There is plenty of evidence that Handel was a good linguist. According to one eighteenth-century account he

Ferdinando de'Medici, in a letter of recommendation to Carl Philipp von Neuburg in Innsbruck in 1709, wrote that among Handel's many talents was a ‘gran pratica delle lingue’ (an ‘excellent knowledge of languages’). As well as his native German (and some Latin learnt at school), he had a good command of French, a necessary skill in those days for all educated Germans, whose own tongue was in some circles considered unsuitable for formal discourse. He wrote French stylishly in letters to his compatriots such as Telemann, Mattheson and his own brother-in-law in Halle; in addressing the latter as ‘Monsieur mon très Honoré Frère’ he was following the same cultural tradition as his fellow German King George II of England, who, as his wife Caroline lay dying and urged him to marry again, uttered the immortal words ‘Non, non, j'aurai des maîtresses’; and, according to Mainwaring, when Cuzzoni grew temperamental about singing an aria in Ottone, it was in French that Handel threatened to throw her out of the window.