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Frederick the Great, discussion post 6
...I think we need another one (seriously, you guys, this is THE BEST) and I'd better make it now before I disappear into the wilds of music performance.
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
The Keiths
I continue to be deeply interested in who takes whose side in the great "Who was ungrateful: Fritz or Peter Keith?" debate. This is the second contemporary who not only takes Keith's side, but says everyone else did too. It seems to be later historians who are all pro-Fritz who think Keith overrated what he deserved
because Fritz can do no wrong.Curiously, this seems to be almost identical to the anecdote that Hanway gives in his travel memoirs, only he dates it to August 15, 1750. Hanway's memoirs were published in 1753, so it's not like he's looking back at the end of his life and misdating things, like Wilhelmine did. Did Fritz just periodically give Keith a lump some of money and a nice letter, which made everyone at court happy? Autumn is bonus time?
Oh, wow. Lehndorf records Keith's death (of course, does not tell me how he dies, which I really want to know; since he doesn't say anything, I'm going to assume an unremarkable illness), and--according to Google Translate--says that the reason Fritz was so ungenerous was that as an adult, he disapproved of Keith encouraging his youthful indiscretions. I...seriously hope that's not the case. Admittedly, I've seen this claim before: that old Fritz thought young Fritz had no right to attempt to escape. I'm holding out hope until I see it from the horse's mouth. Though Fritz's Stockholm Syndrome was pretty strong, so it's far from impossible. Ugh.
Anyway, while I'm here, it has come to my attention that the plethora of Keiths is confusing to people who are not just me. So here is me sorting them out.
There are five Keiths in Fritz's life! Only four are important, thank goodness. And those are two pairs of brothers.
Brotherly pair one: Peter and Robert. They are Pomeranian Keiths. Of Scottish extraction, hence the name, but they've been living in Pomerania for generations now. Nobility, but without much property by this point.
Peter's story we know. Page to FW, bf to 16-yo Fritz, sent away to Wesel near the Dutch border after his affair with Fritz was discovered, implicated in the escape attempt, the only one of the trio to make it safely out of Prussia though hanged in effigy, ten years in exile before being recalled by Fritz. Infamously not happy with his reception on return. Married a woman of a Prussian noble family, no children that I can find. Died age 45 at the start of the Seven Years' War.
Younger brother Robert: page to the King, betrays the escape attempt to FW, plea bargains, gets sent in disgrace to an infantry regiment (the same one his brother just escaped from?), disappears from the pages of history. I don't have a birth date for him, but Peter's only 19 and Robert younger, so 18 at most. Perhaps younger if he's still a page, aka high school age. Obviously the consequences of this betrayal were terrible, but he was young, and he saved his own head from these consequences, and it must have been absolutely *terrifying* being caught between Fritz and FW, so I forgive him.
Then the other, more fortunate fraternal pair. They're both from Scotland, as in born and raised there. Both Jacobites (supporters of the exiled Stuarts against the Hanovers). Both fought in the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion, were stripped of their estates by the crown after the rebellion failed, and had to flee into exile, along with lots of other Jacobites.
James: The younger. Named James Francis Edward Keith, which tells you his parents were Jacobites too. If you're wondering how this tells you that, it's because James Francis Edward Stuart is the name of the Jacobite pretender to the throne, styling himself James VIII. (He's not "king" yet when our Keith is born, only the son of exiled James VII, but he will be.)
He went to Russia, where he had a more successful experience with a coup, managing to help put Elizabeth on the throne (she who hated Fritz, joined the League of Petticoats with MT and Pompadour against him, and whose death got him out of a tight spot in the Seven Years' War). After a lot of traveling around European courts and armies, he ends up with Fritz. Fritz has a high opinion of him, and is genuinely upset when he dies bravely at the battle of Hochkirch--one of Fritz's worst defeats, and probably the one he most clearly brought on himself.
George: The elder, the heir to the title. Fortunately, he mostly goes by the name Marischal in the histories, as in, George Keith, Earl Marischal. After he, like his brother, travels around Europe a lot after 1715, he ends up becoming BFFs with Fritz. He's one of the true close friends Fritz has late in life, and when he dies (1778), it hits Fritz pretty hard. At that point, he mostly only had pen pals left, and they were dying off too (Voltaire, Maria Antonia.)
Marischal ends up with the signal honor of being BFFs with Fritz for a long time and not ever being estranged from him. They even managed to be friends at very close range: Fritz gave him a plot of land from the Sanssouci park and helped design his house, which you can see today (and which you better believe I intend to next time I'm there).
Marischal does a lot of diplomatic work during his lifetime, for Fritz and for others before him. My favorite anecdote: in 1751, Fritz sends him as diplomat to Versailles. One of Fritz's ministers asks him if maybe sending a Jacobite on such an important international mission might offend Uncle George over in Britain.
Fritz: *genuinely confused* And that's relevant how? Actual quote: "I don't give a fuck."
Fritz: *displaying the diplomatic genius that's getting him into a three-and-a-half front war as we speak*
Fortunately for Fritz, international power politics were more important to England during the Seven Years' War than Fritz's latest attempt to offend every single power in Europe before breakfast.
As a result of later, more successful diplomacy, Marischal gets pardoned by George, and gets permission to return to Scotland, and even get his title and estates back, but amazingly, decides he likes Fritz better and decides to live and die with his BFF. <3
The fifth Keith is also named Robert, but fortunately only gets a cameo appearance as British envoy to Vienna around the time of the War of the Bavarian Succession, so you can't confuse him with the others too much.
And there we have a confusion of Keiths.
Re: The Keiths
re: the passage when Keith (Peter) dies, you may rest easier in that the phrasing in German is in the Conditionalis, i.e. Lehndorff speculates that this is why Fritz got out of touch, he doesn't say it as a statement. I assume the German translator rendered the original French here, since both French and German have the that grammatical possibility.
All this being said? Fritz still could have believed it. Then again, Lehnsdorff isn't a Fritz intimate, he never has a single conversation with him that's not part of a public occasion, and he doesn't say he has this theory from Fritz intimates, either. He probably drew his own conclusion out of the remote royal figure with the spectacular temper outbursts he knows. Who is not cool with people running off with their Lovers to England.
Re: The Keiths
But if you want to know what I think, speaking as a close confidant of Fritz who's had many private conversations with him
in my head... :PFirst, I think it's quite likely Fritz was doing to Peter what he did to almost everyone who wasn't Fredersdorf: signaling to him in the early days that there was no way he was going to let him have any influence, and also *nobody* could expect much money from Fritz, that was just a thing. That doesn't say anything about his attitude toward Keith; who *didn't* feel underpaid at his court? I think Hanway is right here.
But second, I think it's significant that Fritz treated Keith rather like he treated Algarotti, Maupertuis, and the other intellectual civilians he invited to his court: told him to sit tight in Berlin while Fritz went off and conquered a province. Well, nobody took that well, and also I think Fritz dramatically underestimated the five years it was going to take him before he could get started on the reign he and everyone had been expecting. Nobody's going to wait that long.
Interestingly, we know from Wilhelmine that young page Peter was intelligent but not educated, and that he got sent off to a regiment by FW as punishment. Like Keith and Fritz, I expect that Peter didn't want to join the army and was more or less forced into it by FW. My read on Peter is that he wanted to be a civilian intellectual.
Furthermore, Hanways reports that in the early days, Fritz "put [Peter] near the queen mother." That, to me, is a very telling signal of favor. I think Lehndorff is way off the mark here. And at the time Fritz is getting things going at the Academy in Berlin, mid 1740s, he makes Peter an honorary member. The more I learn, the more I think Fritz was really giving Peter the option to become the intellectual he'd wanted to be.
Only Peter was a young man, a Prussian (unlike, say, Algarotti), and a member, unwilling or not, of various armies for the last dozen or so years, and he would have been under a certain amount of pressure, external and probably internal, not to "shirk his duty." So he asked for a commission, and got it. Around this same time, he was also getting engaged, and complaining about his salary.
What I think is that Fritz and Peter got their signals mixed (because nobody can communicate). Fritz told Peter to stay in Berlin as a sign of favor, a rare exception to the "everyone has to support my wars in every way possible" rule. Fritz was probably absolutely planning to help Peter live his dream as an intellectual, the same way he invited Maupertuis to Berlin with promises of the presidency of the academy and then went, "But, wait, hold on one minute while I take care of Silesia; then we'll have money for all these awesome plans I have."
Everyone: *twiddles thumbs for significantly longer than one minute*
Everyone: *gets fed up*
Meanwhile, Peter, former personal page and boyfriend, returning to Prussia, might or might not expect a lot of money, but I think he expected to see Fritz. I think "you stay over here, far far away from me," did *not* feel like a mark of favor. It probably felt like, "I know I haven't seen you in twelve years, but, eh, I didn't really miss you, and also I don't respect your military service record, and also here's a pittance for your personal sacrifices for me." That had to hurt.
So Peter, in the absence of anything that felt like an emotional recognition that he was special, reacted with, "Fine. If you're going to try to pay me for what I went through, there's not enough money in the world for that.
I did it for you.And if you're going to treat me like any other subject, I'm going to act like any other subject, because I've gotten the message here. I'm on my own. So I want a bigger salary and a commission. Like anyone else."And Fritz hears, "You know how you decided to make an exception for me? Screw your exception, I want money. Woe is me, my sacrifices were so great and my reward small." When Fritz has just finished handing Katte's dad a promotion and a title, because he can't actually repay Katte for DYING. Without complaining. With a smile on his face. And I can't imagine Fritz reacting to that with, "Oh, yeah, no, you definitely deserve a bigger reward for all that sacrifice. My bad."
At this point, Keith deciding to get married like a normal 30-yo who had a fling with a guy in his teens whom he hasn't seen or communicated with since, and has totally moved on and built a life of his own that isn't just twiddling his thumbs while waiting on Fritz to have time for him, just sealed the deal of "You're not that special to me either."
And that's why I think, if there was any hope of picking up a teenage friendship again at age 30, it fell afoul of Fritz's wars and Fritz's issues. The sad thing is, between exempting him from the war, keeping him near SD, and later giving him an honorary Academy of Sciences membership and an administrative job if not an intellectual one (which reads to me like, "I know through no fault of your own, you never got that fancy education you wanted, but here I am recognizing and sharing your values and expressing my belief in you"), I think Fritz had good intentions here. But as usual, emotional intelligence fail.
After that, I think we saw a general, albeit temporary, increase in Fritz's chill between his wars. Both Lehndorff and Hanway speak well of Peter's personality, and I suspect once Fritz got the message that he wasn't going to make a power grab, and he wasn't at war, he was more willing to give him both money and responsibilities. Lehndorff tells me Fritz entrusted Peter with Amalia's trip the Abbey of Quedlinburg in 1755, which speaks of a certain amount of trust to me. I read in some secondary source that he was made aide-de-camp to Fritz, which is likely reflects what Lehndorff's report that Fritz invited Peter to camp in 1753. Given that it's autumn, I'm guessing it's camp in Silesia.
A couple
1) Lehndorff reports that Fritz gave Peter Jägerhof as a lifelong dwelling. Do we know where that is?
2) Can you translate "Er hatte ein schönes Gesicht und eine ehrliche Physiognomie, der sein etwas schielender Blick keinen Eintrag tat, wie das sonst beim Schielen oft der Fall ist"? My rough translation is "He had an attractive face and an honest-looking physiognomy, such that you didn't notice his somewhat cross-eyed gaze, unlike in most cases of squints*," but can you correct me where needed? I'd like to have this one right. (I've seen a secondary source reporting that Peter was cross-eyed, and I was wondering what the primary source was. Now we know.)
*Where I'm using the "cross-eyed" meaning of "squint" rather than the more common "voluntarily narrowed eyes" meaning.
Re: The Keiths
Jägerhof: sorry, I have no idea, and googling doesn't help, I can tell you, because it's such a common name. It literally means "Hunter's Lodge" and all the many many German principalities had dozens and dozens of places named after those.
Your interpretation of cross communication between Peter Keith and Fritz sounds absolutely plausible and makes the most sense out of everything.
Re: The Keiths
Woohoo, I translated a German sentence! :D
since Heinrich in his later years, post one blow to an eye at some Seven-Years-War battle, got somewhat crosseyed as well
Ooh, I knew he was a bit cross-eyed/boss-eyed, but didn't know it was due to a war wound. Well, that makes sense.
Jägerhof: sorry, I have no idea, and googling doesn't help, I can tell you, because it's such a common name. It literally means "Hunter's Lodge" and all the many many German principalities had dozens and dozens of places named after those.
That's exactly why I couldn't google it. Oh well.
Your interpretation of cross communication between Peter Keith and Fritz sounds absolutely plausible and makes the most sense out of everything.
It makes sense to me. I'm glad you agree.
Re: The Keiths
This should read, "Like Katte and Fritz." And I meant to add that it's very plausible that Fritz at that age was drawn to people who didn't want to be in the army. So at age 30, his primary memory of Peter might be of someone like Katte, who didn't want to be an officer.
I also meant to include Lehndorff's quote about Keith being "almost completely forgotten" in the beginning. That must have been exactly how it felt, sitting in Berlin without even being summoned to see Fritz. It must have hurt. But that's also how Algarotti and company felt, and it's not because adult Fritz disapproved of their actions as teenagers.
which is likely reflects what Lehndorff's report that Fritz invited Peter to camp in 1753
Well, I apparently conflated two syntactical possibilities for that sentence, wow. And now I can't edit any more. You know what I mean. :P
Re: The Keiths