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Frederick the Great discussion post 9
...I leave you guys alone for one weekend and it's time for a new Fritz post, lol!
I'm gonna reply to the previous post comments but I guess new letter-reading, etc. should go in this one :)
Frederick the Great links
I'm gonna reply to the previous post comments but I guess new letter-reading, etc. should go in this one :)
Frederick the Great links
Re: Tangentially...
Also, don't forget he'd make his unwillingness and lack of enthusiasm for the marriage very clear even after giving in, and the sheer awfulness of Küstrin plus preceding almost death certainly worked for her as an excuse. (With Wilhelmine, she'd convinced herself that if W had held out just a while longer, then FW would have given in, and W's life hadn't been at stake in the same way.) But yes, favorite son. And gender different treatment anyway. Fritz wasn't supposed to live the life SD should have had via marriage, Fritz was supposed to be a Wonderful King all of Europe was in awe of, and on this, he would certainly deliver.
Like I said elsehwere, I've come across exactly one remark by Fritz in the 1730s letters to Wilhelmine about SD being in a bad mood in tendem with FW and that if one made one happy, the other wasn't. Otherwise, nothing to indicate she ever gave him trouble. (It's also noticable that only the 1730s letters show him with some awareness that the SD-Wilhelmine relationship is less than stellar, because he's always giving her mood reports on both parents "The Queen loves you" or "The Queen now feels warm towards you again" as well as whatever the status quo of FW's take on Wilhelmine is. After he himself is on the throne, it's Best of All Possible Mothers all the way.
(To be fair, as stated elsewhere, she probably was her best self through the final one and a half decades of her life. No more FW, adoring oldest son to be proud of, younger sons also adoring her and making her proud, court treats her as the more important queen as per Fritz' orders, EC is so not a threat that that's ever going to change: she's living her ideal life and courtiers like Lehndorff rave about how dignified and gracious she is. It's only when you look at the daughters that there's a slight indication of maybe the SD who earlier was able to hand out "if you don't do as I say, you're dead to me" ultimatums isn't entirely gone, as on the crackier side in those arguments with Amalie where she ends up forbidding her kitchen to supply Amalie with food, and on the more serious side when she immediately goes after Wilhelmine for the MT lunch. )
Incidentally, that's another reason why it's good Fritz never got to see Wilhelmine's manuscript. It does contain the incredibly bitter sentence about SD not loving any of her children, just as much as they were of use to her in her struggle with FW. Of Course this is Wilhelmine writing in the 1740s (when she's in the outs with her mother again) about her mother in the early 1730s (remembering all those arguments and rants); it might be just as exaggarated as her trying to convince herself that Fritz gradually stopped loving her through the 30s and post Ascension to the throne had completed cutting himself off from her. But if you put it together with the big surviving siblings argument many years later and Amalie's clashes with her mother, you can make a case that SD simply was a different mother to her daughters than she was to her sons, and she was hardly unique in that regard.
How she'd have reacted to the big Fallout if she'd lived through 1757/58, God knows. Presumably she'd have sided with Fritz there, too, but maybe tried to plead for reconciliation?
Re: Tangentially...
Very true. No self-insert effect here. (No, that was Dad's job.)
she probably was her best self through the final one and a half decades of her life.
No doubt. If SD and EC had been able to swap husbands, I think all four of them would have been much happier people (possible gay husband issue aside), and the kids would have been much more traumatized.
Instead, FW forces Fritz to marry FW's ideal wife, and SD does her level best to force Wilhelmine to marry SD's ideal husband, because nobody is allowed to live their best lives here. Hohenzollerns. Hannovers. Sigh.
that's another reason why it's good Fritz never got to see Wilhelmine's manuscript
Fritz having to deal with the cognitive dissonance of Mom being a different mother to him and his one-soul-separate-bodies* sister is absolutely a thing that comes up in my reincarnation AU plotting. He spends a lot of time on it in therapy.
* Possibly a reference to the following quote attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius (though Diogenes was writing some 500 years later and not always good about his sources, that's never stopped anyone from using this quote or bypassing Diogenes and attributing it straight to Aristotle):
To the query "What is a friend?" his [Aristotle's] reply was, "A single soul dwelling in two bodies."
How she'd have reacted to the big Fallout if she'd lived through 1757/58
Chronology reminder for those who would benefit:
June 18, 1757: First major Fritz defeat, forcing the Prussian army to retreat out of Bohemia.
June 28, 1757: SD dies.
July 29, 1757: Fritz and AW fall out over how AW handled his part of the retreat.
Fritz: Possibly not in a good mental state in July of 1757. Possibly should not be allowed to talk to people.
And of course:
June 12, 1758: AW dies.
God knows. Presumably she'd have sided with Fritz there, too, but maybe tried to plead for reconciliation?
I was wondering about that. Have we talked about her relationship with AW? I remember her using the toddler to try to get the deserter's life spared, but oddly not much else.
Re: Tangentially...
Yep. Relatedly, Wilhelmine biographer Uwe Oster thinks that one reason why she dragged out telling Fritz or anyone else why she wanted Marwitz (female) married and preferably gone was that SD (and Charlotte) had kept harping on the "beggar prince" she'd married during that home visit in 32/33, and she herself knew that Bayreuth was a tiny principality, nothing to write home about, but she could tell herself (and told the family during said disastrous visit)that at least she had a husband who loved her and was devoted to her, and that they were happy with each other. (As opposed to, err, most other Hohenzollern marriages, especially Mom's.) That they were happy together. Admitting Margrave/Marwitz was taking that away, so she keeps silent about it and instead insists that Marwitz continues to be her good friend and she's just deserving of a good husband (who happens to be Austrian) and of course that makes it all worse.
(I mean, I don't think Fritz would have been thrilled about a Prussian noble & Austrian marriage in any case, especially during war time, and would have taken offense, but presumably much less so if she's explained about the affair first?)
SD and AW: from I could gather, there's not much data there to say. I mean, what I learned from biographies and later letter references is:
1.) The story where she makes him plead for the deserter. Does involve the threat he'd get spanked with a rod if he doesn't do it, and the person explaining to little AW what "hanged" means when he asks isn't SD, so not great pedagogy there, but okay, a man's life is at stake.
2.) Pöllnitz' description, rendered in Fontane's Oranienburg chapter of the Wanderungen, and also in Ziebura's AW biography, about how after AW had gotten Oranienburg from Fritz and had it ready for reopening (remember, F1 palace shut down for decades during FW's time), he threw a three day party for his mother with all those baroque court masques and ceremonies and big fireworks spelling out her name at the end which FW would have hated and she adored. Biographies mention she enjoyed her time in Oranienburg so much that she kept going there each summer for a while for every year from this time onwards. (Biographies don't say whether AW also had to throw a party this big every year, but I wouldn't be surprised, because according to Lehndorff during the peace years parties and court masques etc. were a thing for the divine trio.
3.) AW's memorandum on how he'd distribute the budget money if he were King which he wrote when trying to make himself useful on economic matters at least since foreign policy was not an option contains the interesting factoid when it comes to budget for the royal family, in that he thinks the reigning Queen should get more money for her household than the Queen Mother. Now, as we know he wasn't any more in love with Louise than Fritz was with EC, but apparantly he did think that something was off there.
4.) When she's dead, AW's (as recorded in letters to Ferdinand) reaction is the same as the one from all the other Hohenzollern sibs - "we no longer have a mother", terrible blow, sadness, etc.". (When Lehndorff catches up with him in January/February 1758, he mentions they talk a bit about the late SD, too.) (Definitely a safer topic than the very much alive Fritz for Lehndorff to raise, I'd think.)
The problem is that from FW, we have all the letters to various tutors and stewards on how to raise the kid, we have little AW's letters to him (as we have little Wilhelmine's and Fritz'), and we have anecdotes from observers like the Pastor Freilinghausen who reports the "pleading for deserter" story or the envoys who mostly focus on FW (not least because all that indulgent cuddling and joking is such a contrast to you know what). If there are comparative letters from SD to the tutors, or from young AW to SD, then either they weren't archived or if they were the biographers haven't used them. You can only speculate based on what isn't there. For example, how come it takes older brother Fritz in the later 1730s to notice young AW is severely behind in his education and to encourage him that books are cool? I mean, it's obvious why FW doesn't mind, as long as AW likes playing with toy canons as a small child and succeeds in all the drilling he gets as a Hohenzollern prince later on, FW is happy and on the contrary thrilled that there's a son he doesn't have to worry about secretly getting himself educated in ways he doesn't approve of.
But the thing is, Ziebura notes that before he starts corresponding with Big Bro, it's notable AW's French vocabulary and spelling is way less certain than that of his siblings at a comparable age. (He then catches the improve yourself educationally bug, and works on it; it's not that he's more stupid than the rest, it's that his tutor, who probably was scared as hell of FW and had the example of Fritz' tutors in mind, didn't try to push his student to any kind of learning.) And that is something that SD should have noted and objected to, as a matter of pride as much as because of affection, what with French as the international court language and language of all "refined" people. (Later, she is down on her Braunschweig daughters in law precisely because they're not educated enough.)
Now perhaps she was simply worn out from the Fritz and Wilhelmine related battles with FW. But if Fritz via a long distance relationship manages to inspire his younger brother to grab a book or two and improve on his French letter writing by, well, letter writing, you'd think SD could have managed at closer range. So it's possible she basically was relieved here was one child who didn't cause any argument with her husband and made him happy, but it didn't make her feel close to the child in question, especially since while FW was alive she seems to have developed a siege mentality along with "you can only love one of us". (And AW definitely loved Dad back, because why wouldn't he?)
There is, of course, also the way all the boys were educated to consider. The girls remained with her longer, but the boys starting with age 4 got their own household, at by the time they are 12 were treated as junior members of the army complete with drills. So of course we have far more data on how the boys interacted with their father and/or each other. And all four never said a critical word about her and come across as venerating her all their lives. (Remember, when Heinrich during the last years of his life moves into Wusterhausen, he puts up a portrait of SD along with a portrait of AW in his bedroom.) So again, it's equally possible that SD was very fond of AW, and we just are lacking lost letters etc. to back that up in quotes.