where he installs the condition that, among other things, Pöllnitz isn't allowed to talk to foreign envoys about things that happened at the King's table anymore.
Obvious question is obvious: did he expect Pöllnitz to obey?
[Dorothée = Dorothea Sophie (WHY? she wasn't even from Hanover! :P),
I know. The small selection of first names for nobility in this era is most frustrating. :) Re: the poisoning suspicion - independent of whether or not it is true, it's definitely not just Pöllnitz who brought it up. F1 believed it so much - not just that his stepmother wanted to poison him but that she did poison at least two of his brothers (let's not forget, he hadn't been the oldest son) - that he got out of the country and remained in Hannover till Dad gave him a written guarantee he wouldn't die if returning to Brandenburg, which the Great Elector did not forgive him for but did. This comes up, among other things, when Fritz is interrogated after the escape attempt and points to the precedence of Granddad as crown prince getting the hell out of Prussia. (To which FW said it had been totally different since his father had been afraid of poison as far as I recall.)
There's also the passage from F1's letter to Sophie where when he talks about his third marriage he promises her that the new wife won't be a stepmother but a mother to FW and SD, since "you know that I know what a stepmother is".
Again: none of this actually means Dorothea poisoned anyone. Henriette "Minette" the first wife of Philippe D'Orleans was also convinced she'd gotten poisoned, as was her brother Charles II (who cried out "Monsieur is a villain!" when hearing the news, thus clearly seeing his brother-in-law as the culprit), but the autopsy Louis XIV immediately ordered came to different conclusions. Her daughter Marie Louise, the one who married the genetic wonder of Spain, also supposedly was poisoned according to rumor with historians disagreeing. And as we've seen, Philippe II. d'Orleans, Liselotte's son, was suspected off poisoning the entire French royal family with the endgame of making himself King by his contemporaries when it had been a combination of measles, smallpox and terrible 18th century doctors who killed four male French princes in a row. That people were convinced of poison does not mean it was used. What it does mean, in this particular case, is that F1 had such a bad relationship with his stepmother that he believed her capable of it.
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Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-22 08:05 am (UTC)Obvious question is obvious: did he expect Pöllnitz to obey?
[Dorothée = Dorothea Sophie (WHY? she wasn't even from Hanover! :P),
I know. The small selection of first names for nobility in this era is most frustrating. :) Re: the poisoning suspicion - independent of whether or not it is true, it's definitely not just Pöllnitz who brought it up. F1 believed it so much - not just that his stepmother wanted to poison him but that she did poison at least two of his brothers (let's not forget, he hadn't been the oldest son) - that he got out of the country and remained in Hannover till Dad gave him a written guarantee he wouldn't die if returning to Brandenburg, which the Great Elector did not forgive him for but did. This comes up, among other things, when Fritz is interrogated after the escape attempt and points to the precedence of Granddad as crown prince getting the hell out of Prussia. (To which FW said it had been totally different since his father had been afraid of poison as far as I recall.)
There's also the passage from F1's letter to Sophie where when he talks about his third marriage he promises her that the new wife won't be a stepmother but a mother to FW and SD, since "you know that I know what a stepmother is".
Again: none of this actually means Dorothea poisoned anyone. Henriette "Minette" the first wife of Philippe D'Orleans was also convinced she'd gotten poisoned, as was her brother Charles II (who cried out "Monsieur is a villain!" when hearing the news, thus clearly seeing his brother-in-law as the culprit), but the autopsy Louis XIV immediately ordered came to different conclusions. Her daughter Marie Louise, the one who married the genetic wonder of Spain, also supposedly was poisoned according to rumor with historians disagreeing. And as we've seen, Philippe II. d'Orleans, Liselotte's son, was suspected off poisoning the entire French royal family with the endgame of making himself King by his contemporaries when it had been a combination of measles, smallpox and terrible 18th century doctors who killed four male French princes in a row. That people were convinced of poison does not mean it was used. What it does mean, in this particular case, is that F1 had such a bad relationship with his stepmother that he believed her capable of it.