Charles Woodcock
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Charles Burger Woodcock, created Freiherr Woodcock-Savage, later Charles Woodcock-Savage (1 May 1850 — 26 June 1923) was a New Yorker who achieved notoriety as the lover of King Karl of Württemberg, by some decades his elder.
Charles Woodcock was born in New York City, the son of Jonas Gurnee Woodcock (1822-1908) and Sarah Savage Woodcock (1824-1893). He went abroad to study and found a place as chamberlain at the court of Württemberg, where he became the favorite of the king, who had had several previous favorites. In 1888 Karl named Charles Woodcock "Freiherr Woodcock-Savage" creating an uproar that sent Woodcock back to New York in 1890. In New York he adopted the last name "Savage."
On 14 June 1894, Charles B. Woodcock-Savage married a widow, Henrietta Knebel Staples, with four sons. On 19 June 1897, all of her sons (Joseph, Harry, Herbert, and Leslie Curtis) legally changed their last names to Savage. Leslie Curtis also changed his first name to Charles.
In 1906 Charles Woodcock-Savage published A Lady in Waiting: Being extracts from the diary of Julie de Chesnil, sometime lady in waiting to her Majesty, Queen Marie Antoinette (New York: D. Appleton and Company). He dedicated it "To a Noble Soul I Knew and Loved and Mourn." The King had died in 1891. The introduction gives a circumstantial account of the yellowed pages found locked in the secret drawer of a Louis Seize cabinet sold at the auction house of Hôtel Drouot and bought by the translator's dear friend from Paris days, an aesthete, who gives permission to publish. The memoirs offered in this frame story are in fact a novelistic pseudo-autobiography.
[edit] References
- Smith, Geoffrey Dayton (1997) American Fiction, 1901-1925: A Bibliography (Cambridge University Press_ no. W-847.
- Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, E 75 (Württembergische Gesandtschaft in München) Bü 6 (Presseerörterungen betr. den Freiherrn von Woodcock-Savage, 1888)
- Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, E 55
