cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 6

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...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

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Anyway, I'm assuming motherless child Hans Herrman was raised either by staff and/or relations until the remarriage - given that Wilhelmine and MT were closer to their governesses than their mothers, and Fritz had Keyserlinkg, it would be of interest who did the raising in Katte's case.

Watch me go!

Okay, I have no real data. But Wikipedia, giving no source, says that after his mother died, he went to live with relatives in Doorth near Deventer, and also spent time in Berlin and Wust.

Well, Doorth (henceforth Dorth, as all my other sources give it) and Deventer are in the Netherlands, and we know Hans Hermann went to university in Utrecht. (I had been wondering why Utrecht.)

So that seems reasonable. So then I went looking for which relatives might have been living in Dorth at the time.

I found one uncle on his mother's side, Karl Sophronius Philipp van Flodrop-Wartensleben (1680-1751), who died at Dorth bei Deventer. He was married to a Jeannette Marguerite Margarita Huyssen van Kattendijke (1691-1724).

Now assuming I have the right relatives, they might not have been married yet when little Hans Hermann, aged 3 or 4, showed up in probably 1708. Jeannette was only 16, and their first child isn't born until 1710. But they were probably married and having kids by the time Hans Hermann had memories.

Oh, and they have titles like Graf and Gräfin and die in a Schloss, so staff is probably still doing quite a bit of the raising. But Hans Hermann might have been closer to the Wartensleben side, cousins and aunts and uncles, than his Katte relatives, if it's true he spent substantial time in Dorth. And that might account for the "siblings" in the final letter (plus of course the age difference with the younger ones). Did little sister Sophie Henriette, only 1 year old when her mother died, get sent to Dorth as well? Or were they split up? I have no idea.

Anyway, it's good enough for fanfic, if not for scholarship. ;)

Also for fanfic purposes, I'd been wondering how much Dutch he picked up during his university time. If he spent time in Dorth as a kid, he's presumably anywhere from conversational to (near-?)native, depending on the sociolinguistic situation there.

Slowly we start to fill in the blanks...

From:

selenak

You continue to rock at detecting. Re: little Sophie Henriette, by far the most plausible assumption is that she went to the relations as well. Because then Hans Heinrich can dismiss any of his staff who doesn't directly serve him until he remarries, thus saving considerable household expenses. As Prussian noble families are more or less permanently in debt, that's an issue. And seriously, as a military man, he's not at Wust most of the time anyway.

Also: ties between Prussia and the Netherlands were strong ever since the Great Prince Elector, lots of intermarriage from the royal family downwards, Dutch merchants in Prussia, Prussians in the Netherlands etc., Protestants unite, etc., so studying in Utrecht by itself isn't that unusual for a Prussian nobleman. But in context, it furthers the idea of him having spend a part of his childhood in the Netherlands. Mind you: Katte going to the university at all instead of directly to the army also says something about his likes and dislikes.

(None of the Hohenzollern princes of that and for a few more generations got to have a university education, though the later Hannovers did, being primary patrons of the university of Göttingen, which a great many of the British male royals went to in the 19th century. Oh, and Wilhelmine's husband the Margrave, Other Friedrich, went to the university of Geneva, not least because his father was a Calvin Forever! guy but also because Your Mother is an Adulturous Whore I Locked Up, Be Educated Elsewhere!)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Re: little Sophie Henriette, by far the most plausible assumption is that she went to the relations as well.

Right, she went to relations, but did she go to "the" relations? What I was thinking when I said "split up" was that they might have been sent to different relations. That happens sometimes when kids are orphaned. And late Mom had quite a few siblings. Some apparently hadn't even been born yet: Grandpa von Wartensleben married a second time and was still having kids when his kids were having kids, meaning Hans Hermann had aunts and uncles who were younger than he was. Grandpa had 17 kids in all, if the genealogies can be trusted (in one case, the same wife is giving birth in January and July of the same year, and the July kid lives long enough that I kind of doubt he was born that prematurely), ranging from 1678-1710.

I was thinking maybe if younger sister went to a different aunt or uncle, that would explain Hans Hermann's failure to single her out in the letter over the siblings from the second marriage whom he hardly knew, or maybe was just being nice and not wanting to single anyone out, or he was pressed for time. Or maybe they did grow up together and just weren't super close.

But in context, it furthers the idea of him having spend a part of his childhood in the Netherlands.

Agreed.

Mind you: Katte going to the university at all instead of directly to the army also says something about his likes and dislikes.

Indeed, Wilhelmine says he was intended for civil service, and FW directly or indirectly pressured him into the army, and he didn't like it. :/ And apparently there *is* some kind of a letter from Dad to Uncle indicating that even after Katte joined the army, he went to England and kind of just wanted to stay there as a civilian. (Then he's talked/pressured into going back to Prussia, meets Fritz or at least gets to know him better, and falls in love, then Fritz wants to go to England with him, and Katte's like, "That's a terrible idea!"

And the cycle of Prussian subjects wanting to go to England is off to a good start. At least I think Katte was only objecting to the proposed execution and its likelihood of success, not to the idea itself.)