As opposed to volume 2 - which had all the Seven Years War stuff in addition to Lehndorff's love agonies and his familiy relationships, which help flesh him out beyond the court, volume 3 is where I can understand why the Editor cut a lot of this for the original one volume edition, only excerpting the drama around future FW2's first marriage. Once the dust from the war settles down, we're in for a lot of court intrigue, this courtier versus that courtier, and it's just not very interesting to posterity (or even from a fanfiction pov), with a few exceptions:
1. the death of Lehndorff's fourth born child and just half a year or later his poor first wife. Whom he does care for; he had gotten finally permission by Fritz to travel abroad - remember, Prussian nobles have to ask the King for this - and because she is so sick, he abandons this longed for goal and instead goes with her to a spa in the vain hope she might recover. When she dies, Heinrich proves their relationship isn't one sided as a friendship and is there for comfort, visiting, taking him to Rheinsberg and then on a trip to the Netherlands.
2. the Swedish visits, both of Gustav en route and of Ulrike later. As I guessed, Lehndorff was Ziebura's source for much of her description of these visits from her Heinrich bio, with the notable exceptions of the shared Fritz 'n Heinrich concern about both Gustav and his mother wanting to otherthrow the Swedish constitution; her quotes there were directly from Fritz' letters to Heinrich and vice versa. Heinrich in general tells Lehndorff about political stuff such as the partitioning of Poland only after it has happened - Lehndorff thought Heinrich going first to Sweden to visit his sister (when the later's husband was still alive) and then from there to visit Russia for a long time was a pleasure cruise until news got out, and even then, there are more stories about Russia per se and Catherine (Heinrich definitely was a fan). While being treated to travelogues isn't bad, it's also part of Lehndorff's general frustration, more on a moment. Anyway, while Lehndorff when in Rheinsberg of course notices whenever the fraternal correspondance intensifies to more than one letter per week, he doesn't get told why, he's just worried it means war because it's clear this must be politics.
(Lehndorff marries a second time and has a living child and another dying shortly after birth within the time frame of the journals, but second Mrs. Lehndorff mostly gets general terms of "pleased with my beautiful wife, and thank God my mother in law isn't as awful as the last one), with understandable fretting whenever she's in labor.)
There are also the various Heinrich boyfriends, Kalkreuther, Mara and Kaphengst, and while Lehndorff devotes considerable page time to just how much they suck and how unworthy they are, this also increases his bitterness. He tries to console himself on general "these guys come and go, but I, who met Heinrich in 1746, am still around as a friend in the 1770s, and he's never dumped me!", but only a year later, that line of thinking has rather reversed: why is Heinrich willing to go to such lengths for these guys, spend lots of money on them, gets them what they want, takes them blatantly taking advantage of him and screwing other people while with him - and is "less generous to his friends"? Why does Lehndorff STILL have the same dead end job he had at 19! (Yes, he was 19 when he started as EC's chamberlain.) And he can't even tell himself the King only promotes foreigners anymore, because other Prussians, nobles and non nobles alike, do get promoted.
All of which eventually leads to him resigning his post and withdrawing to his family seat in the countryside with his family as a private citizen. In the previous year, he's found a new bff in the form of the premiere Polish poet and thinker of the age... who also happens to be a Catholic Prince Bishop. This guy, whose bishop seat is in the neighbourhood, and who is now "my wonderful Ermland", "my dearest Ermland", etc. Never let it be said Lehndorff doesn't know how to pick them: the Prince Bishop is both a great mind, evidently charming, and ultimately unavailable (or is he? Wiki doesn't say how serious he took his vows). This is in 1775, and that's how far the printed diaries go, although Ziebura in her book on the trio of unwanted wives quotes a later entry from when Lehndorff and second Mrs. Lehndorff are visiting Berlin and see the widowed EC taking pleasure strolling through the Tiergarten. As far as I remember from the Heinrich bio, they keep in contact via correspondance and the occasional visit as well, but you can't blame Lehndorff for finally doing what, from his own emotional pov, he should have done eons earlier - quit a dead end job he doesn't like and end the cycle of "I love you, why don't you love me the way I love you?"
(Though: even if he had ever been one of Heinrich's favourites, he'd never been involved in the political goings on. Heinrich may have thrown money at his guys lilke you wouldn't believe, but the most he ever got them, position wise, were commissions in the army, and not on a command level. Certainly nothing involving secret negotiations, about which he kept mum. I think one key to the hateship of his life was that Fritz really could trust him. Heinrich might have wanted to strangle him a lot of the time, but he'd never ever betrayed his brother's confidence.)
General trivia: Lehndorff the Prussian patriot and Francophile, when he's finally making it to Paris, loves it there, but, he'll have you know, he thinks Sanssouci is every bit as beautiful as Versailles, so there.
Poor Peter III's public image in Prussia goes really down. In 1762/63, he's of course wonderful, a savior of the fatherland and worthy admirer of our noble king who reforms like Fritz does, and whose cruel murder is just shocking and horrible. Fast forward to the 1770s, and Lehndorff - who met Peter's mistress when she was visiting Prussia and also met Poniatowski's brother - jots down gossip about Peter's drunken fits of temper and playing with tin soldiers, and when he's narrating a story he's heard about the Catherine/Poniatowski affair from when she was crown princess, it's with admiration for Catherine for getting away with it despite Peter nearly catching and divorcing her. Notably, Catherine escapes the fate of being called MESSALINA, possibly because Heinrich is a fan and won't hear of it, as opposed to poor Elisabeth (first wife of FW2) and even poorer Caroline of Hannover, the Queen of Denmark, whose lover the reformer Struensee is brought down in the ghastly manner I linked in an earlier post in the early 1770s. Lehndorff definitely believes a version of events where Caroline, age 20, is MESSALINA and clearly planned on killing her husband and ruling for her son.
Otoh, when he's in Stettin he actually visits the previous MESSALINA Elisabeth and softens a bit. I'll have the quote for you. I can understand his partisonship here a bit better because future FW2 is Son of beloved dead AW and to Lehndorff just a nice guy whom he can't understand the King being so harsh on. (When you read the entry where Fritz "absolutely wants to make a soldier out of the Crown Prince" and is "incensed at all the French fashion he wears" , you do have an odd sense of deja vu...) More than I can understand Charlotte, who apropos the big family reunion when Ulrike comes to town inevitably meets her former son-in-law for the first time since her daughter got sent to Küstrin, then Stettin for adultery - and embraces him, telling him she loves him dearly and curses the moment she gave life to such a despicable daughter.
(Anna Amalia, also Charlotte's daughter: and this, dear future readers, is why I count myself lucky as Dowager Duchess - after a brief marriage - in Weimar, ruling the state, and raising my kid Carl August on a general "not like a Hohenzollern" principle.)
So, Lehndorff is in Stettin (which he is an increasing amount in the last years of his diary because it's en route to his country house), when lo, he spots Elisabeth the former Messalina strolling by:
With some pity, I see the former Princess of Prussia, who now lives as Princess Elisabeth banished in Stettin. She has the permission to stroll around as she pleases, which she uses amply. (...) The whole distraction the Princess Elisabeth can take is visiting two or three ladies of Stettin society who can hardly be called charming. No gentleman dares to talk to her, other than the fat Duke of Bevern. She dresses in a strange manner, but as she is beautiful, everything suits her well, wherereas the ladies of Stettin who try to imitate her look absurd - two short skirts so one could confuse them with bad ballet dangers, and the heads full of curls so that they look like Medusa from afar. Whereas when I look at the Princess form afar while she strolls down the promenade, she appears like Diana to me. Her pretty little foot is visible, and her legs well above her ankle; she wears a pink corset which suits her beautifully. (...) My wife pays her respect to Princess Elisabeth and returns delighted by her, singing her praises. She claims the Princess is well content, but I can't help but think she must be unhappy.
You know, Lehndorff, I rather doubt that. You go, Elisabeth.
Heinrich is back from the mysterious Russia trip, which might not have been a pleasure cruise after all!
My long awaited dear Prince has returned in the evening. I run at once to him and am full of joy at seeing him again; as he's as normal and kind as if he had never been near the famous Czarina. At first, there are so many people around him that one gets constantly interrupted and loses the thread of one's conversation, but after a while, I remain alone with ihm and Prince Ferdinand. My greatest joy is to find him healthy and well, having put up with the incredibly long journey without a scratch. (...) At nine, I leave my dear prince, delighted to have seen him and talked to him again. He leaves early the next morning for Potsdam.
(...) Was a list of presents Heinrich received from Catherine and other souvenirs he brought from Russia for his friends. He's mum about why he actually was there, though.
When the Margrave of Schwedt - yes, that one, horrid husband of poor Sophie, father of Ferdinand's wife - finally dies not too long after Heinrich is back from partitioning Poland, Lehndorff, who understably couldn't stand the man ("a terrible husband, a terrible father and a terrible ruler") notes the only nice thing you could say about him is that he timed his death right, because the court is already wearing mourning for the King of Sweden (Ulrike's husband), which means they don't have to go to extra morning cloth expenses for the bloody Margrave.
A word on mourning etiquette: not only does the Prussian court wear mourning for people directly related to the royal family - which both the King of Sweden and the Margrave are as brothers-in-law to Fritz - but they also wear mourning when Isabella (of Parma, Joseph's first wife) dies, which did surprise me. (Ditto when FS dies, of course.) But she's the wife if the future Emperor, and it seems even after having just fought the Seven Years War, at least technically Prussia still considers itself part of the Holy Roman Empire?
Lehndorff: This is the end, my friend - I
1. the death of Lehndorff's fourth born child and just half a year or later his poor first wife. Whom he does care for; he had gotten finally permission by Fritz to travel abroad - remember, Prussian nobles have to ask the King for this - and because she is so sick, he abandons this longed for goal and instead goes with her to a spa in the vain hope she might recover. When she dies, Heinrich proves their relationship isn't one sided as a friendship and is there for comfort, visiting, taking him to Rheinsberg and then on a trip to the Netherlands.
2. the Swedish visits, both of Gustav en route and of Ulrike later. As I guessed, Lehndorff was Ziebura's source for much of her description of these visits from her Heinrich bio, with the notable exceptions of the shared Fritz 'n Heinrich concern about both Gustav and his mother wanting to otherthrow the Swedish constitution; her quotes there were directly from Fritz' letters to Heinrich and vice versa. Heinrich in general tells Lehndorff about political stuff such as the partitioning of Poland only after it has happened - Lehndorff thought Heinrich going first to Sweden to visit his sister (when the later's husband was still alive) and then from there to visit Russia for a long time was a pleasure cruise until news got out, and even then, there are more stories about Russia per se and Catherine (Heinrich definitely was a fan). While being treated to travelogues isn't bad, it's also part of Lehndorff's general frustration, more on a moment. Anyway, while Lehndorff when in Rheinsberg of course notices whenever the fraternal correspondance intensifies to more than one letter per week, he doesn't get told why, he's just worried it means war because it's clear this must be politics.
(Lehndorff marries a second time and has a living child and another dying shortly after birth within the time frame of the journals, but second Mrs. Lehndorff mostly gets general terms of "pleased with my beautiful wife, and thank God my mother in law isn't as awful as the last one), with understandable fretting whenever she's in labor.)
There are also the various Heinrich boyfriends, Kalkreuther, Mara and Kaphengst, and while Lehndorff devotes considerable page time to just how much they suck and how unworthy they are, this also increases his bitterness. He tries to console himself on general "these guys come and go, but I, who met Heinrich in 1746, am still around as a friend in the 1770s, and he's never dumped me!", but only a year later, that line of thinking has rather reversed: why is Heinrich willing to go to such lengths for these guys, spend lots of money on them, gets them what they want, takes them blatantly taking advantage of him and screwing other people while with him - and is "less generous to his friends"? Why does Lehndorff STILL have the same dead end job he had at 19! (Yes, he was 19 when he started as EC's chamberlain.) And he can't even tell himself the King only promotes foreigners anymore, because other Prussians, nobles and non nobles alike, do get promoted.
All of which eventually leads to him resigning his post and withdrawing to his family seat in the countryside with his family as a private citizen. In the previous year, he's found a new bff in the form of the premiere Polish poet and thinker of the age... who also happens to be a Catholic Prince Bishop. This guy, whose bishop seat is in the neighbourhood, and who is now "my wonderful Ermland", "my dearest Ermland", etc. Never let it be said Lehndorff doesn't know how to pick them: the Prince Bishop is both a great mind, evidently charming, and ultimately unavailable (or is he? Wiki doesn't say how serious he took his vows). This is in 1775, and that's how far the printed diaries go, although Ziebura in her book on the trio of unwanted wives quotes a later entry from when Lehndorff and second Mrs. Lehndorff are visiting Berlin and see the widowed EC taking pleasure strolling through the Tiergarten. As far as I remember from the Heinrich bio, they keep in contact via correspondance and the occasional visit as well, but you can't blame Lehndorff for finally doing what, from his own emotional pov, he should have done eons earlier - quit a dead end job he doesn't like and end the cycle of "I love you, why don't you love me the way I love you?"
(Though: even if he had ever been one of Heinrich's favourites, he'd never been involved in the political goings on. Heinrich may have thrown money at his guys lilke you wouldn't believe, but the most he ever got them, position wise, were commissions in the army, and not on a command level. Certainly nothing involving secret negotiations, about which he kept mum. I think one key to the hateship of his life was that Fritz really could trust him. Heinrich might have wanted to strangle him a lot of the time, but he'd never ever betrayed his brother's confidence.)
General trivia: Lehndorff the Prussian patriot and Francophile, when he's finally making it to Paris, loves it there, but, he'll have you know, he thinks Sanssouci is every bit as beautiful as Versailles, so there.
Poor Peter III's public image in Prussia goes really down. In 1762/63, he's of course wonderful, a savior of the fatherland and worthy admirer of our noble king who reforms like Fritz does, and whose cruel murder is just shocking and horrible. Fast forward to the 1770s, and Lehndorff - who met Peter's mistress when she was visiting Prussia and also met Poniatowski's brother - jots down gossip about Peter's drunken fits of temper and playing with tin soldiers, and when he's narrating a story he's heard about the Catherine/Poniatowski affair from when she was crown princess, it's with admiration for Catherine for getting away with it despite Peter nearly catching and divorcing her. Notably, Catherine escapes the fate of being called MESSALINA, possibly because Heinrich is a fan and won't hear of it, as opposed to poor Elisabeth (first wife of FW2) and even poorer Caroline of Hannover, the Queen of Denmark, whose lover the reformer Struensee is brought down in the ghastly manner I linked in an earlier post in the early 1770s. Lehndorff definitely believes a version of events where Caroline, age 20, is MESSALINA and clearly planned on killing her husband and ruling for her son.
Otoh, when he's in Stettin he actually visits the previous MESSALINA Elisabeth and softens a bit. I'll have the quote for you. I can understand his partisonship here a bit better because future FW2 is Son of beloved dead AW and to Lehndorff just a nice guy whom he can't understand the King being so harsh on. (When you read the entry where Fritz "absolutely wants to make a soldier out of the Crown Prince" and is "incensed at all the French fashion he wears" , you do have an odd sense of deja vu...) More than I can understand Charlotte, who apropos the big family reunion when Ulrike comes to town inevitably meets her former son-in-law for the first time since her daughter got sent to Küstrin, then Stettin for adultery - and embraces him, telling him she loves him dearly and curses the moment she gave life to such a despicable daughter.
(Anna Amalia, also Charlotte's daughter: and this, dear future readers, is why I count myself lucky as Dowager Duchess - after a brief marriage - in Weimar, ruling the state, and raising my kid Carl August on a general "not like a Hohenzollern" principle.)
So, Lehndorff is in Stettin (which he is an increasing amount in the last years of his diary because it's en route to his country house), when lo, he spots Elisabeth the former Messalina strolling by:
With some pity, I see the former Princess of Prussia, who now lives as Princess Elisabeth banished in Stettin. She has the permission to stroll around as she pleases, which she uses amply. (...) The whole distraction the Princess Elisabeth can take is visiting two or three ladies of Stettin society who can hardly be called charming. No gentleman dares to talk to her, other than the fat Duke of Bevern. She dresses in a strange manner, but as she is beautiful, everything suits her well, wherereas the ladies of Stettin who try to imitate her look absurd - two short skirts so one could confuse them with bad ballet dangers, and the heads full of curls so that they look like Medusa from afar. Whereas when I look at the Princess form afar while she strolls down the promenade, she appears like Diana to me. Her pretty little foot is visible, and her legs well above her ankle; she wears a pink corset which suits her beautifully. (...) My wife pays her respect to Princess Elisabeth and returns delighted by her, singing her praises. She claims the Princess is well content, but I can't help but think she must be unhappy.
You know, Lehndorff, I rather doubt that. You go, Elisabeth.
Heinrich is back from the mysterious Russia trip, which might not have been a pleasure cruise after all!
My long awaited dear Prince has returned in the evening. I run at once to him and am full of joy at seeing him again; as he's as normal and kind as if he had never been near the famous Czarina. At first, there are so many people around him that one gets constantly interrupted and loses the thread of one's conversation, but after a while, I remain alone with ihm and Prince Ferdinand. My greatest joy is to find him healthy and well, having put up with the incredibly long journey without a scratch. (...) At nine, I leave my dear prince, delighted to have seen him and talked to him again. He leaves early the next morning for Potsdam.
(...) Was a list of presents Heinrich received from Catherine and other souvenirs he brought from Russia for his friends. He's mum about why he actually was there, though.
When the Margrave of Schwedt - yes, that one, horrid husband of poor Sophie, father of Ferdinand's wife - finally dies not too long after Heinrich is back from partitioning Poland, Lehndorff, who understably couldn't stand the man ("a terrible husband, a terrible father and a terrible ruler") notes the only nice thing you could say about him is that he timed his death right, because the court is already wearing mourning for the King of Sweden (Ulrike's husband), which means they don't have to go to extra morning cloth expenses for the bloody Margrave.
A word on mourning etiquette: not only does the Prussian court wear mourning for people directly related to the royal family - which both the King of Sweden and the Margrave are as brothers-in-law to Fritz - but they also wear mourning when Isabella (of Parma, Joseph's first wife) dies, which did surprise me. (Ditto when FS dies, of course.) But she's the wife if the future Emperor, and it seems even after having just fought the Seven Years War, at least technically Prussia still considers itself part of the Holy Roman Empire?