Behind on comments, working on manual cleanup, but just wanted to ask our royal reader a quick question: can you check out Lehndorff, volume 2, page 420, and tell me whether Frau von Keith has a son of her own, or whether that's referring to someone else's son, like the frau in the previous sentence?
Because if so, that's the first indication of Peter Keith not having a childless marriage that I've seen. It surprises me all the more because when Peter dies, Lehndorff doesn't mention any offspring (that I can see from glancing at the German), and only refers to Jägerhof as the place where his widow lives.
(In between political correspondence cleanup, working on a post about the Keiths, emphasis on Peter, for Rheinsberg, and I did a more thorough job of searching through Lehndorff this time. Found some new tidbits that I will share soon.)
Also, when Lehndorff refers to the "Königin" when SD is still alive, he's still referring the actual queen and his boss, right, not the queen mother who outranks EC because Fritz?
Bonus points if you can answer a trickier question: when Lehndorff reports deaths during the Seven Years' War, does he somehow signal a difference between people who died military deaths off somewhere in Saxony or Silesia or the like, and people who died civilian deaths at home in Berlin? Because my default assumption would be that Lt. Col. Keith is at war during the Seven Years' War, but one, Lehndorff seems to get the news very quickly, and two, he doesn't seem to signal at all that Peter died in war, and three, he seems far more interested in Peter's academy tenure and the fact that the academy is going to give some kind of recognition than in any military service. Now this may reflect the fact that Lehndorff is a civilian in Berlin and is much more concerned with local events, but still I wonder: did Peter maybe die at home and not at war? (His death is reported in vol. 1, p. 312., if you want to read that account and see if you can glean any clues about location of death.)
Peter Keith
Because if so, that's the first indication of Peter Keith not having a childless marriage that I've seen. It surprises me all the more because when Peter dies, Lehndorff doesn't mention any offspring (that I can see from glancing at the German), and only refers to Jägerhof as the place where his widow lives.
(In between political correspondence cleanup, working on a post about the Keiths, emphasis on Peter, for Rheinsberg, and I did a more thorough job of searching through Lehndorff this time. Found some new tidbits that I will share soon.)
Also, when Lehndorff refers to the "Königin" when SD is still alive, he's still referring the actual queen and his boss, right, not the queen mother who outranks EC because Fritz?
Bonus points if you can answer a trickier question: when Lehndorff reports deaths during the Seven Years' War, does he somehow signal a difference between people who died military deaths off somewhere in Saxony or Silesia or the like, and people who died civilian deaths at home in Berlin? Because my default assumption would be that Lt. Col. Keith is at war during the Seven Years' War, but one, Lehndorff seems to get the news very quickly, and two, he doesn't seem to signal at all that Peter died in war, and three, he seems far more interested in Peter's academy tenure and the fact that the academy is going to give some kind of recognition than in any military service. Now this may reflect the fact that Lehndorff is a civilian in Berlin and is much more concerned with local events, but still I wonder: did Peter maybe die at home and not at war? (His death is reported in vol. 1, p. 312., if you want to read that account and see if you can glean any clues about location of death.)