selenak: (Émilie du Chatelet)

Re: He's just a soul whose intentions were good: Morgenstern on FW - A

[personal profile] selenak 2021-03-11 06:28 am (UTC)(link)
Lol, Fritz, we know you don't like your friends and generals to marry, but objecting to your grandfather marrying before you were born is taking it too far! :P

In fairness to Fritz, it's the heritage factor and the miserlinesss speaking rather than the general dislike of the matrimonial state, I think. See also Wilhelmine in the early 30s exploding in letters when her father-in-law wants to remarry (and Sonsine's sister, no less). (Luckily for Wilhelmine and BayreuthFriedrich, Flora von Sonsfeld says no to the old Margrave.) Of course the old Margrave can't change primogeniture as far as the order of who gets to be the next Margrave is concerned, because HRE law, for the same reason FW can't remove Fritz from the succession (or Fritz AW or FW2 later)without these agreeing to it or the Emperor and the diet agreeing to a petition asking for it. HOWEVER, if the old Margrave had reproduced, he could have left practically everything but the title to his new son if he had so wished, and Wilhelmine and BayreuthFriedrich were in financial dependence to FW already during the old Margrave's life time. This could have condemmed them to more scraping forever from the Prussian table.

Now, as it happens Grandpa F1 did neither reproduce nor did his poor bonkers third wife drain the treasury. But reproduction had certainly been the intention - since FW's first two baby boys had died - and I can see Fritz, already predisposed to hate on Grandpa, deciding this was F1 wilfully risking his, Fritz' future heritage by potentially dividing it up among more potential heirs and widows.