Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:

We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: Peter Keith

[mildred_of_midgard]

Okay, so I have to share this hysterical piece of sensationalist gossip. While looking through Thiébault on the MT marriage AU (which I never did find), I ran into this.

It's a footnote that the editor of our edition says the editor of the third edition inserted. Our editor says he's reproducing it without comment, since he has no idea what third editor's sources or documents may be.

This is because practically every word is a lie!

Behold the tabloids in their full glory:

Peter went to Portugal, but even that wasn't far enough away from the clutches of FW. Only the vast wildernesses of North America were enough.

Me: Lehndorff! You forgot to mention this! I guess it wasn't as important as Ireland or Scotland in the list of places Peter hid from FW.

He embarked happily, full of hopes, in order to throw himself at the feet of his prince.

Me: I'm not sure if he embarked from Portugal, but okay, sure. He might have. And the rest checks out.

"Quelle surprise!" [Actual quote.] Fritz refuses to admit him into his presence!

Me: I mean, it's possible he couldn't get an audience, but from all my documentary evidence, it looks like Fritz just wasn't in Berlin when Peter arrived, and only passed through briefly on his way to Silesia a month later, and I'm sure he was super busy. IF this even happened.

Fritz wasn't about to honor a rebellious subject who had encouraged the heir to the throne to disobey the king!

Me: Okay, that's Lehndorff's speculative version, but you might notice all the evidence against it, like the Katte family, and also the fact that Fritz immediately made Peter a Hofstallmeister, which is not a trivial position.

All of Peter's relatives get involved! Including his uncle, Milord Marischal.

Me: OKAY. FIRST OF ALL. I understand the urge to make all the major players related, but I DON'T THINK SO. Peter's family has been in Pomerania for generations, Marischal was born in Scotland. Sorry!

Also, I'm generously going with the "relatives" meaning of "parents" rather than the "parents" meaning, because Peter's father is in fact dead at this point, at least if you believe Kloosterhuis's sources.

But! Peter has a trump card. Throughout all his long and difficult journeys, he's kept a letter with him.

Me: Skimming ahead before laboriously parsing the French one word at a time. Oh, are they talking about the nice letter Fritz writes Peter in the 1750s, twice? Oh, no. They're not.

It was written before the escape attempt, and it very conveniently reads, "May I be taken for a rascal, if I ever forget the proofs of devotion given to me by my friend Keith."

Me: I am SO SURE 18-yo Fritz wrote that and Peter kept it.

Marischal presents it to Fritz, on behalf of his nephew.

Me: You really need to ramp up the drama to 11 here, don't you?

Fritz receives it coldly. "I never would have believed he'd give this up." Tosses it into the fire.

I'll just let this speak for itself.

Peter, consumed by the humiliation, is carried off by an illness. [ETA: I'm not braining well enough to come up with a good English equivalent of "maladie de langueur", but it's clear that the illness was directly caused by the humiliation. Fatal enervation? Something like that. Anyway. Died of heartbreak!]

Me: There's a lot of that going around! December 1756, Peter; January 1758, Fredersdorf; June 1758, AW.

Fritz: I can kill you with my brain displeasure.

No sooner is the victim consumed (literally "immolee"), than the royal displeasure lifts! The widow gets a high-ranking position with the queen, the son gets to be ambassador to Turin.

Me: Well, both those things are true, but they were prefaced by a LOT OF favor to Peter that you're just totally neglecting here.

Son gives up ambition, becomes interested in the arts and literature and charity.

Me: Could be, but nothing about your account so far inspires confidence.

Seriously, this is the equivalent of Voltaire's: "And then her father tried to throw her out the window, and she showed ME the mark on her breast!"

It was so awesome and hilarious, though. At first I thought we had more data on Peter, and then I read it, and I was like, "...I can see why people think Thiébault is so unreliable." And then I realized it wasn't even Thiébault. But I had to share it.