of Dragoons, whereupon the government immediately ordered him to dress as a woman, and as such he became lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette for two years.”
Thereafter, D’Éon entered a convent – perhaps several – before resurfacing in London as a female fencer and chess player, sufficiently strong to beat Philidor in one of the latter’s blindfold displays. Sadly, this game has not survived among the relative handful of extant games by Philidor.
The Chevalier’s pension was, unsurprisingly, cancelled after the French Revolution and in 1791 Christie’s held a three-day sale of the books and manuscripts of a certain “Mademoiselle” d’Éon. In 1796 an accidental and inadvertent fencing wound led to “her” retirement. The Chevalier made a living (see main illustration) by engaging in demonstrations of swordsmanship against notable opponents, while dressed in incongruously cumbersome female garb. D’Éon spent the rest of his days in London, and only at his death was the truth about his gender established: a fully functioning male, but endowed with certain female characteristics. The designation “eonism” has, in fact, been adopted as a psychiatric term for male transvestism. RuPaul’s Drag Race, another excellent Netflix series, would have been a natural outlet for his talents in mesmerising adoring crowds.
Philidor’s opponent in this week’s game was the well-known British military celebrity Field Marshal Henry Seymour Conway, a British general and statesman. Brother of the 1st Marquess of Hertford, he began his military career in the War of the Austrian Succession and eventually rose to the rank of Field Marshal in 1759. He shared a passion for chess along with his cousin, Horace Walpole. This week’s game is a win by Philidor from his London sojourn, which in many ways coincided with that of the Chevalier. Field Marshal Conway, Philidor’s opponent, was one of a coterie of habitual Philidor enthusiasts, which also included Dr Thomas Bowdler, the notorious expurgator of William Shakespeare.
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