cahn | Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 18

...apparently reading group is the way to get lots of comments quickly?

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

50 more pages. Wilhelmine has arrived in Bayreuth and is not impressed. Oster is arguing that contemporaneous letters she sent to family show that it wasn't as bad as Wilhelmine later recounted in her memoirs. As opposed to Wilhelmine putting a good face on it?

Particularly this letter:

"Everyone's nice to me here, Dad! It would be great, except I miss you so much. Please send $$$, renovations desperately needed."

None of that strikes me as either something that should be taken at face value or as counterevidence to the memoirs.

Also, lol at imagining that letter being written by Wilhelmine the modern AU college student. :P

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Do you think your body finds daytime a better time to sleep?

Somewhat, but I feel like that's the least of the problems. The biggest of my many sleep problems is that once my sleep gets disrupted, it stays disrupted for a very long time. Naturally, it also gets disrupted extremely easily. :/

I have to say, as much fun as it was being online at the same time, it's *way* better for my sleep for you not to be leaving comments right when I'm trying to go to bed. My willpower isn't that strong! Tell your kids they have my permission to stay up late. :P

From:

cahn

We did The Little Prince in eleventh-grade *English*. Not that we weren't also doing more complicated English prose, but we certainly were not in a position to read that in French.

*blinks* Well, I'm glad you appended that note about doing more complicated English prose, because... what?? But still.

We were still just doing textbook exercises consisting of individual sentences, Duolingo-style.

Yeah, that's not right. My first high school had surprisingly good French, which meant that the second year when we walked in the teacher started talking to us in French and expecting us to respond in same, which we were all very upset by :) (But it turns out that this kind of on-the-fly practice is a really great way to force language learning!) My second high school had great everything except my history teacher, who was terrible (although there is evidence she used to be less bad and was going through some personal problems that year), and the French teacher wasn't nearly as good as my old one. We didn't read books in my third-year class (which first!French teacher would have made us do) but we did read paragraphs!

Now, what your class reminds me of is my Spanish class (at first high school). I don't think I have mentioned before that I took a year of Spanish, which is because I learned and retain next to zero from that class. My parents really wanted me to take Spanish, as it's such a useful language to know in the US, and as an adult living in SoCal I don't disagree with their assessment -- it would certainly be a practical language to know. (Though French was definitely the right choice in terms of life happiness -- useful in a wide range of literary, historical, and musical contexts! :D )

We spent every class, every day, doing the exercises from the book (which are much more repetitive than Duolingo) -- you know, I have this vague memory that we didn't even do them ourselves; I think the teacher told us the answer and we wrote it down -- and then we would be tested on exactly those exercises. This meant that it was much easier to memorize the exercises that one would be tested on than it was to actually learn the language. So I'd dutifully memorize the exercises, and then promptly forget them, and so I know no Spanish. (Well, I mean, living in SoCal, and having done French and Italian, I know enough to pick out words and such, but I can't understand or read as much as I could after even a semester of, say, Italian.)

From:

cahn

They neither of them made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the Prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy— the Queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the Princess Caroline declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe ;

Wow. Even accounting for Hervey maybe not being the most reliable narrator here... gosh.

That analysis of his motives in third person is really... something. I gotta say that it does not inspire me to think of him as more reliable than I thought of him before.

From:

selenak

At a guess, Oster trusting Catt is your explanation for four years old Heinrich being declared FW's fave by him; Catt, remember, claims he was. Now of course I'm prepared to be wrong and to have missed something/misremember, but I don't recall that babysitting story during SD's labor from Wilhelmine's memoirs, and a quick cursory check on my kindle copy doesn't give me that story. With your recent far more thorough reading of the year 1730 in her memoirs, do you recall anything like it? So unless Oster provides a different source citation for the anecdote - say, an ambassadorial report (by Guy Dickens or Hotham the older, presumably), I'm going with my "faith in Catt strikes again" guess.

At any event: why would Wilhelmine need to supervise Heinrich during SD's labor and ensueing lying-in anyway? That's what the staff is for. Heinrich having joined AW's household as of his fourth birthday in January, he wasn't even staying with his mother's household anymore. Note that in the letters from eight years old AW to FW which Cahn could read, which describe what the boys do all day, there's no mention of Mom or their oldest sister anywhere, just of Heinrich and their tutors.

Magdeburgers: would have to look it up.

SD trying to forestall a marriage she doesn't want by arguing that Wilhelmine's too young and will reproach her parents someday if she ends up unhappily married...that's pretty brazen, considering the quote at the beginning of the book where SD is writing about two-year-old FoW asking about his future bride, aka TWO-MONTH-OLD Wilhelmine.

No kidding. It really shows how soon she got fixated on that idea.

FW wanting to marry her to August the Strong: probably not, says Oster, no external evidence, and surely SD would freak out.

On the one hand, yes, on the other there's the Fritz letter from Dresden to Wilhelmine which gives her a "hot or not?" report on August the Strong. Now maybe it's just because Fritz assumes his sister would want to know more about their host, but date wise, it works with when the memoirs say the match was talked about, i.e. between FW's short lived "am gonna abdicate and live the true Christian life with my wife and daughters at Wusterhausen" idea and the Dresden visit. Maybe it wasn't as serious a possibility as she presents it in her memoirs, but what I do think is possible that Grumbkow, who was after all the FW/August liason, put it out there in some drunken rounds, and FW didn't immediately say no, which would have been enough for rumors to start and filter through to Wilhelmine and Fritz.

I take back what I said long ago about this marriage going better than the EC marriage.

Fritz: Franz Stephan, I am not. I'm also an expert in marital warfare even at this tender age. Bring it on.

LOL. And Amelia/Emily comes across as way more strong willed than EC, too. Mind you, her own experience with royal marriage would have been with Caroline managing G2 by pretending to worship to the ground he tread on but manipulating him into accepting all her ideas as his.

I wouldn't wish such a fate on Wilhelmine, but wooow, can you imagine Lord Hervey recording how this went down??

Quite. And Fritz of Prussia would have done him the favor of always talking in French when insulting the Hannover clan, too.

From:

cahn

Methinks whatever is true of Caroline, I wouldn't be surprised if Hervey did come to see her as a replacement mother and that this provided him with additoinal ire fuel against Fritz of Wales.

*nods* That makes sense.

(Cumberland he couldn't rationally object to since he hadn't done anything at that point when Hervey writes, so he just edits him out as much as he can.)

Hee! Yeah, that makes sense too.

But, right, also given the circumstances I can see G2 and Caroline not really having parental feelings for Fritz of Wales, and not really seeing him as a kid of theirs, so any insults, etc. maybe didn't really register to them as all that bad (and then, as you pointed out earlier, there's the part where Caroline didn't exactly have good role models to begin with).

I also rolled my eyes at Hervey none too subtly complaining he'd had to play the perfect courtier for G2 despite being worn out and exhausted from attending Caroline, yet otoh writing the story to demonstrate Emily's "falseness" towards her father.

Ha! I didn't quite get there (I mostly just thought she had a point, lol) so I'm glad you pointed that out :)

From:

selenak

What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!

I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.

It probably was a memory lapse. My other guess would be projection, but projection of what? The baby Sophie Charlotte had before FW, one Friedrich August, died before FW was born, and she never had any more children. As for F1's own childhood, he was son no.3 himself, with two brothers ahead of him, one of whom died before F1 was born. (The other - Karl Emil! - was one of those he later suspected his stepmother of killing, along with his younger brother Ludwig. Two more (fullL) siblings died as babies. Then came stepmom and all the Schwedt half siblings.

"Knirps" is a bit old fashioned but still in use today, though mostly used for little children.

Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts (what with the very recent kingly title) by the rest of Europe, and of course SD had it drummed into her that she was meant for higher things and FW was completely undignified and no one was to follow his example from the get go. I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"

Which, btw, leads into what you say about servants and the chains of abuse and neglect. Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes. Presumably Leti had had her own experiences, too. (And as Oster points out at the very least must have been well educated, because she did give Wilhelmine a first class education in terms of knowledge, see also the difference between child Wilhemine's letters to child AW's letters to FW in style and maturity.)

I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.

Food question: I'm with you there.

From:

selenak

One essay/lecture that was linked at the Bayreuth website about Wilhelmine goes into those letters after her marriage, and shows Wilhelmine writing to FW, SD and Fritz about the same time but quite differently, tailored to recipient. And yes, FW gets the most polyanna letter. Considering he made her sign a disclaimer that she gave up her right to inheritance from SD just before the marriage as a last minute surprise and that as a result she was financially still very much dependent on him (and that her father-in-law had expected more cash), I think any letter from Wilhelmine to Dad has to be taken with extreme caution as to the veracity. And with SD, SD's general disapproval of the marriage was still hanging over her, so a "see, Mom, at least my husband loves me, and I'm doing well!" argument is ongoing.

From:

selenak

I mean, Hervey by no means makes this hostility within the Royal family up. The other bitchy memoirist of the period, Walpole, backs him up there, with the one significant difference that Walpole claims Caroline sent a secret message to Fritz of Wales on her deathbed that she forgives him (so she could die in peace), but that she couldn't allow him in her presence because it would upset G2, whereas Hervey is insistent Caroline hated her eldest till her dying breath. And of course just as with the arguments between G1 and G2, the ones between FoW and his parents made it into various ambassadorial reports. Where I'm a tad sceptical is Hervey's analysis of his own motives, but not in the sense that he's consciously lying.

Now, FoW even when you assume bias was by no means fault-free, but it's the divergence between the rethoric employed - the authors of the "Hephaistion" essay point out Hervey's decriptions occasionally borrow from Tacitus on Tiberius and Nero - and what's actually there that is so startling. Rethoric aside, what FoW is guilty of:

- pre-marriage, having mistresses, as most bachalor (or married) princes, FW aside, did. Possibly also post marriage, depending on whether you think he and Lady Archivald Hamilton had a thing and kept carrying on. (BTW, her wiki entry lists her as his mistress, whereas her son's wiki entry is far more cautious and says "possible", as in: His mother was a favourite, and possibly a mistress, of the Prince of Wales and William grew up with his son George III, who would call him his "foster brother". (Citation given here, a biography of Sir William Hamilton.) (BTW, if you're wondering why G3 calling Sir William "foster brother" did not help Sir William's widow Emma many a year later, by then G3 had his second and lasting diagnosis of madness and was locked away.)

- feuding with his sister and parents about Handel, supporting a rival opera

- wanting a higher budget, like the one his father used to get as Prince of Wales

- drifting towards the parliamentary opposition, to the point where he tries to use Parliament to force his father to give him a higher budget

- not refering to the Queen in his letters to the King (classified as a sign of disrespect by his parents)

- pretending to respect and love his parents in publich when he does not.

- The stunt he pulled with Augusta in labor, inflicting the one and a half hour drive on her rather than let her give birth at Hampton Court.

Only the last one is truly terrible (imo, as always), and Augusta would have been the one with a right to complain and condemn, not the parents who spent the entire pregnancy doubting the baby was real. It's clearly a case of another catastrophic feedback loop, where Fritz of Wales after fourteen years of absence shows up a stranger, can't connect with a family who doesn't really want him to be there (though I doubt they hated him from the get go), and eventually gives up trying and becomes hostile in turn, which furthers everyone's aversion towards him.

Meanwhile, despite groving up in Hannover, he really did his best to fit in, to become English, using only this language when talking to Brits, not French, and during his friendship with Hervey co-writing a play in it. (A bad play, but that's besides the point). Later when he was a father he ensured that English was the children's first language (hence G3 being the first Hannover monarch who actually spoke English as his native language). The friends he chose were from Britain, not from the Germans at court. But that made his parents even more suspicious of him.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Those letters, which you wrote up for us, were exactly what I was thinking of. So far, I haven't been blown away by Oster's scholarship. I mean, Ziebura also trusts Catt, but that seems unavoidable, and I do feel like she did a better job (as far as I can perceive) of deploying the epistolary evidence. I'm still glad I'm reading Oster, of course! Learning a lot, just like with Blanning and MacDonogh. But serious grains of salt.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oster trusting Catt is your explanation for four years old Heinrich being declared FW's fave by him; Catt, remember, claims he was.

Oh, right! I'd forgotten that, but yes. Okay, that makes sense.

So unless Oster provides a different source citation for the anecdote - say, an ambassadorial report (by Guy Dickens or Hotham the older, presumably), I'm going with my "faith in Catt strikes again" guess.

I...I can't tell. Here's the passage:

In dieser Atmosphäre konnte es sogar Wilhelmine wagen, ihrem Vater wieder unter die Augen zu treten, nachdem ihr Brief dessen Zorn bereits hatte erweichen lassen. Auch diese Szene hat der braunschweigische Gesandte am 4. März geschildert: »Wie sie nun ... hereingerufen, habe sich die älteste Prinzessin zu des Königs Füßen geworfen und selbe umfasset; da sie der König bei die Hand genommen und aufstehen heißen. Als sie aber dem König die Hand küssen wollte, war ihr solches resusiret [verwehrt], die Königin ihr darauf einen Wink gebend, war sie [Wilhelmine] dem Könige um den Hals gefallen und ihn geküsset, dabei sagend: ›Papa hat eine Ungnade auf mich geworfen, so mir länger unerträglich fällt. Ich bitte kindlich, Papa lasse mir doch die vorige Gnade wieder verspüren‹; welche Worte die Prinzessin bei Vergießung vieler Tränen hervorgebracht ... Der König habe darauf wieder versetzet: ›Es ist nun alles gut, Wilhelmine, du bist allemal meine liebe Tochter.‹« Friedrich Wilhelms gute Laune ging an diesem Tag sogar so weit, daß er Wilhelmine auftrug, während Sophie Dorothea im Wochen bett lag, für ihren Bruder Heinrich zu sorgen, der damals sein Liebling war. »Hieraus nun will man schließen, daß die Versöhnung zwischen dem Könige und der Prinzessin ihre Richtigkeit habe.«

The bit about taking care of Heinrich and Heinrich being the favorite aren't in the direct quote. But if they're from Catt and not the envoy, then the "Hieraus" is very misleading, to say the least. So the taking care of Heinrich story looks like it must come from the Brunswick envoy, even if the "he was the favorite" could possibly be an addendum from Catt.

cahn, it goes like this:

Brunswick envoy on March 4: "Touching reconciliation between Wilhelmine and FW, everybody cries," in direct quote from the envoy report.

End direct quote.

Oster adds that FW is in such a good mood that he tells Wilhelmine, while SD is in childbed, to take care of Heinrich, who at the time was his favorite.

Resume Brunswick envoy direct quote: "From this, we can [or "we'd like to"?] conclude that the reconciliation between the King and Princess is real." [I'm taking "ihre Richtigkeit habe" to mean "has veracity," i.e. "is real," and the context to be the fact that just in the last month, the envoys have been writing home, "Is FW really being nice to Fritz, or is this just a show for our benefit?"]

So while I don't remember this anecdote from the memoirs, to answer

selenak's question, the anecdote itself seems to be real, though I can't tell whether the envoy vouches for Heinrich being the favorite that year. (If he was, I really want to know what happened to make AW lose that spot temporarily.)

I also don't remember this anecdote from Catt, which is not to say it's not there, though I do remember Heinrich being the favorite, now that I'm reminded.

[ETA: Though I should add that I do remember, if my memory isn't faulty, a very similar episode earlier in the memoirs in which Wilhelmine was given charge of a different younger sibling or siblings. I will need to look that up.]

say, an ambassadorial report (by Guy Dickens or Hotham the older, presumably)

Oster actually quotes a lot from Stratemann, the Brunswick envoy, whom I didn't know about. As I said, there's a lot of good, new-to-me information in this book, and I'm glad I'm reading it!

At any event: why would Wilhelmine need to supervise Heinrich during SD's labor and ensueing lying-in anyway? That's what the staff is for. Heinrich having joined AW's household as of his fourth birthday in January, he wasn't even staying with his mother's household anymore.

Honorary position just to show that she's in favor again? I'm not sure, I was wondering this myself. And yes, I did wonder how this worked with him being in AW's household now.

Good question!

Magdeburgers: would have to look it up.

Please do, when you get the chance (I know you're traveling), and let me know where you find it, if you do. I'm interested in this sort of thing, and my admittedly cursory Google didn't turn anything up. If I have time, I might do a more thorough Googling.

On the one hand, yes, on the other there's the Fritz letter from Dresden to Wilhelmine which gives her a "hot or not?" report on August the Strong.

Oh, right! I'm so glad there are two of us: I remember the things you forget, and you remember the things I forget. :D

Maybe it wasn't as serious a possibility as she presents it in her memoirs, but what I do think is possible that Grumbkow, who was after all the FW/August liason, put it out there in some drunken rounds, and FW didn't immediately say no, which would have been enough for rumors to start and filter through to Wilhelmine and Fritz.

This makes total sense.

And Amelia/Emily comes across as way more strong willed than EC, too.

Right? I mean, most people who aren't Louise do, but seriously. Powder keg, lit fuse...disaster waiting to happen.

Mind you, her own experience with royal marriage would have been with Caroline managing G2 by pretending to worship to the ground he tread on but manipulating him into accepting all her ideas as his.

Sadly, as much as Fritz has a praise kink, I have my doubts about her chances of success.

And Fritz of Prussia would have done him the favor of always talking in French when insulting the Hannover clan, too.

*snort*

Edited Date: 2020-09-27 03:21 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yeah, though I sometimes wonder about that.

Remember Katte's interrogation, which greatly emphasizes how he tried to talk Fritz out of it and throw up lots of obstacles, and never ever actually encouraged it except in order to prevent it from happening? And how none of us actually believe that's the whole story? Especially given that 1) he wanted to stay in England permanently just a year before, 2) he totally admitted he would have gone if Fritz had gone?

And you know how Oster is constantly emphasizing the ways in which Wilhelmine's memoirs were written with the benefit of hindsight and attribute a lot of correct opinions and emotions to her that the contemporary documentary evidence at least partially contradicts?

And how Oster is highly skeptical that Fritz's closest confidante knew that he wanted to escape in general, but had nooo idea about the concrete details of this particular plan?

And how Fritz was pawning jewelry that Wilhelmine and SD had given him, supposedly without telling them why he wanted it?

And how Wilhelmine claims she and SD had to destroy a bunch of letters, and Katte may have risked his life to make sure they got destroyed, NOT because they showed her personal involvement in the escape plan, but because of double-marriage scheming and trash-talking of FW? But now that the letters are destroyed, we don't know *what* they contained?

...Yeah.

Now, I'm willing to believe both Katte and Wilhelmine were reluctant conspirators. Especially Wilhelmine, who didn't have any prospect of escaping with him, and who would be punished, and, most of all, left behind, notwithstanding Fritz's optimism that the Hannovers will help make everything work out for her in the long run. And both Wilhelmine and Katte could probably see that this wasn't the most well-thought-out plan ever.

But did Wilhelmine try to help make it happen, give him her jewelry, etc? We'll never know, but none of the evidence we have is exactly inconsistent with that. It's not like I think she'd admit it in her memoirs, even after Fritz is king (and even if she wasn't writing under threat of torture, like Katte, her memoirs were started when FW was still king, remember), not after the plan failed catastrophically and even Fritz is regretting it.

Oh, and speaking of Katte risking his life over those letters, I meant to point out in the Oster thread that Oster reports that Katte stayed behind because he didn't think there was any danger of Fritz fleeing when he, Katte, had the money--and adds that this was a disastrous miscalculation that cost him his life, *and* that his reasoning was incomprehensible, since Fritz was telling Katte to meet up with him in the Hague, so Katte should have known lack of money wouldn't be an obstacle.

To which I'm like, "Yeah, so MAYBE that wasn't Katte's real reason??" This kind of thing is what I mean by not being impressed with Oster's scholarship: there are so many other reasons given in our sources, even in Wilhelmine's memoirs, for Katte's lingering that you can't just take the one from his interrogation (under threat of torture! where he has to deny that he had any reason to believe he knew his arrest was impending!), announce that his reasoning doesn't make any sense, and stop there.

Like, just out of sheer psychology, even if we had no other sources, I could come up with other reasons someone might choose to stay. Not least that if you stay, you at least haven't committed desertion and can hope to insist on your innocence (an argument that carried some weight during the trial and would have gotten him a ten-year imprisonment if not for FW), whereas if you flee, you *have* committed desertion, and you're in Berlin, not Wesel, and you might GET CAUGHT.

Seriously. That's not even taking into account the actual reasons given by Fritz and Wilhelmine for why he lingered, both of which are plausible if you consider the evidence external to them that Katte did know his arrest was coming and had to deny it.

That's *also* not taking into account the documentary evidence that he requested leave to go into the countryside and received it, but didn't get to use it in time to get out of Berlin before his arrest.

Oh, and Oster does something that I've seen other biographers do: quote Wilhelmine saying Katte was so indiscreet as to go around telling "the whole city" about the escape plan, and implicitly chide Katte for it, without recounting that the actual episode in her memoirs went like this:

Some courtiers: Hey, Wilhelmine, you know that Katte is telling everyone your brother wants to escape?
Wilhelmine: Katte, how could you?!
Katte: I never did! I only told Lovenorn, who's totally on our side. [He will later be the one who supposedly tells Katte his arrest is coming and he'd better get the hell out of Dodge, and Fritz will still be remembering him fondly and wanting to know how he's doing nine years later.]

Now, maybe Katte *was* indiscreet! I'm not absolving him just on his own word. But nobody, when citing this passage, ever seems to point out that even Wilhlelmine says he denied it. We simply have no way of knowing.

And if you think, well, obviously some people know Fritz is planning an escape and it involves Katte, so someone must have told someone something!...remember, Rottembourg in Madrid 2 years earlier knew Fritz planned to escape, and I totally believe Wilhelmine's account that Katte was running around telling everyone that the Crown Prince loved him and confided in him. That's how you act whether you're genuinely head over heels in reciprocated love or just exploiting a royal for all the favor you can get out of him while pretending to be in love with him.

It wouldn't have been that hard to put two and two together, even if Katte had kept totally mum about the escape (and I'm not saying he did).

So, yeah. I feel like a lot of reading between the lines needs to be done for this whole episode, given how everyone after the fact wants to disclaim any connection with the catastrophe.

Lol, I'm reminded of what I was reading immediately before I switched to Fritz: 4th century Athenian oratory, where as soon as the Peace of Philocrates was seen to have failed miserably, Athenian politicians were falling all over themselves to announce that they knew it was a bad idea from the beginning.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

It probably was a memory lapse.

Yeah, since F1 isn't exactly taking care of tiny babies, he probably remembers that Wilhelmine didn't like Bb!Fritz2, and of course the number 2 was burned into his brain, as in the number of prospective heirs that have died, and he conflated the two.

I'm just impressed that within the space of about a page, Oster manages to report all these dates and quote this letter and never notice the contradiction!

Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts

Yep. I forget which biographer said FW's attitude toward all things German vs. French smacks of an inferiority complex, but it makes perfect sense.

I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"

Also makes perfect sense!

Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes.

Yep, I was thinking of the Brontes. Even today, my wife talks about the class tensions of being middle to upper middle class and being raised largely by poor nannies in Brazil, where labor is still that cheap. When you tell the kids what to do and can punish them, but they're still considered inherently superior to you, and their parents control your life...it can get complicated.

I'm glad Sonsine worked out.

Though after reading the memoirs, I had forgotten just how pro-English marriage Wilhelmine depicts her as being, to the point of scolding Wilhelmine for finally giving in and agreeing to marry into Bayreuth. :/

She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.

Indeed. Also, *facepalm*.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I still think it's silly that past Yuletides in the last two years signed off on "19th Century German Literature RPF" (which in theory would have encompassed anyone from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Thomas Mann, who did start to publish before the century ended), and "19th Century British Writers RPF" (ditto, and did include Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll as well as Byron and the Shelleys), i.e. an enormous amount of time, and a cast of thousands who don't have anything in common but geography, but "Enlightenment Writers and Scientists" is too broad.

I'm not going to pick a fight in the Yuletide admin community, but let's not forget "Historical Royals and Their Favourites RPF", which the mods and a couple of us, myself included, arrived at after much discussion, for which the nominated characters included Alexander the Great (4th century BCE Macedon) and James VI and I (17th century CE Great Britain). 2000 years and an entire continent, and we went with a gender-neutral "royals" specifically to make sure women like Anne could get included if needed. I mean, we could have included Catherine and Poniatowksi for 18th century Russia! Gilgamesh and Enkidu, probably. :P

But all right, Circle of Voltaire it is. :D

Algarotti: *I'm* the one who's six degrees from everyone who even slightly overlaps the 1700-1799 period!
Voltaire: Nobody knows who you are. Even in the salon, nobody had heard of you before last year.
Algarotti: :(

From:

cahn

Thank you! I've updated the promo post :)

From:

cahn

Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes.

Huh, I hadn't thought to make that connection, but having just read Dark Quartet, ...yeah.

I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.

*blinks* My Brit Lit teacher didn't tell us that part! That's really... something. Definitely not surprising he didn't care much for religion, wow.

From:

cahn

Ha! OK then. My kids are all for this :P

From:

selenak

Clearly, we'll have to read up on Stratemann of Brunswick, too, to find out whether he reports the "take charge of the (so far) youngest "story as well or whether Oster has it from another source. Also, like you so often said, Mildred: the envoys are where it's at! :)

More seriously, given AW gets Fritz' regiment toute suite that year and is made Colonel, and we have sunny letters to Dad which Ziebura quotes, I'm not sure what would have made FW temporarily rearrange his favourites children list. I mean, he was in a spectacularly bad mood for much of the year as well, as amply documented in the Fritzian context, so he may not have needed a reason, but it would still be very surprising, especially since Heinrich doesn't rate individual instructions to his stewards but is lumped under "the young princes" together with Ferdinand, and I'm sure that if Ziebura had found an FW remark especially about Heinrich indicating favor, she'd have quoted it, having gone through not just the published but the unpublished family correspondance at the state archive. Usually if you like a kid best, you talk about said kid. Not to mention that apparantly we have letters from Wilhelmine, from Fritz, from Charlotte and from AW to FW in the archive, all of which I've seen quoted, but not from child Heinrich. At a guess, if a letter from child!Wilhelmine survives in which she sends Dad her drawn tooth, a letter from temporary fave Heinrich would have been preserved as well, if such a letter had existed.

All this said: as long as they are babies and toddlers, the youngest children of a large family tend to be either neglected or spoiled, no? Maybe FW not getting along with his oldest kids at all in 1730 translated into liking the baby (until new baby Ferdinand was born) but not so much anymore once he grew older and developed a (suspiciously Fritz like) personality. That's always assuming the Brunswick envoy did report this, as opposed to Oster getting his info from Catt.

Magdeburgers: well, I seem to recall we have the two part FW biography in the library? I haven't braved that one yet, but it could be in there.

From:

selenak

Re: Byron, here's the evidence, re the nurse May Grey. (Btw, google tells me that an entry on Byron by a Scottish tourist website - since Byron spent his early childhood in Aberdeen- calls her "Agnes Grey", which, speak of the Brontes. But really, it was May.) John Hanson had already been the lawyer of Byron's mother, and later was Byron's lawyer. Since Byron died at age 36, he survived him.

After Byron's death, the lawyer, John Hanson, informed Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse, of the lustful attentions of his (Byron's) nurse. Hobhouse writes later:

When nine years old at his mother's house a free Scotch girl used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person.

And Byron himself writes in Detached Thoughts (a serious of diary-like notes published years after his death under that title): in 1821:

My passions were developed very early - so early, that few would believe me, if I were to state the period, and the facts which accompanied it.

John Hanson informed Byron's mother of May Gray's unacceptable conduct towards the young lord in a letter dated 1st September 1799, suppressing his knowledge of the sexual play:

... her conduct towards your son while at Nottingham was shocking, and I was persuaded you needed but a hint of it to dismiss her... My honourable little companion (Byron) ... told me that she was perpetually beating him, and that his bones sometimes ached from it; that she brought all sorts of Company of the very lowest Description into his apartments; that she was out late at nights, and he was frequently left to put himself to bed; that she would take the Chaise-boys into the Chaise with her, and stopped at every little Ale-house to drink with them. But, Madam, this is not all, she has even --- traduced yourself. (Prothero, Rowland E (ed), The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol I, p 17)

The two parter about Byron in which Johnny Lee Miller played Lord B. used this story - Byron tells it to his sister and lover Augusta (they were half siblings who didn't grow up together and only got to know each other as teenagers) in this excerpt (at 1.45) - at what is probably his most vulnerable moment in the two parter.

Edited Date: 2020-09-28 01:32 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

.it can get complicated.

Mind you, the flipside of that is what a relation of one of Charlotte's charges said to Mrs. Gaskell: My cousin Benson Sidgwick, now vicar of Ashby Parva, certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Bronte! and all that another cousin can recollect of her is that if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.

Sonsine being pro English marriage: well, to be fair, of all the matches available at that time, it was definitely the toppermost of the poppermost. The only comparable match would have been to Louis XV. of France, and good old Stanislav Lescynsky got there first. (P)RussianPete was still HolsteinPete in blissful ignorance of his future and also years younger, even Ulrike's future husband was still HolsteinAdolf and not yet Crown Prince of Sweden, and since the Polish crown wasn't inheritable but went by vote, there was no guarantee August the Strong's son - who'd have matched Wilhelmine's age far better than August - would have succeeded him as King of Poland as well as Elector of Saxony. If you were a Princess of Wilhelmine's age and generation, the future King of England (not that he'd ever be, but no one knew that) was the big marital price to be had. Especially if your own father was only the second king of his line and his tiny kingdom brandnew.

...whereas all the Margraves FW considered as matches for his daughters meant they were marrying down. Within FW's life time, Charlotte did best with a duke (of Braunschweig), lending some strength to the argument that among the daughters, she was his fave, but Wilhelmine, Friederike and Sophie really were not making good matches in terms of rank, power and splendor.

Byron: see my reply to Cahn below.

From:

selenak

Yes, and it works both ways: when Kennedy was killed and for years became a shining idol, way more Americans recalled voting for him than ever did. Also, when I talked with my AP about the battle of Hochkirch he at first refused to believe everyone except for Fritz said making camp there was a terrible idea and that the Austrians would attack and cited just this phenomenon. My counter argument was that the early historians invested in the legend of Fritz the genius general had to resort to the story of the double agent spy giving Fritz false intel to explain his misjudgment there, and that it was far less popular to write "the King had made a mistake, and we pointed this out to him before the fact", not to mention risky in an absolute monarchy.

re: did Wilhelmine know more about the escape plan than she later admitted, given how it turned: FW certainly believed she did, and it would work with the need to destroy those letters and her giving Fritz jewelry to pawn. It would even work with the later "I sacrificed myself for his freedom" without mentioning Fritz told her not to re: the marriage, because while she can talk about the marriage, she wouldn't be able to talk about the earlier escape attempt, if she was involved - and if she helped him there, she certainly would have been willing to risk FW making her pay in the worst way for his, had Fritz succeeded, and it would have been a sacrifice. (Honestly, there's no way I can see FW allowing Wilhelmine to marry a Hannover afterwards. She'd have been extremely lucky if he married her to anyone at all, as opposed to do what he claimed he'd have done in the 1731 submission scene - shut her into into the worst prison he could find.)

This prospect is why I'm also not 100% sure she'd have done it. If she believed Fritz would otherwise die or commit suicide out of desperation over FW's treatment of him, then yes. But give up the brother who was her main source of affection, possibly forever, and face a future of becoming Dad's favourite punishment target, when there's still a chance that if Fritz holds out some years more, FW dies and Fritz becomes King? Not sure.

Re: why Katte remained in Berlin, Fontane is with you, as you might recall. He thinks Katte remained because of his knightly instincts and because he was just too busy to make a getaway in time.

Katte boasting of Fritz' favor: also ties with the part in his letter to his father about having had ambitions etc. Not to say this is what it was about for him with Fritz, but I doubt he was immune to the fact that this was the future King when they first became friends.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

This prospect is why I'm also not 100% sure she'd have done it. If she believed Fritz would otherwise die or commit suicide out of desperation over FW's treatment of him, then yes. But give up the brother who was her main source of affection, possibly forever, and face a future of becoming Dad's favourite punishment target, when there's still a chance that if Fritz holds out some years more, FW dies and Fritz becomes King? Not sure.

Yeah, that's also why I'm not sure, and why I am sure she was a very reluctant conspirator. (I think I've said this before: his willingness to leave and her reluctance to let him go, I think *must* have fed into some kind of repressed and even subconscious mutual resentment after the fact, no matter how much they understood the other's motives.)

But as for dying: she does record that scene where Fritz tells her FW was trying to strangle him with a cord and had to be pried off him by (invisible and very brave) servants). So maybe?

Re: why Katte remained in Berlin, Fontane is with you, as you might recall. He thinks Katte remained because of his knightly instincts and because he was just too busy to make a getaway in time.

I absolutely remember. :) He was a victim of his knightly disposition. Fontane also thinks Mitchell's "on account of some girl he was fond of" can't be right, because it hasn't occurred to Fontane that "some girl" might be Wilhelmine. ;)

Katte boasting of Fritz' favor: also ties with the part in his letter to his father about having had ambitions etc.

Yep, I always connect those two things too. And while those letters can't be trusted, I have always believed, like you, that he was in no way immune to Fritz being the Crown Prince. Plus that other letter (the Puncta one, written by Müller), where Katte says Fritz had promised him great things someday when he was king (and thus Katte's death shows the vanity of human plans, etc., etc.).

Now, that letter *really* can't be trusted, but given who Katte's father and grandfather were, I imagine he would expect some kind of preferment as a matter of course, and that's not mutually exclusive with him having real feelings for Fritz. (Which I'm sure he did: the fact that he was repeatedly asking to talk to Fritz at Küstrin and was reassuring him that he didn't blame him tells me that, motives for religion and pleasing Dad and going to a "good death" aside, he actually cared about Fritz's feelings after his death.)

Btw, now that I've seen the exchanges between Fritz and AW in the 1730s, I'm more willing to believe in the existence of that letter that Peter Keith is supposed to have carried with him for 10 years, saying that Fritz will always be grateful and stating or implying that there will be rewards someday.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Clearly, we'll have to read up on Stratemann of Brunswick

Great minds think alike! A quick glance through Oster when I was doing that write-up didn't show me what the source for Stratemann is, nor have I googled, but those items are on my to-do list.

Also, like you so often said, Mildred: the envoys are where it's at! :)

Also exactly what I was thinking when I realized we have a new envoy!

Maybe FW not getting along with his oldest kids at all in 1730 translated into liking the baby (until new baby Ferdinand was born) but not so much anymore once he grew older and developed a (suspiciously Fritz like) personality.

Maybe? And as you've pointed out, AW was Heinrich's hero, so maybe FW heard about how Heinrich just adored his new roommate and looked up to him in everything, and FW thought, "That boy's going places!" (He is, just not in the way you might think, FW.)

Magdeburgers: well, I seem to recall we have the two part FW biography in the library? I haven't braved that one yet, but it could be in there.

Oh, Förster, you're right! Hmm, I've put "Förster detective work" on my to-do list, assuming you don't get around to "Förster write-up from the royal reader" first. ;)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Sonsine being pro English marriage: well, to be fair, of all the matches available at that time, it was definitely the toppermost of the poppermost.

Oh, no question! And advocating for this as the marriage Wilhelmine should make is one thing. But after she's already agreed to marry into Bayreuth through the application of force majeure by the absolute monarch, scolding her that she did a bad thing tells you something about Sonsine's priorities. That's the part that came as a surprise to me.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

In 1724/1725, the Magdeburgers brought some sort of lawsuit against FW at the Imperial Court?

I was busy looking into this, and I still haven't found it, but what I did find was very interesting.

Brandenburg had possessed the expectation of certain limited rights in Limpurg since 1693...When the last count died in August 1713 without male heirs, Brandenburg-Prussia occupied the territory. This prompted the widowed countess to appeal to the Reichshofrat to secure the continued autonomous existence of the county. The Reichshofrat subsequently sent the Emperor a report, which related that 'Prussia invaded the Limpurg lands with a whole battalion, and even failed to spare the widowed countess’s castle from being occupied by soldiers.'

Citation: "Imperial law versus geopolitical interest: the Reichshofrat and the protection of smaller states in the Holy Roman Empire under Charles VI (1711-40)", Patrick Milton, a heavily footnoted academic paper from 2015 with primary source citations (including envoy reports), available here.

cahn, to help you out with dates:

1713		1740
February 25	FW becomes king	May 31	Fritz becomes king
August 19	Limburg male line dies out	October 20	Habsburg male line dies out
by December	Prussian troops occupy Limburg, ignoring legal female heir	December 16	Prussian troops occupy Silesia, ignoring legal female heir

The difference being that FW recognized imperial authority and grudgingly backed down when the Reichshofrat told him to. I guess he *didn't* start a war of aggression over it.

But yeeeeeah. Between this and FW's decision to go to war to get Swedish Pomerania in 1715, I'm at least half side-eyeing that political testament.

ETA: This table looks so much better in preview. Sigh.

Edited Date: 2020-09-29 01:06 am (UTC)