Ohhh noooooeesss. :-((( Maaan. These tragic stories.
While we're keeping up the parallels, I maintain that Katte was also, at one point, trying to telepathically get Fritz to understand. (I hope he did. I think he did. IN MY HEADCANON HE DID.)
In summary, around the time he was being condemned to death, Katte started frantically toeing the royal line. He recanted his atheism, starting loudly praying and loudly singing hymns, and wrote a last farewell letter to Fritz in which he urged total submission to the King's will and reminded him that he had always done so and had tried to talk him out of the escape plan.
The key thing to know here is that Fritz and Katte were freethinkers (the former ended up being the most prominent royal freethinker in Europe), and Friedrich Wilhelm was suuuper pious. One of his major contentions with his son and heir was that Friedrich was not falling into line with the specific doctrine FW subscribed to. A lot of Fritz's "rehabilitation" in prison after the escape attempt was an attempt to indoctrinate him into the right religious beliefs.
Well, the moment I read what Katte was doing, I saw a man who was desperately trying to impress the King into giving him a last-minute reprieve, while trusting Fritz to understand (with hopes of being able to explain someday). At least one historian I've found agrees.
Since after Katte's execution, Fritz also went through the motions of doing whatever his father demanded and paying lip service to everything he was told to believe, while privately keeping up a campaign of increasingly successful passive resistance, and when he became king, proceeding to do whatever the heck he wanted, including publicly proclaiming his lack of religion, I maintain that Fritz understood exactly what Katte was up to and only wished it had been successful.
Supported by Friedrich's later words when he was establishing religious toleration: "One can compel by force some poor wretch to utter a certain form of words, yet he will deny to it his inner consent; thus the persecutor has gained nothing. But if one goes back to the origins of society, it is completely clear that the sovereign has no right to dictate the way in which the citizens will think." [emphasis mine]
I'm positive Friedrich had himself in mind, and hopefully his beloved Katte too.
Omg, my boys, now I'm furious all over again. And sad. :-( </3
(Thank you for letting me ramble about my fandom again. I hope it's interesting.)
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Ohhh noooooeesss. :-((( Maaan. These tragic stories.
While we're keeping up the parallels, I maintain that Katte was also, at one point, trying to telepathically get Fritz to understand. (I hope he did. I think he did. IN MY HEADCANON HE DID.)
In summary, around the time he was being condemned to death, Katte started frantically toeing the royal line. He recanted his atheism, starting loudly praying and loudly singing hymns, and wrote a last farewell letter to Fritz in which he urged total submission to the King's will and reminded him that he had always done so and had tried to talk him out of the escape plan.
The key thing to know here is that Fritz and Katte were freethinkers (the former ended up being the most prominent royal freethinker in Europe), and Friedrich Wilhelm was suuuper pious. One of his major contentions with his son and heir was that Friedrich was not falling into line with the specific doctrine FW subscribed to. A lot of Fritz's "rehabilitation" in prison after the escape attempt was an attempt to indoctrinate him into the right religious beliefs.
Well, the moment I read what Katte was doing, I saw a man who was desperately trying to impress the King into giving him a last-minute reprieve, while trusting Fritz to understand (with hopes of being able to explain someday). At least one historian I've found agrees.
Since after Katte's execution, Fritz also went through the motions of doing whatever his father demanded and paying lip service to everything he was told to believe, while privately keeping up a campaign of increasingly successful passive resistance, and when he became king, proceeding to do whatever the heck he wanted, including publicly proclaiming his lack of religion, I maintain that Fritz understood exactly what Katte was up to and only wished it had been successful.
Supported by Friedrich's later words when he was establishing religious toleration: "One can compel by force some poor wretch to utter a certain form of words, yet he will deny to it his inner consent; thus the persecutor has gained nothing. But if one goes back to the origins of society, it is completely clear that the sovereign has no right to dictate the way in which the citizens will think." [emphasis mine]
I'm positive Friedrich had himself in mind, and hopefully his beloved Katte too.
Omg, my boys, now I'm furious all over again. And sad. :-( </3 (Thank you for letting me ramble about my fandom again. I hope it's interesting.)