Now that I'm able to scan entire books that I own, I've been able to start on Asprey's bio. It's very dense on political and military history, light on anything else, and given my concentration issues, I doubt I'll be reading it cover to cover at present, but I did manage to get through the easiest and most interesting to me part: the Crown Prince years.
Overview: I can't recommend it, though I'm glad I have it. As mentioned, it's full of information that might not be of the most interest to you, and it's really bad at sources. He only gives citations when he feels like it, and then he only gives the book, not the page number. Why?????
Worse, reading Katte's execution and knowing virtually all of the primary sources, I think Asprey's not above supplying detail and dialogue to make scenes more vivid, at the cost of accuracy. Unless there's a source I don't know, Katte's execution seems like a novelization. He's mixing and matching sources with no rhyme or reason I can detect, except for tension building, and also, as far as I can tell, making up some of the detail, including dialogue, out of wholecloth. Unless there's a source I'm forgetting or don't know about...so far I would rank him below Blanning and MacDonogh and only slightly above Burgdorf in reliability.
Given that much of the battle depiction is in present tense for vividness, I'm inclined to think some of the military detail has also been supplied by the imagination of the author.
I meant to add the date and overall attitude toward Fritz. It's 1986, and he's generally positive and sympathetic without being overly enthusiastic. I mostly notice Asprey refraining from criticism by either not bringing up facts that don't show Fritz in the best light, or refraining from attacking Fritz for actions that other authors attack him for. (This does sometimes lead to me liking Asprey better! Because sometimes they're just blaming the abuse victim.) Whereas MacDonogh and Blanning's usual MO is, "I should stop and add a 'to be fair,' because I've just spent the last page (MacDonogh) or several pages (Blanning) ripping into him." Blanning has been deeply influenced by the Heinrich school of thought, you can tell, though he does stop and make an effort to be fair.
Asprey stops short of a life-or-death competition with (P)RussianPete. His attitude seems to be, "Yeah, no, Old Fritz did a pretty good job at what he did, I guess. Some shortcomings, nobody's perfect. I'll point out a few, but let's not dwell on them too much."
Also of note: his Crown Prince Fritz is a bisexual playboy, ruining his health with dissipation (but no penis operation!), impregnating Wreech, having sex with mistresses left and right, and taking male lovers and we'll-never-know-but-probably male lovers left and right. Asprey's picture of a Katte portrait (the one that Wikipedia thinks is Catt) is captioned with "Frederick's lover and friend." No "maybe" about Katte for him. Suhm is one example of a maybe.
Also, the 1986 date is interesting, because Asprey doesn't seem to know about Operation Bodysnatch. His very last paragraph on the last page of the book is to state that Fritz was buried in a church that was blown up during WWII. I bet he was in for a surprise in 1991!
Overall, not recommended except as military historical fiction, and take everything below with a grain of salt. But here we go:
On the HRE recognizing F1 as King in Prussia:
Wily old Prince Eugene of Savoy...informed of the treaty, said: “The emperor should hang the minister who gave him such perfidious counsel."
Also Eugene: Boss? Do you think the Pragmatic Sanction might not last five minutes past your death and instead of focusing on signatures, we should focus on an army and a treasury?
Also Eugene: That Crown Prince is one dangerous young man.
Also Eugene, probably: Why does no one listen to me?
Ghost of Eugene, 1740, 1742, 1745, 1748, 1763: TOLD YOU SO!
cahn: those dates are the invasion of Silesia, and years in which MT had to sign a treaty recognizing Prussian control of Silesia.
FW & SD:
When on good terms, they used diminutives — he called her Fiechen, and she called him Wilke.
I knew about Fiechen, but not Wilke.
On currency and measurements. I hope this is accurate, because it's super useful if so:
This was an age of thalers, crowns, ducats, écus, florins, guilders, livres, and pounds. I have in general used the thaler value because it was similar to that of the crown and écu and because it seemed futile to try to calculate today's dollar value, themore so because the thaler was almost exactly the equivalent in silver content to the much later American silver dollar.
The real value of money, however, is what it buys, and here we are on slightly more rewarding ground. In 1730 a loaf of bread cost a few pfennige (ten pfennige = one groschen; thirty groschen = one thaler), a pound of butter cost four groschen, a pound of beef one groschen and six pfennige, two young chickens two groschen and six pfennige, a pound of sugar six groschen, a whole deer three thalers two groschen, and a wild boar four thalers. A wispel of rye, twenty -four bushels, cost twenty -two thalers, a good riding horse two hundred fifty to three hundred thalers ormore, a cavalry horse from forty to eighty thalers, an artillery horse around sixty thalers. A collected set of Plutarch's Lives (ten volumes) cost ten thalers. So when a regimental commander bought a tall recruit for a thousand thalers, or when King Frederick gave a departing ambassador two thousand thalers, we are talking of a lot of bread, butter, beef, pigs, chickens, deer, and wine (and volumes of Plutarch).
Measures, weights, and distances presented a further problem because this was an age of wispels, roggens, quintals, scheffels, puds, centners, füsse, rute, long German miles, French leagues, and toises. I have converted these into bushels, pounds, American miles, and so on.
Completely contradicting Blanning's "couldn't count to ten at the age of 10," which I side-eyed the moment I saw it:
At the age of eight, Frederick William kept a personal account of expenditures. (“ So young and such a miser!" his mother complained .)
I've seen that quote a lot, but not with an age. I have no idea if the age is accurate, of course. But Blanning's "couldn't count to ten" sounds a great deal like Voltaire's, I mean some anonymous guy's, 1752 pamphlet in which AW couldn't read or write at all until Fritz became king. As opposed to the more accurate "was lagging behind."
First suggestion I've seen of FW having a coronation:
His father had spent five million thalers on his own prolonged coronation; Frederick William spent twenty- five hundred thalers and couldn't wait for it to end.
I'm taking this with as much confidence as I'm taking Blanning's reports of FW having a coronation: these were cheap homage ceremonies in Königsberg that took the place of coronations, and biographers are being sloppy.
More plagiarism, Fritz?
Frederick William frequently pointed out that he was a mere mortal, “the first sergeant" of the kingdom.
FW anecdotes:
1) He had a pathological hatred of idleness. On occasion he would grab a passing woman and harshly order her home, where she should be working ; he went so far as to publish a ukase that forced all Berlin market women to spin or weave in idle moments.
2) In all dealings his motto was ein Plus machen (Show a profit). He sold favors with the fervor of a corrupt cardinal, the money going into the army recruiting chest. No official could authorize cash expenditures without the king 's personal approval. He normally turned down such requests, sometimes in rude verse form:
I cannot grant your request, I have a hundred thousand people to support. I cannot shit money, Frederick William, King in Prussia
3) the famed Tabaks-Kollegium, or Tabagie, an institution begun by his father during a plague epidemic on the theory that tobacco smoke would ward off the fatal disease
I mean, if you smoke enough to suffocate any fleas that come near you, maybe?
Fritz may have gotten his "We were totally raised like private citizens!" partly from Dad's discourse:
Believing that children should be rarely seen and almost never heard, he insisted that his own be raised in bürgerlich, or middle-class, style, and not have their heads filled with royal affectations.
Okay, so I've seen claims that Fritz started playing the flute as a kid (somewhere in the 5-10 range), and claims that he started with Quantz, in his mid teens.
Asprey says that somewhere in volume 1 of Förster (because he doesn't believe in page numbers), is FW complaining about Fritz being a flute player at a young age, maybe 7-10. But because he doesn't give a page number, who knows. It could be 15-yo Fritz!
Poor bb!Fritz:
Count Friedrich Heinrich von Seckendorff, described Frederick William's own demanding schedule to his court and added that Crown Prince Frederick, despite his thirteen years, "had to follow this same regimen, and even though the king loves him dearly, he so tires him with early rising and constant activity through the day that he, despite his youth, looks old and stiff and walks as if he already were a veteran of numerous military campaigns."
And this from when he was 16:
Dubourgay reported still another quarrel, when the king grabbed his son by the throat, and servants had to separate them. The incident made Frederick ill, but his father insisted on his hunting the next day, "and would not permit him, though in this severe cold weather, to be as warmly clad as the meanest of his Peasants is. God be praised, it did His Royal Highness no harm."
You mean physically, Dubourgay. :(
Seriously, reliability concerns notwithstanding, I would read Asprey just for the similes. He's the one I reported saying that FW would "storm into the nursery or have the child brought to him to examine as if he were some sort of backward worm."
Well, here he is making me snicker again:
In an attempt to change Empire rules, he had some years earlier drawn up a document, called the Pragmatic Sanction, that would guarantee the Imperial succession to his daughter, and for years his emissaries had been hawking the document about Europe like demented insurance salesmen.
"Guarantee the Imperial succession to his daughter": not quite. He's guaranteeing the hereditary Austro-Hungarian lands to her, and it's her future husband who's (eventually) supposed to be elected HRE.
So I knew that 14-yo Fritz and French envoy Rothenburg used a go-between to avoid drawing attention to the fact that they were basically conspiring to overthrow FW. I had not realized that this go-between was Knyphausen, who, among many other more important things, is the father of Peter Keith's future wife. (He will die in 1731, before he can become Peter's father-in-law.)
I also knew French envoy Rothenburg had been seeking his recall to Paris because he hated FW so much and eventually got it, but what I didn't realize was:
Rothenburg had been recalled that summer and was not replaced by another ambassador.
My immediate reaction was, what about Sauveterre? La Chétardie? But French Wikipedia says they showed up in 1730 and '32, respectively. If Rothenburg was recalled in 1728, and if that list is complete, it looks like for a while France didn't have an official envoy to Prussia. I didn't realize that was a thing!
*updates Rothenburg WIP accordingly*
Poor Gundling, abused even by posterity:
Seckendorff...shortly afterward obtained an Imperial medal set with diamonds for the court jester Jakob Gundling.
When the king was hunting, however, Frederick became most unruly, tormenting the drunken old jester, Gundling
See, this is why I had no idea! MacDonogh and Asprey both refer to Gundling as the court jester. Ugh.
Also, I think you were right, selenak, about Fritz seeing him as someone associated with Dad and worthy of being despised, rather than fellow abuse victim.
I cannot grant your request, I have a hundred thousand people to support. I cannot shit money, Frederick William, King in Prussia
Does this rhyme in the original -- is that what he means by "rude verse"? If so I willingly concede this is the first actually endearing story I have heard about FW (though still pretty low down on the endearing scale). It made me laugh, anyway.
Why would he provide the original? Or a citation where I could look up the original? This is *Asprey* we're talking about. (He does provide the book, but I am not reading the entire book just because he doesn't believe in page numbers.)
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Asprey 1
Overview: I can't recommend it, though I'm glad I have it. As mentioned, it's full of information that might not be of the most interest to you, and it's really bad at sources. He only gives citations when he feels like it, and then he only gives the book, not the page number. Why?????
Worse, reading Katte's execution and knowing virtually all of the primary sources, I think Asprey's not above supplying detail and dialogue to make scenes more vivid, at the cost of accuracy. Unless there's a source I don't know, Katte's execution seems like a novelization. He's mixing and matching sources with no rhyme or reason I can detect, except for tension building, and also, as far as I can tell, making up some of the detail, including dialogue, out of wholecloth. Unless there's a source I'm forgetting or don't know about...so far I would rank him below Blanning and MacDonogh and only slightly above Burgdorf in reliability.
Given that much of the battle depiction is in present tense for vividness, I'm inclined to think some of the military detail has also been supplied by the imagination of the author.
I meant to add the date and overall attitude toward Fritz. It's 1986, and he's generally positive and sympathetic without being overly enthusiastic. I mostly notice Asprey refraining from criticism by either not bringing up facts that don't show Fritz in the best light, or refraining from attacking Fritz for actions that other authors attack him for. (This does sometimes lead to me liking Asprey better! Because sometimes they're just blaming the abuse victim.) Whereas MacDonogh and Blanning's usual MO is, "I should stop and add a 'to be fair,' because I've just spent the last page (MacDonogh) or several pages (Blanning) ripping into him." Blanning has been deeply influenced by the Heinrich school of thought, you can tell, though he does stop and make an effort to be fair.
Asprey stops short of a life-or-death competition with (P)RussianPete. His attitude seems to be, "Yeah, no, Old Fritz did a pretty good job at what he did, I guess. Some shortcomings, nobody's perfect. I'll point out a few, but let's not dwell on them too much."
Also of note: his Crown Prince Fritz is a bisexual playboy, ruining his health with dissipation (but no penis operation!), impregnating Wreech, having sex with mistresses left and right, and taking male lovers and we'll-never-know-but-probably male lovers left and right. Asprey's picture of a Katte portrait (the one that Wikipedia thinks is Catt) is captioned with "Frederick's lover and friend." No "maybe" about Katte for him. Suhm is one example of a maybe.
Also, the 1986 date is interesting, because Asprey doesn't seem to know about Operation Bodysnatch. His very last paragraph on the last page of the book is to state that Fritz was buried in a church that was blown up during WWII. I bet he was in for a surprise in 1991!
Overall, not recommended except as military historical fiction, and take everything below with a grain of salt. But here we go:
On the HRE recognizing F1 as King in Prussia:
Wily old Prince Eugene of Savoy...informed of the treaty, said: “The emperor should hang the minister who gave him such perfidious counsel."
Also Eugene: Boss? Do you think the Pragmatic Sanction might not last five minutes past your death and instead of focusing on signatures, we should focus on an army and a treasury?
Also Eugene: That Crown Prince is one dangerous young man.
Also Eugene, probably: Why does no one listen to me?
Ghost of Eugene, 1740, 1742, 1745, 1748, 1763: TOLD YOU SO!
FW & SD:
When on good terms, they used diminutives — he called her Fiechen, and she called him Wilke.
I knew about Fiechen, but not Wilke.
On currency and measurements. I hope this is accurate, because it's super useful if so:
This was an age of thalers, crowns, ducats, écus, florins, guilders, livres, and pounds. I have in general used the thaler value because it was similar to that of the crown and écu and because it seemed futile to try to calculate today's dollar value, themore so because the thaler was almost exactly the equivalent in silver content to the much later American silver dollar.
The real value of money, however, is what it buys, and here we are on slightly more rewarding ground. In 1730 a loaf of bread cost a few pfennige (ten pfennige = one groschen; thirty groschen = one thaler), a pound of butter cost four groschen, a pound of beef one groschen and six pfennige, two young chickens two groschen and six pfennige, a pound of sugar six groschen, a whole deer three thalers two groschen, and a wild boar four thalers. A wispel of rye, twenty -four bushels, cost twenty -two thalers, a good riding horse two hundred fifty to three hundred thalers ormore, a cavalry horse from forty to eighty thalers, an artillery horse around sixty thalers. A collected set of Plutarch's Lives (ten volumes) cost ten thalers. So when a regimental commander bought a tall recruit for a thousand thalers, or when King Frederick gave a departing ambassador two thousand thalers, we are talking of a lot of bread, butter, beef, pigs, chickens, deer, and wine (and volumes of Plutarch).
Measures, weights, and distances presented a further problem because this was an age of wispels, roggens, quintals, scheffels, puds, centners, füsse, rute, long German miles, French leagues, and toises. I have converted these into bushels, pounds, American miles, and so on.
Completely contradicting Blanning's "couldn't count to ten at the age of 10," which I side-eyed the moment I saw it:
At the age of eight, Frederick William kept a personal account of expenditures. (“ So young and such a miser!" his mother complained .)
I've seen that quote a lot, but not with an age. I have no idea if the age is accurate, of course. But Blanning's "couldn't count to ten" sounds a great deal like Voltaire's, I mean some anonymous guy's, 1752 pamphlet in which AW couldn't read or write at all until Fritz became king. As opposed to the more accurate "was lagging behind."
First suggestion I've seen of FW having a coronation:
His father had spent five million thalers on his own prolonged coronation; Frederick William spent twenty- five hundred thalers and couldn't wait for it to end.
I'm taking this with as much confidence as I'm taking Blanning's reports of FW having a coronation: these were cheap homage ceremonies in Königsberg that took the place of coronations, and biographers are being sloppy.
More plagiarism, Fritz?
Frederick William frequently pointed out that he was a mere mortal, “the first sergeant" of the kingdom.
FW anecdotes:
1) He had a pathological hatred of idleness. On occasion he would grab a passing woman and harshly order her home, where she should be working ; he went so far as to publish a ukase that forced all Berlin market women to spin or weave in idle moments.
2) In all dealings his motto was ein Plus machen (Show a profit). He sold favors with the fervor of a corrupt cardinal, the money going into the army recruiting chest. No official could authorize cash expenditures without the king 's personal approval. He normally turned down such requests, sometimes in rude verse form:
I cannot grant your request,
I have a hundred thousand people to support.
I cannot shit money,
Frederick William, King in Prussia
3) the famed Tabaks-Kollegium, or Tabagie, an institution begun by his father during a plague epidemic on the theory that tobacco smoke would ward off the fatal disease
I mean, if you smoke enough to suffocate any fleas that come near you, maybe?
Fritz may have gotten his "We were totally raised like private citizens!" partly from Dad's discourse:
Believing that children should be rarely seen and almost never heard, he insisted that his own be raised in bürgerlich, or middle-class, style, and not have their heads filled with royal affectations.
Okay, so I've seen claims that Fritz started playing the flute as a kid (somewhere in the 5-10 range), and claims that he started with Quantz, in his mid teens.
Asprey says that somewhere in volume 1 of Förster (because he doesn't believe in page numbers), is FW complaining about Fritz being a flute player at a young age, maybe 7-10. But because he doesn't give a page number, who knows. It could be 15-yo Fritz!
Poor bb!Fritz:
Count Friedrich Heinrich von Seckendorff, described Frederick William's own demanding schedule to his court and added that Crown Prince Frederick, despite his thirteen years, "had to follow this same regimen, and even though the king loves him dearly, he so tires him with early rising and constant activity through the day that he, despite his youth, looks old and stiff and walks as if he already were a veteran of numerous military campaigns."
And this from when he was 16:
Dubourgay reported still another quarrel, when the king grabbed his son by the throat, and servants had to separate them. The incident made Frederick ill, but his father insisted on his hunting the next day, "and would not permit him, though in this severe cold weather, to be as warmly clad as the meanest of his Peasants is. God be praised, it did His Royal Highness no harm."
You mean physically, Dubourgay. :(
Seriously, reliability concerns notwithstanding, I would read Asprey just for the similes. He's the one I reported saying that FW would "storm into the nursery or have the child brought to him to examine as if he were some sort of backward worm."
Well, here he is making me snicker again:
In an attempt to change Empire rules, he had some years earlier drawn up a document, called the Pragmatic Sanction, that would guarantee the Imperial succession to his daughter, and for years his emissaries had been hawking the document about Europe like demented insurance salesmen.
"Guarantee the Imperial succession to his daughter": not quite. He's guaranteeing the hereditary Austro-Hungarian lands to her, and it's her future husband who's (eventually) supposed to be elected HRE.
So I knew that 14-yo Fritz and French envoy Rothenburg used a go-between to avoid drawing attention to the fact that they were basically conspiring to overthrow FW. I had not realized that this go-between was Knyphausen, who, among many other more important things, is the father of Peter Keith's future wife. (He will die in 1731, before he can become Peter's father-in-law.)
I also knew French envoy Rothenburg had been seeking his recall to Paris because he hated FW so much and eventually got it, but what I didn't realize was:
Rothenburg had been recalled that summer and was not replaced by another ambassador.
My immediate reaction was, what about Sauveterre? La Chétardie? But French Wikipedia says they showed up in 1730 and '32, respectively. If Rothenburg was recalled in 1728, and if that list is complete, it looks like for a while France didn't have an official envoy to Prussia. I didn't realize that was a thing!
*updates Rothenburg WIP accordingly*
Poor Gundling, abused even by posterity:
Seckendorff...shortly afterward obtained an Imperial medal set with diamonds for the court jester Jakob Gundling.
When the king was hunting, however, Frederick became most unruly, tormenting the drunken old jester, Gundling
See, this is why I had no idea! MacDonogh and Asprey both refer to Gundling as the court jester. Ugh.
Also, I think you were right,
Re: Asprey 1
I have a hundred thousand people to support.
I cannot shit money,
Frederick William, King in Prussia
Does this rhyme in the original -- is that what he means by "rude verse"? If so I willingly concede this is the first actually endearing story I have heard about FW (though still pretty low down on the endearing scale). It made me laugh, anyway.
Re: Asprey 1
It did make me laugh too.