It's not just Hanover! Katte's mom was Dorothea Sophia von Wartensleben!
But Katte's mom was the daughter of a chief courtier of F1's, and thus presumably could have been named after any of the Hannover Sophies. F1's stepmom has no excuse!
Btw, Original Sophie tells us how that name came to pass in her snarky memoirs. You may recall that she was the twelfth child of the Winter Queen. (And would be the youngest surviving child). Her brothers' names for the most part read like a check list of whoever Elizabeth Stuart would help her (hence, for example, a Gustavus Adolphus among them) in the 30 Years War and her exile. The girls were given the usual Stuart family names. But by the time No.12 arrived, they had simply run out of names and supposedly did a lottery of sorts with the few ladies in waiting asked to write a name on a bit of paper. Presto, Sophia/Sophie, first of her name in either family (i.e. the Stuarts and the Palatine Wittelsbachs). But not the last by far. :)
I have to point out that Voltaire was also made to sign an agreement not to satirize members of Fritz's court, and we don't know what on earth Fritz expected there! :P
Verily. I mean. Presumably people who never met Voltaire and hadn't read a word of his writing would have expected him to stick to that agreement, but...
Do you know of more contemporary sources, Selena?
Alas Sophie's memoirs end before that bit of scandal (which indirectly would lead to her becoming F1's mother-in-law since it was to Hannover he fled), and the Schnath-edited letters between Sophie and Team Hohenzollern start afterwards. The letter from F1 to Sophie I've repeatedly quoted doesn't mention poison, it just illustrates he had a bad relationship with his stepmother. However, his German wiki entry details the poison accusation story at length and doesn't reference Pöllnitz as source; the footnotes are all to modern biographies, and I guess I'll have to put those on my list, too, to see what they use as source material.
(The German wiki entry also says that right until the 20th century, Fritz' opinion on Granddad was taken as gospel by historians, and only the later 20th century went "hang on, it wasn't that simple".)
Another possibility to check would be Liselotte's letters. Of course she could only provide hearsay, being in France, but presumably the fact future F1 wanted a guarantee in writing he couldn't get killed before returning to Brandenburg would have made waves enough for her to hear about it. However, any edition of the letters is slanted by whatever the editor in question thought would be good for their audience, and the free one on kindle is a 19th century one with an eye on German nationalism and French decadence, so something not flattering to the Hohenzollern clan like that might not have made the cut. I'll check anyway.
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Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-26 05:24 am (UTC)But Katte's mom was the daughter of a chief courtier of F1's, and thus presumably could have been named after any of the Hannover Sophies. F1's stepmom has no excuse!
Btw, Original Sophie tells us how that name came to pass in her snarky memoirs. You may recall that she was the twelfth child of the Winter Queen. (And would be the youngest surviving child). Her brothers' names for the most part read like a check list of whoever Elizabeth Stuart would help her (hence, for example, a Gustavus Adolphus among them) in the 30 Years War and her exile. The girls were given the usual Stuart family names. But by the time No.12 arrived, they had simply run out of names and supposedly did a lottery of sorts with the few ladies in waiting asked to write a name on a bit of paper. Presto, Sophia/Sophie, first of her name in either family (i.e. the Stuarts and the Palatine Wittelsbachs). But not the last by far. :)
I have to point out that Voltaire was also made to sign an agreement not to satirize members of Fritz's court, and we don't know what on earth Fritz expected there! :P
Verily. I mean. Presumably people who never met Voltaire and hadn't read a word of his writing would have expected him to stick to that agreement, but...
Do you know of more contemporary sources, Selena?
Alas Sophie's memoirs end before that bit of scandal (which indirectly would lead to her becoming F1's mother-in-law since it was to Hannover he fled), and the Schnath-edited letters between Sophie and Team Hohenzollern start afterwards. The letter from F1 to Sophie I've repeatedly quoted doesn't mention poison, it just illustrates he had a bad relationship with his stepmother. However, his German wiki entry details the poison accusation story at length and doesn't reference Pöllnitz as source; the footnotes are all to modern biographies, and I guess I'll have to put those on my list, too, to see what they use as source material.
(The German wiki entry also says that right until the 20th century, Fritz' opinion on Granddad was taken as gospel by historians, and only the later 20th century went "hang on, it wasn't that simple".)
Another possibility to check would be Liselotte's letters. Of course she could only provide hearsay, being in France, but presumably the fact future F1 wanted a guarantee in writing he couldn't get killed before returning to Brandenburg would have made waves enough for her to hear about it. However, any edition of the letters is slanted by whatever the editor in question thought would be good for their audience, and the free one on kindle is a 19th century one with an eye on German nationalism and French decadence, so something not flattering to the Hohenzollern clan like that might not have made the cut. I'll check anyway.