Frederick the Great discussion post 11

[cahn]

In our last installment, our heroes found that Henri de Catt's memoirs, a major source for current biographers of Frederick the Great, are not to be trusted!!

rheinsberg

Comments

Fredersdorf

[selenak]

Okay, with Darth Real Life in hot pursuit - though I will answer all the other comments, I swear - here's my quick assessment of the Burchardt edition of the Fredersdorf letters which Mildred found and uploaded.

1.) This edition has a very humble dedication to the current Czar - Nicholas - dedicating this book which shows the great, the one, the adored and feared as "a friend and a human being". Dedications of books to sovereigns were in fact on their way out about this time - 1833 is just a bit of a decade more before it's revolution time all over Europe again, including Germany - so that marks our editor as an old fashioned kind of guy.

2.) Burchardt, the editor, then gives us a biographical sketch of Fredersdorf. Said sketch starts with a massive departure from everything else we know about Fredersdorf. In this version, he's the son of a respectable merchant from Franconia, who was also trained to be a merchant when "because of his size he fell into the hands of Prussian recruiters who tricked him into changing the pen for the sword".

Now, seriously, this is all rubbish. Firstly, everyone else, including Lehndorff who actually talked with the man, says Fredersdorff hails from Pomerania, and from the back of Pomerania at that. (And from a poor background.) This is an utterly different province from Franconia. Franconia is where I come from, it's in the south of Germany, and back then it was partly owned by small scale princes like the Margrave of Bayreuth, partly by the church (like my hometown, Bamberg), and partly consisting of free imperial cities, like Nuremberg. It wasn't even under Prussian rule when Fredersdorff was born. (Though once Bayreuth & Ansbach fell back to the main Hohenzollern line, it would be, for a while.) It also has an utterly different dialect than Pomerania, which is in the uttermost east of of Germany, and today partly in Poland.

I should maybe also point out the following, in case you're wondering whether Burchardt is confusing something.

Franconia = Franken (in German). A Region in the northern part of Bavaria, i.e. the south of Germany, which still makes it very southern from Prussia's pov.

Frankfurt am Main = the more famous Frankfurt. Where Goethe was from, where Emperors until the end of the HRE got crowned, where the Frankfurt Book Fair, world's greatest even today, takes place. Used to be a free imperial city, which didn't stop Fritz from having Voltaire and his niece arrested there. Is located in the southern-midwest province of Hesse.

Frankfurt an der Oder = the less famous Frankfurt. Is actually in the very east of Germany. That's where Fritz got serenaded by students, and where he and Fredersdorf supposedly met.

If Burchardt were a foreigner, I'd assume he just confused Frankfurt an der Oder with Franken, but as a German, he shouldn't be able to make that mistake.

As for Fredersdorf's dad being a respectable merchant, that's the first I hear of it and sounds far less plausible than everyone else so far saying he was a musician and that was where Fredesdorf got his musical training pre army. The only thing sounding remotely plausible about this is that he got nabbed by Prussian recruiters for his size. But given the nonsense in the rest of the opening statement, I'm sceptical.

Which is a shame, because on the next page, our editor says Fredersdorf consoled himself about his new unwanted career in the army by playing the flute and thus became a virtuoso, and then the "governor" - Gouverneur, he uses this word - of Küstrin concluded he was just the ticket to cheer up the distressed Crown Prince, who after all also had only the flute as his sole consolation. I assume this preface is thus the source for the story "Fredersdorf was picked by the Küstrin staff to cheer up Fritz". No Frankfurt meeting/sighting mentioned.

Burchardt says Fritz soon started to use Fredersdorf to smuggle out and in letters to friends and relations in general and to Wilhelmine specifically. He also, in a footnote to Fredersdorf's self taught musical virtuoso status, says F made it into history as "der liebliche Flötenspieler des Königs" - "the lovely flutist of the King". He does not provide a citation for that one.

Burchardt does share Mildred's theory that alchemy did Fredersdorf in, saying his passion for alchemy was thus that "he sacrificed a good deal of his fortune and even his physical health" to it.

No mention of any firing in disgrace Otoh editor thinks Fredesdorf lived until freaking 1780, and conducted his office as chamberlain of the King even from his sickbed until then, which, what?

Finally: "Since the death of Fredersdorff, this correspondance, with the exception of the letters which the King demanded back after his death, has remained in the possession of the heirs. The editor has been permitted within the lifetime of the recently died owner to read it, and to make copies of the most excellent ones, and after his death to use it as he (the editor) sees fit. This he fulfills a holy obligation in the sense of the nobly departed by putting these letters into print and recommends them to the German public for their attention."

Okay. Now, this is where yours truly having a PhD in German literature comes in handy. If you'll recall, Fredersdorff's widow married the Granddad of Achim von Arnim, who while a writer himself is mostly famous by being the bff of poet Clemens Brentano and husband of Bettina Brentano (she of the Goethe fandom and one of the few female German star writers of the early to mid 19th century). I just checked with wiki, and yes, Achim von Arnim died in 1831 (Bettina would live on until the 1850s), which means that he's probably the "noble deceased" Burchardt is talking about in a book printed in 1833. And I would furtherly speculate that Fredersdorff suddenly being the son of a respectable Franconian merchant instead of a Pomeranian town piper is entirely to the von Arnim family wanting to beef up their sort-of-relations social ancestry.

The letters: are numbered, not dated, and not always in chronological order (thanks, editor), so you get letters complaining about the alchemy stuff before the letter about the Soor raid and the dead/missing dogs/horses. Also, there are just two or so letters from Fredersdorff, whereas 1926! editor included more, presumably more having been found in the Prussian state archives since then. As for the letters themselves, from what I can see via a quick browsing through - will have to reread the 1926 edition to be sure, am working from memory and under time pressure here -, 1926 editor did not leave any out, with the possible exception of letter Number 35, page 44 f., which goes:

I'm sending you a rare elixir which comes from Theophrast Paracelsus and which has worked miracles for me and all who have taken it, do take from this medicine, but don't take any quackery in addition to it, for he who does loses the male power of love for the rest of his life.

"männliche Kräfte der Liebe" can also be translated as "masculine force of love", or "male vigour" - or less literal, more factual (i.e what is meant) as "male potency", of course. I don't recall that letter from the 1926 editiion, though like I said, maybe I missed it a few months ago when I read it. Anyway, a "you don't want to become impotent, do you?" teasing letter like that would argue for a not so platonic relationship, no?

Various

[selenak]

Carrying over replies to comment on the last post:

"Three whores of Europe": you know, I've never seen a direct citation for this one. It gets quoted in every single 20th century biography that I've read, but without the addendum of "as such and such reports". (Same, btw, with MT's "evil man from Potsdam" - that also gets quoted as a saying of hers about Fritz without "see letter x" or "memoirs y" because it's so often used that it's taken for granted. (Meanwhile, the "but does this hero who has won himself such praise etc..." sentence I let her use in the Yuletide story are from a letter to Joseph the Rational fanboy"; *pats self on back for using actual sourced quote*) All this being said, Fritz' subject and contemporary Lehndorff, when the war is going badly for Prussia, does have an entry where he doesn't quote "three whores" but says that maybe the King shouldn't have insulted all the female leaders of Europe.

The letters to Heinrich, to Voltaire and to Wilhelmine have Fritz casting himself as Orpheus, peacefully minding his own business, and MT, Elizabeth & the Marquise de Pompadour as tihe maenads who after him to tear him apart. There's also the famous description "the league of petticoats" which again I don't think I've ever seen being given with a direct citation. Barbara Stollinger quotes a couple of direct MT directed insults and she's good with citation, but my copy of her MT biography is in Munich, and I'm in Bamberg, so I can't look it up.

"Women smelling bad": depressingly, this seems to have been a historic gay men's trope about women? Because Philippe d'Orleans and his favourites used that one, too. Now how anyone could smell anything in Versailles, between all the bodily waste necessitating the court moving every few months and all the perfumes used is beyond me anyway.

More seriously, in a lifetime of hypocrisy, there is little that Fritz was more hypocritical about than money. If you ask me, he's trying to compensate for a deprived childhood. Anyone trying to take money that could be his is a trigger that emotionally puts him back in a place where he has to live without books and music and adequate food.
I think his obsession with good food, what he described as "disorderly cravings, like a pregnant woman," and his apparent inability to keep from bolting it (even when he had no trouble skipping meals or living on tight rations) stems from the same source.

*nods* Agreed. And I think the way he both withheld from and showered his siblings at different times with money also plays into this. (Btw, since McDonogh is wondering: yes, he paid Amalie's debts.) Money isn't just money. Money is power, control and affection. Not always as point blank as as when he sends some and tells Heinrich to get rid of Kaphengst, but the subtext is often there. And of course, he keeps sending food to them, too. (Even to EC in their fruit exchanges.)

But the fact that it remained so deniable, and the fact that he spent that much time denying it, and the fact that people like Heinrich or Algarotti leave us in no doubt about their sexual activity, and the fact that there are so few candidates and he spent relatively little time with them (even Fredersdorf and he are frequently separated after 1740), and the fact that Trenck absolutely would have talked...it kind of makes me think he'd figured out that he liked the idea of sex better than the act.

I mean, his contemporaries seem to have been in little to no doubt in terms of orientation, even those who were not particularly close to him. It's not just Liechtenstein with the Alexander seal and Manteuffel with the "Seckendorff, read up on Hadrian if you want to understand Junior!" tip, but courtiers like Lehndorff who report matter of factly that Glasow's original in with Fritz were his good looks, and also says of Fredersdorf that "a very pretty face aided him and was the beginning of his fortune". But Voltaire's story about morning fooling around with the pages and cavaliers between breakfeast and work aside, I can't recall a contemporary claiming that he/she knew without the shadow of a doubt that Fritz had actually had sex with any of them. (Though correct me if I'm missing good examples, and if Blanning reports otherwise.)

Thièbault making FW the author if the Fritz/MT marriage idea demonstrating he had zilch idea about FW's hardcore Calvinism:

Yup. He also didn't live at a strictly Calvinist court, and Fritz was pretty chill about religion (I mean, he badmouthed Catholics, but we all know he was willing to pretend to be a Protestant for the sake of winning his wars), so why not FW? I mean, if Voltaire can have FW present at the execution...

Quite. I mean, don't get me wrong: if there had been a way for FW to get a Hohenzollern son of his on the throne of the HRE without religious conversion (or, even better, an Archduchess go Protestant), I do think he'd have jumped on it, which was my justification for making him that tiny but key bit more ambitious in the first MT-Fritz encounter. But the Prussian kings being Protestants was really a key part of their image. Remember, as late as the mid 1750s Fritz asks Wihelmine to make a stop at Geneva on her way back from Italy to squash the rumors that she and the Margrave were converting to Catholicism (that's when she promises to "make my salamaleikums"). Allowing Jesuits in his kingdom was one thing, but having members of his family go Catholic would have been damaging Fritz' standing as the hero of the Protestant faith and he knew it. (Especially since that business wiht the Stuarts must have been on every Protestant's mind in this regard, and that, too, started with first family members converting.

Serious question: does Lehndorff normally comment on the attractiveness of random courtiers and officers whose death he reports?

Not in the death reports, but he does mention attractiveness (or lack of same) when he draws one of his pen portraits. Both for the men and the women. And independent from whether he personally likes them. (For disliked but still described as attractive, see, Glasow, Heinrich's various no-good boyfriends, Ferdinand's wife, and Elisabeth the first wife of FW2, who even after she's shown herself to be MESSALINA to his beloved Crown Prince Jr. rarely gets mentioned without a remark of how pretty she is. See, for example, that entry about spotting her in her exile in Stettin and how she can carry off her extravagant fashion but everyone imitating her just looks stupid.)

This said, he mentions Peter being good looking in both the first entry on him (when Peter is still alive) and in the death entry, in combination of praising him in other regards as well, and that's certainly not standard. (Heinrich's various boyfriends gt a "good looking BUT...." type of description, not "so nice, and brave, and also good looking" the way Peter did.

In regards to how reliable Lehndorff calling someone good looking is, given the "beautiful as an angel" about Heinrich - well, to be fair, he says that specifically about Heinrich in his riding pants, so maybe what he found beautiful on that occasion wasn't Heinrich's face. Ahem. (Having more regular eating habits than Fritz, Heinrich kept his trim figure and in his older years erred more on the thin side than on the plumb side.) Otherwise, Lehndorff's Heinrich crush doesn't voice itself in praising his looks but his charm, intelligence, reading (out loud), and of course Lehndorff during the 7 Years War is delighted to now add "being a great general and looking out for civilians and pows" to his "why I love Heinrich" eloges.

Wilhelmine's memoirs: She should also sue the Boston editor guy who bowdlerized her memoirs and cut out the Dresden episode, oh and also her dad getting punched. Come on. Who *doesn't* want to read about FW getting punched? It's the most cathartic thing in the world after you've gotten through volume 1.

Indeed. The way she introduces this episode also cracks me up: "These memoirs really are all gloom and doom, I realize. So, here's a comic relief episode: how Dad got punched! (Describes it.) I return to my narrative."

OMG, Catt, you fucking liar! Look at this, guys.

*Looks* Tsk. My explanation would be that either Fritz woke him up on another occasion and he merges the two stories, or he changes the story as part of the effort of making himself look better, as the ultimate Fritz Wrangler, endlessly patient and enduring.

Katte!

[selenak]

Katte's puncta:

If you think this reads like it was dictated by FW, yeah. Down to the rejection of predestination. Remember, FW has a preacher standing by to step into Fritz's cell the moment Katte's head falls, to lead him back to the true faith, and most specifically, the lack of predestination.

It reads like such a perfect and instant conformity to FW's will that I'm not the only one who thinks that it's a performance. He rejects atheism when staring death in the face and reverts to the religion of his childhood? Sure, maybe. He's been raised in a world where fathers and kings have absolute power and perfect obedience is owed to them, and he buys into that? Sure.

He really, really cares, of his own accord, that Fritz not believe in predestination, so much that it's his second-to-last words to Fritz?

Riiiight.

I'm with you. The predestination paragraph seals it. (That it's dictated and Katte's meaning is "just save your head, Fritz, please!") However:

The prince royal must remember that I remonstrated with him, in the strongest manner, first at the camp in Saxony, where we originally had the idea of absconding, and where I foretold what has now happened; and secondly, more recently, one night when I called upon him in Potsdam.

Here I wonder: did Katte mention this in his interrogations, i.e. would FW, or Müller, or both have known this had happened? Or is it something only Katte and Fritz would know about?

Also, possible theory: in addition originally advising against the escape plan, Katte might have said something to Fritz that he now reminds Fritz off under the disguise of telling him to obey his father. After all, to FW this would sound as pleasingly conformist, but who knows what they have said to each other on those occasions? Maybe it was also something along the lines of "the main thing is that you survive, even if you have to play the good son for some years more, and then, when you're king, it will be worth it".

Rereading your post, could it be that Wolden is sending to *FW* a copy of the Puncta in August? And Fritz has had it since November? Lavisse also says Fritz has had since the first moment Müller talked to him after Katte's execution. So unless you tell me the German can't possibly mean that, that's what I think is going on here. FW is getting a copy for the first time.

Remind me again, was this in Preuss or in Forster or elsewhere, so I can look it up again? It's all jumbled in my head now.

Mysterious Prussian Whistleblower/Leaker of Katte's letters:


So...Katte family servant? Maybe a governess or some loyal retainer who raised Katte as a child? Someone who was angry and rebelling in the only way they could: getting some visibility into this poor guy's fate?

I like it! It's easy to forget the servants. Which were ever present and human beings, not machines. When I read that Fritz even during his hard core imprisonment months got assigned a servant to clean him and presumably dress him etc, I was reminded again of this.

Andrew Mitchell: First Impressions

[selenak]

Okay, I had a quick and partial look at Mitchell. Mildred, you wanted to know how reliable Mitchell's account about his conversation with Fritz re: Katte is vs Henri de Catt's. My impression: very reliable.

For starters, these aren't memoirs in the sense that Mitchell wrote them years after the fact based on his notes at the time and many other sources. These are letters, both official dispatches and private letters, as well as journals Mitchell kept at the time, edited and published in 1850 together with an account of Mitchell's life.

1850 as the date is important. Because it means there isn't a German empire yet. Or a unified Germany. Bismarck is a young man who just fought on the reactionary side of the aborted 1848 revolution, while young Theodor Fontane was involved on the revolutionary side. So when the editor in a footnote about the battle of Rossbach says that was the first event to "light the light of German freedom and unity" in the hearts of the various non Prussian and Prussian German alike, he's writing from a pov where just two years earlier, the first attempt to achieve a unified Germany happened by the first elected Parliament in Frankfurt and had a constitutional monarchy modelled on England's in mind. (And promptly was squashed, with FW4 saying "no way is a Prussian king going to be a constitutional German emperor severely limited in power and owing what little he has to commoners, now, soldiers, go after those revolutionaries!) What our editor has no idea bout is that twenty years later, German unification will happen via a war and from above, as unfree as possible, and that the resulting Empire then will start to see itself as a rival to Britain. No, 1850 editor is writing in an England where there are still all those Fritz pubs and fannishness. He himself is a bit more snarky about Fritz than Mitchell - there's a footnote to a Mitchell letter where Mitchell writes that in Fritz' breast there are competing "a most delicate sense of honor" with "the utmost capriciousness"; the footnote snarks that evidently Mitchell didn't know Fritz as well in 1758 as he thought since clearly as opposed to such men as Mitchell himself or the worthy brothers Keith (the Scots), honor and Fritz were at best nodding aquaintances, if not altogether strangers. But the editor still thinks Fritz is the greatest, and buys into such Prussian propaganda like the MT "dearest sister" letter to Marquise de Pompadour.

Also important to keep in mind, for both Mitchell and the 1850 editor, the French are the worst. Not the pre Peter III Russians (which is certainly the case for Lehndorff, worrying about his family - before they arrive in Berlin - and family estates in Eastern Prussia), or the Austrians (suspicious because of their Catholicism, sure, and not as cool as the Protestant Prussians, but not irredeemable): the French. It's the traditional English/French enmity which in Mitchell's case is heightened by the fact there's an actual parallel France vs England war going on in the colonies and for 1850 editor by the Napoleonic interlude.

Mitchell is an Aberdeen Scot, friends especially with James Keith (who when he writes about his death he laments wasn't "always used" as well as he could have been), is also friends with Lord Auchinleck, father of my guy James Boswell, and thus will be visited by Boswell when Boswell is on the Grand Tour. (See about the Boswell-Mitchell connection here. In this context, he's described as " an Aberdeen Scotsman, creditable to his country, hardheaded, sagacious, sceptical of shows, but capable of recognising substances withal, and of standing loyal to them stubbornly if needful", which is also how he gets across on Lehndorff's journals. (Lehndorff likes him a lot, not just during his Hotham-caused Anglophile phase.) Mitchell's German wiki is far longer than his English wiki entry; it mentions he died in fact in Berlin and is buried there, in the Dorotheenstädter Kirche. He has a marble statue there, financed by his friends, among them Heinrich.

Which brings me to another reason why I don't think the two volumes of Mitchell papers were rewritten in 1850 (ad opposed to selected and edited). These papers reflect from the partial look I took already reflect when he's changing his mind on people, with Heinrich being a case in point, instead of pretending he had the magic benefit of hindsight. Mitchell goes from describing him on December 19th, 1757 in very negative terms and suspecting him of being already up to stabbing Fritz in the back and making a secret separate peace with the French:

My Lord,

I have had some suspicicion that Prince Henry is paving the way to a negociation with France without the knowledge of the Kijng his brother. This Prince is very vain and hates his brother, of whose greatness he is jealous. At the same time he has talents, but more cunning than real parts, and French to the bone. (...) I know the Prince's way of thinking; ambition is his only principle. He imagined (looking upon the affairs of the King of Prussia as desperate) that he should have the glory of making peace.

To a series of "Heinrich is awesome!" letters about the same man starting with September 27th, 1759, about the maneouvre von Krockow describes in detail as quoted by me in the "Fritz and Heinrich as generals" section of the relevant post. Mitchell's most detailed description of Heinrich's circumventing, trapping and defeating the Austrians is in the October 8th letter. On October 22nd in a personal letter, he writes:

"His Royal Highness Prince Henry, whom I had the honour of attending these three months past, has shewed (sic) very great military talent, and though his constitution is not robust, he's indefatigable. I observe but one failing, which is in the blood; he exposes his person too much and upon slight occasions. His character and temper of mind are entirely different from his elder brother, and yet in many respects they resemble each other."

So Mitchell doesn't present himself as infallible in his judgment unlike Henri de Catt; he gives his assessments as he sees them at the time. Doesn't mean he doesn't have an agenda; worrying about Prussia making a separate peace with France is a legitimate British concern, given Fritz, ahem, has been known to dump allies and make separate peace before, Heinrich is a Francophile, and he hates his brother. (He also, like Fritz, loves to hear himself praised.) But he's also open minded enough to go from "ambition is his only principle" to "his only flaw is that he's too damn ready to risk his life in battle, just like big bro".

Incidentally, re: separate peace with France, in addition to Fritz' own track record, there's additional irony that later Mitchell realises he has the wrong sibling trying to make peace with France via backchannels, albeit not behind Fritz' back. At one point, angry about not getting enough money and support by the Brits, Fritz shows Mitchell a peace proposal written by someone whom he says he's 100% sure means well and which suggests a French/Prussian peace including the mutual obligations that France promises to try and make peace between Prussia and Austria while Prussia promises to make peace between England and France. Mitchell says he's pretty sure the writer can't have been anyone but Wilhelmine and that he has the impression that Fritz is sorely tempted. Mitchell, I should add, is still 100% Team Fritz and keeps badgering his government for more support for "his Prussian majesty", as he calls him to differentiate him from "his majesty", aka Uncle George.

Now, of course it's in Mitchell's interests to present himself as being in the confidence of the King to his superiors - that's an envoy's top goal. And it's important to note that the intermittent journals he writes aren't private journals in our sense, or like Lehndorff's diary; they are written so he can draw on them for his later dispatches home, and with the awareness that if pressed for time, he might just send the entire journal.. But I really doubt he would invent a Katte & Küstrin conversation for that purpose; mid 7 Years War, there are other concerns. Which means I do think what he quotes Fritz saying is indeed the horse's mouth. Further support for this is the phrasing. "He talked much of the obligations he had towards the Queen Mother, and of the affection he has for his sister the Margravine of Bayreuth, with whom he has been bred." (In the entry after SD's death news reach the camp.) If you remember, in his letters to Heinrich, Fritz keeps saying "I was brought up with her" or "think that I was born and raised with my sister of Bayreuth". Conclusion: Mitchell is quoting authentic Fritz.

Which also means: either Fritz did think Katte stayed in Berlin for a girl, or he pretends to think that to Mitchell for whatever reason.

Lavisse

[selenak]

*working on catching up with Mildred*

If he loved Wilhelmine, that ended with Küstrin. And even before that, she mostly meant to him the possibility of having a sister as Queen of England, and his aloofness on the occasion of her wedding can be partly attributed to him giving up on that idea.

Good grief. Even Jürgen Luh, the other "he didn't love anyone" (except possibly Fredersdorf) guy, doesn't believe Fritz' emotional investment in Wilhelmine (or lack of same) had anything to do with her potential Queendom and its loss. I guess Lavisse doesn't mention why, if Fritz only values his siblings according to their rank (and bringing in their husbands as allies, in the case of the Margrave), Queen Ulrike isn't his favourite?

Royal Reader, you who are so much more knowledgeable about Austria and Imperial politics than I am, I would be interested in your take on the complexity of FW's politics vis-a-vis the Emperor as described in pages 75-95.

Sorry, I'll have to get back to you on that. Darth Real Life, also the absence of my best MT biography, which is excellent in presenting the political backfround for the previous generation. Would say that Young Seckendorff's Journal does contain Vienna being sceptical About FW's general intentions, which is a neat contrast to the Prussian pov of cruelly exploited by the Emperor FW.

Making a habit of executions in front of loved ones: even Henry VIII didn't go that far…

All I see that remotely corresponds to that in the Suhm write-up is "er habe mich so in den Arm gekniffen, daß ich ihn nicht mehr rühren könne," which sounds like Fritz holding Suhm's arm so tight Suhm couldn't move it. You tell me, O German Speaker.


You got it. Fritz is the pincher/hold-tight-er, Suhm is hte one who can't move his arm afterwards. Which absolutely isn't saying either of them couldn't feel anything. Where Lavisse got "this was playacting" from is beyond me.

Damn. I bet he approves of FW's "But consider my peace of mind!" letter to Hans Heinrich. Because indecision and fear of death are totally equivalent!

Now, if I had to make a case for FW to be pitied, I'd argue his tragedy is that he wanted to have not a typical "noble/royal" marriage but a normal one, with faithful spouses and adoring children and a lot of affection, and managed to make his family with one or two exceptions fear him at best and hate him at worst, that he wanted to be a good Christian but managed to distort all the Christian virtues into punishment devices, without getting any of the emphasis on love and comfort, even for himself, for he was plagued by religious fears throughout his life. But I certainly would not go for "Peace of mind"/fears and equalize that with what his children (or poor Gundling) went through in terms of abuse.

Also, lol at the implicit shade-throwing at FW, "recruits about ten feet high."

Do we detect some subversiveness in loyal Prussian subject Hille?

Fritz not loving Katte: sigh. Head. Desk.

Catt and Voltaire

[mildred_of_midgard]

Because I'm interested in the question of whether Catt wrote/edited his memoirs after reading Voltaire's (man, I wish I could get my hands on that 1752 anti-Fritz pamphlet that Voltaire self-plagiarized for the memoirs), I present to you the following passages.

Voltaire
Il était dans sa nature de faire toujours tout le contraire de ce qu'il disait de ce qu'il ecrivait, non par dissimulation, mais parce qu'il écrivait & parlait avec une espèce d'enthousiasme, & agissait ensuite avec un autre.

But it was constitutional with him to do the direct Contrary of what he said or writ; not from dissimulation; but because he spoke and writ with one kind of enthusiasm, and afterwards acted with another.

Catt
C'est que parfois on parlait avec une espèce d'enthousiasme et qu'on agissait ensuite avec un autre bien contraire au premier... ces disparates étaient plutôt la suite de cet enthousiasme que d'un manque de franchise.

Sometimes the King spoke with a kind of enthusiasm, and acted afterwards with an enthusiasm very different from the first...These discrepancies were rather the consequence of this enthusiasm than of a lack of sincerity.

Independent observation or plagiarism? You tell me.

Some points to consider:
- Everybody who knows about the developments of September - November 1740 can independently arrive at the conclusion that Fritz wrote/said one thing and proceeded to do the opposite. Even cahn probably knows what I'm talking about just from the dates!
- Not everybody has felt the need to observe that he was sincere about what he wrote; in fact, some antis have believed the opposite.
- The word "enthousiasme" occurs nowhere in the diary, although a few places in the memoirs.

Side note: I notice the translator has taken Catt's impersonal and given it a subject.

Catt is also nicer than Voltaire and says "sometimes" instead of "always." As you'd expect given the general tone of their memoirs.

Totally unrelated except for tracking down sources: Catt tells a story about how FW accidentally knocked over a young woman, laughed, then realized she might really be hurt and gave her some money. I swear I've seen this before in a list of FW anecdotes, and recently. I seem to remember encountering it in old-fashioned English. I thought it was Voltaire, but it's not. Also doesn't seem to be Lavisse. Anyone remember if it's in Wilhelmine? Or otherwise recognize the source?

ETA: Ignore me; what I was remembering was just someone quoting Catt. Btw, it's in both the diary and the memoirs, but in Fritz's mouth in the memoirs, of course.

Operation Bodysnatch

[mildred_of_midgard]

I have no idea how reliable this account is--perhaps selenak does--but I read it with absolute fascination, so here you go.

Operation Bodysnatch, or what to do with the remains of historical-figures-turned-Nazi-propaganda-tools when you're the Allies and it's 1945.

And now for today’s story titled Operation Bodysnatch, which begins on April 27th of 1945, just three days before Adolf Hitler’s suicide. On this day, seven members of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corp were searching the northern reaches of Germany’s Thuringian Forest – basically the middle of nowhere - for hidden ammo dumps. That is when they stumbled across a salt mine in Bernterode that had been used as a munitions manufacturing and storage facility.

To provide you with a bit of sense as to the size of this mine, let me just tell you that one reached it by taking an elevator down about 1800 feet – that’s about a 1/3 of a mile or ½ a kilometer from the surface. Down there, the men found an estimated 400,000 tons of stored ammo in its estimated 14 miles or 23 kilometers of tunnels. These guys were sure that they found the mother lode, but there was an ever bigger surprise in store for them.

About 1/4 of a mile or 4/10 of a kilometer from the elevator shaft, the soldiers stumbled across a side passageway that appeared to be sealed off with fresh cement. Curiosity got the better of them and they decided to find out what was behind that newly mortared wall. They tunneled an opening through an estimated 6-feet or 2-meters of masonry and rubble. And what they found on the other side was simply astounding.

It was a room that had been partitioned off into bays that were filled with artwork, boxes, and tapestries. An estimated 225 Prussian flags and banners were hanging unfurled. More importantly, all this stuff surrounded four coffins, one of which was adorned with a large wreath and red ribbons with swastikas and bore the name Adolph Hitler.

Holy cow! They had found the body of Adolph Hitler. But, as history later would show, they had not.

Upon closer inspection, they noticed that someone had quickly scribbled a few words in red crayon on each casket. Three of these were the remains of Germany’s most celebrated rulers: King Frederick Wilhelm I, King Frederick the Great, and Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg. The fourth casket belonged to Frau von Hindenburg.

These remains had been placed down in the mine about three weeks earlier as the Russians were closing in on Potsdam, the location of the Tannenberg Memorial. The Nazis feared that the Russians would destroy not just the monument, but also the remains that were buried there – those of Hindenburg and his wife. They quickly removed the caskets and blew up the remaining sarcophagi, ultimately finding their way, along with the two Fredericks, to the Bernterode mine.

It has been theorized that this room deep in the mine was set up to preserve the most precious artifacts of German military history for the next rise of the German Reich.

The job of getting these four coffins and all of the associated regalia up and out of the mine became the responsibility of the MFA&A – or the Monuments, Fine Arts, & Archives – branch of the military. This was a group of 345 art historians, museum directors, architects, educators, and curators that hailed from thirteen different countries. Better known today as the Monuments Men and the subject of a soon to be released George Clooney movie, their chief goal was to preserve all of the treasures plundered by the Nazis during WWII.

The coffins were the last objects to be removed from the mine. Frau von Hindenburg had the lightest casket and was the first one to take the fourteen minute ride up to the surface. Next was Frederick Wilhelm I, followed by Field Marshall von Hindenburg.

The last coffin, however, was not going to return to the surface easily. Frederick the Great’s casket was massive and weighed over half-a-ton. In addition to being incredibly difficult to maneuver, it wouldn’t fit into the elevator car.

But, as everyone knows, what goes up, must come down. In this case, it was the reverse – what went down in the elevator should surely be able to come back up by the elevator. And it did, with just inches to spare.

To the surprise of the men accompanying Frederick the Great on his journey skyward, as they approached the surface they could hear a radio blasting the Star Spangled banner followed by God Save the King. Germany had just surrendered the war.

And that is generally where this story ends in most books. In my case, since I tend to gravitate toward the more obscure, this is the point where my research had really started. That’s because I found the story of what happened to these caskets after they left the mine to be far more interesting than what occurred up to that point.

These four caskets created an incredible dilemma for the US Army. Three of these four caskets belonged to men that played a significant role in Germany’s military history. They couldn’t be reburied in just any ordinary way. On the other hand, to give each a grand burial with an ornate tombstone or monument could help bring the Nazi party back to life.

So, the Army did what others would do in a situation like this. They basically said it wasn’t their problem and quickly passed the responsibility on to the higher-ups in Washington, DC to deal with. Since the US government was dealing with the bodies of dignitaries, the issue was deferred to the State Department, the branch of our government that deals with international relations.

And what did the State Department do with the bodies? Absolutely nothing. For an entire year the coffins didn’t move from their guarded storage location in the basement of a castle in Marburg.

Ultimately, it was decided that these bodies were of historical importance and should be treated just like any other historical treasure or artwork plundered during the war. This top secret reinternment of the bodies once again became the responsibility of the Monuments Men. Three officers were assigned: Theodore Heinrich, Francis Bilodeau, and Everett Lesley Jr. It was Lesley that coined the name of this top secret mission: Operation Bodysnatch.

Their instructions were fairly straightforward. The two kings were to be reburied in the US controlled zone Greater Hesse, while the two Hindenburgs were to be buried near Hanover in the British Zone. Why Hanover? That’s because Hindenburg had requested that he be buried on his family plot there. It was Hitler who decided to override his final wishes and have his remains placed at the Tannenberg Memorial.

The US was simply trying to respect Hindenburg’s wishes, but it was not to be. The British government wanted nothing to do with the bodies. Word came back from London that would not allow the bodies into their zone under any condition.

Okay, since burying the Hindenburgs in the place that they had chosen was clearly out of the question, the three Monuments Men decided to focus their energies on the two kings. The solution seemed straightforward – the kings were Hohenzollerns – so why not bury them on one of the properties still owned by their descendants?

This also proved to be problematic. After their great loss in World War I, the Hohenzollerns now only owned two pieces of land in Germany. One was being used as a lodging for French troops, so there was no way to bury two kings in secret there. The second was Burg Hohenzollern castle, but it was located in the French controlled zone. Like the British, the French also said no way.

So, they couldn’t be buried in the British or French zones. It became clear that all four bodies needed to be buried somewhere in the US zone. And, since all four of these corpses were of the Protestant faith, it seemed logical to bury them in a Protestant church. That idea quickly fizzled after it was determined that all of the suitable Protestant churches were either badly damaged or totally destroyed in the war.

The next step of the three Monuments men was to see if they could find a place, any place, that had even a slight connection to the Hohenzollern family. After careful research, the Kronberg castle near Frankfurt seemed like the perfect fit.

Once again, luck was not on their side. The Monuments Men, Theodore Heinrich in particular, had a bigger problem thrown on their plate. Someone had stolen the jewels that had been hidden in the Kronberg castle. Valued at $7.6 million dollars in 1947 or about $77 million today, the great mystery of the theft focused worldwide attention on the castle. Certainly not the place to try to have the secret reburials of nobility.

Their search for a suitable burial ground continued. A former Hohenzollern summer castle had a chapel, but lacked a burial crypt. Another smaller castle was found to have been badly damaged during the war. And yet another was ruled out because its current owner forbid the digging because it would have meant possible damage to his prize rhododendrons.

Ultimately, the answer they had been seeking was hidden right under their noses: St. Elizabeth’s church in Marburg. The church had survived the war in good shape and lie just a few hundred yards from where the bodies were currently being stored.

But, the real question was whether or not the church had any space left to bury the bodies. The church was built way back in 1235 and the odds were that every bit of available real estate may have been occupied by others. The three officers spent a considerable amount of time searching through the church’s burial records to locate possible burial spots.

It was decided that the two Fredericks would be buried below the floor of the north transept, while the Hindenburgs would find final rest at the base of its north tower.

Before moving forward with their plan, descendants of both families were consulted to seek their approval. The French would not allow Crown Prince Wilhelm, the eldest son of Germany’s last Emperor, to leave their zone, so a letter notifying him that his eldest daughter Cecilia, along with Captain Leslie, would be coming to see him was sent. When they showed up, the Crown Prince initially refused to give permission. Why? Because he thought that Captain Leslie was coming to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, he wholeheartedly gave his permission for the reburial to take place.

Getting Hindenburg family approval didn’t go smoothly either. They were to meet his only son Oskar in Wiesbaden, but he was a no-show. It turns out that he had been arrested by American security police for signing a Wiesbaden hotel register with his full military title. Once released, Hindenburg was taken to St. Elizabeth’s and granted his family’s approval for the reburial plan.
­­­­­
Digging of the two burial plots added another wrinkle to this ongoing saga. While excavating the hole for the two kings, workers uncovered the remains of undocumented pre-Reformation monks. Their remains were gently moved aside, leaving enough space for the two caskets to fit in. In the Hindenberg’s case, workers hit bedrock at a depth of 2-feet or 2/3 of a meter. Since using explosives in an old church like St. Elizabeth’s was clearly out of the question, they took the advice of a local architect who recommended elevating the church’s floor by several steps in the area round the coffins.

The four bodies were finally laid to rest on August 19th of 1946, 479 days after they were first discovered deep down in that Thuringian mine. There was fear that fanatics may want to steal the bodies, so the graves were covered with steel plates and a layer of concrete. Large sandstone blocks, weighing in at two tons a piece, were placed over each grave site, with the names and dates of its personages chiseled in.

The Hindenbergs are still buried there to this day. In September of 1952, the caskets of the two kings were moved once again. This time they were taken to Hohenzollern Castle in Hechingen where a family spokesman declared they were to remain “until Germany is united again and they can return to Potsdam.” When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the decision was made to do just that. On August 17th of 1991, the 205th anniversary of Frederick the Great’s death, they were interred one last time. At least I hope it is the last time…

Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

If reliable, definitely useful in this fandom! I had no idea there was so much gossipy sensationalism surrounding the pre-1991 reburials. (I already thought it was weird enough FW and Fritz turned up in a salt mine.)

Catt

[mildred_of_midgard]

Due to the fact that I'm constantly wanting to look things up in Catt's memoirs, and can never find them because it's a bunch of conversations that don't have an intrinsic logical order, I decided to make an outline of all the things I'm interested in and the order in which they occur, so when I'm navigating through the volume, I can close in on what I'm looking for.

I may or may get around to fleshing these out into sentences that make sense to other people and adding page numbers, but for now, this has already been tremendously useful to me just in the one day since I finished volume 1.

Volume 1
Fritz has lost weight
D'Argens gives Catt advice
Mitchell gives Catt advice
Fritz starts telling Catt about his ADCs and other people he associates with
Strasbourg anecdote
Guichard recounts an anecdote about saving a woman from rape
Guichard and Roman soldiers carrying more weight than Prussians
Voltaire and Maupertuis
Catt and Fritz disagree on religion
Voltaire letter arrives, Fritz devours with his eyes
Fritz wants to send Voltaire a poem, Catt advises against.
Maupertuis, Algarotti, La Mettrie, Jordan, d'Argens, de Prades, Darget, the Palladion, d'Arnaud
Fritz's snuff habit
Voltaire and Fritz argue about war
Fritz would like to live a civilian life
Fritz makes Guichard wear the gear of a grenadier
Catt is accused of overloading his packhorse
Childrearing
Lentulus and Schwerin
Poetry
Priests
Fritz's dream about being taken to Magdeburg
FW
Fritz beaten for learning Latin
Henry's the favorite son
Katte
Siblings beaten up
Reading records relating to his trial after becoming king
How terrible Fritz's life is
Rebuilding a town in the Italian style
Sanssouci, how much it cost, draws a picture of it
Count Hoditz
"Am I a Trenck that I should pillage you?"
Rousseau
Eugene
Immortality of the soul
Hussar buried alive
Ingratitude
Crying over Racine
Fritz foresaw the 7 Years' War 6 years in advance.
Women
MT
Montezuma
Fritz has an ADC steal from him, lets him keep the money, but dismisses him
Free will discussion
Ghost-writing love poetry
Epaminondas
Mitchell
Grant
Reading, Rheinsberg, dancing
Raising princes
Recites Cicero, importance of trained memory
Maupertuis and Voltaire
More ghost-writing
Voltaire, d'Argens, Algarotti
Wilhelmine encouraged Fritz to read
Fritz snuck out at night to read
FW tried to make him a hunter, opposed to dancing
Fritz hasn't danced since 1750, still likes to see young people dancing
Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt
Wolff deeply flawed
FW intelligent and good sense but hates learning, literature, philosophy
FW, SD, AW, Wilhelmine dream
Dreams and prophets
Existence of spirits, ghosts, prophecy, souls
Catt very sick
Fritz very good at medicine
Bookbinding
Seydlitz
Charles XII
Poetry, Marquis d'Argens
Swinish, snuff, mother used to send shirts
Colic
"I would sell Prussia and live in France."
Fritz has a bad temper but only when provoked
If they had tried to raise me instead of humiliating me, I would be a better person. Have to be won with praise, like Voltaire did.
Catt chats with Mitchell
The Keiths
Fritz accidentally opens letters belonging to other people
One is Catt's, in which a Swiss friend has criticized Fritz
Tries to ask a Bohemian peasant a question in his own language, can't understand the answer
Tells Catt to keep his diary around so Fritz can plagiarize from it later
Catt insists on joining the King, August 10, gets told he'll get in trouble for going uninvited, doesn't get in trouble
Turenne says anyone who hasn't made mistakes hasn't waged war
Watchmaker Deist argument
Küstrin destroyed by Russians
Fritz makes verses on the eve of Zorndorf
Pose-dam
Lesson on Zorndorf
The Wreeches
Peasant woman wants a place for her son
Lucretius, religion, Catt thinks Fritz's opinions aren't firm because he speaks of them so often

Volume 2
Seydlitz and Zorndorf
Amelia visit
AW's terrible medical care and how it killed him, plus bad advisors
Fritz used to listen to flattering friends too
Importance of not being led
d'Argens
Sanssouci
Letter of Pompadour to the Queen of Hungary
Apostolic Hag
Catt meets Heinrich, Fritz speaks well of him
Fritz needs help with basic Latin
Fritz wants to send an ode on the French to Voltaire, Catt advises against it
Worried that Voltaire may have made a copy of the book of poems that was retrieved at Frankfurt
Voltaire exaggerated Frankfurt
Hochkirch
Worried about Wilhelmine, who taught him to work and to moderate his temper
Trying to write a letter with an ode for her
Battle of Hochkirch starts
Catt says Fritz exposes himself too much
Shows Catt opium
Fritz didn't listen to advice
Opium again
Wilhelmine dies
Catt consoles him
Heinrich visits, Fritz and Heinrich have a good cry
Fritz eavesdrops on Marwitz, who complains about Fritz berating him for how he pitched his camp
Seydlitz: "Well, win it then, Your Majesty."
Finally sleeps a little
Depressed, doesn't want cheering up, wants some sympathy
Torments Guichard by not letting him eat when he's hungry
Feverish
Makes fun of guy who believes in prophets
Refuses to ride in carriage, despite being sick and having a rash
Misses Wilhelmine, wants Catt to speak of her often
Doesn't like sitting in high, royal chairs
Mocks the King of Poland
Writing his memoirs, hopes his family will be pleased
Sends instructions to his generals to Fouque
Hochkirch not entirely his fault, but an unfortunate stone in his garden
Dog keeps jumping up and interrupting him
Hopes to see mother and sister after death
Doesn't like Voltaire's ode to his sister
Voltaire given credit for Fritz's history of Brandenburg
Fritz thinks Voltaire gave himself credit and pretends to be outraged
Prince of Brunswick wants promotion, Fritz refuses to be pressured
Voltaire
MT hates whores
Thinks Wedell is the greatest, makes snap judgments, sometimes goes back on them
Colic
Misses Wilhelmine and SD
FW anecdotes: knocks down girl, tells Grumbkow a secret,
Rheinsberg, Mollwitz, no opium at Mollwitz
Wedell defeated by Russians
Studied geometry more for logic and math, forgot most of the math, kept the reasoning abilities
Leaves Catt with Heinrich
Catt doesn't think you should get information from grooms
Praise of Heinrich
Kunersdorf, Fritz saved by gold case from bullet
Charles XII
Maxen
Nobody except Catt dares inform Fritz
Brief allusion to Küstrin
Wishes he had been laid up with gout longer so he could have prevented this
Wants to retire
Compares himself to Voltaire, Catt says Fritz writes for a distraction, Fritz says genius even bigger difference
Religion, immortality of the soul
Bother-free Voltaire visits
Individual vs. general maps
Fritz can't draw up retreat plan after Kolin
Discussion of Kunersdorf
Jesuits and education
Training memory
Wilhelmine and Keith
Gout
FW2 positive appraisal
Anonymous letter, Fritz's secret poems published
Fritz sick
Rewrites offensive poems
Doesn't believe in turning the other cheek either
Voltaire, D'Alembert
Lulls inner child
Catt tells Fritz he usually guesses wrong about how things are going to turn out
Wet behind the ears but old in courage
Misbehaved as a child, but would have been better with more gentleness. Hard to undo upbringing.
Anecdote about minister of state beating coachman
Voltaire, letters
Voltaire yelling "warmth" in theater
Classical education
Vengeance is sweet
Peasant won't spy on Austrians
Very bad mood, impatient with everyone, talks about hanging himself
Fouqué captured
Dreams of father, wants his approval, asks Old Dessauer if he should attack

Peter Keith

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yes, yet another thread from me titled "Peter Keith"!

Remember back when 1860 editor of Thiebault said third edition editor had this wild and unsourced story about Peter Keith dying of humiliation when Fritz burned the letter he'd kept all those years? I found the source for one small part of that!

Kloosterhuis quotes from a letter by Peter's son in 1820 in which Keith fils says that Fritz originally invited Peter back to Prussia with promises of great rewards, and then those promises kept getting downgraded, until Peter finally had to produce a letter written when Fritz was Crown Prince, promising great things. Fritz took it about as well as you'd expect Fritz to take such a thing, and the upshot was that Peter came back to Berlin as a lieutenant-colonel and stable master with a pension of 1200 thalers.

Now, that's interesting, because it suggests there might have been a letter and more direct conflict at the beginning than I'd imagined. Reasons I have niggling doubts:

- According to the contemporary documentary evidence I have, Peter wasn't given the lieutenant-colonel commission until 1742, he had to ask for it, and he had to make a case for why he wanted to join the army. It appears that Fritz took a former Prussian officer and current Portuguese officer and gave him a prestigious if not highly paid civilian job in Berlin at the start of his war. Either Fritz is so mad at Peter he doesn't want him in his army, or he's trying to keep him safe, *I* think. And since he ends up giving Peter the commission in 1742, either he got over his hissy fit, or it was never because he didn't want Peter in his army, but because he was trying to protect him.

- Peter was certainly disappointed with his salary in 1742 and made it known, but Fritz didn't have to be displeased with you to make you feel underpaid. Peter didn't actually ask for more in the documentation I have, though; he said one reason he wanted to leave Berlin and join the army was that Berlin was too expensive on his current income. Now, implicitly he's saying he wants more money, but since he's volunteering to help fight Fritz's war, that's going to come across rather differently.

- Fritz didn't have a problem making him an honorary member of the Academy in 1744. Now, maybe that's just an empty title and doesn't mean anything, but I don't see a lot of contemporary evidence that Fritz is actually mad at him, as opposed to Peter thinks he is and Peter is disappointed. And this is significant, since Peter is his son's source, directly or indirectly (assuming wife wasn't pregnant when they married, the kid can't have been more than 13 when Peter died, so Mom and/or other relatives are probably the main source here).

- I have reason to believe Keith fils is wrong about the chronology of the escape attempt as well. The sources I have that follow contemporary documentation most closely agree that Peter deserted Wesel and went to the Hague on August 6, as part of the original escape plan. There is a parallel story that's evidently not supported by the evidence that first Fritz's part in the escape attempt was uncovered, Peter's life was in danger from FW, and Peter was warned by someone in Wesel and fled to the Netherlands just ahead of the pursuit. This is in Wilhelmine, who obviously wasn't there, and constantly gets her dates wrong. It also, of course, makes for a much more dramatic story! (Plus the narrative parallels of both Peter and Katte getting warned and one acting in time and one not.)

Just from the evidence I have examined myself, it appears that FW found out about the escape attempt on August 6 from Robert Keith, didn't think it was a huge deal, then on August 12 discovered Peter had already deserted, and *then* freaked out about conspiracies. So it's unlikely that Peter was a hunted man in Wesel before FW even knew he was part of the plan.

So younger Keith's family history seems to be less than rock-solid.

Furthermore, I would add that one story of Peter's escape involves confusing letters Fritz sent to Peter. The real story seems to be that during the trip with FW, Fritz discovered Katte couldn't get leave and meet him in the west, so he needed Keith to go to the Hague instead. So he sent a message to Peter telling him to meet him there (and look for a Count d'Alberville, Fritz's planned alias when traveling incognito, which he'd told Katte about previously). Peter gets the letter, and goes to the Hague on August 6. That's the same day that younger page Keith fesses up to FW.

Now, there's a story that Fritz managed to dash off a note to Peter reading, "Sauvez-vous, tout est decouvert," on the trip north to Wesel. Whether or not that's true, the part where Peter deserted after getting Fritz's letter has been taken to mean *this* letter rather than the "meet me in the Hague" letter. It probably also doesn't help that Catt has Fritz saying that Katte didn't escape because Fritz wasn't able to warn him in time, unlike Keith.

So what I'm saying is, Peter's life story is not exactly known in great detail in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and there are variants floating around.

But maybe there was a letter. Katte's last letter says Fritz was planning to raise him to high office. (Which may be true, but I always felt that Katte played up the role of ambition in his desire to help Fritz, because he couldn't exactly say, "Actually, it was because the King is abusive as hell and I wanted to stop seeing my bf crying and talking about wanting to die.")

So if there was a letter, maybe Peter showed it to Fritz and they had some conflict, and maybe he didn't. If he did, we can assume Fritz wouldn't react well. But it's also possible that there was a letter and that Peter talked about it to his wife in terms of bitter disappointment, but didn't actually get into a showdown with Fritz over it. Considering Fritz seems pretty benignly disposed toward him, if not hugely enthusiastic. And Fritz has a number of reasons to be less than enthusiastic in 1740-1742, without there being a showdown.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting to know that there may have been a letter from Crown Prince Fritz after all. Of course, it may also have been a verbal promise that got upgraded in family oral history to a letter, for dramatic effect, just like the alleged showdown.

Tangentially, one thing that broke my heart was Koser saying that when Peter first arrived at the Hague, he started asking everywhere for the Count d'Alberville. Most accounts I've seen have him going straight to hiding, but of course, if it's only the 6th, FW's only just found out about the plan hundreds of miles away, and won't know about Peter's involvement for 6 more days, he has no reason to hide immediately and will of course start looking for Fritz.

I think what broke my heart was the idea of him having hope and looking and looking for someone who's not coming. Then the loss of hope and the flight for his life, when he *did* evidently go into hiding with Chesterfield and then get his help sneaking over to London while the Prussians were after him. And then FW had a reward out for him even in London.

:-(

He was 19. Probably also could use a therapist, or at least a few sessions with a counselor. I'm glad it looks like the marriage at least worked out, Peter. <3

Saxon envoys

[mildred_of_midgard]

Remember when I said Fritz must have gone around telling everyone about his escape plans in hopes someone would take some initiative and get him out of there? And instead, everyone tried to talk him out of it, and he had to come up with his own plan, and part of the reason it failed was because *everyone* knew he wanted out of there?

We have that exact sequence of events happening in Suhm's letter to his boss King Augustus. Reminder: it's October 1728, so two years before the escape attempt.

Suhm shows up at Wusterhausen, Fritz accosts him and starts telling him how terrible his life is, so emphatically that Suhm is flustered. Fritz says, "I say this to all my friends that I believe I can count on, in the hope that someone will get me out of this slavery in which I've been so cruelly placed." Actual quote, in direct discourse as reported by Suhm.

Suhm: I counseled patience and said that advertising his discontent just makes it harder for him to change the opinions he expresses so that his father is pleased with him, and that demonstrating his love for his father will lead to his father treating him better.

Fritz: I'VE TRIED THAT! Nothing works. Nothing moves him. Please, let your king have pity on me and intervene so that I can travel. I'll go anywhere he wants, just to be able to live more freely.

Suhm: That's not so easy to do, and the more you make it known that you want to get out of here, the harder your father's going to make it.

They get interrupted.

Fritz: *won't stop begging for someone to have pity on him and the state he's in*

Suhm: *does not stop explaining how making his opinions more acceptable to his father is the way to go*

Yes, literally, "il me réitéra sans cesse la prière," "he repeated his prayer ceaselessly to me," and "je ne cessay," "I did not stop."

And thus, when 1730 rolls around, Fritz has already tried to escape at least once (November 1729), with Peter, who's sent away to Wesel in January 1730, and by August, everyone in charge of Fritz knows to keep an eye on him, which makes his well-advertised escape plan even more likely to fail.

And then, in the next paragraph, Fritz is forced by Dad to get drunk! Avec une grande répugnance! And it causes him to start complaining about his treatment in one breath and reiterate in the next how much he loves Dad. And then want hugs and kisses.

And then people don't even believe it's real.

SMH.

Also, from reading the French, it appears that I mis-parsed the German: it's not that Fritz told Suhm the next day that he had hated getting drunk; he told him at the time that he hated drinking so much and was sure that he'd be really sick the next day. So my morning-after hurt/comfort headcanon is an AU. Bloody hell, can't the boy get some hurt/comfort instead of hurt/"have you tried appeasing your abuser better?" I know everyone means well and has limited options, but, you know, we're still telling abuse victims/bullied kids that today.

And before anyone wonders if maybe Suhm got to comfort Fritz the next day anyway, well...if I'm reading the letters correctly, Suhm arrives in Wusterhausen on the 17th, the drinking episode took place on the 19th, and Suhm is back in Berlin on the 20th.

Well. I knew Fritz was telling everyone about his desire to get out of there as a cry for help and a hope someone else would rescue him, without him having to figure out his own escape plan, and I knew that no one did, but seeing it spelled out like that is so painful.

Ugh.

On a more cheerful note, Koser has a bit on the four reasons Manteuffel thought Fritz liked him, which I ran across when looking for Suhm:

Wenn der Kronprinz ihm sein Vertrauen schenkte, so geschah es, wie Manteuffel annahm, „aus vier Gründen": erstens vermöge seines ungewöhn lichen Triebes, sich zu unterrichten, zweitens aus etwas guter Meinung für Manteuffel, drittens in der Voraussetzung, daß derselbe ein unabhängiger und uninteressierter alter Mann sei, und endlich, weil dieser alte Mann nie im Lehrton zu ihm sprach.

My interpretation of this, please correct any mistakes:

1) Manteuffel's unusual drive to teach himself.
2) A good opinion of Manteuffel.
3) He was an independent and disinterested old man. (I still wonder when the scales fell from Fritz's eyes.)
4) He never lectured Fritz.

I'm sure (4) was key!

Looking for Manteuffel mentions in the Suhm correspondence, I found one.

There have been new harassments these past days. It all comes from a jealousy that Bredow has against Wolden. The first found a way to insinuate to the King that I was a man without religion, that Manteuffel and you had contributed a lot to pervert me, and that Wolden was a madman who was the buffoon with us, and who was my favorite. You know that the charge of irreligion is the last refuge of the slanderers, and that, having said that, there is nothing more to say. The King caught fire, I held myself tight, my regiment worked wonders, and the handling of arms, a little flour thrown on the heads of soldiers, men over six feet, and many recruits, were stronger arguments than those of my slanderers. Everything is quiet now, and there is no longer talk of religion, of Wolden, of my persecutors, or of my regiment.

So one, FW thinks Manteuffel and Suhm have perverted ("pervertir") Fritz, presumably because they all like Wolff, and FW won't like Wolff for two more years. Two, when you're accused of irreligion, what do you do? Spruce up your regiment, make sure you meet quotas, and above all, those men over six feet! Strongest arguments you can get.

Hamilton tells me that Manteuffel had an unusually disappointing 1740:

It is painful to know that Manteuffel was waiting eagerly for Suhm's arrival and counting on his being appointed successor to Thulemeier, the Minister of State (who died August 4th 1740), expecting, as a matter of course, that through him he himself and his Dresden employers would at once be put in possession of the deepest secrets of the Prussian government, more directly and much more accurately than they could get them from any subordinate.

Suhm dies November 8 without ever making it, and Manteuffel gets kicked out of Prussia sometime in November, shortly before the Silesian invasion. Now there's someone who didn't foresee Frederick the Great--Manteuffel!

The question of whether Suhm would have been allowed to play a political role is an interesting one. You'd think! And yet Fritz's letter to him after becoming king asks whether he wants to give up being a minister in order to lead the reflective life of a sage, and if he can find something in Fritz's company that compensates him for politics.

Interestingly, that does support my idea that Fritz would have relegated Katte to an artistic/intellectual role. With luck, Katte would have taken that well and it would have been good for their relationship with less potential for conflict than a military and/or political role. Headcanon, anyway! (I still hope he's ready to be micromanaged.)

Random things

[mildred_of_midgard]

1) Reading along in Blanning, coming to the question of whether Fritz ever had sex with a woman ever, and I found some interesting surprises that all turned out to be in Förster. Of course, our library copy had a terrible quality scan, and one of the relevant pages was unreadable, so I tracked down a better copy and swapped it in for the one we had.

First and most surprising: Volume 3, page 112.

On 30 August 1732 the minister von Grumbkow wrote to the Austrian ambassador von Seckendorf (often spelled “Seckendorff”) that Frederick William had told him that Frederick had got Frau von Wreech pregnant and that the cuckolded husband would refuse to recognize the child as his own.

Okay, so far, so good. Nothing new here. Next sentence.

Frederick William was pleased by this sign of his son’s virility and hoped that Frederick’s fiancée would be equally impressed.

Frederick William the guy who spent the entire time Fritz was at Küstrin going NO WOMEN to all of Fritz's minders/captors? Frederick William the NO WHORES political testament guy? Are we in an OOC AU?

I tracked down the letter, it was in French, and sure enough, it looks like FW wanted Fritz to get a married Frau Wreech pregnant.

Il m'a dit en confidence, que le P.R. avoit fait ..... à la Wreech, femme d'un Colonel, et que le mary disoit, ..... qu'il ne le reconnoitroit pas pour ..... Cela luy fait plaisir, espérant qu'il en feroit autant à la Bevern.

And looking at the preceding context, "il" does seem to be "le roy." Is FW so worried about his son's heterosexuality by 1732 that any heir is better than no heir, even if it means Fritz is having some extra/premarital sex on the side? Is this like MT allying with Pompadour because needs must and all that?

Well! At any rate, as Blanning points out, the lady turned out not to be pregnant, and it was probably all smoke and no fire. And he says Seckendorff was skeptical even at the time.

Certainly there is nothing in the surviving correspondence to indicate a physical relationship and Frau von Wreech was not pregnant. Seckendorf himself was not convinced. A month later he told Prince Eugene that, although Frederick was in an erotic mood, “it was believed” that his physical capability did not match his ambition and consequently his amorous pursuits were more a case of showing off than genuine desire.

Citation: page 91 of ibid. It's in German, but as far as I can tell, does seem to be saying that.

2) And then I found this. Fritz simultaneously sends two letters about the marriage, one to his father saying the only pleasure he has in life is doing whatever FW wants and he will marry if that's what he's told to do, and one to Grumbkow saying, "I'd rather shoot myself in the head." (All biographers I've seen give Fritz a hard time about his duplicity. I'm willing to forgive him trying everything to get out of a situation that he should never have been in. And definitely should not put other people in later, sigh.)

"I have been unhappy all my life and I believe that it is my destiny to stay that way… but I still have a last resort, and a pistol shot would simultaneously put an end to my misery and to my life." He implored Grumbkow to get the wedding stopped. The minister replied with a stern reminder of the fate of Philip II’s son Don Carlos.

Chronology: it's February 1732, Katte's been dead for just 15 months, and Fritz is still under house arrest at Küstrin.

Citation: page 80. Also in German. Grumbkow seems to be saying, "Look, kid, if you want to play Don Carlos, fine, but I'm not inclined to play the Duke of Grammont."

From context, I can guess it didn't end well for Grammont, but Wikipedia is failing me. You two know the story better than I do, help?

At any rate, it appears Grumbkow is not above implicitly threatening Fritz with being killed by his father, in 1732.

3) Totally unrelated thing I ran across while tracking all this down: when Fritz was planning to run away, he sent Katte a letter and told Katte to leave it behind. It was his "Why I left" apologia. I haven't tracked the text down, but in it he apparently mentions Derschau as one of the people who's made life especially unbearable.

So it looks like he had a grudge against Derschau even before Derschau was assigned to interrogate him.

4) The translator of Lavisse, says in a footnote about something Fritz wrote before the escape attempt, "This, as well as all of Frederick's writing in this book, is in bad French. Voltaire said (I quote from Edward Everett), that 'there was not a sentence which you would not know to be the language of a foreigner.'"

So again I wonder: how good was Fritz's unedited-by-others prose? And to what extent, notwithstanding that Fritz was trying to write the most French French of the best authors, was Brandenburgian French simply a different dialect that is perfectly legitimate in and of itself, but wasn't a prestige dialect and wouldn't get any respect from someone like Voltaire? I.e. to what extent is this simply a matter of sociolinguistics rather than proficiency? (The question continues to impact speakers of non-prestige dialects in a very real way today.)

[selenak]

Great Grandpa the Great Prince Elector had his anniversary this weekend, so there was an article in my favourite newspaper about him. (Pointing out, among other things, the oddity that in an age where there was Cromwell, Richelieu and Louis XIV, the one making away with the adjective „the Great“ past his own life time was the not king of little Prussia. If google translates for you, have a look at this take on „the creator of Prussia“:

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/friedrich-wilhelm-von-brandenburg-preussen-schoepfer-1.4795494

(Still frightfully busy, but just ten more days to go. Am feeling like Yoda in Return of the Jedi, to tell you the truth.)

Andrew Mitchell: War Reporter at Large

[selenak]

(Two hours in the train = new quotes.)

As mentioned, Mitchell changes his mind on things, which is one of the reasons why I trust Bisset not to have meddled with his papers, as Thiebault's editor/rewriter did. (Though of course Bisset selected what was interesting to him.) One of the things that changes the longer the war goes on is that Mitchell pays more and more attention to the horrendous price the war effort demands on the civilian population. Early on, in 1756, Fritz invading Saxony is a bold strategic choice Mitchell is totally behind, even if he's a bit disturbed at the occasional plundering. By the end of 1760/ start of 1761, though, he's horrified by the way the Saxons are treated. (He's also horried that Fritz and Heinrich are at odds about this and in one of their "I'm not talking to you" stages and reports "I have laboured underhand with the Prussian Ministers here to bring about some reconciliation, but they have made no progress. They are well disposed, but timid." Mitchell, getting between Fritz and Heinrich must have been only slightly less uncomfortable than getting between FW and Fritz, so no surprise there.) Some choice quotes showing Mitchell the war reporter:

December 1760:

My other letters by this messenger will inform your Lordship of everything that has passed since the 12th, and I am very unwilling and very unfit at the present moment to make reflections. I cannot think of the bombardment of Dresden
without horror, nor of many other things I have seen. Misfortunes naturally sour men's tempers, and the continuance of them at last extinguishes humanity.

3rd January 1761:

The very harsh manner in which the country of Saxony is treated fills me with horror, though there is now the fatal plea of necessity for adopting measures which were practised before that necessity existed.


16th January 1761:

The demands of contributions of all sorts made by the Prussians in Saxony are most exorbitant, and far exceeding the abilities of the country to comply with, so that many of the subjects are now actually under military execution, equally ruinous to the country, and to the officers employed upon that service, who, when they have once tasted the sweets of plunder, cease to be soldiers.

None of this, btw, means he's now anti-Fritz. Also near the end of 1760, there are admiring descriptionis like:


His Prussian Majesty has escaped many dangers, but none greater nor more immediate than that I have mentioned. His deliverance is owing, under God, to his superior capacity, the celerity of his motions, and that firmness of mind he enjoys in the most horrid situations, and in the midst of the greatest alarms.

But if you ever need a canon basis for it NOT being anachronistic for a contemporary to be appalled even he's basically on board with the general war aim, here it is.

Koser on Münchow

[mildred_of_midgard]

Der einzige detective (yes, der) is at it again. I was looking for something else in Koser, and I spotted (yay getting better at old German fonts!) a mention of Münchow, and wooow, Koser just takes Münchow apart as a witness.

First, I'll just note that he confirms that it's Alexander Christoph (or Christoph Alexander) von Münchow, whom Wikipedia gives as being born in 1726. Since we had been wondering about that.

But second, and more important, he does that Koser thing where he's like, "I know you all just take the popular source that's in front of you at face value, but *I*, superior historian and einzige detective that I am, off the top of my head recognize that there's actually this other, more obscure, source that says the same thing but differently, and that's why you shouldn't believe this source." (Or, alternatively, should conclude this source was leaked by a Danish ambassador or someone close to him.)

Namely, he says that people, like Preuss and Hoffbauer*, who rely on the undated letter given by Gallus in his 1803 work miss the fact that there's *another* publication put out by Münchow's estate in 1810 that contains a very similar write-up to what's in Gallus, dated to January 24, 1797, in which Münchow says his father and Lepel totally had orders to make Fritz watch. And that these orders had to be obeyed. (Or at least that's how I'm reading "Man muste es tuhen.")

* Hoffbauer is the 1860s Küstrin preacher who wrote the "Where did Katte get executed? and could Fritz see?" and concludes, "No, I live here, and I say no way could Fritz see," and Fontane relies on him. I have tried and tried to get a copy of one of his two publications on the subject and I have been defeated.

After reporting this discrepancy, Koser writes, "Man wird sich nun nicht länger auf diesen Zeugen berufen wollen"--"You don't want to rely on this witness any more."

Guess not!

Then Koser points that Münchow gives two slight variations on Katte's last words. The one we've seen goes, "Pardonnez-moi, mon cher Katt," and "La mort est douce pour un si aimable prince." The more obscure version goes, "Pardonnez-moi, mon cher Katt, je suis la cause de votre mort," and "Pour un prince comme vous on meurt avec contentement."

THEN Koser gets into the whole question of the birthdate of this Münchow kid, which we've already seen is a very nontrivial question.

Koser says Gallus (author who published the Münchow letter that we've already read) has his birth in 1723, which can't be right, because Koser has checked the church register, and Münchow Sr.'s got a daughter being born in May 1723. And he says in the 1797 publication, Münchow Jr. claims to be 78 years old in 1797 yet 7 years old in 1730. Do the math.

Koser says the Küstrin church register doesn't record any Christoph Alexander von Münchow. Then just to make things more confusing (Koser says!), Christoph Alexander von Münchow is listed as 32 years old in 1756 in his regiment's documents, but as born in 1726 according to the records of the Johanniter Order.

So he's either born in 1723 (if he's an unregistered fraternal twin, I guess?) or 1724 or 1726 or 1728.

So who even knows, but goodbye eyewitness report, is the upshot, I guess.

This is all page 240 in our copy, btw. I feel like Koser would repay a careful reading, either by selenak when she has time, or me when I learn German, whichever comes first. :P

More interesting, if there are only two sources so far that say that Fritz didn't have to watch, and one is Münchow and the other is Hoffbauer, and Münchow elsewhere said he did, and Hoffbauer was relying on the one where Münchow said he didn't, and Münchow and Hoffbauer can't even agree on the nature of the Weisskopf...maybe Fritz did have to watch and he just passed out in time! And he's the only one who knows that! Even more plausible: he didn't lose consciousness immediately after Katte said goodbye, but had traumatic amnesia for everything afterward, and his brain simply never recorded anything that happened after he saw Katte.

And so maybe Katte and Fritz did sustain eye contact until the end, Fritz just didn't remember it.

OH GOD.

Disclaimer: this is a hypothesis, as I haven't been able to read Hoffbauer for myself. I may have to see if ILL can help out, or possibly our subdetective when she has more time.

It's also possible that Catt and Mitchell don't give a final dialogue because Fritz didn't remember one, not because they were summarizing (Mitchell clearly was, but Catt's pretty detailed) or because Fritz found it too painful to talk about.

Oh, the Weisskopf: I'm not sure if I've talked about this, but according to Fontane, Hoffbauer reports it as the remains of an old tower, about man-high. Münchow, in that letter in Gallus, says that from Fritz's second-floor room, there was a staircase that led out and up to the top of Weisskopf, where you had a good view of the execution spot, meaning it was at least 3 stories high. So either Hoffbauer is reporting it in ruins as it was in his day (1860s), but it was still 3 stories high and intact in 1730, Münchow is senile in his 70s, or something has been lost in translation from Hoffbauer to Fontane to Google translate to me. I really want to get my hands on Hoffbauer's original reports.

At any rate, it seems like our two "Küstrin layout prevented Fritz from watching, I lived there and I should know" sources can't even agree with each other on the layout, and one can't even agree with himself. Which doesn't inspire confidence in the case for Fritz not watching.

The one hypothesis that I think stands with even higher likelihood now: sources claiming that Fritz didn't watch because he fainted in time really are most likely to come from Fritz himself, meaning I still think Catt's account is real, and that Fritz talked to Wilhelmine. That is a highly unlikely independent innovation in the face of unanimity in other sources saying that he watched and fainted after the head fell, not before.

Blanning 1

[mildred_of_midgard]

Less than 100 pages into a 500-page bio, here's what I've found so far.

ETA: Still too many characters for a single DW comment, lol.

---

Not for nothing was Frederick’s core territory Brandenburg known as the “sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire.” This was a land of thin soil thinly populated, where lakes alternated with heaths, bogs with moors. Frederick told d’Alembert that the good people of Aachen had come to believe that their foul-tasting mineral water represented the summit of God’s creation, in the same way that the Jews worshipped the mud of Jerusalem, but as for himself, he could never work up the same sort of enthusiasm for the Prussian equivalent: sand. 

This repeated denigration was, of course, fishing for compliments. “If I could do all this with so little, what might I have done if I had had the population of France or the riches of England?”

---

Prussia not only had a big one [army], it came to be synonymous with militarism. In the eighteenth century, however, this status was of recent origin. In 1610, when the Elector Johann Sigismund instructed his militia to conduct training exercises, the timorous soldiers declined on the ground that firing their guns might frighten their women.

---

In that year [1709] it was also present in strength at the battle of Malplaquet when Marlborough and Eugene again defeated the French in the bloodiest engagement of the War of the Spanish Succession. Leading the Prussian contingent were two men who were to make a decisive contribution to Prussia’s military elevation: the Crown Prince Frederick William and General Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau. Despite, or perhaps because of, the carnage, which inflicted 25 percent casualties on the victors, the former always maintained that the day of the battle— 11 September 1709— had been the happiest of his life and he always celebrated the anniversary.

---

Some context for Evil Catholic Plots (TM): German Protestants...were already fearful because of the numerous apostasies of their rulers: between 1650 and 1750 there were at least thirty-one princely conversions to Catholicism. The most spectacular occurred in 1697 in Saxony, the very heartland of the Lutheran Reformation, when the Elector Frederick Augustus (better known as “Augustus the Strong”) sought to facilitate his election as King of Poland by apostasy...In reality, Warsaw did not prove to be worth a Mass. Although the Electorate retained the nominal presidency of the Protestant members of the Imperial Diet (the corpus evangelicorum), effective leadership now moved north to Berlin. It was a transfer made permanent when Augustus’s son and successor also converted and married a Habsburg archduchess into the bargain.

The clearest sign that Augustus the Strong had thrust his way into the premier league of European sovereigns came in 1719 when his son and heir was married to the Habsburg Archduchess Maria Josepha, daughter of the late Emperor Joseph I.

---

On HRE electors becoming kings:

In the second half of the seventeenth century, it was the more important secular princes who proved the most dynamic, as the acquisition of royal titles demonstrated. Just staying still meant falling behind. If the Elector of Brandenburg had sat idly by as his Hanoverian and Saxon neighbors moved from the well of the hall to the top table, he would soon have found himself being jostled by lesser fry. It was well known that other princes, notably the Electors of Bavaria and the Palatinate, were also on the hunt for royal or even imperial titles. It was to avoid being overtaken that in the 1690s the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick III embarked on his own campaign. A sharp reminder of his subordinate status had been delivered by the peace negotiations at Rijswijk in 1697 when the Brandenburg envoy was excluded from the inner circle.

---

And you thought the Hohenzollerns were confusing:

The limited range of first names employed by the Hohenzollerns— either Frederick or Frederick William— has naturally led to confusion. Frederick William “the Great Elector” (1620– 88) must not be confused with his grandson King Frederick William I (1688– 1740). Even more miserly in their allocation of first names were the princes of Reuss of Thuringia, all of whose numerous sons were christened Henry.

Reminds me of this earworm:

I'm 'Enery the Eighth, I am,
'Enery the Eighth I am, I am!
I got married to the widow next door,
She's been married seven times before
And every one was an 'Enery
She wouldn't have a Willie nor a Sam
I'm her eighth old man, I'm 'Enery,
'Enery the Eighth, I am!

---

Tiny terror FW strikes again.

On another occasion, the little boy dealt with a threat of punishment by clambering onto the window ledge of his upstairs nursery and supporting his negotiations with his governess with a threat to jump.

I keep seeing the thing that FW swallowed alternately described (or translated) as a golden "shoelace" or a golden "shoe buckle". These are very different items! And considering it was on display in Berlin in the 19th century...you'd think people could agree on what it was? Is there a German (or French) word that can mean either? Shoe-fastener?

---

FW the pedant:

After 1725, the king was never seen wearing anything but a uniform, rather pedantically the uniform of a colonel, because it was to that rank that his father had promoted him and Frederick William took the view that after his death there was no one authorized to promote him further.

---

Between 1717 and 1738 he shot 25,066 pheasants at Wusterhausen alone. Notoriously averse to ceremonial, Frederick William made an exception for hunting, staging an elaborate burial of a favorite falcon who had got the worst of a “heroic struggle” with a heron.

Go heron! I almost feel like you could make an MT-Fritz parallel here.

---

FW likes it bloody:

The Feast of St. Hubertus, the patron saint of hunters, on 3 November, was one of only two festivals he observed (the other was the anniversary of the battle of Malplaquet on 11 September).

Hubertus, btw, is the feast at which FW got Fritz drunk in 1728 and Suhm reported.

---

Even Count Seckendorf had to smuggle in books to Wusterhausen, lest he be suspected of wasting on reading time that might have been better employed in hunting, drinking or praying.

---

At the age of ten Frederick William still did not know the alphabet and could not add up to ten.

Citation: Hinrichs, Friedrich Wilhelm I. König in Preussen, pp. 36– 7.

---

 
Dubourgay reported in July 1729 that Frederick William now refused to sit with his son at dinner, consigning him to a seat at the bottom of the table, where he often got nothing to eat and so had to rely on food-parcels sent round to his room later by his mother.

---

Frederick never seems to have considered the most obvious solution— regicide—

Oh, Fritz. I would have exonerated you on grounds of self-defense.

---

Zimmerman, physician of Fritz and author of the totally unfounded "Fritz had an operation that disfigured his penis and made him self-conscious about sex!" crackfic claim, apparently wasn't consistent on this point:

Even Zimmermann himself had once believed this too, not least because one of Frederick’s male favorites had told him that Frederick was still active homosexually in 1756.

Citation: Zimmermann, Fragmente über Friedrich den Grossen, pp. 70, 72.

I've uploaded the volume in question; the chapter title appears to be "on Fritz's TOTALLY FAKED interest in Greek love."

Royal German Reader help?

---

Claims that Fritz was trying to get his marriage dissolved as late as 1738:

In 1738 he [Fritz] sent Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau on a secret mission to the Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire, Friedrich Karl von Schönborn, to secure imperial assistance in getting the marriage dissolved.

Deeply unsatisfying citation: Rudolf Endres stated this in the discussion which followed the papers given by Peter Baumgart and Volker Press at a symposium held at Bayreuth in 1986— Manfred Agethen, “Diskussionsbericht,” in Heinz Duchhardt (ed.), Friedrich der Grosse, Franken und das Reich (Cologne and Vienna, 1986), p. 196.

cahn, Fritz and EC married in 1733, officially separated in 1740 once Fritz became king.

---

More evidence that Fritz is faking his interest in EC during the Rheinsberg years:

Two letters written to his mother [I think he means wife] during a journey with his father to East Prussia in the summer of 1739, also hint at playacting. In a letter to Elizabeth Christine of 27 July which was to be passed on to his mother, Frederick went out of his way to emphasize his affection, as in: “I very much look forward to being back in Rheinsberg and even more to the pleasure of kissing you… May God protect you, my lady! Please do not forget me, and permit me to embrace you with all my heart, be sure that I am totally devoted to you.” But a letter written two weeks later which he expressly stated was not to be shown to his mother was appreciably less fulsome, ending simply with “your most obedient servant.”

---

EC miserable as a result of Fritz's treatment:

Left on the sidelines was Queen Elizabeth Christine, publicly humiliated by her brutal subordination to her mother-in-law. “You can have no idea of what I have to suffer,” she wrote to her brother Duke Karl of Brunswick on 28 June 1740. “God alone knows and only God can help me.”

cahn, that's just about one month after Fritz became king (May 31).

Four years later:

At Schönhausen she formed her own little court and eked out what was clearly a lonely and frustrated existence. In March 1744 she wrote to her cousin Ferdinand of Brunswick:

I remain stuck in this old château like a prisoner, while the others have fun. I entertain myself with reading, work and music, and it is always a high day for me when I get a letter from you— that puts me in a happy frame of mind for the whole day, and the time I spend writing to you is a time of relaxation.

---

The Fredersdorf section was interesting.

1) In 1730, when serving at Frankfurt an der Oder as a musician in a regiment of musketeers, he was introduced to Frederick by his commanding officer, Count Schwerin, to lighten his captivity at Küstrin with some mutual music-making

This is version of the tale that we ended up going with for "Counterpoint," rather than the "Fritz met him during the student performance in Frankfurt" version.

Except of course for the year, which I think has to be sloppiness on either Blanning's part or that of his source (which is a URL that is no longer up nor can I find it in the Wayback Machine). I do not think anyone was risking letting Fritz near any music in 1730.

2) At Rheinsberg Fredersdorf was recognized as Frederick’s “favorite,” who played only for his master. 

Awww.

3) Oh, that famous quote about a "chancellor who never spoke, a huntsman who would not dare to kill a quail, a butler who did not know whether there was wine in the cellar, a stable-master who did not know how to saddle a horse, etc." that was Fredersdorf? Blanning finally told me where that was from, namely the anonymous 1752 pamphlet that everyone is pretty sure is Voltaire! And that's when I tracked it down, and indeed, that quote is there, and it's now in our small but growing library.

4) Remember when Fredersdorf passed on EC's request for permission to attend the festivities with a retinue of five? Blanning says "in vain," but only cites Richter, our 1926 editor of the Fredersdorf correspondence, whom selenak says leaves it an open question whether it was in vain or not.

5) Then Blanning adds this delightfully snarky footnote to his citation: 

This episode prompted Richter to spend the next nine pages explaining away Frederick’s relations with Fredersdorf as just one of those 'intense friendships' that were so common at the time and asserting that Frederick’s change of attitude to his wife when he came to the throne was motivated by his determination not to be diverted from the path of duty by sensual appetite.

6) THEN THIS. Remember Burgdorf's uncited "The King's love could be deadly. Katte wasn't the only one who lost his life. A young officer, Gregorii, shot himself when Friedrich turned towards a new favourite"?

Blanning gives a little more detail:

Only once did Fredersdorf appear to have lost his position, when ejected from Frederick’s tent while on campaign in favor of a handsome hussar. The mysterious suicide of his rival soon afterwards saw Fredersdorf back in Frederick’s favor.

His citation, Hahn, Friedrich II., p. 62, is a modern biographer, and since he cites Burgdorf for the Marwitz episode, I don't trust Blanning's rigor one bit. But it would be interesting to see if Hahn gives a source. Page 62 is sadly not included in the e-book preview, though it's only $13.59, so I'm tempted. If selenak hasn't had a chance to check it out at a library before I'm back at work and earning income again, I might grab it.

7) Finally, Blanning says that "According to the French envoy, the Jacobite Earl of Tyrconnell, Fredersdorf took money from supplicants seeking royal favors," and he cites Koser as his source. Now, I haven't tracked down that particular Koser publication, but assuming Blanning isn't misrepresenting it, this explains a lot.

Remember when I thought that evidence for dismissal on grounds of embezzlement (whether founded or unfounded) must be out there, because Wikipedia and MacDonogh have very different but overlapping accounts, which they must be getting from somewhere?

Well, all MacDonogh actually says is "he may have pocketed small sums," which could even more easily be referring to Tyrconnell's accusation than to any alleged dismissal.

So now Wikipedia is our *only* source claiming any dismissal, and it badly needs a "citation needed." And I'm now completely throwing it out of consideration until I see one.

Blanning 2

[mildred_of_midgard]

Glasow, Fredersdorf's "short-lived successor":

He had caught Frederick’s eye in 1755 when serving as a private soldier in an infantry regiment at Brieg in Silesia and was made his batman.

---

Algarotti time!

1) Algarotti then moved to London, where he very quickly made an intriguing double conquest of two aristocrats: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (daughter of the Duke of Kingston) and Lord Hervey (son of the Earl of Bristol). Not only were these two engaged in an intermittent adulterous relationship, they were also both bisexual. As Hervey’s biographer put it: “They accepted each other for the flawed but interesting human beings that they respectively were, Lady Mary as a woman who at times wanted to be a man and Lord Hervey as the opposite.”  

Truly, they are an embarrassment of riches for even the most gossipy of sensationalists. :P

2) Even by the standards of mid-eighteenth-century London, this was an exotic ménage à trois. Love letters circulated in multiple permutations. “I love you with all my Heart, & beg you never to forget the affection I have for you, nor let the affection you have expressed for me grow weaker,” wrote Hervey to Algarotti. “Adieu, My Lord, continue to love me, and sometimes think of me,” replied the latter.

The latter wrote ruefully to Algarotti on 28 June 1740: “There are so few people in the world whom God Almighty has made to be liked or who have made themselves to be loved, that you will not wonder when I tell you I hourly regret one of the few I find so deserving of both. Adieu.”

Yeah, but notice how there are no such quotes from Algarotti to Lady Mary. Poor Lady Mary.

3) Now, Algarotti writing to Voltaire about Fritz (a totally different sensationalist triangle) on the occasion of their first meeting in 1739, when they're still in honeymoon phase and have not gotten disillusioned:

Algarotti wrote to Voltaire: “I have seen, oh me beato, this adorable prince… I cannot put in words the number of pleasures I have experienced!”

4) Then Fritz writes to Voltaire gushing about Algarotti, and Voltaire replies to Fritz with poetry for Algarotti (the amount of Cyrano playing is hilarious):

Cease, Algarotti, to look at other people,
The call-girls of Venice and the rent-boys of Rome,
In the theaters of France and at the tables of Germans,
The ministers, kings, heroes and saints;
Don’t wear yourself out, no longer look for a man:
He has been found. Heaven, which fashioned his virtues,
Heaven, has placed my hero at Rheinsberg…
Bring your wanderings to an end at the foot of Rheinsberg,
The universe no longer counts for anything;
You have nothing left to see.

LOL. Well, Fritz, now it's your turn to play sugar daddy! 

---

A couple of things that raised eyebrows on my part:

1) Trier has Fritz writing a two-liner "come quickly!" to Algarotti after his accession, and Jordan adding a poetic postscript. Blanning, citing a different compilation of Fritz's correspondence, says Fritz added the two-liner, Latin line included.

I've always wondered what was up with some of my sources saying the postscript was written by Fritz and others by Jordan. I'm still confused.

2) Blanning has Algarotti accompanying Fritz to his "coronation" at Konigsberg. Now, my understanding was that Fritz didn't have a coronation, just a much cheaper homage ceremony, so maybe this is shorthand. Given that Blanning has Fredersdorf being introduced in 1730 and Katte being executed by ax directly under Fritz's window, my confidence in his attention to detail is not high.

---

Oh, on this occasion, Fritz writes "The Orgasm" for Algarotti (as read and discussed at some length in previous posts), and Algarotti...

For his part, Algarotti entertained Frederick with bawdy sonnets and songs by the Venetian patrician Giorgio Baffo, a special favorite being “In Praise of the Bum.”

And supposedly Hans Heinrich was on this trip too. Man, I hope he was in a different carriage or riding on his horse. :P

---

As discussed, Blanning doesn't know what a literary trope is and concludes that the orgasm poem is not evidence for Fritz/Algarotti, because of the nymph Chloris who features in the poem. ??? Blanning, you're a professor. I guess this is the flip side of the literary scholar concluding Aunt Melusine was a fictional allusion to Fontane instead of a very real person that Katte visited and had an affair with her daughter (according to Hans Heinrich, at least).

Blanning is weird sometimes.

---

Oh, Blanning's take on why Algarotti left in 1742:

It was probably sensible of Algarotti to move to the less demanding and more luxurious surroundings of the Saxon court at Dresden, where he spent the next five years.

You may remember that the dissertation writer's (she who gives every appearance of not knowing who the Queen of Hungary is) claim is that Algarotti left because he wanted an actual *job* and Fritz had him twiddling his thumbs while he conquered Silesia, whereas August let him do some actual art collecting (although he couldn't leave for Italy right away, because SOMEONE had started a war in Central Europe and made it unsafe to travel).

---

Blanning cites Manteuffel and the other Seckendorff's diary quite a bit:

On 2 October 1736 the younger Seckendorf confided to his diary that “Junior [Frederick] will not think in such a pacific way when he comes to the throne, but will begin with a sensational stroke [coup d’éclat], even at the risk of being on the receiving end of one himself.” Another well-placed observer, Count Manteuffel, agreed, adding that Frederick was so much more arrogant, lively, bold, devious and unpredictable than his father that the new reign was certain to be much more volatile. That prediction came after receipt of a letter from Frederick, who was at a training camp at Wehlau, which began: “Alas! Must I always have to write to you from a camp of peace, and shall I never be able to address my letter from a battlefield or the trenches? Shall I spend my whole life like one of those swords which never leave the armaments shop and rust on the nail from which they hang?

Guy Dickens agrees: 

Guy Dickens reported to London that comparisons were being made between the Prussian and Macedonian armies and posed the following rhetorical question: If Alexander the Great could conquer so much with so few, what might Frederick achieve with so many more? They were all correct. Frederick told his envoy sent off to Versailles in June 1740 to stress his “dynamic and headstrong mindset” and to warn the French that it was in the nature of young people to be enterprising and that their ambition to be heroic had often proved disruptive. 

---

So I remembered Fritz's pre-Silesian conquest of Liège, but I had forgotten his pre-Liège saber-rattling:

Just a week after Frederick sent his warning to the French, he advertised his intentions by intervening in a dispute between the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz and the Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel over the castle and village of Rumpenheim near Offenbach on the river Main. He protested vigorously at the Elector’s preemptive military occupation—“ a rape,” he called it— and threatened his own retaliation if the Mainz troops were not withdrawn forthwith. Needless to say, he had his way.

The Saxons: *all develop simultaneous coughing fits in 1756*

---

Legal argument that Fritz wasn't required to support the Pragmatic Sanction (which is not the same thing as a claim to Silesia, mind):

Whether these commitments were worth more than the paper on which they were inscribed remained to be seen. The same applied to the international recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction negotiated with such effort and at the cost of so many concessions during the remainder of Charles’s reign. Among the rulers signing a guarantee was Frederick William I, in 1728, in return for a promise of imperial support for Prussian claims to the Rhenish duchies of Jülich and Berg when the current ruler died. This was a promise that could not be kept, not least because a similar undertaking had been given to Saxony and also to the Sulzbach branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty. By 1732 it had become clear that Charles would renege; in 1738 it became certain. Even a man less volatile than Frederick William I might have been enraged. He had always been ambivalent in his attitude to the Habsburg Emperor, and this latest act of bad faith drove him into the arms of France.

Blanning thinks FW would have loved Frederick the Great's wars:

Four years later [1737] he told his son and heir never to trust the Austrians— they would flatter him so long as he was useful and then drop him immediately when he was not. In this respect, Frederick proved to be a chip off the old block that flew in just the direction his father would have wanted.

I don't think this quote is the strongest evidence, but I do agree with the conclusion.

---

Blanning not inspiring great confidence in his ability to quote from his sources honestly:

Voltaire also observed: “If Machiavelli had had a prince as a pupil, the first thing he would have recommended would have been that he write against him.” That is too cynical. More persuasive was the argument advanced by Friedrich Meinecke that in Frederick humanitarian and power-political impulses coexisted in fruitful tension.

That's LITERALLY what Voltaire said!

Voltaire's LITERAL next sentence is: "The Prince Royal, however, was not master of so much finesse; he really meant what he writ."  I knew that when I was fifteen! (I disagreed and thought it was all a cunning plan by Fritz, but at least I knew what Voltaire said!)

---

To give cahn a little background on FW, and also because I enjoyed the phrasing of the subsequent paragraph:

Even Frederick William the Great Elector, the most vigorous and successful of Frederick’s predecessors, had found himself at the mercy of the great powers. At the Peace of Saint-Germain in 1679 he had been forced to hand back to the Swedes all the conquests he had made at their expense during the previous five years of victorious campaigning, simply because their ally Louis XIV of France had ordered him to do so.

He had been unfortunate enough to encounter Louis XIV at the height of his power and prestige, a time when a French diplomat could boast that “not a dog barks in Europe unless our king says he may.” Sixty years later, dogs were howling without any reference to Versailles.

---

And that's as far as I've gotten on this reread. More to come!

Latest additions to the Fritzian library

[mildred_of_midgard]

1) Eklektische_Monatsschrift1785, a 1785 publication in which some of the documents pertaining to Katte's execution were published. There are the last letters from Katte that we're familiar with, of course, but also Schack and Müller write-ups, which Fontane selected from, but non-comprehensively, and a couple other things. I would be curious if our reader could tell us if there's anything new and interesting, or if we know everything. There's also an inscription by Katte on November 5 in a book that he was bequeathing to a friend, which I have seen before, but not the full text. You can actually view an excerpt in Hans Hermann's handwriting here, in case you're curious what his handwriting looked like.

2) Thanks to Blanning actually giving me the *name* of the 1752 anonymous pamphlet and not just saying "1752 anonymous pamphlet almost certainly by Voltaire," I managed to get a copy of that as well, *finally*. It's in French, of course, and I've only skimmed, but what jumped out at me was that Heinrich is "aimable, poli, genereux," (also a Potsdamite aka sodomite, of course) but AW is just like Fritz, and his rule, if he succeeds Fritz, will be just as despotic and militaristic. ??? I don't *think* it's my French that's the problem here?

Anyway, that's up now, as VoltairePamphlet, if anyone wants to struggle through the French. I probably will at some point.

3) I put up a volume by Raumer, who's got the perspective on 1730-1740 events of the English and French archives (in German translation, sigh), starting on page 491. Dickens' report on Katte's execution is on page 546. I see that, while it varies slightly from Johnn's (especially the last words), he's also got Katte pulling his cap over his eyes with one hand while he threw Fritz a kiss with the other. It's dated to the same day as Johnn's, November 11, so it's kind of interesting that they've got very different last words already. ("There's no need to [apologize]" vs. "If I had ten lives, I would give them all up so that you could be reconciled with your father.")

4) Zimmermann, Fritz's physician of the "TOTALLY HET Fritz had an operation on his penis" claims, where chapter 3 is his take on Fritz's sexuality and supposedly (according to Blanning) contains evidence that Fritz was sexually active into the 1750s. Gossipy sensationalists need to know with whom, according to whom!

Finally, if all goes well, in a few days when my scanner arrives, the Royal Reader should have another interesting volume of German primary sources on Fritz and MT. :D

Oh, as always, let me know if I did something silly like upload the volumes to the wrong place yet again.

Happy birthday, Katte!

[mildred_of_midgard]

February 21, 1704 - November 6, 1730

Per Fontane, who says he inspected the church register at Wust.

I'm sorry you only got 26 birthdays, Hans Hermann. :( But we still remember you! <3

Can... Can I join?

[gambitten]

Yo!

I honestly can't remember how I came across rheinsberg but I've been lurking for about a month and I have no idea how this website works (I had to look at a tutorial page to figure out how to link the page yikes). I'm not sure if other folks are allowed to post.

I'm really impressed by the thorough scholarship here and I'm on an 18th century research kick, with Fritz being one of the big interests, so if I can, I'd like to pop in every now and then and contribute to the discussion. I'm a university student studying biomedical science, so this is a hobby and I don't have loads of time to devote, but I do have access to the Electronic Enlightenment letter database and a lot of scholarship via university access. I can also point to some more obscure publicly available research which you might already be familiar with...?

My memory isn't very good currently and I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to really dig deep psychologically into the minds of the 18th century cast, on account of my people skills being rather lacking, but there are a few subjects which I can write a decent bit about (assuming these things haven't been discussed already). I want to learn too.

I hope to get to know all of you if it's alright!

Fritz: The French Envoy's Take

[selenak]

So I'm snatching time now and then for Jenssen, the 1976 collection of Fritz and MT related documents that Mildred discovered. As mentioned in another comment, Jennssen is surprisingly starry eyed about Fritz for a 1976 editor - and you can sometimes tell by his choice of documents; for example, no Frederician condolence letters, but a Prussian account from 1756 of how the Saxons were all rooting for Fritz and happy to be invaded, err, liberated and totally understood he had to preemptively strike against the conspiracy aganst him. But Jennssen also delivers on the Fritz critical front - there's an Austrian report on AW's withdrawal that got him casheered, for example, which is actually quite complimentary to AW,as well as AW's letter to Mina from Dresden shortly therafter -, though he's a bit miffed when having to do so, as in saying Fritz believed the French to be his friends, while how they truly thought about him (implied: those bastards!) can be learned from this report by the pre-7 Years envoy Valory.

Valory, cahn: French ambassador between Silesia 2 and shortly before 7 Years War. Friends with the Divine Trio. Got nearly captured by Austrians during Silesia 2, which Darget prevented by claiming to be Valory, which got Darget hired by Fritz thereafter and later meant both Darget and Valory co-starred in Fritz raunchy poem "Palladion" about Darget getting buggered by Austrians for the cause.

Now I've seen quotes from this particular Valory dispatch before, but never the entire letter. Even Jenssen doesn't give us the entire letter, but he quotes more from it than I've ever seen, and it's absolutely fascinating as a not unsympathetic (imo) but highly critical psychological dissection of Fritz in the early 1750s. Valory also provides a source for a "FW about Fritz" quote which I had seen only once, in a work of fiction, and thus didn't know whether or not it was authentic.

I beginn with his portrait. His face is compelling. He's small and of noble bearing. His figure isn't regular; his hips are too high, and his legs are too strong. He has beautiful blue eyes which are a bit too strongly pronounced, but easily reflect his moods, so their expression varies depending on his state of mind. If he's dissatisfied with something, their gaze is threatening, but nothing is more soft, gracious and captivating than if he's in a mood to please. His hair is thick, mouth and nose agreeable, his smile charming and witty, but often bitter and mocking. When his soul is peaceful, the softness of his gaze can charm anyone. His health varies, his temper heated, and his personal life style contributes quite a lot to heating his blood. He used to drink incredible amounts of coffee. One day, I dared to tell him that he drank too much coffee; he admitted as much and said he was trying to abandon the habit. "I now drink only six to seven cups in the morning", he said, "and after supper only one."

The King is extreme in anything he does. His main character flaw is his misanthropy. A virtuous and enlightened man is his ideal, and in his opinion the most foolish people are called honorable men. In general, he finds only a few to have wit, and he doesn't esteem the so colled common sense which as opposed to wit can provide a right and sound judgment. Anyone has their share of the later, and only a ruler of judgment can esteem everyone correctly, and if a man has his right place, he can surprise even the most witty people. The King talks a lot and very well, but he listens very little, and mocks every objection.

One can be hardly more daring than he is; hence his contempt for humanity. He speaks out against vice with surprising eloquence. The same is true for morals, the most beautiful traits of which he seems to have learned to name by heart. But he's so little consequential and believes so little in what he says that his own claims refute him only fifteen minutes later.

He does have principles regarding administration, and, if I may say so, even about temper and disloyal reports. Fortunately what he decides when in a mood isn't set in stone; he usually returns to a correct judgment. If, however, his decision is made, he has no regard for etiquette. As soon as something he has come up with and pondered thoroughly appears right to him, he abandons all restraint in order to execute it. He is extremely suspicious; if he was less so, he'd be content to have come up with good ideas and would delegate their execution to his ministers, who are more sensible than he is and would soften any too great harshness.

Again: he has contempt for humankind and believes people are born to obey without talking back. This explains the excess in his behavior and the obvious paradoxes which amaze all who managed to get closer to him. I always have tried to analyze the immediate causes he named for his rejections, as well as the reasons why he hurt or flattered those close to him. In most cases, I had to admit his reasons were good, though not the form they took.

He owes the conquest of Silesia (...) to his boundless energy. (...) The good status of his troops and his magazines which were equipped with all that was needed to start a campaign with a strong army heightened his audacity and made him reckless for as long as he was confronted by only a handful of troops dispersed across a few Silesian fortresses. As soon as he was confronted with a proper army, he got conscious of all the dangers he faced. I dare to say he even exaggareted them in his mind. His consistent fortune has nourished his boldness for a while, but since then he thought about this and has admitted he owes much to luck. His enemy in a distance is always politics. The later often get scorned as being dependent on the moment, especially the Saxons, and yet during the campaign of 1744, they caused him the deepest trouble, but he punished them thouroughly for it in 1745. In this last campaign, he has shown the talents of a great general. But he believes to have all the talents, both those of a King and of a writer, which is a strange brew; we see the great man occupy himself with trifles.

The arts have become his weakness, in the same way as his royal father had a weakness for anyone above six feet. He pursues the reputation of a polymath - the poet, the orator, the musician are starting to dominate the King in him. His many troops force thriftiness on him, and yet I dare say he's too thrifty. It is impossible to possess more ésprit than he does, but very possible to make a better use of it. He's never more charming than if he wants to please you, and he always wants this to flatter his love of self. Once he has charmed you, he neglects you and regards you as his slave, who is there to obey him in a servile manner and to put up with all his moods.

He's harsh and masterful towards his brothers. He holds them in an utter dependency which he himself never got used to when having it on his father who made everyone tremble. This father knew him very well and once told him: "When you are lord and master here, you will betray everyone, for you can't help yourself. You are false to the core of your being, and a betrayer. Be careful, Friedrich! Make that first betrayal as complete as possible, for you won't manage to fool them a second time." I have a trusthworthy second source for this anecdote, for it has been confirmed to me by the crown prince, his worthy brother. I hope thus to have drawn some traits of his character for you. In totem, he remains an enigma.

Fritz/Voltaire marriage

[mildred_of_midgard]

"I have been handed over, my dear, with all due formalities, to the King of Prussia. The marriage is accomplished: will it be happy? I do not know in the least: yet I cannot prevent myself saying, Yes. After coquetting for so many years, marriage was the necessary end. My heart beat hard even at the altar."

IT'S CANON, GUYS. Unlike the Fritz/MT AU that follows us everywhere, this is not an AU, it's actual canon.

cahn, we just have to do something with Fritz/Voltaire at some point. They write themselves! (selenak, I highly encourage you to write Fritz/Voltaire as well.)

Speaking of marriage...

[selenak]

Given the examples of marriage Fritz was familiar with, it's not surprising that the one of MT and Franz Stephan baffled him. More from Jessen. As with Valory's letter about Fritz, bits and pieces from the following letter were already familiar to me, just not this amount. The letter is written by Louis-Marie de Fouquet, Comte de Gisors, who was the nephew of the Marshal Belle-Isle (France's main military man during the Austrian War of succession) and in September 1754 attended first an Austrian manoeuvre (where MT and FS had been present) and then a Prussian manoeuvre.

As soon as Friedrich saw me, he pulled me aside and and bombarded me with questions about Maria Theresia (...) Above all, the King wanted to know how the Empress acted towards the troops. "Does she flatter them? Does she talk to the officers?"

I replied that I had seen her act graciously towards everyone, but without spotting those subtle differences who distinguish the one or encourage the competitive rivalry in the other. However, I added that I had never watched her talk to subaltern officers.

"And the Emperor?"

"Your Majesty, he is very polite and wears his uniform when in the camp. Basically, it seemed to me as if what happened during manouevres did not touch him deeply. He noticed the mistakes correctly, and joked without reproving them, and instead lead Field Marshal Browne act."

"Doesn't one want to say", Friedrich exclaimed, "that the woman has dressed up as a man and the man as a woman? At least the Emperor shows the behavior of a good honest househusband leaving all to his wife."

I looked down and returned that I had noticed that the Empress showed great consideration to the Emperor. (...)

"She must be a strange woman", the King remarked, "much more masculine than feminine. Does she come across as being very busy?"

"Your Majesty, she works from morning to late in the night, and given her strong willpower, she would accomplish very great deeds if she got supported by her ministers in the same way. Her behaviour in the last war proves her courage and her strength of character. Something I especially observed with her was the exquisite courtesy she showed towards everyone. She seemed to use all the advantages of her sex to charm those who come to her court. It is amazing how her face grows more beautiful when she talks, and in which degree she possesses the gift of talking graciously to people even if she feels very differently towards them."

As opposed to, you know, certain other monarchs the good Comte could think of. Fritz being Fritz, he made the "MT is totally the man in that relationship!" quip re: the MT/FS marriage to a lot of people. Unsurprisingly, FS heard about it, too. And had fun with Ambassador Podewils on August 31st, 1748:

(Franzl) believes to know your majesty's character: you had a very energetic mind, and one shouldn't give you opportunity to catch fire. He also knows that your Majesty has said of him that he was a good man without any power and thus of no earthly use. I replied with urgency that one had given him wrong information. (...) He replied that he wasn't particularly gullilble, but that he had the observations your majesty had made about him from a good source; he still assured me that he wasn't insulted in the least; he would keep exactly the same friendship for your majesty your majesty showed him and would always have the sincere wish to contribute to the harmony between the Empress-Queen and your majesty.

Make of that what you will, Fritz.

Asprey 1

[mildred_of_midgard]

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.

Asprey 2

[mildred_of_midgard]

During this miserable autumn of 1728 [Fritz] unburdened himself to his confidant and possible lover, Lieutenant Friedrich von Borcke.

Borcke shows up in Lavisse just enough and in just suggestive enough contexts that I had begun to wonder if we had a new boyfriend here. But this is the first time I've seen someone else suggest it.

I haven't been able to find much about him. He was born in 1702, so he was 10 years older than Fritz. I found a collection of correspondence between Fritz and the Borcke brothers (older brother Borcke is notable enough to get his own Wikipedia page, possible boyfriend Borcke is not), but there's no extant correspondence between 1728 and 1731. The editor thinks that Fritz may have turned from him to people who were more congenial and supportive of the escape plans. Borcke may have known nothing about the escape at all. The editor thinks it's certain that he didn't approve, because Borcke wrote a letter to his brother in August 1730 expressing disapproval after it became clear.

I find that possible, but less than convincing, because...

"Wow, it's too bad he didn't make it, the King's been really awful to him"...said no one ever.

But yes, if Fritz started hanging out more with Keith and Katte, it's possible it's because Borcke wasn't giving him the sympathy and support he was looking for.

---

Not sure to what extent Asprey can be trusted on this, but this was interesting, if true. It's from the late 1720s, when the British double marriage negotiations are kicking off, and Austria wants to prevent the alliance.

[Seckendorff] unveiled a secret weapon, the Prussian resident secretary in London, one Benjamin Reichenbach, "a Person," as the important British minister Lord Townshend had earlier complained," whose Behaviour is such , that neither the [English] King nor his Ministers can put the least confidence in him." Reichenbach was a paid agent of Seckendorff and Grumbkow. For some time he had been reporting to the Prussian king what his employers told him to report. English archives contain copies of over forty of his letters, the originals of which were found in Grumbkow's effects. They were generally long, written in French, and employ a simple number code. They showed the three principals — Grumbkow, Reichenbach, and Seckendorff - to be extremely intelligent, at home in the classics, and complete masters of the Prussian king.

---

Wars of aggression are okay if they involve men over six feet tall:

Prussian recruiting officers illegally at work in Hanover had been arrested and would not be released until ten Hanoverians who had recently been impressed into the Prussian army were freed. Frederick William, who learned of the arrests from newspapers and not through diplomatic channels, lost his temper and immediately ordered preparations for the Prussian army to march.

[Everyone sane: "Omg no."]

Frederick William...seemed determined to have his war. In ensuing weeks orders went out to purchase horses for the heavy cannon, procure blacksmiths for work on artillery carriages, grind corn for magazines, and all the other measures necessary to put his army on the march. Dubourgay reported that the king would spend over 600,000 thalers in the first stages of mobilization; the Danish envoy reported that he had just returned from parade "where everything breathes war"; a few days later: he wrote that "preparations for war are redoubled from one day to the next."

---

More amusing Asprey comparisons:

Sir Charles Hotham is one of those figures who suddenly and unexpectedly appears. on center stage of a historical drama, a deus ex machina who performs badly and returns to virtual anonymity when the play goes bust.

cahn, this is *not* Lehndorff's Sir Charles Hotham, this is a relative (I think an uncle?) who was the English envoy negotiating the unsuccessful double marriage project between Fritz & Wilhelmine and Amelia (whom Asprey calls Emily, the first time I've seen that) & the Prince of Wales.

Asprey blames Hotham, I don't know how fairly or unfairly, for mishandling the marriage negotiations and causing their eventual failure.

---

I was starting to think I'd read this quote in a fanfic somewhere, but no, it's Asprey.

"Starvation for starvation, I prefer Cüstrin to Potsdam."

No citation given. Lavisse gives a quote with the same thrust but different wording, so this may be Asprey paraphrasing for snappiness.

---

Asprey seems to think Fritz actually fathered a daughter on Wreech, although Fritz denied it. He agrees with our interpretation of FW's reaction: "hoping that he will do the same for la Bevern."

Blanning said she wasn't pregnant at all. When two unreliable biographers disagree...*sigh*

Re Wreech:

A few years later he would write to Voltaire of this "little wonder of nature" who had taught him love and poetry "with taste and delicacy." "I did well enough in love but poorly in poetry."

I thought Orzelska had taught him love and poetry? Or did he write two quotes like this to Voltaire? Or am I misremembering?

---

When Fritz shows up to Wilhelmine's wedding celebrations:

He responded to Wilhelmina's impassioned embraces and words with distinct coolness, and when she presented her husband, Frederick refused to speak to him. She partially recovered on learning that von Grumbkow had advised Frederick to seem aloof in order to impress the king

Huh, I didn't realize she had spelled this out, but admittedly I've only selectively read volume 2 of her memoirs, and haven't read their correspondence. At any rate, Asprey supports selenak's reconstruction of events here!

---

Asprey thinks the Fritz-reforming project is working pretty well:

[Fritz] came down with three - day fever, and although he had learned to prefer beer, in accordance with paternal desires, he drank champagne because the doctors prescribed it.

Considering he continued to prefer champagne for the rest of his life, I'm with MacDonogh that Fritz was faking liking beer and excusing his continued champagne drinking to his father by saying it was medicinal.

---

Hee:

He was forced to correspond with his fiancée, but his letters were short and desultory, significantly lacking verses, which he normally inflicted on friends.

---

Death of August the Strong:

Early in 1733, while traveling to Poland, the sixty-three-year old monarch had summoned Grumbkow to Crossen to discuss his ambitious diplomatic plans. Acting on Frederick William's instructions to pump the Polish king for all he was worth, the general had turned the meeting into a prolonged drinking bout, from which neither participant ever fully recovered. Throughout January, August weakened so much that he told his confessor, “I have not at present strength to name my many and great sins."

---

So remember when one of Fritz's "brothers" visited him with two companions and they were all more interested in food than learning, leading Fritz to complain to Suhm that he was forced to entertain when would rather be reading? Asprey claims this was...Henry! Who was all of 10 years old.

He gives no citation, as usual, and I'm heavily question marking the purported identification.

---

The early correspondence between Fritz and Voltaire:

A modern French historian has noted that Voltaire in various letters saw in Frederick "a Caesar, an Augustus, a Marcus Aurelius, a Trajan, an Anthony, a Titus, a Julian, a Virgil, a Pliny, a Horace, a Mécène, a Cicero, a Catullus, a Homer, a Rochefoucauld, a Bruyère, a Boileau, a Solomon, a Prometheus, an Apollo, a Patroclus, a Socrates, an Alcibiades, an Alexander, a Henry IV, and a Francis I."

Meanwhile, post-breakup Voltaire, in his memoirs:

Epithets cost us nothing. They have printed some of these ridiculous things in a collection of my works, and happily they have not printed the thirtieth part of them.

More Asprey snark about the early correspondence:

In truth, neither correspondent was much of a philosopher and the exchange of thoughts was not very deep, but in those shallow waters the Prussian crown prince more than held his own. Mercifully, they soon lost interest in the subject.

---

Okay, so I knew Fritz got money from Dickens (the English envoy) in 1730 because the British were trying to pressure him out of trying to escape and come to England, I knew he was getting money later in the 1730s from the Austrians via Seckendorff, Liechtenstein, and Manteuffel, the Brunswicks via EC, and the Russians via Suhm, but apparently the British decided to send him more money in 1739 via Dickens.

Asprey comments: 

The first payment was like the first drink to an alcoholic. At Frederick's urging, Truchsess was soon again on the way to Rheinsberg to deliver another two thousand pounds. Frederick meanwhile had in formed Dickens that "he was greatly mistaken in his Calculations": he owed four years of accumulated debts at home and abroad (Dickens reported a total of several hundred thousand thalers) and needed an other six thousand pounds. In addition, he wanted an annual allowance of fifty thousand thalers, to begin in a few weeks.

As usual, the code was books:

In a November dispatch, Dickens somewhat frantically noted that he had given the student" a few "brochures" in advance but that he now demanded “folios"!

On the subject of paying back the loans:

Frederick was constantly and often heavily in debt. Thanks mainly to Voltaire's biased Mémoires, the legend grew that as king he did not have to repay these debts. This is false. (Granier, "Kronprinzlichen Schulden.") From 1749-1750 he repaid debts in the sum of 272,242 thalers. One debt incurred in 1738 was repaid with interest in 1782! (Preuss, Friedrich . . . eine Lebensgeschichte, Volume 1.)

The British money was paid back promptly according to Asprey, the Russians as far as I can tell from the Suhm correspondence got paid back in 1740 (although I suppose I only know that he *started* paying them back then, not that he didn't wait until 1782 to finish), we know Liechtenstein had to wait until after the Seven Years' War...I wonder if this means we can answer Fontane's question about whether the Austrians got repaid in the positive. Or if he made an exception for them.

Also, Asprey, I'm sorry, but "Preuss, volume 1" is not a citation. FFS.

---

From the Anti-Machiavel (which I need to reread, seriously):

A good prince will cultivate his mind before seeking such riotous and brutalizing pleasures as the hunt. (Take notice, King Frederick William.)

Asprey's parenthesis.

---

Late 1739, FW is dying:

The king was in constant pain from severe gout, not to mention dropsy
and shortness of breath with frequent vomiting. He sometimes recovered sufficiently to conduct state business in the mornings, but a relapse usually followed. He could not sleep and frequently held night-long sessions of the Tabagie, insisting that old comrades smoke and tell stories; sometimes he dozed off, but if someone stopped talking he instantly awakened. To pass lonely and painful hours he made wooden boxes, furiously hammering on a special bed table. On occasion he would have some of the Potsdam giants march through the bedroom. The sight of them invariably made him feel better, and sometimes he would hug one or paint a portrait.

I knew about the marching through his sickroom and the painting, of course, but the hugging is new to me. Citation needed!

Also, I wonder if both Fritz and FW died of congestive heart failure due to excessive tobacco consumption.

---

March 1740:

In March he told Old Dessauer that since Frederick did not enjoy hunting, he wanted the prince to take his pick of the royal hounds and hoped he would continue to derive much pleasure from the chase.

---

After watching FW verbally abuse Fritz all the way up to 1739, we reach May 1740:

Frederick now received a letter from his father with the salutation, the first time ever, "My beloved Son." He returned to Potsdam the following day expecting to find his father dead. Instead, the king was in the palace gardens, supervising the laying of a cornerstone for a blacksmith's cottage!

I'm not sure it was the first, though? Checking...Okay, the one I was thinking of, from December 1731, was "lieber", and this is "geliebter." Okay!

Not long after:

The king next summoned various officers and officials to his deathbed, "Has God not graced me by having given me such a courageous and worthy son?" he asked them. Frederick rose, gripped the royal hand, and cried. The king embraced him and said, "My God, I die content, since I leave behind such a worthy son and successor."

And as selenak shared with us:

When a chaplain sang one of his favorite hymns, “Naked I came into this world, naked I shall fare hence," the king interrupted: "That isn't true; I shall be wearing my uniform."

---

And now that FW has died in uniform and Fritz is no longer Crown Prince, I leave Asprey and return to Blanning, who is a breath of fresh air in terms of responsible scholarship, in that when he blatantly misrepresents what an author says, he at least cites a page number so you can tell!

*headdesk*

War of the Polish Succession

[mildred_of_midgard]

Cast of Characters
Augustus the Strong: father of Countess Orzelska and purportedly 353 other illegitimate children, Elector of Saxony, and also King of Poland.
Augustus III: only legitimate son of Augustus II.
Stanislaus Leszczyński: The father of Louis XV's wife, Marie Leszczyńska. (Polish surnames are gendered.)
Charles VI: Holy Roman Emperor, MT's dad.

Causes of the War
During our period, King of Poland is an elective title. The Polish Diet votes on who gets to be king. In practice, that means neighboring powers with armies get a major say.

As we've seen recently, Augustus II converted to Catholicism to get the crown of Poland.

All is hunky-dory for a while, and then, in 1733, Augustus II dies. According to Asprey, a drinking bout with Grumbkow kicked off his final decline. Take with the usual grain of salt.

Now the position for King of Poland is wide open. Two major candidates emerge: Augustus' only legitimate son, Augustus III, and Stanislaus.

The French want their king's father-in-law, Stanislaus, on the Polish throne. Charles VI, MT's dad, obviously wants Augustus III on the throne, because he is Holy Roman Emperor and Augustus III is his subject, in his capacity as Elector of Saxony. (Much like how FW is simultaneously Elector of Brandenburg and King in Prussia.)

The War of the Polish Succession thus breaks out.

Let Slip the Dogs of War
Stanislaus is elected king by the Polish Diet. But Austria and Russia, fearing a Poland-Sweden-France bloc, kick him out and force the Poles to elect Augustus III monarch.

Stanislaus flees to Königsberg. Now, this is interesting, because Königsberg is part of East Prussia, under FW's control, and outside the HRE.

FW, despite the fact that he answers to Charles VI, doesn't want the Elector of Saxony on the throne of Poland, because Prussia and Saxony are rivals competing for dominance in the Holy Roman Empire. FW insists that he wants Saxon recognition of one of the territories he's always after, Berg, if he's going to support Augustus.

When Augustus refuses, FW thus, in his capacity as King in Prussia, offers asylum to Stanislaus in East Prussia.

France, meanwhile, invades Lorraine (the border territory where MT's soon-to-be husband Franzl is from, and which he had to give up in order to marry her).

Charles, HRE, calls on the German princes to help fight off this invasion.

FW: Elector of Brandenburg reporting for duty, sir! I've got an army of 40,000 ready to march today. Just say the word!

Austrians: *do not have an army of 40,000 ready to march today*
Charles VI: Giant independent Prussian army marching across Germany sounds scary, frankly. How about you just send 10,000, and wait until I'm ready--oh, and not seize Juliers and Berg while you're at it?
FW: *is offended* <-- this will be relevant later

So then the Siege of Philippsburg happens, summer of 1734. The French army is besieging the Austrian fort at Philippsburg, on the Rhine. It goes on for several weeks. Fritz, Prince Eugene, and Joseph Wenzel, Prince of Liechtenstein, the current, past, and present owners of the Antinous statue, are all present on the Austrian side. Voltaire, fleeing another of his endless arrest warrants, shows up on the French side and hangs out over there, almost gets executed by the French as a spy.

Eugene confirms his belief that Fritz is a dangerous young man, says Europe can expect great things of him, tries to instill loyalty to the House of Habsburg, but concludes, "the French poison has gone too deep."

Fritz has mixed feelings about meeting his hero: admires what he once was, completely disappointed in his mental decline into senility. Says it's worse to lose your life than your reason. But later in life will say Eugene gave him some useful advice on that occasion.

Then the Austrian garrison surrenders, and the siege is over. FW, who just showed up as it was ending, and Fritz, who's been there a little longer, head home.

Peace Breaks Out
FW is not very supportive of the war effort thereafter, and particularly of letting Fritz hang out with Eugene, who's trying to win him over to the Austrian cause, just when FW is getting super disillusioned. (FW, you really have nothing to worry about.)

So instead of getting to go to war again in 1735, which he really wanted to do, Fritz gets denied permission by FW to join the Imperial army and gets sent on an inspection tour of East Prussia.

Now, Stanislaus is still under FW's protection in East Prussia. Fritz meets him and decides he likes him, despite being disgruntled at not getting to see any action this year.

Meanwhile, the Austrians and French have been negotiating. It's complicated and takes them 3 years to finally end the war, but the upshot is this: Augustus gets to be King of Poland, Stanislaus gets to be Duke of Lorraine, Franzl gets Tuscany, France guarantees the Pragmatic Sanction. Franzl, who's historically been the Duke of Lorraine, has to give it up, because he's set to marry MT, and the French don't want the Habsburgs as next-door neighbors.

Charles is mad at FW because FW is still harboring Stanislaus and treating him as king. Yes, despite marching his army against the French, who want to make Stanislaus king. This is what happens when you're Elector of Brandenburg and King of--I'm sorry, in--Prussia at the same time. You get to play both sides of the board. Charles is also mad because FW didn't send troops for the final stage of the campaign, because FW was mad at him and didn't really want Augustus to be king anyway.

Charles therefore doesn't bother telling FW about the peace. FW gets to read about it in the newspaper. Charles also bans FW from recruiting troops for the Prussian army within the Holy Roman Empire. And you know how FW feels about recruiting. Charles also, as the final straw, doesn't tell him about MT's marriage to Franzl.

All these insults combined culminate in FW pointing to Fritz in front of other Seckendorff and saying, "There stands one who will avenge me." It wasn't just the lack of wedding invitation.

Stanislaus and Émilie
Remember how Stanislaus ends up in Lorraine? We've heard about him before. In the Émilie story! I will copy-paste from that write-up:

In the 1740s, Émilie and Voltaire go hang out at the court of Stanislaus, deposed king of Poland (remember the War of the Polish Succession that Voltaire and Fritz were briefly involved in) and father of Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France.

The gossipy sensationalism begins!

It turns out Stanislaus has a mistress named Catherine. His priest does not approve of this. Especially since said priest is a Jesuit, and Catherine hates Jesuits. Father Joseph decides that, while no mistress would be ideal, Stanislaus has made it clear that's not happening, so any mistress would be better than this mistress.

"Émilie is famous! And pretty enough. If I invite her to court, Stanislaus is sure to ditch Catherine for her!" goes Father Joseph's rather bizarre logic.

Émilie: Lol wut. He's 71. I'm with Voltaire. Catherine, though, you seem cool.
Émilie and Catherine: *become BFFs*
Stanislaus: *is relieved not to have to satisfy two mistresses at his age* (<-- Seriously, this is what the author says.)

However, Voltaire and Émilie are on the outs again. She starts having an affair with a rather younger and better looking man at Stanislaus' court, who used to be Catherine's lover. Stanislaus approves. Things are good for a while. She finds a love letter from her new lover to Catherine. Voltaire catches Émilie and her new lover having sex. Émilie knows he has a lover in Paris (but doesn't guess it's his niece). Drama and explosions ensue.

Stanislaus: The Prequel
Now, if you want to get an idea of how complicated Stanislaus' life was, you should know that this isn't even the first time he was deposed as King of Poland!

Way back in 1704, as part of the Great Northern War, Charles XII of Sweden (super-famous general) invades Poland, deposes Augustus III "the Strong", and puts Stanislaus on the Polish throne. That lasts about 5 years before Charles is defeated, Stanislaus kicked out, and Augustus the Strong put back on the throne.

Twenty-five years later, Stanislaus gets to be king again thanks to a foreign power, then gets kicked out again in favor of Augustus' son, confusingly also named Augustus.

So 18th century Polish monarchs go like this:

Augustus II (1697-1704/1706)
Stanislaus I (1704/1706-1709)
Augustus II (1709-1733)
Stanislaus I (1733-1734)
Augustus III (1734-1763)
Stanislaus II Augustus (Poniatowski) (1763-1795)

1704/1706 is the difference between de facto and de jure rule.

Poniatowski
And who should succeed Augustus III but Catherine's favorite, Stanislaus Poniatowski, who got nominated for Yuletide! Augustus III is the one of whom Fritz said, "And now the king of Poland has died like a fool! I do not like these people who do everything at the wrong time." Notice that he dies in 1763, which is the year the Seven Years' War ends, which is...not a good time for Fritz. Notwithstanding that he won by maintaining the status quo, everyone is dead (hyperbole alert), the country's in ruins, and money's a big problem* in Prussia. Not a good time for Polish upheaval or Fritz's ability to do anything about the vacancy.

So Catherine got to put her favorite on the throne. He then started trying to be an actual responsible monarch, reform the government, put Polish interests first, help Poland get its act together, instead of being a Russian puppet...none of which Fritz or Catherine liked. But, never mind, he didn't put up a fight when Prussia and Russia decided they wanted to carve up Poland in the 1770s, so that worked out for the neighbors in the long run. (Not so much the Poles.)

* Remember that after the war, Lehndorff said, on the subject of the economy, "Fritz better fix this." It's not an accident that Jägerhof got converted to a bank in 1765.