Excellent detecting! (Also, LOL about Sophie's baroque German.) Looking at your link, I also see he thinks the "Pride of the Welfes" (that's House Hannover, cahn) has ruined two Hohenzollern father/son relationships, i.e. Great Elector/F1 and FW/Fritz, which automatically gets my hackles up. Do I think SD and her insistence on the English marriage project is partly to blame for the unfolding disaster that was FW/his oldest two children? Yes, but not nearly as much as FW, and the letters from young SD (both the ones you quoted and the ones I saw in the Sophie correspondence) convinced me she really did try her utmost to be a "good wife" as the era understood it and to help her children with FW before things went beyond dysfunctional and she and FW were at warfare point. And even if she hadn't insisted on the British project, Fritz and his father would still have had a terrible relationship if FW hadn't tried a very different type of parenting. That wasn't the "pride of the Welfs".
As for F1 & the Great Elector, I haven't read a biography of either yet, and the Barbara Beuys covers it from the Sophie(s) angle and hence probably has bias in the other direction, but by the time Sophie met young future F1, he was already an adult married man (to his first wife, the one who died even younger than Sophie Charlotte would). Beuys thinks one reason why F1 took to the Hannover clan even before marrying into it was that he didn't get much affection from Dad (independent from the stepmother question), and given he was son No.3, physically handicapped and was expected to die young through much of his childhood, I wouldn't be surprised if she was right.
Mind you, I'm completely prepared to believe Dorothea the stepmother was innocent of any poisoning. As can be seen from the other examples I listed several replies ago, it really was the go to suspicion and accusation in several cases where today we're as sure as can be no such thing happened, and it was bad medicine and illness instead. But otoh I also can see why people got the suspicion(s) in the first case in several if not all of these situations. Dorothea's children would only have a chance at the Elector title if all of his sons from his previous marriage were dead, and since both the two older ones and the younger brother from the earlier marriage died, leaving only F1, I can see him getting paranoid, especially if he'd had the suspicion that his father would rather have a manlier, healthy successor to begin with. He didn't need his in-laws for that.
BTw, I'm reading a book about Elizabeth Stuart and her daughters, "Daughters of the Winter Queen", and what do you know, as a young guy, the Great Elector romanced Sophie's older sister Louisa! (The one who was a gifted painter, and ended up a Catholic abbess at Maubisson much to her mother's horror. Sophie and little Sophie Charlotte visited her en route to Versailles.) Alas his parent had an eye on money, of which the Winter Stuarts didn't have much. So no young Elector/Louisa match.
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
As for F1 & the Great Elector, I haven't read a biography of either yet, and the Barbara Beuys covers it from the Sophie(s) angle and hence probably has bias in the other direction, but by the time Sophie met young future F1, he was already an adult married man (to his first wife, the one who died even younger than Sophie Charlotte would). Beuys thinks one reason why F1 took to the Hannover clan even before marrying into it was that he didn't get much affection from Dad (independent from the stepmother question), and given he was son No.3, physically handicapped and was expected to die young through much of his childhood, I wouldn't be surprised if she was right.
Mind you, I'm completely prepared to believe Dorothea the stepmother was innocent of any poisoning. As can be seen from the other examples I listed several replies ago, it really was the go to suspicion and accusation in several cases where today we're as sure as can be no such thing happened, and it was bad medicine and illness instead. But otoh I also can see why people got the suspicion(s) in the first case in several if not all of these situations. Dorothea's children would only have a chance at the Elector title if all of his sons from his previous marriage were dead, and since both the two older ones and the younger brother from the earlier marriage died, leaving only F1, I can see him getting paranoid, especially if he'd had the suspicion that his father would rather have a manlier, healthy successor to begin with. He didn't need his in-laws for that.
BTw, I'm reading a book about Elizabeth Stuart and her daughters, "Daughters of the Winter Queen", and what do you know, as a young guy, the Great Elector romanced Sophie's older sister Louisa! (The one who was a gifted painter, and ended up a Catholic abbess at Maubisson much to her mother's horror. Sophie and little Sophie Charlotte visited her en route to Versailles.) Alas his parent had an eye on money, of which the Winter Stuarts didn't have much. So no young Elector/Louisa match.