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Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 29
Stay tuned for RMSE!
From a trio of German Romantic writers - Achim von Arnim, his wife Bettina, who is also the sister of the third, Achim's bff Clemens Brentano. Of interest to us because Achim was the grandson of the former Mrs. Fredersdorf, grew up at Zernikow and provided a good quote for the current Zernikow website which as it turns out hails from this volume (though the website version lacks the virginity part). The editor points out that both the Brentano siblings and Achim von Arnim lost their mothers early and did not get along with their fathers, hence the intense relating to the grandparents, of whom all these anecdotes tell. Of interest to us is what Achim has to say about Grandma, her father, and also his Grandfather (her third husband). It's also worth reading the footnotes, which reveal that, drumroll, Caroline (i.e. Mrs. Fredersdorf) wrote a short "My life so far" memoir in 1777, of which a typoscript exists and is mentioned in the source footnote as follows: Typoskript einer Lebensbeschreibung vom 13. September 1777 im Brandesburgischen Landeshauptarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 37, Bärwalde-Wiepersdorf, Nr. 1832.) As the description of Fredersdorf the footnote quotes from it is even more glowing than the one Achim renembers her giving, this almost makes me cry that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
felis doesn't live in Potsdam anymore. Anyway, something to look up in the future.
Caroline's father, Gottfried Adolf Daum (1679 - 1743) founded together with David Splitgerber the Berlin Bank and Trading House Splitgerber & Daum. They were just the kind of manufacturers FW wanted to encourage. Daum managed to impress him (not least by building houses in Berlin) and got permission to found and lead the Royal weapons and gun manufactory in Potsdam and Spandau 1722. (After Daum's death, his partner Splitgerber also founded the first Prussian sugar manufactury in 1746. You can see why Caroline was loaded as an heiress.) Daum also managed to become a casual member of the Tobacco Parliament. So it won't surprise you if I tell you he was a strict Dad. Quoting Achim remembering what his grandmother said:
For all the wealth, strict austerity ruled the house, the children were cautioned to work hard, so only in the evening was time for leisure. And even those evening hours were used in summer to practice how to walk decent and ladylike under the eyes of governess and governor.
(Methinks we know where the "freedom" part in Caroline's characterisation of her first marriage comes from. The governor was for her brother. Who scandalized Dad and Mom by becoming a Catholic and moving to Italy later. Mom would have disinherited him if Caroline, who loved her brother, hadn't insisted that she then wouldn't accept her inheritance, either, and reconciled him with Mom.)
When autumn arrived, their hearts grew heavy when they saw fruits lying on the ground and weren't allowed to touch them. They then thought of some artifice, like saying: "a pretty colorful stone, perhaps father's cufflink!" and adroitly hid the fruit beneath their skirts in order to eat it in the restroom later in secret.
On to Daum and FW:
He had built a Dutch kitchen in his house in order to honor the King, that is a clean oven, the Kitchen red with white streaks of chalk in imitation of the usual burned stone, a large table and a closet full of Dutch pipes. The King often visited him with his generals and enjoyed his kind of pranks. Thus, he told him once: Listen, Daum, all women are whores! - No, your Majesty, Daum replied, my wife is not a whore. - Well, the King said, be he reassured, his wife and mine excepted, all women are whores. - The King rarely took back anything he said, and it showed how much credit Daum had with him that he did this time. For the King had the habit, on each Sunday to order the entire high society of Potsdam to drive past him three times and to call to each lady "Whore Whore!" - It's strange that my grandmother claimed that actually, there had been only one whore in Potsdam at that time, who'd been called Putzers Hanne, but maybe she didn't know the other ones.
Or maybe FW was an oafish ass, Achim. Though I'm impressed Caroline knew the name of an actual prostitute, which I wouldn't have thought a rich man'd daughter would.
On to Caroline.
My grandmother had even into her old age very vivid intense blue eyes, regular features, she was tall and had a good figure. Her coloring she'd lost due to an illness, without looking sickly or being an invalid, though. She was very vivacious, fulll of eagerness for the world's turnmoil, was used to devotion, discipline and austerity from her youth, was very noble in mind, and a witty companion to most. One should have believed these qualities would have assuredly let her into blissful domesticity with an ever growing circle of children. But strange fate! Her affection was won by a man who was already really ill and suffering from hemorhoids, though he was otherwise very handsome - the original word Achim uses is "schön", i.e. beautiful, but I know it's not used for men in English - , the Secret Chamberlain of the new King Friedrich II, his favourite ever since he as a soldier in the prison of Küstrin had lessened (Fritz') grief through his flute play. He seems to have been too well educated for a soldier; probably his tall figure caused his being drafted into service under the old King. My grandmother in her love believed him to be the most intelligent and wittiest man of the world. In her old age she read their exchanged love letters again, and be it that she had been aged too much, or that she did not want us to know and did not see the suitability of the jokes anymore, she did not want to share them and burned them with the same amazement that she'd been delighted by them in her youth.
Friedrich didn't like the people around him to be married, he may have felt that they then didn't belong to him as completely anymore; he demanded utter devotion, but permitted them much confidentiality as a result. Moments in which to demand something of him had still be spotted and used quickly. The opportune moment to get the permission to marry from the King seemed to take years, the illness of the poor favourite grew, and he explained to the King that he could only hope to get better through this marriage and that he was dying of grief. That worked; the King agreed, and so that the King wouldn't change his mind again, the marriage was celebrated within twenty four hours after the hard won permission of the King had arrived. Thus the sickbed was the entrance to a marriage in which my grandmother lived as a virgin under a thousand worries but also with blissful freedom, mutual agreement and inner cheerfulness for three years after which he died after much sicknesss, so that after her own death she only wanted to rest at the side of this most beloved of her three husbands in her coffin.
Illness made the poor man often irritable, but she swore that his general kindness and repentance over each outburst had her always reconciled. He tried to find all kinds of diversions for her so that she wouldn't suffer from the sitting in a sick room, and made her go on long rides so she'd have distractions. As a proof of her fitness may serve the fact she often rode to Berlin and back from Potsdam in one day, at a time when this way was much longer and very uneven, so really lasted eight miles. I have seen a painting of her in her riding dress, it was a half male outfit in green, wiht a female skirt and a three point hat. She also rode like a man.
Comment: we already know the "got married within 24 hours" isn't true from Lehndorff's diary (and also by implication from the one Fritz letter where Fredersdorf's upcoming marriage is mentioned), but it's interesting the story had taken this shape decades later for Achim and his brother. The footnote to this passage by the editor contains an actual quote from Caroline's memoir preserved in typoscript, and it says:
His loss and his memory will always remain unforgettable to me, since our love was uncontestedly the purest and most loyal I was ever to find, which is why this worthy man has deserved that it should be known he was gifted besides the most beautiful pleasant looks with the most enlightened mind, abilities and quickness of spirit, which can hardly find their like anywhere.
From this praise by Caroline in 1777 you can deduce not just her very brief second marriage but the longer one to Achim's actual grandfather was less than stellar. Stay tuned as to why, but which I'll translate and transcribe later and separatedly.
felis doesn't live in Potsdam anymore. Anyway, something to look up in the future. Caroline's father, Gottfried Adolf Daum (1679 - 1743) founded together with David Splitgerber the Berlin Bank and Trading House Splitgerber & Daum. They were just the kind of manufacturers FW wanted to encourage. Daum managed to impress him (not least by building houses in Berlin) and got permission to found and lead the Royal weapons and gun manufactory in Potsdam and Spandau 1722. (After Daum's death, his partner Splitgerber also founded the first Prussian sugar manufactury in 1746. You can see why Caroline was loaded as an heiress.) Daum also managed to become a casual member of the Tobacco Parliament. So it won't surprise you if I tell you he was a strict Dad. Quoting Achim remembering what his grandmother said:
For all the wealth, strict austerity ruled the house, the children were cautioned to work hard, so only in the evening was time for leisure. And even those evening hours were used in summer to practice how to walk decent and ladylike under the eyes of governess and governor.
(Methinks we know where the "freedom" part in Caroline's characterisation of her first marriage comes from. The governor was for her brother. Who scandalized Dad and Mom by becoming a Catholic and moving to Italy later. Mom would have disinherited him if Caroline, who loved her brother, hadn't insisted that she then wouldn't accept her inheritance, either, and reconciled him with Mom.)
When autumn arrived, their hearts grew heavy when they saw fruits lying on the ground and weren't allowed to touch them. They then thought of some artifice, like saying: "a pretty colorful stone, perhaps father's cufflink!" and adroitly hid the fruit beneath their skirts in order to eat it in the restroom later in secret.
On to Daum and FW:
He had built a Dutch kitchen in his house in order to honor the King, that is a clean oven, the Kitchen red with white streaks of chalk in imitation of the usual burned stone, a large table and a closet full of Dutch pipes. The King often visited him with his generals and enjoyed his kind of pranks. Thus, he told him once: Listen, Daum, all women are whores! - No, your Majesty, Daum replied, my wife is not a whore. - Well, the King said, be he reassured, his wife and mine excepted, all women are whores. - The King rarely took back anything he said, and it showed how much credit Daum had with him that he did this time. For the King had the habit, on each Sunday to order the entire high society of Potsdam to drive past him three times and to call to each lady "Whore Whore!" - It's strange that my grandmother claimed that actually, there had been only one whore in Potsdam at that time, who'd been called Putzers Hanne, but maybe she didn't know the other ones.
Or maybe FW was an oafish ass, Achim. Though I'm impressed Caroline knew the name of an actual prostitute, which I wouldn't have thought a rich man'd daughter would.
On to Caroline.
My grandmother had even into her old age very vivid intense blue eyes, regular features, she was tall and had a good figure. Her coloring she'd lost due to an illness, without looking sickly or being an invalid, though. She was very vivacious, fulll of eagerness for the world's turnmoil, was used to devotion, discipline and austerity from her youth, was very noble in mind, and a witty companion to most. One should have believed these qualities would have assuredly let her into blissful domesticity with an ever growing circle of children. But strange fate! Her affection was won by a man who was already really ill and suffering from hemorhoids, though he was otherwise very handsome - the original word Achim uses is "schön", i.e. beautiful, but I know it's not used for men in English - , the Secret Chamberlain of the new King Friedrich II, his favourite ever since he as a soldier in the prison of Küstrin had lessened (Fritz') grief through his flute play. He seems to have been too well educated for a soldier; probably his tall figure caused his being drafted into service under the old King. My grandmother in her love believed him to be the most intelligent and wittiest man of the world. In her old age she read their exchanged love letters again, and be it that she had been aged too much, or that she did not want us to know and did not see the suitability of the jokes anymore, she did not want to share them and burned them with the same amazement that she'd been delighted by them in her youth.
Friedrich didn't like the people around him to be married, he may have felt that they then didn't belong to him as completely anymore; he demanded utter devotion, but permitted them much confidentiality as a result. Moments in which to demand something of him had still be spotted and used quickly. The opportune moment to get the permission to marry from the King seemed to take years, the illness of the poor favourite grew, and he explained to the King that he could only hope to get better through this marriage and that he was dying of grief. That worked; the King agreed, and so that the King wouldn't change his mind again, the marriage was celebrated within twenty four hours after the hard won permission of the King had arrived. Thus the sickbed was the entrance to a marriage in which my grandmother lived as a virgin under a thousand worries but also with blissful freedom, mutual agreement and inner cheerfulness for three years after which he died after much sicknesss, so that after her own death she only wanted to rest at the side of this most beloved of her three husbands in her coffin.
Illness made the poor man often irritable, but she swore that his general kindness and repentance over each outburst had her always reconciled. He tried to find all kinds of diversions for her so that she wouldn't suffer from the sitting in a sick room, and made her go on long rides so she'd have distractions. As a proof of her fitness may serve the fact she often rode to Berlin and back from Potsdam in one day, at a time when this way was much longer and very uneven, so really lasted eight miles. I have seen a painting of her in her riding dress, it was a half male outfit in green, wiht a female skirt and a three point hat. She also rode like a man.
Comment: we already know the "got married within 24 hours" isn't true from Lehndorff's diary (and also by implication from the one Fritz letter where Fredersdorf's upcoming marriage is mentioned), but it's interesting the story had taken this shape decades later for Achim and his brother. The footnote to this passage by the editor contains an actual quote from Caroline's memoir preserved in typoscript, and it says:
His loss and his memory will always remain unforgettable to me, since our love was uncontestedly the purest and most loyal I was ever to find, which is why this worthy man has deserved that it should be known he was gifted besides the most beautiful pleasant looks with the most enlightened mind, abilities and quickness of spirit, which can hardly find their like anywhere.
From this praise by Caroline in 1777 you can deduce not just her very brief second marriage but the longer one to Achim's actual grandfather was less than stellar. Stay tuned as to why, but which I'll translate and transcribe later and separatedly.
Edited 2021-07-24 06:54 (UTC)
Hans von Labes. You can see both why Caroline at first fell for him and why it later went downhill, and Fredersdorf remained unseated as her favourite husband.
My mother's father had a thoroughly unique mental life, a strange mixture of free, great experience and close minded tastes bound to his era, much character, a lot of quircks, which in the lonely years near the end of his life verged on impossibilities. He was a self made man, and never forgot it, and thus the rest of the world often seemed to him just an attachment to his movement. As a boy, he'd run away to Hannover and was able to distinguish himself there so much that he found support at the universities. Afterwards, he distinguished himself in the eyes of Friedrich II. through voluntary important services in foreign departments. As resident in some South German courts through personal influence with one princess, he knew how to uncover her preparations for the 7 Years War.
Translation: Granda Labes was a spy! The footnote says the princess in question was either the Duchess of Bavaria or Wilhelmine's daughter the Duchess of Württemberg, Friederike Sophie. However, since Friederike at this point was already back home with her parents in Bayreuth, having left her husband for good, I'm not sure how that should have worked, so Mrs. Wittelsbach it has to be.
After the outbreak of said war he was limited to working in a department. Through a strange inflexibility and a lot of impudence he eventually drew the hatred of the King on himself, left town and spent his last year at Zernikow, his wife's estate. This as an overview of his life, some details which I have chosen of a great number.
Achim next goes into said details. Seems Grandpa Labes once the war was over turned into a wine, women and song guy. He was celebrated for his spectacular wine cellar and for his banquets. Each banquet guest had to gift him one book for his library, and said library was really large by the end, thus, says Achim, you can see Grandpa was popular as long as he was throwing said banquets.
His most favourite friend seems to have been Count Gotter whom Friedrich himself also wrote poetry about as an expert, and of whom there are three different portraits in his heritage. Of his female friends, of whom he had many as a chevalier d'amour, I only name the later famous Karschin, of whom there are many tender poems adressed to him in his papers.
(Anna Karsch, the "Karschin", was one of the few famous 18th century female poets.)
He supported her in her rise to fame, often let her improvise at his banquets, and thus it happened that since she was fond of wine herself that she once in the middle of enthusiastic poetry reciting fell under the table crowned with laurels but completely drunk and passed out. He had put coffins in the next room for all drunks as if for dead people. She, too, was put in one of them with her laurels, and forgotten there, so that in the next morning people first thought a thief had broken into the house when she awoke and completed her triumph with a cat's howling over her headache.
In general, he didn't much esteem German poetry, though, Horace was for him the ultimate in wit and wisdom, and even dying he recommended Latin to his son, or rather to his son's mother so that his son should learn it.
Achim says when Grandduke Paul returned with Heinrich after Heinrich's second trip to Russia in order to get married again, Grandpa Labes sent food and drink over to the Grandduke from Zernikow, but was already on his deathbed and hence unable to attend to the Grandduke even if he'd been permitted.
His tauntings of the law of the country sometimes got him arrested. He was tireless in tormenting the royal civil servants. So he had once an argument over hunting. In order to annoy the hunters, he invited them into his banqueting room, where there were a lot of mice and rats, and between them shot with his gun after the little vermin. (...) He had some favourites among the farmers, whom he often made drunk in many ways in order to have sex with their wives undisturbed. He gave then poetical names to the children like Galathée whereas the farmer named her Theke.
And this, mes amies, is why Caroline during these last years of her husband's life didn't live in Zernikow with her husband, much as she loved the estate otherwise, but in Berlin with her daughter and only returned to Zernikow after he had died. :(
My mother's father had a thoroughly unique mental life, a strange mixture of free, great experience and close minded tastes bound to his era, much character, a lot of quircks, which in the lonely years near the end of his life verged on impossibilities. He was a self made man, and never forgot it, and thus the rest of the world often seemed to him just an attachment to his movement. As a boy, he'd run away to Hannover and was able to distinguish himself there so much that he found support at the universities. Afterwards, he distinguished himself in the eyes of Friedrich II. through voluntary important services in foreign departments. As resident in some South German courts through personal influence with one princess, he knew how to uncover her preparations for the 7 Years War.
Translation: Granda Labes was a spy! The footnote says the princess in question was either the Duchess of Bavaria or Wilhelmine's daughter the Duchess of Württemberg, Friederike Sophie. However, since Friederike at this point was already back home with her parents in Bayreuth, having left her husband for good, I'm not sure how that should have worked, so Mrs. Wittelsbach it has to be.
After the outbreak of said war he was limited to working in a department. Through a strange inflexibility and a lot of impudence he eventually drew the hatred of the King on himself, left town and spent his last year at Zernikow, his wife's estate. This as an overview of his life, some details which I have chosen of a great number.
Achim next goes into said details. Seems Grandpa Labes once the war was over turned into a wine, women and song guy. He was celebrated for his spectacular wine cellar and for his banquets. Each banquet guest had to gift him one book for his library, and said library was really large by the end, thus, says Achim, you can see Grandpa was popular as long as he was throwing said banquets.
His most favourite friend seems to have been Count Gotter whom Friedrich himself also wrote poetry about as an expert, and of whom there are three different portraits in his heritage. Of his female friends, of whom he had many as a chevalier d'amour, I only name the later famous Karschin, of whom there are many tender poems adressed to him in his papers.
(Anna Karsch, the "Karschin", was one of the few famous 18th century female poets.)
He supported her in her rise to fame, often let her improvise at his banquets, and thus it happened that since she was fond of wine herself that she once in the middle of enthusiastic poetry reciting fell under the table crowned with laurels but completely drunk and passed out. He had put coffins in the next room for all drunks as if for dead people. She, too, was put in one of them with her laurels, and forgotten there, so that in the next morning people first thought a thief had broken into the house when she awoke and completed her triumph with a cat's howling over her headache.
In general, he didn't much esteem German poetry, though, Horace was for him the ultimate in wit and wisdom, and even dying he recommended Latin to his son, or rather to his son's mother so that his son should learn it.
Achim says when Grandduke Paul returned with Heinrich after Heinrich's second trip to Russia in order to get married again, Grandpa Labes sent food and drink over to the Grandduke from Zernikow, but was already on his deathbed and hence unable to attend to the Grandduke even if he'd been permitted.
His tauntings of the law of the country sometimes got him arrested. He was tireless in tormenting the royal civil servants. So he had once an argument over hunting. In order to annoy the hunters, he invited them into his banqueting room, where there were a lot of mice and rats, and between them shot with his gun after the little vermin. (...) He had some favourites among the farmers, whom he often made drunk in many ways in order to have sex with their wives undisturbed. He gave then poetical names to the children like Galathée whereas the farmer named her Theke.
And this, mes amies, is why Caroline during these last years of her husband's life didn't live in Zernikow with her husband, much as she loved the estate otherwise, but in Berlin with her daughter and only returned to Zernikow after he had died. :(
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rheinsberg - let me know if there's something else from the discussion you want added (or if you think I included too much already/should change something :P). Plus, I don't have tagging rights, that's why there aren't any so far. :)
rheinsberg - let me know if there's something else from the discussion you want added (or if you think I included too much already/should change something :P). Plus, I don't have tagging rights, that's why there aren't any so far. :)Belated reply to Selena from the previous post:
Thank you for looking at Droysen and Wallat for me! I'm still trying to read some of the Wallat sections for font practice, but it's slow going at the best of times, and there have been some delays. I am delighted that Droysen led us to the discovery of Wilhelmine's diary. One day we'll get our hands on it!
However, since Pöllnitz survived Wilhelmine by considerable time, he may in addition to whatever they told each other in 1744 have gotten a copy from the memoirs - or been allowed to read one and make excerpts - from Dr. Superville, who according to Droysen had the most extensive “Braunschweig” one, after her death. Given we simply don’t know when his own Histoire was finished, it could have been at any point before his own death.
Ahh, interesting. Yes, I agree you should go look for modern scholarship on the composition of her memoirs when you have time! Remember also that we wanted to compare the 1739 copy to the mid 1740s one to see how the takes on Fritz differed based on whether she was having a falling out or not.
Along with sense-making textual comparisons and critique there’s a lot of “FW would never”.
19th century historians are so great, right up until they're...not.
I had picked up on the pro-FW take even with the little reading I'd managed!
and “one believes one hears the Margravine speak” when FW’s parenting is described, which, however, doesn’t enhance Wilhelmine’s credibility (despite the fact Seckendorff can’t possibly have it from her), it just proves how biased Other Seckendorff is. Otoh, his “here stands one who will avenge me?” Quote? utterly credible und ace reporting.
UGH, yes. You can see why Arneth is so defensive!
I mean, he also does a lot of actual source comparisons. But that attitude is everywhere.
Yep. I'm here for the source comparisons, Wallat. Keep your opinions to yourself.
Also, MIldred, Wallat wants to know why Fritz doesn’t get more credit for HIS portrayal of FW in the Histoire, because clearly it’s the best ever.
Lol, I had strongly suspected that that's where he was going! Fritz the great historian! *cough*
Droysen says the one owned by Heinrich, for example, is written on paper from FW3’s era (with the water sign proving the paper was created only when FW3 was already king). (This fits with FW3 being the one to give the memoirs to Heinrich - evidently he didn’t give him an original but a copy to keep.)
Interesting! Yes, definitely interested in knowing more about the evolution of her memoirs when you have time.
Good lord. Never mind, I'll see whether I can sell the Stabi on my researcher creds
Tell them how creative, competent, and socially engaged you are. ;)
but not this year - next year!
That should give you time to learn French. :P More seriously, I just learned that only 100 copies each of volumes 1 and 2 were ever published. Volume 3 was projected but never published, and volume 4 copies have no indication of how many copies were printed total, but since it was privately printed, surely not many. I can see why no one ever uses this diary!
Thank you for looking at Droysen and Wallat for me! I'm still trying to read some of the Wallat sections for font practice, but it's slow going at the best of times, and there have been some delays. I am delighted that Droysen led us to the discovery of Wilhelmine's diary. One day we'll get our hands on it!
However, since Pöllnitz survived Wilhelmine by considerable time, he may in addition to whatever they told each other in 1744 have gotten a copy from the memoirs - or been allowed to read one and make excerpts - from Dr. Superville, who according to Droysen had the most extensive “Braunschweig” one, after her death. Given we simply don’t know when his own Histoire was finished, it could have been at any point before his own death.
Ahh, interesting. Yes, I agree you should go look for modern scholarship on the composition of her memoirs when you have time! Remember also that we wanted to compare the 1739 copy to the mid 1740s one to see how the takes on Fritz differed based on whether she was having a falling out or not.
Along with sense-making textual comparisons and critique there’s a lot of “FW would never”.
19th century historians are so great, right up until they're...not.
I had picked up on the pro-FW take even with the little reading I'd managed!
and “one believes one hears the Margravine speak” when FW’s parenting is described, which, however, doesn’t enhance Wilhelmine’s credibility (despite the fact Seckendorff can’t possibly have it from her), it just proves how biased Other Seckendorff is. Otoh, his “here stands one who will avenge me?” Quote? utterly credible und ace reporting.
UGH, yes. You can see why Arneth is so defensive!
I mean, he also does a lot of actual source comparisons. But that attitude is everywhere.
Yep. I'm here for the source comparisons, Wallat. Keep your opinions to yourself.
Also, MIldred, Wallat wants to know why Fritz doesn’t get more credit for HIS portrayal of FW in the Histoire, because clearly it’s the best ever.
Lol, I had strongly suspected that that's where he was going! Fritz the great historian! *cough*
Droysen says the one owned by Heinrich, for example, is written on paper from FW3’s era (with the water sign proving the paper was created only when FW3 was already king). (This fits with FW3 being the one to give the memoirs to Heinrich - evidently he didn’t give him an original but a copy to keep.)
Interesting! Yes, definitely interested in knowing more about the evolution of her memoirs when you have time.
Good lord. Never mind, I'll see whether I can sell the Stabi on my researcher creds
Tell them how creative, competent, and socially engaged you are. ;)
but not this year - next year!
That should give you time to learn French. :P More seriously, I just learned that only 100 copies each of volumes 1 and 2 were ever published. Volume 3 was projected but never published, and volume 4 copies have no indication of how many copies were printed total, but since it was privately printed, surely not many. I can see why no one ever uses this diary!
Thanks to Czernin's annotated bibliography, I discovered that Montesquieu traveled through Germany in 1728-1729 and kept a diary that is muuuuch easier to access than Wilhelmine's Italian counterpart! I obtained a recent German translation (lol, the day has come that my German is better than my French) via Kindle. Due to the slowness of my German and the busy-ness of my week, I've only read the couple of pages dealing with FW so far. No new information, but a couple of gems.
First of all, Montesquieu gives no signs that I can see (conceding my German and time limitations) that he met any of the Prussian royals, and this leads me to believe he's purely reporting hearsay. (He did get to meet G2, it seems.) He's also reporting hearsay from a French perspective, so he has no time for FW and is very concerned that the Catholic religion is disappearing in Prussia and Hanover (where he also visited and where there might be some stuff of interest for Selena to find, along with many other principalities).
So the entire Prussia section is just an anti-FW diatribe with a dash of anti-Prussia. FW's terrible, he's a miser, he beats his officers and soldiers, and he starves his family. Fritz would give up his title as crown prince in exchange for a 100 pound pension. (I mean, in 1729, that's borderline accurate.) Prussian fathers are sending their sons to other countries, merchants don't want to do business in Prussia because they'll get impressed into the army, the army wants to desert, and in general the population is fleeing the country. One-sided, but you start out almost with him, watch it get more and more exaggerated...and then you hit the part where Montesquieu concludes that, as a result, FW's power is going to gradually collapse on its own. You wish, Montesquieu. No credit to FW for making his country financially solvent or putting together an army that might someday kick French butt. Oh, and the Old Dessauer gets a diss for being a miser and just like FW too.
Montesquieu does mention the autumn 1729 incident between Prussia and Hanover where they almost went to war, though no duel that I can see. (Sadly, the dissertation I'm reading by one of the foremost English language scholars of diplomacy of the period, Jeremy Black, covers the incident in excruciating detail and does not once mention an almost duel!)
But the best quote of all, amidst several passages ragging on FW for his kidnapping of tall soldiers:
He loves his soldiers, beats them liberally, and then kisses them afterward.
That alone was worth the cost of the Kindle book.
Either Selena or I will someday have to read the whole thing and report back. There's an elaborate description of the Herrenhausen water works, which I presume he did see. (Perhaps G2 should have given some tips to Fritz? :P)
Ha, I just flipped to the imperial court in Vienna section, and I see he's describing the people he's gotten to know, and he starts with, "Eugene, who is pretty well known," and then moves onto the next person. Needs no introduction!
A fair amount of Duke of Berwick, James II's illegitimate son who distinguished himself in the War of the Spanish Succession, with whom Montesquieu is friends. Some of their letters are included.
That's all I have time for now, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't share FW kissing and making up with his soldiers.
First of all, Montesquieu gives no signs that I can see (conceding my German and time limitations) that he met any of the Prussian royals, and this leads me to believe he's purely reporting hearsay. (He did get to meet G2, it seems.) He's also reporting hearsay from a French perspective, so he has no time for FW and is very concerned that the Catholic religion is disappearing in Prussia and Hanover (where he also visited and where there might be some stuff of interest for Selena to find, along with many other principalities).
So the entire Prussia section is just an anti-FW diatribe with a dash of anti-Prussia. FW's terrible, he's a miser, he beats his officers and soldiers, and he starves his family. Fritz would give up his title as crown prince in exchange for a 100 pound pension. (I mean, in 1729, that's borderline accurate.) Prussian fathers are sending their sons to other countries, merchants don't want to do business in Prussia because they'll get impressed into the army, the army wants to desert, and in general the population is fleeing the country. One-sided, but you start out almost with him, watch it get more and more exaggerated...and then you hit the part where Montesquieu concludes that, as a result, FW's power is going to gradually collapse on its own. You wish, Montesquieu. No credit to FW for making his country financially solvent or putting together an army that might someday kick French butt. Oh, and the Old Dessauer gets a diss for being a miser and just like FW too.
Montesquieu does mention the autumn 1729 incident between Prussia and Hanover where they almost went to war, though no duel that I can see. (Sadly, the dissertation I'm reading by one of the foremost English language scholars of diplomacy of the period, Jeremy Black, covers the incident in excruciating detail and does not once mention an almost duel!)
But the best quote of all, amidst several passages ragging on FW for his kidnapping of tall soldiers:
He loves his soldiers, beats them liberally, and then kisses them afterward.
That alone was worth the cost of the Kindle book.
Either Selena or I will someday have to read the whole thing and report back. There's an elaborate description of the Herrenhausen water works, which I presume he did see. (Perhaps G2 should have given some tips to Fritz? :P)
Ha, I just flipped to the imperial court in Vienna section, and I see he's describing the people he's gotten to know, and he starts with, "Eugene, who is pretty well known," and then moves onto the next person. Needs no introduction!
A fair amount of Duke of Berwick, James II's illegitimate son who distinguished himself in the War of the Spanish Succession, with whom Montesquieu is friends. Some of their letters are included.
That's all I have time for now, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't share FW kissing and making up with his soldiers.
...by Matthew Dennison. A very readable and recent biography of Queen Caroline. Dennison would get the Horowski seal of approval: he spells all the German names correctly (which is a true challenge in the case of the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg), is aware that the Countess of Kielsmansegg was G1's half sister, not mistress, and while sympathetic to his main subject is able to investigate her less than stellar sides as well. (Though he thinks Wilhelmine has no idea what she's talking about with her powerhungry-as-Agrippina comparison, since she never met Caroline.) This is especially notable in the description of the increasingly toxic breakdown of the (non-)relationship between Caroline and her oldest son, but more about this in a moment.
The bibliography is impressive. (No books in German, but he's read all the English translations of Sophie's various correspondences he got his hands on, for example, as well as translated into English or French biographies.) I haven't come across an immediately noticable error save one, and because he's so good otherwise, I'm now actually confused and uncertain whether he could have been right. In every book except for this that I've read touching on the English Marriage Project, the cousin intended for Fritz (of Prussia) is named as Amelia/Emily. Dennison says it was her older sister Anne, and that Fritz of Wales and Anne as the oldest were intended for their counterparts Wilhelmine and Fritz of Prussia, also the oldest surviving kids. Like I said - I've always read that it was Amelia. I mean, even her wiki entry claims she kept a miniature of Fritz. And the famous letter Fritz was talked into writing to Caroline about vowingn to only marry her daughter I recalled as naming Amelia as well, but now I'm not sure anymore. Miiiiiiildred - could it have been Anne? (Until her marriage to yet another William of Orange, that is.)
On to the life of Caroline. Her father, the Margrave of Ansbach, already had several sons when remarrying Caroline's mother, so that marriage was seen as a love match Alas he died just a few years later, and Caroline's mother could not handle widowhood at all, hence Caroline's education being neglected to the degree that she had to teach herself how to write and read. (Dennison gives a few examples for the fact she was never able to spell well in any of the languages she spoke - German, French and English - despite being a passionate reader and lover of scholarly debates - which was the long term result.) Her mother eventually married again, another widower, which was social step up and a human step down, for her second husband Johann Georg was the older brother of August the Strong, Prince Elector of Saxony before him. Johann Georg had a mistress, Magdalen Sybille, aka Billa, whom he had no intention of giving up and insited on being treated as the true spouse. Her mother, Ursula, had been his father's mistress as well, and the question mark as to whether or not Billa could have been his half sister didn't seem to bother him. (One can see the family resemblance to August.) Billa eventually got infected by smallpox and died, Johann Georg, who had insisted on being with her, also got infected and died, and August the Strong started his ascendancy to the throne by putting about a hundred Bill-related people on trial for corruption and her mother Ursula for witchcraft (she'd been massively unpopular, so this was a cheap popularity gesture, and one of the last prominent witch trials).
What all this meant for Caroline was that she kept being shuffled between courts in her childhood: her mother's, her older half brother's at Ansbach (said older half brother, btw, eventually produced the son who'd marry Wilhelmine's and Fritz' sister Friederike, the first of the siblings to get married, and make her miserable), her stepfather's - and always in between the one of Sophie Charlotte and F1 in Berlin. The full name of Caroline's dad had been von Brandenburg-Ansbach, as the Margraves of Ansbach were an offshot of the Hohenzollern, too, so F1 was the ultimate overlord of the family, so to speak, and had offered her a home to stay. Caroline first did this at eight, but more long term and for years as a teenager, where, says Dennison, she adopted Sophie Charlotte - whom Dennison refers to by her family nickname of Figuelotte, presumably to cut down the number of Sophies and Charlottes in this book - as a life long heroine and role model.
Sidenote: this made me recall my puzzlement at Hervey claiming that Caroline told him Figuelotte had been "a silly, shallow woman", as opposed to G2 admiring her. Dennison - who quotes a lot from Hervey on other matters - never mentions this one. He does quote many positive and admiring statements from Caroline about Figuelotte from her own letters to back up his claim of Figuelotte - who was the first to encourage Caroline's hunger for books and to provide her with education and who had created the first intellectual court in Berlin - as her heroine. Now, could the letters have been for show and Caroline voiced towards Hervey her true feelings? Sure. But I suspect that Hervey, who self confessedly tuned out whenever G2 and Caroline talked about their German relations and couldn't be bothered to memorize who was related to whom, simply confused Prussian queens, and the one whom Caroline had been uncomplimentary about was in fact her sister-in-law Sophia Dorothea. (With whom she lived in Hannover close-up between marrying G2 and SD marrying FW.) After all, Caroline was writing positive things about the late Figuelotte even when she herself was Queen and the late Sophie Charlotte had probably been forgotten my many, i.e. when there was no profit to claim the connection.
Through Figuelotte, Caroline also attracted the attention of Sophie of Hannover. (BTW, Dennison chronicles Sophie's changing emotions about Caroline - first very positive - she definitely wanted her for grandson G2 - , then cooling off after the marriage, than positive again , but doesn't quote or explain the letter from Sophie to SD where she refers to Caroline as a habitual liar. I was hoping he'd explain the occasion and/or lie, but no. His explanation for the cooling off period on Sophie's part is that she was mourning for her then very recently dead daughter, had been hoping Caroline would be a second Figuelotte, which of course no one could have been, was disappointed and held it against her, with relationships improving again once Sophie had worked through her immediate grief. For Caroline's part, she seems to sincerely have attached herself to Sophie and learned a lot from her. One of Dennison's proofs for this is that after Sophie had died, Caroline started to correspond with Liselotte, and an intense correspondence it was, too, twice weekly, according to Liselotte. The two of them had never met, and all they shared was Sophie; also, Sophie's death was quickly followed by Queen Anne's, which meant Caroline became Princess of Wales and moved to Britain, so it wasn't like she didn't have other things to do, while Liselotte was an old widow without political influence (yes, she was the mother of the French Regent, but no one thought Philippe II consulted her about politics), so writing to her was most likely out of the genuine need to have a maternal confidant whom the Sophies had previously filled. With the caveat that how we present ourselves in letters isn't necessarily how we're perceived in person, Dennison adds it's also worth noting down that Liselotte - who in her long life at Versailles had experienced all types of people - quickly took to Caroline and considered her both smart and engaging.
But back to Caroline, young princess of tiny Ansbach with no big heritage (remember, product of second marriage) hanging out a lot at Berlin. She was a youthful beauty by the standards of her age - bright blond hair, white, luminous skin, a good figure which only later would get heavy, but would almost to the end be perceived as voluptous -, and an impressive conversationalist. Given the lack of a dowry, the amazing thing is that her first proposal should come from a very impressive source - young Archduke Charles, future Dad of MT. Now, this proposal and Caroline's eventual refusal became quickly the stuff of legend, and in later years it cemented her standing as a Protestant heroine - the princess who had "scorned an empire for her faith" - so it's worth pointing out, as Dennison does, that when Charles proposed, he wasn't the Emperor yet, nor was it all that likely he'd be. He was the second son of the Emperor, there was no reason to assume his older brother Joseph wouldn't produce heirs, and the best he could hope for was being King of Spain. This still made him a likely monarch to be when proposing to Caroline and as Habsburg, he was pretty much the best she could hope to get in the marriage market. She wavered at first. Figuelotte and Sophie were conspiciously neutral about the prospect, which made Dennison wonder whether Figuelotte wanted Caroline for her son FW while Sophie wanted her for grandson future G2 already, but neither prospect was voiced, so he says it's also possible that they didn't, or that Figuelotte also thought G2 was a better match but didn't say so because FW was her son. They were neither encouraging nor discouraging about the Habsburg match, and Team Vienna did sent a Jesuit to convert Caroline, but talks with Father Orban had the opposite effect on her: they likely as not made her decide that no, becoming Queen of Spain wasn't worth this, she'd rather stay a Protestant, thanks, Charles.
It was an audacious gesture for a minor German princess - as I said, looking at the logistics of the time, it wasn't likely she could have hoped for a better proposal -, but it would pay off in dividends for the rest of her life, and not just because Sophie used it to sell her son on a Caroline/future G2 match.
Speaking of the Georges: in order to make it always clear who is who, Dennison calls G1 George Louis both before and after his becoming King, and G2 George Augustus (ditto). Why was Caroline's attachment to the Protestant faith a good selling point to convince George Louis she could make a good match for his son, despite the lack of a dowry? Because at this point, the prospect of the British succession became increasingly real. Cousins William and Mary had produced no living offspring. Cousin Anne's children had all died. And the reason why the ca. 50 people between Sophie and Anne were disqualified from the succession in the eyes of Protestant England was that they were all Catholics. Now, George Louis and Sophie cunningly let young George Augustus believe this was all his idea, and he went through that romantic undercover mission where he under a pseudonym showed up at Ansbach (Caroline after Figuelotte's death had gone to her half brother's court) and fell in love at first sight. But there was a lot of stage management behind the scenes there.
As we've learned in the Schnath edited correspondence, F1 was miffed about this because he'd been toying with the idea of a Caroline/FW match (Dennison assumes, though F1 would deny it later), and if Morgenstern is to be believed, young FW was heartbroken. But Dennison thinks Caroline didn't consider him even for a microsecond, and I'm with him there. Otoh, Dennison also thinks George Augustus did know FW was interested in Caroline and that this - like the rejected Habsburg proposal - heightened her allure in his eyes. Then again, by the evidence of their remaining lives together, he was well and truly smitten. He adored her and would do so till her dying day and beyond, ordering that after his own burial the parting wood between their coffins would be lifted so that their dust could mingle.
Was Caroline felt is harder to say. Dennison doesn't think it was all power hunger and calculation that made her become the perfect wife to G2. On the one hand, he didn't share some of her most important interests - notably books (G2 liked music but not reading, and Caroline could only read when he was sleeping or otherwise not requiring her company) -, he could be petty, and his ego required constant massaging. Dennison along with Hervey thinks that while G2 clearly liked sex, his open preference for his wife over his mistress demonstrates that he mostly took a maitresse because a) it's what Kings post Louis XIV did, and b) people were noting his uxoriousness and making jokes that it was Caroline who was wearing the pants in the marriage, so taking a mistress was supposed to show he was the boss. Given such scenes as the one where when his mistress, Henrietta Howard, as lady-in-waiting was dressing his wife:
G2: *snatches the hankerchief covering Caroline's shoulders while her hair was being dressed* : Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen's!"
and the thirty pages love letters he wrote to Caroline from Hannover when not with her, his British subjects were less than convinced by this strategem of his.
On the other hand: after a childhood and youth as the poor relation with ever changing guardians, a husband who, whatever other faults he had, really is constant in his conviction that you are the best, sexiest, most wonderful woman on the planet and loves you - let's not forget, George Augustus, whose mother had disappeared into captivity when he was 11 and whose father was famouly a cold fish to almost anyone other than his mistress and illegitimate kids even before that frosty attitude would devolve into father/son warfare later, was something of a love starved teen himself - may have been someone made for Caroline in more ways than by eventually making her Queen. Among their contemporaries there was the wide spectrum of "she adores him, too" to "totally faking it for power's sake!" in how their marriage was seen from her side.
The bibliography is impressive. (No books in German, but he's read all the English translations of Sophie's various correspondences he got his hands on, for example, as well as translated into English or French biographies.) I haven't come across an immediately noticable error save one, and because he's so good otherwise, I'm now actually confused and uncertain whether he could have been right. In every book except for this that I've read touching on the English Marriage Project, the cousin intended for Fritz (of Prussia) is named as Amelia/Emily. Dennison says it was her older sister Anne, and that Fritz of Wales and Anne as the oldest were intended for their counterparts Wilhelmine and Fritz of Prussia, also the oldest surviving kids. Like I said - I've always read that it was Amelia. I mean, even her wiki entry claims she kept a miniature of Fritz. And the famous letter Fritz was talked into writing to Caroline about vowingn to only marry her daughter I recalled as naming Amelia as well, but now I'm not sure anymore. Miiiiiiildred - could it have been Anne? (Until her marriage to yet another William of Orange, that is.)
On to the life of Caroline. Her father, the Margrave of Ansbach, already had several sons when remarrying Caroline's mother, so that marriage was seen as a love match Alas he died just a few years later, and Caroline's mother could not handle widowhood at all, hence Caroline's education being neglected to the degree that she had to teach herself how to write and read. (Dennison gives a few examples for the fact she was never able to spell well in any of the languages she spoke - German, French and English - despite being a passionate reader and lover of scholarly debates - which was the long term result.) Her mother eventually married again, another widower, which was social step up and a human step down, for her second husband Johann Georg was the older brother of August the Strong, Prince Elector of Saxony before him. Johann Georg had a mistress, Magdalen Sybille, aka Billa, whom he had no intention of giving up and insited on being treated as the true spouse. Her mother, Ursula, had been his father's mistress as well, and the question mark as to whether or not Billa could have been his half sister didn't seem to bother him. (One can see the family resemblance to August.) Billa eventually got infected by smallpox and died, Johann Georg, who had insisted on being with her, also got infected and died, and August the Strong started his ascendancy to the throne by putting about a hundred Bill-related people on trial for corruption and her mother Ursula for witchcraft (she'd been massively unpopular, so this was a cheap popularity gesture, and one of the last prominent witch trials).
What all this meant for Caroline was that she kept being shuffled between courts in her childhood: her mother's, her older half brother's at Ansbach (said older half brother, btw, eventually produced the son who'd marry Wilhelmine's and Fritz' sister Friederike, the first of the siblings to get married, and make her miserable), her stepfather's - and always in between the one of Sophie Charlotte and F1 in Berlin. The full name of Caroline's dad had been von Brandenburg-Ansbach, as the Margraves of Ansbach were an offshot of the Hohenzollern, too, so F1 was the ultimate overlord of the family, so to speak, and had offered her a home to stay. Caroline first did this at eight, but more long term and for years as a teenager, where, says Dennison, she adopted Sophie Charlotte - whom Dennison refers to by her family nickname of Figuelotte, presumably to cut down the number of Sophies and Charlottes in this book - as a life long heroine and role model.
Sidenote: this made me recall my puzzlement at Hervey claiming that Caroline told him Figuelotte had been "a silly, shallow woman", as opposed to G2 admiring her. Dennison - who quotes a lot from Hervey on other matters - never mentions this one. He does quote many positive and admiring statements from Caroline about Figuelotte from her own letters to back up his claim of Figuelotte - who was the first to encourage Caroline's hunger for books and to provide her with education and who had created the first intellectual court in Berlin - as her heroine. Now, could the letters have been for show and Caroline voiced towards Hervey her true feelings? Sure. But I suspect that Hervey, who self confessedly tuned out whenever G2 and Caroline talked about their German relations and couldn't be bothered to memorize who was related to whom, simply confused Prussian queens, and the one whom Caroline had been uncomplimentary about was in fact her sister-in-law Sophia Dorothea. (With whom she lived in Hannover close-up between marrying G2 and SD marrying FW.) After all, Caroline was writing positive things about the late Figuelotte even when she herself was Queen and the late Sophie Charlotte had probably been forgotten my many, i.e. when there was no profit to claim the connection.
Through Figuelotte, Caroline also attracted the attention of Sophie of Hannover. (BTW, Dennison chronicles Sophie's changing emotions about Caroline - first very positive - she definitely wanted her for grandson G2 - , then cooling off after the marriage, than positive again , but doesn't quote or explain the letter from Sophie to SD where she refers to Caroline as a habitual liar. I was hoping he'd explain the occasion and/or lie, but no. His explanation for the cooling off period on Sophie's part is that she was mourning for her then very recently dead daughter, had been hoping Caroline would be a second Figuelotte, which of course no one could have been, was disappointed and held it against her, with relationships improving again once Sophie had worked through her immediate grief. For Caroline's part, she seems to sincerely have attached herself to Sophie and learned a lot from her. One of Dennison's proofs for this is that after Sophie had died, Caroline started to correspond with Liselotte, and an intense correspondence it was, too, twice weekly, according to Liselotte. The two of them had never met, and all they shared was Sophie; also, Sophie's death was quickly followed by Queen Anne's, which meant Caroline became Princess of Wales and moved to Britain, so it wasn't like she didn't have other things to do, while Liselotte was an old widow without political influence (yes, she was the mother of the French Regent, but no one thought Philippe II consulted her about politics), so writing to her was most likely out of the genuine need to have a maternal confidant whom the Sophies had previously filled. With the caveat that how we present ourselves in letters isn't necessarily how we're perceived in person, Dennison adds it's also worth noting down that Liselotte - who in her long life at Versailles had experienced all types of people - quickly took to Caroline and considered her both smart and engaging.
But back to Caroline, young princess of tiny Ansbach with no big heritage (remember, product of second marriage) hanging out a lot at Berlin. She was a youthful beauty by the standards of her age - bright blond hair, white, luminous skin, a good figure which only later would get heavy, but would almost to the end be perceived as voluptous -, and an impressive conversationalist. Given the lack of a dowry, the amazing thing is that her first proposal should come from a very impressive source - young Archduke Charles, future Dad of MT. Now, this proposal and Caroline's eventual refusal became quickly the stuff of legend, and in later years it cemented her standing as a Protestant heroine - the princess who had "scorned an empire for her faith" - so it's worth pointing out, as Dennison does, that when Charles proposed, he wasn't the Emperor yet, nor was it all that likely he'd be. He was the second son of the Emperor, there was no reason to assume his older brother Joseph wouldn't produce heirs, and the best he could hope for was being King of Spain. This still made him a likely monarch to be when proposing to Caroline and as Habsburg, he was pretty much the best she could hope to get in the marriage market. She wavered at first. Figuelotte and Sophie were conspiciously neutral about the prospect, which made Dennison wonder whether Figuelotte wanted Caroline for her son FW while Sophie wanted her for grandson future G2 already, but neither prospect was voiced, so he says it's also possible that they didn't, or that Figuelotte also thought G2 was a better match but didn't say so because FW was her son. They were neither encouraging nor discouraging about the Habsburg match, and Team Vienna did sent a Jesuit to convert Caroline, but talks with Father Orban had the opposite effect on her: they likely as not made her decide that no, becoming Queen of Spain wasn't worth this, she'd rather stay a Protestant, thanks, Charles.
It was an audacious gesture for a minor German princess - as I said, looking at the logistics of the time, it wasn't likely she could have hoped for a better proposal -, but it would pay off in dividends for the rest of her life, and not just because Sophie used it to sell her son on a Caroline/future G2 match.
Speaking of the Georges: in order to make it always clear who is who, Dennison calls G1 George Louis both before and after his becoming King, and G2 George Augustus (ditto). Why was Caroline's attachment to the Protestant faith a good selling point to convince George Louis she could make a good match for his son, despite the lack of a dowry? Because at this point, the prospect of the British succession became increasingly real. Cousins William and Mary had produced no living offspring. Cousin Anne's children had all died. And the reason why the ca. 50 people between Sophie and Anne were disqualified from the succession in the eyes of Protestant England was that they were all Catholics. Now, George Louis and Sophie cunningly let young George Augustus believe this was all his idea, and he went through that romantic undercover mission where he under a pseudonym showed up at Ansbach (Caroline after Figuelotte's death had gone to her half brother's court) and fell in love at first sight. But there was a lot of stage management behind the scenes there.
As we've learned in the Schnath edited correspondence, F1 was miffed about this because he'd been toying with the idea of a Caroline/FW match (Dennison assumes, though F1 would deny it later), and if Morgenstern is to be believed, young FW was heartbroken. But Dennison thinks Caroline didn't consider him even for a microsecond, and I'm with him there. Otoh, Dennison also thinks George Augustus did know FW was interested in Caroline and that this - like the rejected Habsburg proposal - heightened her allure in his eyes. Then again, by the evidence of their remaining lives together, he was well and truly smitten. He adored her and would do so till her dying day and beyond, ordering that after his own burial the parting wood between their coffins would be lifted so that their dust could mingle.
Was Caroline felt is harder to say. Dennison doesn't think it was all power hunger and calculation that made her become the perfect wife to G2. On the one hand, he didn't share some of her most important interests - notably books (G2 liked music but not reading, and Caroline could only read when he was sleeping or otherwise not requiring her company) -, he could be petty, and his ego required constant massaging. Dennison along with Hervey thinks that while G2 clearly liked sex, his open preference for his wife over his mistress demonstrates that he mostly took a maitresse because a) it's what Kings post Louis XIV did, and b) people were noting his uxoriousness and making jokes that it was Caroline who was wearing the pants in the marriage, so taking a mistress was supposed to show he was the boss. Given such scenes as the one where when his mistress, Henrietta Howard, as lady-in-waiting was dressing his wife:
G2: *snatches the hankerchief covering Caroline's shoulders while her hair was being dressed* : Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen's!"
and the thirty pages love letters he wrote to Caroline from Hannover when not with her, his British subjects were less than convinced by this strategem of his.
On the other hand: after a childhood and youth as the poor relation with ever changing guardians, a husband who, whatever other faults he had, really is constant in his conviction that you are the best, sexiest, most wonderful woman on the planet and loves you - let's not forget, George Augustus, whose mother had disappeared into captivity when he was 11 and whose father was famouly a cold fish to almost anyone other than his mistress and illegitimate kids even before that frosty attitude would devolve into father/son warfare later, was something of a love starved teen himself - may have been someone made for Caroline in more ways than by eventually making her Queen. Among their contemporaries there was the wide spectrum of "she adores him, too" to "totally faking it for power's sake!" in how their marriage was seen from her side.
When the British parliament produced the Act of Settlement (which made it law that any successor to Anne had to be Sophie or a PROTESTANT descendant of Sophie), Caroline, who definitely had the brains of the marriage, inmmediately started an Anglisation project, learning English, cultivating the increasing number of British visitors now showing up at Hannover, reading up on English literature, and on English history. (She became an early member of Tudor fandom, which the poets cultivating her later noted, pleasing her by comparing her to Elizabeth, not more recent Queens like Anne or Mary II.) Among the Brits showing up at Hannover were the Howards. Charles Howard was a louse, and a physically abusive husband, and his wife, Henrietta, had come here with one aim in mind: get a job from the future British monarchs that would get her away from her husband. Her original idea had been becoming lady in waiting to Caroline, which she did, but she also ended up as future G2's first mistress.
Caroline: ?
Sophie (I'm not making this up, she really said this): Look at it this way: It will improve his English.
George Augustus, like FW, had a hell of a time getting his father to permit him to join team Eugene & Marlborough on campain. Unlike FW, this was because George Louis - who'd done ample soldiering in his own father's life time - didn't want his disliked son to distinguish himself. Like FW, eventually permission was granted, and George Augustus got to go soldiering for six months, which included the Battle of Oudenaard and future G2 distinguishing himself by personal bravery - a horse was shot under him and he still went on fighting. This got him praise from Marlborough and some mention from British poets who called him "Young Hannover Brave", a description he would relish for the rest of his life.
Anne: *still not impressed and refusing to allow any Hannover cousins to set foot on British shore while she's alive*
Dennison: I'm with Anne here, not with Sophie. It wasn't personal - Anne knew that any successor in residence would esssentially become a second, alternative court, and she already had to deal with one in Paris courtesy of her father and half brother.
Sophie: Then it wasn't personal on my part, either. You may think it was must wounded vanity that made me roll my eyes at Anne, Dennison, but I've been ruling Hannover whenever my husband did his regular trips to Venice, I know something about governing, and I tell you, if Grandson had been able to take his seat in the House of Lords as Duke of Cambridge, it would have allowed him to learn about Britain and English politics ahead of time, which could only have been good for the country in the long term.
Caroline & motherhood: Dennison points out that in addition to the usual royal set up where a nurse and governess are in charge of the day to day caring of the kids, Caroline got smallpox when Fritz of Wales as six months, and then, barely recoverd, she got pneumonia. During this time, she wasn't allowed any contact with the baby at all for obvious reasons. So there was a disruption of this particular relationship from the get go. Also, while paying lip duties to believing in the highest calling for a woman being a wife and mother, she even according to an admiring and sympathetic observer had a perference for "settling points of controversional divinity" (Caroline was very much interested in philosophical and religious debates and later would be involved in a big Leipniz vs Newton and Clarke clash) over child play. She made sure her children would be educated from the get go, unlike her (lessons in Latin, German, French, Italian and the works ofancient historians were on the schedule), but as for day to day visits even when she was healthy, well...
Quoth Dennison: Caroline's apparant failure to react either swiftly or effectively to the infant Frederick developing rickets suggests negligence, but should be read within the context of contemporary parenting habits and widespread medical ignorance (...) In the event, credit for Frederick's recovery mostly belongs to Sophia, who, by directing that "Fritzchen" spend time outdoors in the gardens at Herrenhausen, exposed him to the light and fresh air which effected a cure around the time of his third birthday. In her lietters, Sophia intimated that her contribution extended to supervising Fritzchen's wetnurse and feeding regimen: first smallpox then pneunomonia had separated Caroline from her baby. (...) Frederick did benefit from the doting ministrations of his still energetic great-grandmother.
(Who took him along on her garden walks, she didn't just tell the nurse to take him outside. You might recall she does mention him a lot in her letters to SD.) All this might still have been recoverable within an 18th century context, but then when "Fritzchen" is seven, the family moves to Britain, except him.
On George Louis' instructions, Frederick stayed behind in Hannover with hish great-uncle, Ernest Augustus. His grandfather had decided that Frederick would serve as the family's permanent representative in the electorate. He was seven years old. Only in January, Sophia had written to Liselotte of his excitement that Christmas. 'I have no doubt that your Prince Fritzchen is absolutely delighted with the Christchild, because I still remember so well how I loved it,' Liselotte replied. To enforce a permanent separation from his parents an dsiblings on so young a child was an act of terrible cruelty, from which neither prince nor parents would recover.
Early on, Caroline kept asking British visitors to the continent who'd been in Hannover to tell her how her son was doing, and to be fair, future G2 made at least two attempts to persuade his father to let "Fritzchen" join the the rest of the clan in said early years. But at some point, at the very latest when his brother William was born, they emotionally cut him off in their minds and hearts, and for good. Dennison points out that both Caroline and her oldest son were passionate letter writers, child!Fritz of Wales was definitely able to write letters to other relations (we have some of his letters to his sister Anne, for example) and yet no letter from Caroline during the 14 years the absence would eventually last exists. This could be because the correspondence was lost, or destroyed when mother and son became enemies, but even in the case of the only three years of Hervey/Fritz of Wales relationship, who were in the same country and the same town most of the time, some letters survive the subsequent breakdown, so Dennison speculates that Caroline may have never written, either because she could cope better this way or because there was something performative in her motherhood to "Fritzchen" from the get go, acting how she thought she ought to feel (a doting mother, asking questions about her child) rather than how she actually felt (not having been bonded with her oldest due to unfortunate circumstance).
Relations between George Louis and George Augustus had never been warm - Dennison thinks that maybe because of George Augustus' physical resemblance to the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea the Older -, though like FW with AW, George Louis could be a doting parent - to his illegitimate children with Melusine von der Schulenburg. Whereas with his two legitimate ones, he was cool, and after everyone moved to Britain, things between him and his son got steadily worse, which very much affected Caroline.
It has to be praised here that Dennison doesn't repeat old English clichés about G1. Who like grandson Fritz didn't like being undressed and dressed by his courtiers, so he changed this ceremonial, cut the office of the "Groom of the stool" entirely, and kept as his personal servants his two Turkish valets Mohammed and Mustafa. (Remember, his sister Sophie Charlotte, Figuelotte, also had brought two Turkish servants with her to Berlin from Hannover, and they were the last people she talked to on her death bed - "Adieu Ali, adieu Hassan".)
Brits: What kind of foreign weirdo keeps Turks around him? Who does he think he is, a sultan? No talking to Turks on our part.
Mohammed & Mustafa: Have it your way. We're not shopping in London, then, we're still ordering G1's wardrobe in Hannover.
G1: Which is how I like it. Mustafa, I'm ennobling you. You're allowed to choose your title.
Mustafa: Count von Königstreu.
Unlike G1, who was too set in his ways, Caroline and George Augustus cultivated the English which was very much Caroline's idea and strategem. She only kept two German ladies-in-waiting and otherwise appointed only British nobility. She and future G2 with and without their younger children were seen regularly taking strolls through St. James Park by the population. (Such a wholesome family, unlike the last Stuarts!). She and George Augustus learned English country dances and danced them at balls to the amazement of the nobility and delight of the population. Caroline became a patron of poets and artists. That all this enthusiasm for all things British was on G2's part not entirely sincere would only be revealed once he got on the throne, but for now, it was a very effective way to become popular and seen as the opposite of Dear Old Dad with his German mistress and Turkish valets and German officials and regular trips to Hannover. Oh, and this also happened:
1715 Jacobite rising: *happens*
George Augustus: Sounds like a job for me! I'm Young Hannover Brave, remember!
George Louis: I do remember. You're staying in London. Argyll, Supreme Command of my army is yours. Deal with the Jacobites.
George Augustus: I hate you.
Things escalate to the point where, when Caroline gives birth to another son (not yet Cumberland, but another William who will die as a baby just a few months later), we get the infamous quarrel at Westminster Abbey because George Louis changes the godfather George Augustus wanted, and George Augustus and the unwanted new godfather almost come to blows. This ends with future G2 and Caroline first locked up and then kicked out of the palace, with access to their children forbidden to them. Caroline is told by G1 she can stay but only if she takes his part. Caroline replies that while she loves her children, she loves her husband more and will go with him.
(Dennison points this may have been true but was also the only thing she could do in the long term, as G2 would not have forgiven her siding with Dad against him, and he was the one she lived with and who would survive G1.)
This treatment of Caroline has the effect that Europe, which might otherwise have sided with the patriarch, now sides with the young couple, because cutting off Caroline from her children just because she's a loyal wife looks terrible. It also does lasting damage. Caroline's relationships to her first three daughters won't ever be as close again as with the three children born after this event who grow up entirely with her. And she really did try to keep the contact, always sending little notes to the girls (which are preserved) and wearing G1 down to permitting weekly visits. She and George Augustus settled down in Leicester House, which was owned by Elizabeth Stuart the Winter Queen in the last months of her life when she had finally returned to England to die, and hence was owned by the Hannover clan. Caroline gives birth to three more children, two girls and William the future butcher of Cumberland. Who will spend seven years as the de facto only son, petted and adored, and will resent the ultimate arrival of his older brother only slightly less than Caroline and George Augustus.
Caroline: ?
Sophie (I'm not making this up, she really said this): Look at it this way: It will improve his English.
George Augustus, like FW, had a hell of a time getting his father to permit him to join team Eugene & Marlborough on campain. Unlike FW, this was because George Louis - who'd done ample soldiering in his own father's life time - didn't want his disliked son to distinguish himself. Like FW, eventually permission was granted, and George Augustus got to go soldiering for six months, which included the Battle of Oudenaard and future G2 distinguishing himself by personal bravery - a horse was shot under him and he still went on fighting. This got him praise from Marlborough and some mention from British poets who called him "Young Hannover Brave", a description he would relish for the rest of his life.
Anne: *still not impressed and refusing to allow any Hannover cousins to set foot on British shore while she's alive*
Dennison: I'm with Anne here, not with Sophie. It wasn't personal - Anne knew that any successor in residence would esssentially become a second, alternative court, and she already had to deal with one in Paris courtesy of her father and half brother.
Sophie: Then it wasn't personal on my part, either. You may think it was must wounded vanity that made me roll my eyes at Anne, Dennison, but I've been ruling Hannover whenever my husband did his regular trips to Venice, I know something about governing, and I tell you, if Grandson had been able to take his seat in the House of Lords as Duke of Cambridge, it would have allowed him to learn about Britain and English politics ahead of time, which could only have been good for the country in the long term.
Caroline & motherhood: Dennison points out that in addition to the usual royal set up where a nurse and governess are in charge of the day to day caring of the kids, Caroline got smallpox when Fritz of Wales as six months, and then, barely recoverd, she got pneumonia. During this time, she wasn't allowed any contact with the baby at all for obvious reasons. So there was a disruption of this particular relationship from the get go. Also, while paying lip duties to believing in the highest calling for a woman being a wife and mother, she even according to an admiring and sympathetic observer had a perference for "settling points of controversional divinity" (Caroline was very much interested in philosophical and religious debates and later would be involved in a big Leipniz vs Newton and Clarke clash) over child play. She made sure her children would be educated from the get go, unlike her (lessons in Latin, German, French, Italian and the works ofancient historians were on the schedule), but as for day to day visits even when she was healthy, well...
Quoth Dennison: Caroline's apparant failure to react either swiftly or effectively to the infant Frederick developing rickets suggests negligence, but should be read within the context of contemporary parenting habits and widespread medical ignorance (...) In the event, credit for Frederick's recovery mostly belongs to Sophia, who, by directing that "Fritzchen" spend time outdoors in the gardens at Herrenhausen, exposed him to the light and fresh air which effected a cure around the time of his third birthday. In her lietters, Sophia intimated that her contribution extended to supervising Fritzchen's wetnurse and feeding regimen: first smallpox then pneunomonia had separated Caroline from her baby. (...) Frederick did benefit from the doting ministrations of his still energetic great-grandmother.
(Who took him along on her garden walks, she didn't just tell the nurse to take him outside. You might recall she does mention him a lot in her letters to SD.) All this might still have been recoverable within an 18th century context, but then when "Fritzchen" is seven, the family moves to Britain, except him.
On George Louis' instructions, Frederick stayed behind in Hannover with hish great-uncle, Ernest Augustus. His grandfather had decided that Frederick would serve as the family's permanent representative in the electorate. He was seven years old. Only in January, Sophia had written to Liselotte of his excitement that Christmas. 'I have no doubt that your Prince Fritzchen is absolutely delighted with the Christchild, because I still remember so well how I loved it,' Liselotte replied. To enforce a permanent separation from his parents an dsiblings on so young a child was an act of terrible cruelty, from which neither prince nor parents would recover.
Early on, Caroline kept asking British visitors to the continent who'd been in Hannover to tell her how her son was doing, and to be fair, future G2 made at least two attempts to persuade his father to let "Fritzchen" join the the rest of the clan in said early years. But at some point, at the very latest when his brother William was born, they emotionally cut him off in their minds and hearts, and for good. Dennison points out that both Caroline and her oldest son were passionate letter writers, child!Fritz of Wales was definitely able to write letters to other relations (we have some of his letters to his sister Anne, for example) and yet no letter from Caroline during the 14 years the absence would eventually last exists. This could be because the correspondence was lost, or destroyed when mother and son became enemies, but even in the case of the only three years of Hervey/Fritz of Wales relationship, who were in the same country and the same town most of the time, some letters survive the subsequent breakdown, so Dennison speculates that Caroline may have never written, either because she could cope better this way or because there was something performative in her motherhood to "Fritzchen" from the get go, acting how she thought she ought to feel (a doting mother, asking questions about her child) rather than how she actually felt (not having been bonded with her oldest due to unfortunate circumstance).
Relations between George Louis and George Augustus had never been warm - Dennison thinks that maybe because of George Augustus' physical resemblance to the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea the Older -, though like FW with AW, George Louis could be a doting parent - to his illegitimate children with Melusine von der Schulenburg. Whereas with his two legitimate ones, he was cool, and after everyone moved to Britain, things between him and his son got steadily worse, which very much affected Caroline.
It has to be praised here that Dennison doesn't repeat old English clichés about G1. Who like grandson Fritz didn't like being undressed and dressed by his courtiers, so he changed this ceremonial, cut the office of the "Groom of the stool" entirely, and kept as his personal servants his two Turkish valets Mohammed and Mustafa. (Remember, his sister Sophie Charlotte, Figuelotte, also had brought two Turkish servants with her to Berlin from Hannover, and they were the last people she talked to on her death bed - "Adieu Ali, adieu Hassan".)
Brits: What kind of foreign weirdo keeps Turks around him? Who does he think he is, a sultan? No talking to Turks on our part.
Mohammed & Mustafa: Have it your way. We're not shopping in London, then, we're still ordering G1's wardrobe in Hannover.
G1: Which is how I like it. Mustafa, I'm ennobling you. You're allowed to choose your title.
Mustafa: Count von Königstreu.
Unlike G1, who was too set in his ways, Caroline and George Augustus cultivated the English which was very much Caroline's idea and strategem. She only kept two German ladies-in-waiting and otherwise appointed only British nobility. She and future G2 with and without their younger children were seen regularly taking strolls through St. James Park by the population. (Such a wholesome family, unlike the last Stuarts!). She and George Augustus learned English country dances and danced them at balls to the amazement of the nobility and delight of the population. Caroline became a patron of poets and artists. That all this enthusiasm for all things British was on G2's part not entirely sincere would only be revealed once he got on the throne, but for now, it was a very effective way to become popular and seen as the opposite of Dear Old Dad with his German mistress and Turkish valets and German officials and regular trips to Hannover. Oh, and this also happened:
1715 Jacobite rising: *happens*
George Augustus: Sounds like a job for me! I'm Young Hannover Brave, remember!
George Louis: I do remember. You're staying in London. Argyll, Supreme Command of my army is yours. Deal with the Jacobites.
George Augustus: I hate you.
Things escalate to the point where, when Caroline gives birth to another son (not yet Cumberland, but another William who will die as a baby just a few months later), we get the infamous quarrel at Westminster Abbey because George Louis changes the godfather George Augustus wanted, and George Augustus and the unwanted new godfather almost come to blows. This ends with future G2 and Caroline first locked up and then kicked out of the palace, with access to their children forbidden to them. Caroline is told by G1 she can stay but only if she takes his part. Caroline replies that while she loves her children, she loves her husband more and will go with him.
(Dennison points this may have been true but was also the only thing she could do in the long term, as G2 would not have forgiven her siding with Dad against him, and he was the one she lived with and who would survive G1.)
This treatment of Caroline has the effect that Europe, which might otherwise have sided with the patriarch, now sides with the young couple, because cutting off Caroline from her children just because she's a loyal wife looks terrible. It also does lasting damage. Caroline's relationships to her first three daughters won't ever be as close again as with the three children born after this event who grow up entirely with her. And she really did try to keep the contact, always sending little notes to the girls (which are preserved) and wearing G1 down to permitting weekly visits. She and George Augustus settled down in Leicester House, which was owned by Elizabeth Stuart the Winter Queen in the last months of her life when she had finally returned to England to die, and hence was owned by the Hannover clan. Caroline gives birth to three more children, two girls and William the future butcher of Cumberland. Who will spend seven years as the de facto only son, petted and adored, and will resent the ultimate arrival of his older brother only slightly less than Caroline and George Augustus.
When G1 finally kicks it, en route to Hannover, Fritz of Wales acts as chief mourner at the funeral in Hannover. He'd seen his grandfather during the later's regular visits to Hannover, but no other member of his family. And despite there being four months between G1's death and G2's coronation, he wasn't invited. He wasn't invited for over a year, and then, finally, only because of, surprise surprise, a certain marriage projects.
Like I said, with the birth and survival of William of Cumberland at the latest, Caroline and George Augustus emotionally buried their oldest, long before Fritz of Wales had any chance to personally piss them off. Which also can be seen by the inheritance question.
G1 in his last will, written at a point when "Fritzchen" was still the only son future G2 had, had written that if at some future point there were two male heirs in the same generation, the older should get Britain and the younger Hannover. This was intended for Fritz of Wales' future heirs, since both George Louis and George Augustus at the point when the will was written had only one son each. However, once George Augustus had actually a second son who made it out of the first few months of babyhood alive, there was suddenly a situation where this scenario could happen a generation earlier. At which point G2 and Caroline pointed out that since Fritz of Wales was educated in Hannover, it would make sense if he'd get Hannover and new beloved Bill get Britain. G1 wasn't keen on anything G2 suggested, but he said this actually made kind of sense BUT that it was unfair to do this without asking Fritz of Wales what HE wanted. (Who was raised bilingualy and trained as hard as Wilhelmine at the same time for his destiny as future King of England.) This, G2 and Caroline did not want. They wanted it to be decided, full stop. G1 didn't budge. End result: when G1 died, G2 went to some considerale effort to collect all three copies of the will and destroy them, lest it could be used to make young Cumberland go to Hannover and give Fritz of Wales Britain.
The infamous marriage project also was subject to G2's kneejerk reaction to anything his father had suggested first, to wit, the Fritz of Prussia/ Princess A? and Wilhelmine/Fritz of Wales matching. G2 never liked the idea of a spawn of FW as an in-law. Dennison provides a quote from G2 on this matter which I hadn't been familiar with before, to wit: Grafting my half-witted (son) upon a madwoman would not mend the breed. (Source footnoting for this one: Hervey's memoirs, the latest non-Victorian edition we DON'T have, volume 3, and a biography of Princess Anne.) Then legend has it this happens:
Fritz of Wales: Okay, a year has passed since Granddad died, I'm still in Hannover, still single, that's it, gonna show up in Berlin and marry Wilhelmine on my lonesome.
G2 (informed by spies): No you don't! Kidnap the Prince at a masque ball, bring him here!
Whereas Dennison says this happened:
Fritz of Wales: Okay, a year has passed, I'm still in Hannover, gonna make myself useful and help arrange the marriage between my cousin of Ansbach and Friederike, my hopefully soon sister-in-law, daughter of FW.
Caroline: You what? What business is my nephew's marriage of yours? Husband, we need to bring him here.
G2: Kidnap the prince at a masque ball, bring him here!
Fritz of Wales arrives without public fanfare through the back entrance of the St. James Palace and is presented with a family who hasn't been missing him. Things go downhill from there.
As for Hervey: Dennison goes with a replacement mother/son relationship between him and Caroline, additionally ensuring the relationship between him and Fritz of Wales is doomed, though he oddly doesn't mention the fact that Caroline's disliked lady in waiting Lady Bristol was Hervey's mother, who hated him as Caroline came to hate Fritz of Wales.
Now, remember how the fervent German nationalist historian detailing Sir Charles Hotham's mission to Berlin who ranted against perfidious and doubletongued Albion had gone on about how SD had written a lovely letter to Caroline in the winter of 1729 asking what was up and how Caroline the double tongued never replied, and that Hotham never refered to this key letter towards FW etc.? In Dennison's Caroline biography, the same series of events sound like this:
A letter written by a British diplomat in December 1729 suggested that Frederick William had "forced" Sophia Dorothea "to write an insolent letter of his dictating to our Queen (Caroline), insisting on her speedy performance of hte opes she has given her of marrying Prince Frederick to her oldest daughter (Anne), and this before February next, and unconditionally, or else she cannot hinder her husband from disposing of her to someone else." In George Augustus, to whom Caroline was bound to show such a letter, such high-handedness inspired a predictable response.
Sidenote: I'm the last to believe fervent German nationalists, but I think that one quoted SD's letter, and it did sound somewhat differently as far as I recall. Anyway, that's the last we hear of the Prussian drama, since Hannover dysfunctionality is about to kick in its own big gear once Fritz of Wales does get married. No new facts here, except that Dennison interprets the famous last exchange between a dying Caroline and G2 a bit differently. To remind everyone, it was, in French:
Caroline: *tells G2 to marry again after her death*
G2: Never! I shall have mistresses.
Caroline in Hervey's memoirs: That works, too.
Caroline in Dennison's biography: That's no impediment to marriage.
Caroline dies, after that painful illness, Händel composes a new work in her honor ("The Ways of Zion to Mourn"), G2 says "I never saw a woman worth to buckle her shoe" and at the Royal Exchange, a wit posts: "Death, where is thy sting? To take the Queen, and leave the King!" (As by this time, G2 had lost all the popularity he'd had as Prince of Wales, not least because by his trips to Hannover post ascension to the throne, he'd shown that he did not, as had been expected, "hate Germany and love England". Dennison thinks it's very unfair that Caroline is forgotten today, who'd been the first Princess of Wales since a young Katherine of Aragon and who'd been the most powerful Queen Consort in many a generation, too, doing more than any other single member of the Hannover royal family to assure it became largedly accepted in GB, and he opes his biography helps bringing her memory back at least somewhat.
Like I said, with the birth and survival of William of Cumberland at the latest, Caroline and George Augustus emotionally buried their oldest, long before Fritz of Wales had any chance to personally piss them off. Which also can be seen by the inheritance question.
G1 in his last will, written at a point when "Fritzchen" was still the only son future G2 had, had written that if at some future point there were two male heirs in the same generation, the older should get Britain and the younger Hannover. This was intended for Fritz of Wales' future heirs, since both George Louis and George Augustus at the point when the will was written had only one son each. However, once George Augustus had actually a second son who made it out of the first few months of babyhood alive, there was suddenly a situation where this scenario could happen a generation earlier. At which point G2 and Caroline pointed out that since Fritz of Wales was educated in Hannover, it would make sense if he'd get Hannover and new beloved Bill get Britain. G1 wasn't keen on anything G2 suggested, but he said this actually made kind of sense BUT that it was unfair to do this without asking Fritz of Wales what HE wanted. (Who was raised bilingualy and trained as hard as Wilhelmine at the same time for his destiny as future King of England.) This, G2 and Caroline did not want. They wanted it to be decided, full stop. G1 didn't budge. End result: when G1 died, G2 went to some considerale effort to collect all three copies of the will and destroy them, lest it could be used to make young Cumberland go to Hannover and give Fritz of Wales Britain.
The infamous marriage project also was subject to G2's kneejerk reaction to anything his father had suggested first, to wit, the Fritz of Prussia/ Princess A? and Wilhelmine/Fritz of Wales matching. G2 never liked the idea of a spawn of FW as an in-law. Dennison provides a quote from G2 on this matter which I hadn't been familiar with before, to wit: Grafting my half-witted (son) upon a madwoman would not mend the breed. (Source footnoting for this one: Hervey's memoirs, the latest non-Victorian edition we DON'T have, volume 3, and a biography of Princess Anne.) Then legend has it this happens:
Fritz of Wales: Okay, a year has passed since Granddad died, I'm still in Hannover, still single, that's it, gonna show up in Berlin and marry Wilhelmine on my lonesome.
G2 (informed by spies): No you don't! Kidnap the Prince at a masque ball, bring him here!
Whereas Dennison says this happened:
Fritz of Wales: Okay, a year has passed, I'm still in Hannover, gonna make myself useful and help arrange the marriage between my cousin of Ansbach and Friederike, my hopefully soon sister-in-law, daughter of FW.
Caroline: You what? What business is my nephew's marriage of yours? Husband, we need to bring him here.
G2: Kidnap the prince at a masque ball, bring him here!
Fritz of Wales arrives without public fanfare through the back entrance of the St. James Palace and is presented with a family who hasn't been missing him. Things go downhill from there.
As for Hervey: Dennison goes with a replacement mother/son relationship between him and Caroline, additionally ensuring the relationship between him and Fritz of Wales is doomed, though he oddly doesn't mention the fact that Caroline's disliked lady in waiting Lady Bristol was Hervey's mother, who hated him as Caroline came to hate Fritz of Wales.
Now, remember how the fervent German nationalist historian detailing Sir Charles Hotham's mission to Berlin who ranted against perfidious and doubletongued Albion had gone on about how SD had written a lovely letter to Caroline in the winter of 1729 asking what was up and how Caroline the double tongued never replied, and that Hotham never refered to this key letter towards FW etc.? In Dennison's Caroline biography, the same series of events sound like this:
A letter written by a British diplomat in December 1729 suggested that Frederick William had "forced" Sophia Dorothea "to write an insolent letter of his dictating to our Queen (Caroline), insisting on her speedy performance of hte opes she has given her of marrying Prince Frederick to her oldest daughter (Anne), and this before February next, and unconditionally, or else she cannot hinder her husband from disposing of her to someone else." In George Augustus, to whom Caroline was bound to show such a letter, such high-handedness inspired a predictable response.
Sidenote: I'm the last to believe fervent German nationalists, but I think that one quoted SD's letter, and it did sound somewhat differently as far as I recall. Anyway, that's the last we hear of the Prussian drama, since Hannover dysfunctionality is about to kick in its own big gear once Fritz of Wales does get married. No new facts here, except that Dennison interprets the famous last exchange between a dying Caroline and G2 a bit differently. To remind everyone, it was, in French:
Caroline: *tells G2 to marry again after her death*
G2: Never! I shall have mistresses.
Caroline in Hervey's memoirs: That works, too.
Caroline in Dennison's biography: That's no impediment to marriage.
Caroline dies, after that painful illness, Händel composes a new work in her honor ("The Ways of Zion to Mourn"), G2 says "I never saw a woman worth to buckle her shoe" and at the Royal Exchange, a wit posts: "Death, where is thy sting? To take the Queen, and leave the King!" (As by this time, G2 had lost all the popularity he'd had as Prince of Wales, not least because by his trips to Hannover post ascension to the throne, he'd shown that he did not, as had been expected, "hate Germany and love England". Dennison thinks it's very unfair that Caroline is forgotten today, who'd been the first Princess of Wales since a young Katherine of Aragon and who'd been the most powerful Queen Consort in many a generation, too, doing more than any other single member of the Hannover royal family to assure it became largedly accepted in GB, and he opes his biography helps bringing her memory back at least somewhat.
Finally having a chance to read again, I read a book called Longitude, about the problem of figuring out your longitude at sea. It's more interesting than it sounds!
Caveats first: even a few pages into the Kindle sample, I started getting suspicious about how hard the author was taking her protagonist's side and ragging on his opponents. Then shortly after buying the book and reading a little further, I hit two "Really?" anecdotes, to which Wikipedia promptly said, "No, not really." Both were described as local legends that were first recorded much later, and were contradicted by documentary evidence.
So how much of this I should be believing, I don't know. But the book was a very readable piece of popular science history, and I definitely learned a lot.
On to the book!
Finding your location at sea is a super important problem, for the following important reasons, among others:
1. Finding land and not dying of scurvy.
2. Not having to adhere to the same handful of well-known shipping lanes as all the other countries and getting ambushed and raided by them.
3. Not suddenly getting run aground and dying in shipwreck because you had no idea you were this close to land.
Re 3, I didn't realize just how bad it was before reading this book, but in 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession, 4 English warships returning to England crashed into the Isles of Scilly, because the crew didn't know how close they were to England, and sank. The death toll was somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000 sailors. (This is where two local legends arose that apparently have no bearing in reality, which is too bad, because they're really good stories.)
This was a really, really bad experience, obviously, and it led directly to the Longitude Act of 1714 (i.e. as soon as the war was over). Parliament offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude at sea.
The problem with determining longitude is that the earth rotates, so the stars keep moving in the sky (or appearing to). So their position changes with time. The North Star makes latitude easy, but for longitude, you have to know exactly what time it is where you are and exactly what time it is in some position of known longitude (like London).
This sounds easy to us, but in the 18th century, determining exactly what time it was was a really, really hard problem. Because of friction, clocks lost time and had to be rewound. While they were rewound, they didn't measure time, so they had to be set with reference to some other clock. Pendulums in pendulum clocks were made out of materials that would shrink in the cold and expand in the heat, so they would swing faster or slower. Finally, at sea, with all the tossing and turning due to the winds and waves, it was insanely hard to keep a clock from getting thrown out of sync by all the agitation.
So this problem of knowing what time it is, and therefore where you are, was an extremely unsolved problem in those days.
The author presents one hilarious method that was suggested in 1688, which she can't tell whether it's satire or not, but having read the original pamphlet as well as Wikipedia, I am extremely convinced is satire. The idea was that there was this thing in medical quackery called "sympathy powder," which worked kind of like voodoo dolls. You would take a wounded dog and create sympathy powder on port. Then the dog would go on board the ship, and the sympathy powder would stay behind. By doing the equivalent of voodoo back at home at regular intervals with the sympathy powder, you would make the dog on the ship yelp in pain. Then, two or three months later, the sailors would know what time it was back home by when the dog on the ship barked.
SATIRE.
Anyway, because of the economic and military payoffs, both governments and leading scientists took a huge interest in the subject. The book is full of names like Galileo, Newton, Hooke, Halley, Louis XIV, and George III.
Now, there were two main schools of thought for how to tackle this problem. One was the celestial measurement approach, and one was the timekeeping approach. According to the celestial measurement approach, you needed astronomers to plot the motions of some body or bodies in the sky, determine what was predictable over time, make up tables containing the data, give the tables in the form of an almanac to the sailors, have the sailors take measurements at sea, and then have them consult the books.
Galileo came up with a very good method for doing this, but unfortunately, it only really worked on land, under ideal conditions. It led to huge improvements in mapmaking! This is when people finally realized that 1) the Atlantic Ocean was a whole lot wider than they'd thought, 2) certain countries were not as big as thought. Allegedly, Louis XIV quipped that he was losing more of his territory to the astronomers than to his enemies. But he did keep funding them.
That's the astronomy approach. It was worked on by royal societies and observatories and funded by monarchs and parliaments.
Then there was the timekeeper approach, according to which all you had to have was a device that told the time and didn't gain or lose more than 3 seconds a day. You'd set it before you sailed from port, you'd take the local time using astronomical measurements, and you'd compare the time of your device (the time back in London or wherever) to local time (the time in the middle of the Pacific or wherever), and knowing the difference in times and the longitude of London, you could solve easily for the longitude of your current location.
This was worked on by one probably autistic Englishman of humble origins who decided to devote his life to tinkering with making clocks better. He first got assistance from his brother, and then his son. His name was John Harrison. [To quote the author, His family, in keeping with the custom of the time, dealt out names so parsimoniously that it is impossible to keep track of all the Henrys, Johns, and Elizabeths without pencil and paper. To wit, John Harrison served as the son, grandson, brother, and uncle of one Henry Harrison or another, while his mother, his sister, both his wives, his only daughter, and two of his three daughters-in-law all answered to the name Elizabeth.]
By 1730, he was introducing himself to Edmund Halley and presenting him with the drawings for the sea clock he had in mind. Halley sent him to a clockmaker friend, who gave him a loan to work on the clock.
In 1735, Harrison got to do a trial run with his clock. The admiralty decided to send it to Lisbon with Admiral Norris in 1736.
Now, if you're me, the words "Lisbon with Admiral Norris in 1736" is a magic phrase that means "Peter Keith." Given Peter's already demonstrated scientific interests in the early 1730s, and his later honorary Academy of Sciences membership, I was super hoping they were on the same ship! But alas, Peter (according to his eulogy) was on the flagship Britannia, which sailed in May, and Harrison was on the Centurion, which joined the main fleet in Lisbon in late September. But Harrison and Peter were in Lisbon at the same time as part of the same fleet, and they could have met there.
I also learned, while doing a bit of detective work, that the Englishmen who arrived in Lisbon in the second half of 1736 got so sick and so many of them died, due to a combination of an outbreak of smallpox and dysentery due possibly to local food that the English hadn't adjusted to, that Norris requested permission to sail home asap, and when he couldn't get it, demanded and received a hospital ship. 1 in 6 of the 12,000 men were recorded as sick. (Look, I just want to know every single detail I can reconstruct about the elusive Peter's life, it's my detective case.)
Anyway, back home in 1737, Harrison was presenting the results to the Board of Longitude (no, really, it was called that). His device had barely lost any time on the trial runs to and from Lisbon.
Everyone was super impressed! England was going to get a huge advantage over her enemies if this worked out! This was the time to demand the trial voyage to the West Indies required by the 1714 act as a prerequisite for the £20,000 prize.
But instead of advertising how great his invention was, Harrison proved himself a true engineer by pointing out its defects and talking about how he knew he could make a better one, and make it smaller, if they just gave him £500 and some more time to work on it. Once it was up to his standards, he'd submit it for a trial run, but not now. (I laughed so hard in recognition and knew I immediately had to share withcahn. Engineer mentality at its finest!)
"Uh, okay. Works for us," said the board that didn't have to pay £20,000.
Then Harrison disappeared for 20 years to work nonstop on 3 more iterations of his clock, which he eventually got down to a watch. A largish watch, but still a watch. He sacrificed his health and his work-life balance to this obsession.
Unfortunately, this dedication to his craft proves to be a political error, because in the meantime, his open-minded buddy Halley dies and is replaced as Astronomer Royal by a succession of astronomers who believe that astronomy is the One True Way for solving the longitude problem, and who are out to persecute poor lone genius John Harrison.
This is where the narrative becomes incredibly one-sided and I'm not sure we have the full story. But there seems to have been a rivalry between the astronomers and Harrison once he was ready to claim his prize. Eventually, George III, the noble, scientifically minded king takes the part of Our Hero and all is right with the world. Harrison doesn't get the prize because of politicking, but he gets an equivalent amount of money from Parliament by taking George's advice on presenting himself favorably during the trial. (Spends 20 years of his life tinkering with clocks and only emerging from his workshop to ask for a little more money to kepe working, talks shop for 10 solid hours with another clockmaker, is described as stubborn and argumentative, can't write readable prose to save his life, apparently has limited people skills...sounds spectrumish to me, based on what little data I have.)
Euler gets a cameo in the book for winning a prize for his role in furthering the cause, by reducing certain celestial motions to elegant equations and corresponding with an English astronomer who was able to apply those equations to the longitude problem.
In the end, the longitude problem seems to have been solved by a combination of astronomical (though you have to read between the lines and recall some other history you have read to get that from this rather biased-seeming book) and mechanical advances. But the ability to make a clock that does lose several minutes a day was a huge win for many other reasons, and led directly to the mass-production of pocket watches and wrist-watches that were actually reliable.
One thing that Harrison apparently invented that I had actually heard of was the bimetallic strip, which is used in thermostats even today (the context in which I learned about it in physics class). Since metals expand and contract at different rates at different temperatures, you can get something that will keep the temperature from getting too hot or too cold by combining two metals together in a strip, which will keep the temperature within a certain range by flexing in one direction or the other, depending on which of its two metals is reacting to it being too hot or too cold.
Harrison invented this to compensate for the fact that all previous timekeeping devices lost or gained time depending on the temperature. He used a combination of metals in first rods--in his first, large clocks--and then a bimetallic strip in his smaller, more sophisticated watches.
So that was cool.
The devices he built are called the H1, H2, H3, and H4 ('H' for 'Harrison'), and you can view them today (or some post-pandemic utopian future) at the National Maritime Museum, and online in the meantime. The H1, the original giant clock that went to Lisbon.
The H2, the improved version.
The H3, the one that took 20 years of his and then his son's life.
The H4, the one where he went from "This can never be made watch-sized" to "Oh, wait, it can!" because someone made him a really good watch for his personal use, incorporating many of his inventions (including the bimetallic strip), and that made him go "Hmmm."
Caveats first: even a few pages into the Kindle sample, I started getting suspicious about how hard the author was taking her protagonist's side and ragging on his opponents. Then shortly after buying the book and reading a little further, I hit two "Really?" anecdotes, to which Wikipedia promptly said, "No, not really." Both were described as local legends that were first recorded much later, and were contradicted by documentary evidence.
So how much of this I should be believing, I don't know. But the book was a very readable piece of popular science history, and I definitely learned a lot.
On to the book!
Finding your location at sea is a super important problem, for the following important reasons, among others:
1. Finding land and not dying of scurvy.
2. Not having to adhere to the same handful of well-known shipping lanes as all the other countries and getting ambushed and raided by them.
3. Not suddenly getting run aground and dying in shipwreck because you had no idea you were this close to land.
Re 3, I didn't realize just how bad it was before reading this book, but in 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession, 4 English warships returning to England crashed into the Isles of Scilly, because the crew didn't know how close they were to England, and sank. The death toll was somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000 sailors. (This is where two local legends arose that apparently have no bearing in reality, which is too bad, because they're really good stories.)
This was a really, really bad experience, obviously, and it led directly to the Longitude Act of 1714 (i.e. as soon as the war was over). Parliament offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude at sea.
The problem with determining longitude is that the earth rotates, so the stars keep moving in the sky (or appearing to). So their position changes with time. The North Star makes latitude easy, but for longitude, you have to know exactly what time it is where you are and exactly what time it is in some position of known longitude (like London).
This sounds easy to us, but in the 18th century, determining exactly what time it was was a really, really hard problem. Because of friction, clocks lost time and had to be rewound. While they were rewound, they didn't measure time, so they had to be set with reference to some other clock. Pendulums in pendulum clocks were made out of materials that would shrink in the cold and expand in the heat, so they would swing faster or slower. Finally, at sea, with all the tossing and turning due to the winds and waves, it was insanely hard to keep a clock from getting thrown out of sync by all the agitation.
So this problem of knowing what time it is, and therefore where you are, was an extremely unsolved problem in those days.
The author presents one hilarious method that was suggested in 1688, which she can't tell whether it's satire or not, but having read the original pamphlet as well as Wikipedia, I am extremely convinced is satire. The idea was that there was this thing in medical quackery called "sympathy powder," which worked kind of like voodoo dolls. You would take a wounded dog and create sympathy powder on port. Then the dog would go on board the ship, and the sympathy powder would stay behind. By doing the equivalent of voodoo back at home at regular intervals with the sympathy powder, you would make the dog on the ship yelp in pain. Then, two or three months later, the sailors would know what time it was back home by when the dog on the ship barked.
SATIRE.
Anyway, because of the economic and military payoffs, both governments and leading scientists took a huge interest in the subject. The book is full of names like Galileo, Newton, Hooke, Halley, Louis XIV, and George III.
Now, there were two main schools of thought for how to tackle this problem. One was the celestial measurement approach, and one was the timekeeping approach. According to the celestial measurement approach, you needed astronomers to plot the motions of some body or bodies in the sky, determine what was predictable over time, make up tables containing the data, give the tables in the form of an almanac to the sailors, have the sailors take measurements at sea, and then have them consult the books.
Galileo came up with a very good method for doing this, but unfortunately, it only really worked on land, under ideal conditions. It led to huge improvements in mapmaking! This is when people finally realized that 1) the Atlantic Ocean was a whole lot wider than they'd thought, 2) certain countries were not as big as thought. Allegedly, Louis XIV quipped that he was losing more of his territory to the astronomers than to his enemies. But he did keep funding them.
That's the astronomy approach. It was worked on by royal societies and observatories and funded by monarchs and parliaments.
Then there was the timekeeper approach, according to which all you had to have was a device that told the time and didn't gain or lose more than 3 seconds a day. You'd set it before you sailed from port, you'd take the local time using astronomical measurements, and you'd compare the time of your device (the time back in London or wherever) to local time (the time in the middle of the Pacific or wherever), and knowing the difference in times and the longitude of London, you could solve easily for the longitude of your current location.
This was worked on by one probably autistic Englishman of humble origins who decided to devote his life to tinkering with making clocks better. He first got assistance from his brother, and then his son. His name was John Harrison. [To quote the author, His family, in keeping with the custom of the time, dealt out names so parsimoniously that it is impossible to keep track of all the Henrys, Johns, and Elizabeths without pencil and paper. To wit, John Harrison served as the son, grandson, brother, and uncle of one Henry Harrison or another, while his mother, his sister, both his wives, his only daughter, and two of his three daughters-in-law all answered to the name Elizabeth.]
By 1730, he was introducing himself to Edmund Halley and presenting him with the drawings for the sea clock he had in mind. Halley sent him to a clockmaker friend, who gave him a loan to work on the clock.
In 1735, Harrison got to do a trial run with his clock. The admiralty decided to send it to Lisbon with Admiral Norris in 1736.
Now, if you're me, the words "Lisbon with Admiral Norris in 1736" is a magic phrase that means "Peter Keith." Given Peter's already demonstrated scientific interests in the early 1730s, and his later honorary Academy of Sciences membership, I was super hoping they were on the same ship! But alas, Peter (according to his eulogy) was on the flagship Britannia, which sailed in May, and Harrison was on the Centurion, which joined the main fleet in Lisbon in late September. But Harrison and Peter were in Lisbon at the same time as part of the same fleet, and they could have met there.
I also learned, while doing a bit of detective work, that the Englishmen who arrived in Lisbon in the second half of 1736 got so sick and so many of them died, due to a combination of an outbreak of smallpox and dysentery due possibly to local food that the English hadn't adjusted to, that Norris requested permission to sail home asap, and when he couldn't get it, demanded and received a hospital ship. 1 in 6 of the 12,000 men were recorded as sick. (Look, I just want to know every single detail I can reconstruct about the elusive Peter's life, it's my detective case.)
Anyway, back home in 1737, Harrison was presenting the results to the Board of Longitude (no, really, it was called that). His device had barely lost any time on the trial runs to and from Lisbon.
Everyone was super impressed! England was going to get a huge advantage over her enemies if this worked out! This was the time to demand the trial voyage to the West Indies required by the 1714 act as a prerequisite for the £20,000 prize.
But instead of advertising how great his invention was, Harrison proved himself a true engineer by pointing out its defects and talking about how he knew he could make a better one, and make it smaller, if they just gave him £500 and some more time to work on it. Once it was up to his standards, he'd submit it for a trial run, but not now. (I laughed so hard in recognition and knew I immediately had to share with
cahn. Engineer mentality at its finest!)"Uh, okay. Works for us," said the board that didn't have to pay £20,000.
Then Harrison disappeared for 20 years to work nonstop on 3 more iterations of his clock, which he eventually got down to a watch. A largish watch, but still a watch. He sacrificed his health and his work-life balance to this obsession.
Unfortunately, this dedication to his craft proves to be a political error, because in the meantime, his open-minded buddy Halley dies and is replaced as Astronomer Royal by a succession of astronomers who believe that astronomy is the One True Way for solving the longitude problem, and who are out to persecute poor lone genius John Harrison.
This is where the narrative becomes incredibly one-sided and I'm not sure we have the full story. But there seems to have been a rivalry between the astronomers and Harrison once he was ready to claim his prize. Eventually, George III, the noble, scientifically minded king takes the part of Our Hero and all is right with the world. Harrison doesn't get the prize because of politicking, but he gets an equivalent amount of money from Parliament by taking George's advice on presenting himself favorably during the trial. (Spends 20 years of his life tinkering with clocks and only emerging from his workshop to ask for a little more money to kepe working, talks shop for 10 solid hours with another clockmaker, is described as stubborn and argumentative, can't write readable prose to save his life, apparently has limited people skills...sounds spectrumish to me, based on what little data I have.)
Euler gets a cameo in the book for winning a prize for his role in furthering the cause, by reducing certain celestial motions to elegant equations and corresponding with an English astronomer who was able to apply those equations to the longitude problem.
In the end, the longitude problem seems to have been solved by a combination of astronomical (though you have to read between the lines and recall some other history you have read to get that from this rather biased-seeming book) and mechanical advances. But the ability to make a clock that does lose several minutes a day was a huge win for many other reasons, and led directly to the mass-production of pocket watches and wrist-watches that were actually reliable.
One thing that Harrison apparently invented that I had actually heard of was the bimetallic strip, which is used in thermostats even today (the context in which I learned about it in physics class). Since metals expand and contract at different rates at different temperatures, you can get something that will keep the temperature from getting too hot or too cold by combining two metals together in a strip, which will keep the temperature within a certain range by flexing in one direction or the other, depending on which of its two metals is reacting to it being too hot or too cold.
Harrison invented this to compensate for the fact that all previous timekeeping devices lost or gained time depending on the temperature. He used a combination of metals in first rods--in his first, large clocks--and then a bimetallic strip in his smaller, more sophisticated watches.
So that was cool.
The devices he built are called the H1, H2, H3, and H4 ('H' for 'Harrison'), and you can view them today (or some post-pandemic utopian future) at the National Maritime Museum, and online in the meantime. The H1, the original giant clock that went to Lisbon.
The H2, the improved version.
The H3, the one that took 20 years of his and then his son's life.
The H4, the one where he went from "This can never be made watch-sized" to "Oh, wait, it can!" because someone made him a really good watch for his personal use, incorporating many of his inventions (including the bimetallic strip), and that made him go "Hmmm."
Edited 2021-08-02 00:04 (UTC)
While we're all waiting for the RMSE opening (again), Stabi has delivered two biographies of F1 to me - the Werner Schmidt one from 2004, which is the one his Germman wiki entry footnotes most frequently, and one by Frank Göse from 2012. Frank Göse we already know as the guy who co-edited the FW essays anthology together with Kloosterhuis and who published the latest FW biography (only last year or so). His F1 biography is, like his FW biography, only intermittently chronological and arranged by topics (foreign policy, inner policy, family life etc). Like his FW biography, it's also a bit plodding to read - a great narrator, he's not - but unlike with his FW biography, I'm glad I've read to have read this one, since Werner Schmidt's attitude towards their shared subject is: "F1 is my woobie and I'm his one man defense squad!", so Göse, while also sympathetic to F1, provides a good counterbalance. A good example of how differently they present the same subject comes when we get to the fall of Danckelman.
But mainly I wanted to read these books to look up F1's youth and the other escape attempt by a Crown Prince, well, Kurprinz. And on the youth, Schmidt the woobie defense squad delivers in far more detail than Göse, despite his book being far slimmer. (Their different emphasis is also telling.)
Schmidt: First, have some background to understand where my woobie's Dad is coming from so I won't be accused to be mean about the Great Elector. Once upon a time, there was this really ghastly war, remember? 30 Years? Johann Georg of Brandenburg really wanted to keep out of it, but between having married the Winter King's sister and his sister having married Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, naturally before all went to hell, he really couldn't. With the result that Brandenburg kept being invaded either by Swedes or Imperials. Future Great Elector, whose first names were Friedrich Wilhelm which is just too confusing, soselenak won't mention them again, thus spent seven years as a boy (from 7 to 14) at Küstrin because it was the toughest fortress Prussia had and his parents wanted him to be safe. Then he went to stay with relations in the Netherlands, where he met Louisa Hollandine the painter and daughter of the Winter Queen and romanced her, only it didn't work out because money. Then he came back and unsurprisingly had two major principles once he became the Prince Elector:
a) Brandenburg needs an army of its own so we won't get invaded, devastated and depopulated again.
b) Brandenburg also needs money.
He married the (rich) Dutch princess Louise Henriette of Orange whom Oranienburg the palace is named after and who gave him four sons. The first one died as a kid. Then came Karl Emil, who looked like the ideal Prussian prince - healthy, jolly, loves sports and playing war Then came Friedrich, future F1, who wasn't only sickly, no, his nurse managed to drop him during a carriage drive, with the result that future F1 ended up with both feet turned inwards and a curved spinal (is this the right expression in English?). None one thought he'd live long, except for his mother, who fought for him. (More details to come.) Unfortunately, fighting for future F1 also meant subjecting him to an endless series of medical tortures, iron corsets, getting pressed between weights to correct his spine and feet, until one Dr. Fey put an end to it and said the weight pressures especially were probably responsible for F1's asthma or at least it being so bad and could kill the kid.
Future F1 remained the youngest until his brother Ludwig was born. Now, for as long as his mother and older brother Karl Emil were still alive, he had affection to balance the medical tortures and some aspects of the teaching. The teaching parts are interesting for many reasons. Like future Prussian rulers after him, the Great Elector wrote a "how to handle the princes" instructions to his sons' governor. There are things in common with FW's lists, to wit, the religion - the Elector, too, wanted his sons to be raised as good Christians, start the day with praying etc. -, but there's a very different approach to art and sciences. The Elector wanted his sons to learn Latin, for example, but in a way that wouldn't make them hate the language, so the teacher was to be playful about it and also use it in conversation as often as possible. (French, too, but that's what the princess, including future F1, had a governess for. Unlike FW, though, F1's first language was German.) And with geography, the princes were supposed to learn the names of towns and countries etc. in a non-dull manner by the teacher attaching interesting stories to them so they memorize them better. All pretty fly for a 17th century guy!
These were the instructions for Karl Emil and F1 both. Karl Emil still hated school, but he wrote a lovely letter to his brother when being hunting. Practice your German on this baroque letter opening:
"Herzallerliebstes Brüderchen,
weil Ihr bei Eurer grossen Glückseligkeit da Ihr alllzeit bei Papa und Mama seit, meiner ganz vergesset, so will ich hiermit beweisen, dass ich fleissig an Euch gedenke. Ich hoffe, mein Herzensbrüderchen bald wieder zu sehen."
Future F1's teacher was one Eberhard Danckelmann. (Later to be ennobled into "von Danckelmann".) He was a proto Prussian two generations before FW - austere, dutiful, into discipline. A genuine prodigy - he'd debated and defended his thesis at 12 years old at a university! - but extremely shouty, and the first time F1's mother Louise Henriette noticed this, she wrote a letter in protest, that "Fritzchen" surely would be better guided by kindness than by verbal abuse. Whereupon Danckelmann was a bit quieter but still did things like this bit of German-to-Latin translation exercise for F1, of which there is a copy of the manuscript in child!F1's handwriting in the book:
Baroque German: "Mein Bruder und ich wollen gelehrte Printzen werden. Aber Fritz wird ein Esel bleiben."
Latin: "Frater et ego volumus fieri docti Principes. Sed Fridericus manebit Asinus."
Werner Schmidt: Pray keep this in mind when we get to the fate of Danckelmann a few decades later! At age 10, my woobie makes a fateful discovery when deciding he'll found an order "De la generosité". His governor (a member of the Schwerin clan at this point, Danckelmann was his teacher, different thing) lets him play this out. Little F1 discovers that the play acting as a gracious ruler, the ceremony, the investing, that all this makes him feel good and not like damaged goods for the first time! Not that his bitchy grandson shows any understanding for this. FYI, F2, your precious Black Eagle Order grew directly from this childhood Order de La Generosité.
But back to a tale of childhood woe, which is about to kick in in earnest. Because his mother dies, only one of two persons to love my hero truly and unconditionally. According to an eyewitness, ten years old F1 when told his mother was dying "cried out terribly, and hung from the Stewardess' neck and begged for for God's sake she should save everything and make it so his Mama did not die!" But she does, with her body exhausted after giving birth or having stillbirths nearly every other year. And then the Great Elector remarries. A woman who wasn't a poisoner, I don't think that, but she was without any sensitivity or sympathy for the stepkids and...
Frank Göse: Let me stop you right here. She wasn't that bad. Before her own kids were born, she wrote downright lovely letters to little future F1, calling him "Engelchen" and "Fritzchen". True, once she had kids of her own, she didn't do that anymore, but you yourself point out that every mother fights for her children, and when the late Electress got future F1, she immediately persuaded the Elector that he'd get a life long rent and a county of his own so his financial future was assured despite him being a third son. Dorothea followed the same principle for her kids.
Werner Schmidt: The only women I approve of unconditionally in this book are F1's mother and his first wife, who loved him unconditionally. Be content I don't think Dorothea the founder of the Schwedt line was a poisoner. Anyway, back to young F1's woes: Karl Emil dies next. This is a devastating blow for Dad, who until this point hasn't singled F1 out for anything but hasn't done anything against him, either. It's not too much to say, though, that after Karl Emil's death, the Great Elector will treat my guy as if it needs to be made clear the wrong brother died. Think that I'm exaggarating? Lemme quote the French ambassador.
Background here: The Elector had won some key battles against the French as part of the anti Sun King team up only for the Habsburgs to screw him over by making peace with Louis XIV without asking him to the negotiations. He then screwed over the Habsburgs by making his own secret treaty with Louis in which he promised that he'd vote for Louis or Louis' son the Dauphin the next time an HRE Emperor got voted hin, and that he'd make Louis executor of his last will. This team up with the French went on until Louis kicked the Huguenots out of France, at which point the Elector, champion of Protestants, couldn't stand by it anymore and changed his policy. But because grandson F2 as well as subsequent historians for two centuries accused my guy F1 of falling short of his Dad, let me point out the Great Elector made a completely bad treaty with the goddam French here, and wasn't the mastermind Hohenzollern historians insisted he was.
Anyway: the French were also hand in glove with Stepmom and her campaign to get her sons as big a portion of the Electorate as possible. Bear in mind primogeniture wasn't yet a fixture in all the German principalities, and Stepmom campaigned for dividing the realm the old fashioned way among all the sons. The French were all for it, since Louis hadn't forgotten the Elector had won that battle and many tiny Brandenburg pieces sounded better than an increasingly larger one. Future F1, now the Kurprinz (Prince Elector) instead of Karl Emil, otoh, thought this was a bad idea and got increasingly distrustful about Dad changing his will. Rébenac, the French envoy who was on Team Dorothea for the above named reason, wrote thus reports like this to Louis in France:
The Prince, Sire, has a very damaged figure, is of a weak constitution and doesn't show much will to live; a doctor has said he'll only live for three or four years more. He's of a weak mind, a hypocrite and very miserly, of little noblesse; and if he has the wish to enlarge his realm, then only in order to fill his purse with more cash, which is his only ambition. He lets himself be ruled by a man named Danckelmann who used to be his teacher, a feeble mind who is teaching his master hypocricy and hatred towards some of his father's ministers. (...) The Elector does not love him, nor does he esteem him. (...) A man from Sweden told the Elector unguardedly that the King of Sweden - against whom the Elector had fought and won battles - says he'll let the Elector of Brandenburg die in peace but that he'll make the Elector's son pay. The Elector himself told me this and added: "The King of Sweden is right; for my son isn't good for anything."
Objectivity, thy name is not Rébenac. More like "Wishful thinking". But while posterity can point out the obvious mistakes here at once (F1 would live on some decades more, he wouldn't get crushed by Sweden, and miserliness isn't a fault he's ever been accused of by posterity), the quote from the Elector about his son has the ring of authenticity to Werner Schmidt and Frank Göse alike.
Meanwhile, young future F1 had one good thing going in his life. As a child and youth, he'd been sent to take the waters in the principality of Hessen-Kassel every year (because the Elector's mother had been from there). There, he'd struck up a childhood friendship with the Hessian princess Elisabeth Henriette, nicknamed Hanette. (There's a letter from child!F1 to her mother thanking the mother for the hospitality and saying all the other Hessian princesses can be married of as long as "the one I love" stays.) And once little Hanette, five years younger than him, was of marriagable age, "weak" F1 lobbied for permission to marry her with both sets of (surviving) parents - and actually managed to pull it off. Thus, he achieved that rarity in the era, a mutual love match between friends. He also got a household of his own granted, in Köpenick (there's a Fontane chapter from the Wanderungen on his and Hanette's time there.) Mind you, the Elector behaved very badly and grumpily about the marriage, making it as insulting to the Hessen-Kassel family as possible by for eons refusing to name a date and then cancelling one agreed on and then, one morning while in bed with his wife, deciding this evening the marriage would happen without a fuss and no ceremony since Hanette was already in town. Young F1 put up with it and hightailed it out of Berlin with Hanette as soon as possible.
Werner Schmidt: But because that's the way his life goes, nothing good ever lasts long. Hanette gives birth to a daughter - his only daughter, as it would happen - and dies after just a few years. And that was the last person to ever truly love my guy. By this comment you may gather I don't like Sophie Charlotte, aka Figuelotte. Who was just like her grandson Fritz: a sarcastic, cold-hearted bitch unable to resist a witty quip no matter how hurtful, with an intellectual superiority complex. Granted, she started out not as bad as that at age 16, which is when she became still not yet F1's second wife. I'll quote Sophie her mother (about whom I'm a bit more positive right until two decades later she makes a sarcastic remark about F1 and his ministers, at which point I'll say she's just like her daughter, because I am A One Man Defense Squad) who writes to one of Liselotte's sisters:
She's not cruel, either, and he's always shown amiability and esteem towards her when her Highness the Princess Elector had still been alive and nobody would have imagined this possibility.
The Kurprinz isn't a handsome man in his figure, but he has a very good temper, and sound reason, and his face isn't ugly; it's a good thing she does like him and doesn't care about the exterior so much, for his highness the Duke and I love her so much that we could follow her own inclination if she'd chosen another suitor.
(As mentioned in the Barbara Beuys biography, future F1 & wife had visited Hannover, and he'd taken to the entire clan like a duck to water.)
Because Figuelotte is a princess of Hannover and has a mother who is quite up to standing toe to toe with the Elector, she gets a proper princely wedding. This does not mean relations between the Elector and his oldest surviving son improve.
But mainly I wanted to read these books to look up F1's youth and the other escape attempt by a Crown Prince, well, Kurprinz. And on the youth, Schmidt the woobie defense squad delivers in far more detail than Göse, despite his book being far slimmer. (Their different emphasis is also telling.)
Schmidt: First, have some background to understand where my woobie's Dad is coming from so I won't be accused to be mean about the Great Elector. Once upon a time, there was this really ghastly war, remember? 30 Years? Johann Georg of Brandenburg really wanted to keep out of it, but between having married the Winter King's sister and his sister having married Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, naturally before all went to hell, he really couldn't. With the result that Brandenburg kept being invaded either by Swedes or Imperials. Future Great Elector, whose first names were Friedrich Wilhelm which is just too confusing, so
selenak won't mention them again, thus spent seven years as a boy (from 7 to 14) at Küstrin because it was the toughest fortress Prussia had and his parents wanted him to be safe. Then he went to stay with relations in the Netherlands, where he met Louisa Hollandine the painter and daughter of the Winter Queen and romanced her, only it didn't work out because money. Then he came back and unsurprisingly had two major principles once he became the Prince Elector: a) Brandenburg needs an army of its own so we won't get invaded, devastated and depopulated again.
b) Brandenburg also needs money.
He married the (rich) Dutch princess Louise Henriette of Orange whom Oranienburg the palace is named after and who gave him four sons. The first one died as a kid. Then came Karl Emil, who looked like the ideal Prussian prince - healthy, jolly, loves sports and playing war Then came Friedrich, future F1, who wasn't only sickly, no, his nurse managed to drop him during a carriage drive, with the result that future F1 ended up with both feet turned inwards and a curved spinal (is this the right expression in English?). None one thought he'd live long, except for his mother, who fought for him. (More details to come.) Unfortunately, fighting for future F1 also meant subjecting him to an endless series of medical tortures, iron corsets, getting pressed between weights to correct his spine and feet, until one Dr. Fey put an end to it and said the weight pressures especially were probably responsible for F1's asthma or at least it being so bad and could kill the kid.
Future F1 remained the youngest until his brother Ludwig was born. Now, for as long as his mother and older brother Karl Emil were still alive, he had affection to balance the medical tortures and some aspects of the teaching. The teaching parts are interesting for many reasons. Like future Prussian rulers after him, the Great Elector wrote a "how to handle the princes" instructions to his sons' governor. There are things in common with FW's lists, to wit, the religion - the Elector, too, wanted his sons to be raised as good Christians, start the day with praying etc. -, but there's a very different approach to art and sciences. The Elector wanted his sons to learn Latin, for example, but in a way that wouldn't make them hate the language, so the teacher was to be playful about it and also use it in conversation as often as possible. (French, too, but that's what the princess, including future F1, had a governess for. Unlike FW, though, F1's first language was German.) And with geography, the princes were supposed to learn the names of towns and countries etc. in a non-dull manner by the teacher attaching interesting stories to them so they memorize them better. All pretty fly for a 17th century guy!
These were the instructions for Karl Emil and F1 both. Karl Emil still hated school, but he wrote a lovely letter to his brother when being hunting. Practice your German on this baroque letter opening:
"Herzallerliebstes Brüderchen,
weil Ihr bei Eurer grossen Glückseligkeit da Ihr alllzeit bei Papa und Mama seit, meiner ganz vergesset, so will ich hiermit beweisen, dass ich fleissig an Euch gedenke. Ich hoffe, mein Herzensbrüderchen bald wieder zu sehen."
Future F1's teacher was one Eberhard Danckelmann. (Later to be ennobled into "von Danckelmann".) He was a proto Prussian two generations before FW - austere, dutiful, into discipline. A genuine prodigy - he'd debated and defended his thesis at 12 years old at a university! - but extremely shouty, and the first time F1's mother Louise Henriette noticed this, she wrote a letter in protest, that "Fritzchen" surely would be better guided by kindness than by verbal abuse. Whereupon Danckelmann was a bit quieter but still did things like this bit of German-to-Latin translation exercise for F1, of which there is a copy of the manuscript in child!F1's handwriting in the book:
Baroque German: "Mein Bruder und ich wollen gelehrte Printzen werden. Aber Fritz wird ein Esel bleiben."
Latin: "Frater et ego volumus fieri docti Principes. Sed Fridericus manebit Asinus."
Werner Schmidt: Pray keep this in mind when we get to the fate of Danckelmann a few decades later! At age 10, my woobie makes a fateful discovery when deciding he'll found an order "De la generosité". His governor (a member of the Schwerin clan at this point, Danckelmann was his teacher, different thing) lets him play this out. Little F1 discovers that the play acting as a gracious ruler, the ceremony, the investing, that all this makes him feel good and not like damaged goods for the first time! Not that his bitchy grandson shows any understanding for this. FYI, F2, your precious Black Eagle Order grew directly from this childhood Order de La Generosité.
But back to a tale of childhood woe, which is about to kick in in earnest. Because his mother dies, only one of two persons to love my hero truly and unconditionally. According to an eyewitness, ten years old F1 when told his mother was dying "cried out terribly, and hung from the Stewardess' neck and begged for for God's sake she should save everything and make it so his Mama did not die!" But she does, with her body exhausted after giving birth or having stillbirths nearly every other year. And then the Great Elector remarries. A woman who wasn't a poisoner, I don't think that, but she was without any sensitivity or sympathy for the stepkids and...
Frank Göse: Let me stop you right here. She wasn't that bad. Before her own kids were born, she wrote downright lovely letters to little future F1, calling him "Engelchen" and "Fritzchen". True, once she had kids of her own, she didn't do that anymore, but you yourself point out that every mother fights for her children, and when the late Electress got future F1, she immediately persuaded the Elector that he'd get a life long rent and a county of his own so his financial future was assured despite him being a third son. Dorothea followed the same principle for her kids.
Werner Schmidt: The only women I approve of unconditionally in this book are F1's mother and his first wife, who loved him unconditionally. Be content I don't think Dorothea the founder of the Schwedt line was a poisoner. Anyway, back to young F1's woes: Karl Emil dies next. This is a devastating blow for Dad, who until this point hasn't singled F1 out for anything but hasn't done anything against him, either. It's not too much to say, though, that after Karl Emil's death, the Great Elector will treat my guy as if it needs to be made clear the wrong brother died. Think that I'm exaggarating? Lemme quote the French ambassador.
Background here: The Elector had won some key battles against the French as part of the anti Sun King team up only for the Habsburgs to screw him over by making peace with Louis XIV without asking him to the negotiations. He then screwed over the Habsburgs by making his own secret treaty with Louis in which he promised that he'd vote for Louis or Louis' son the Dauphin the next time an HRE Emperor got voted hin, and that he'd make Louis executor of his last will. This team up with the French went on until Louis kicked the Huguenots out of France, at which point the Elector, champion of Protestants, couldn't stand by it anymore and changed his policy. But because grandson F2 as well as subsequent historians for two centuries accused my guy F1 of falling short of his Dad, let me point out the Great Elector made a completely bad treaty with the goddam French here, and wasn't the mastermind Hohenzollern historians insisted he was.
Anyway: the French were also hand in glove with Stepmom and her campaign to get her sons as big a portion of the Electorate as possible. Bear in mind primogeniture wasn't yet a fixture in all the German principalities, and Stepmom campaigned for dividing the realm the old fashioned way among all the sons. The French were all for it, since Louis hadn't forgotten the Elector had won that battle and many tiny Brandenburg pieces sounded better than an increasingly larger one. Future F1, now the Kurprinz (Prince Elector) instead of Karl Emil, otoh, thought this was a bad idea and got increasingly distrustful about Dad changing his will. Rébenac, the French envoy who was on Team Dorothea for the above named reason, wrote thus reports like this to Louis in France:
The Prince, Sire, has a very damaged figure, is of a weak constitution and doesn't show much will to live; a doctor has said he'll only live for three or four years more. He's of a weak mind, a hypocrite and very miserly, of little noblesse; and if he has the wish to enlarge his realm, then only in order to fill his purse with more cash, which is his only ambition. He lets himself be ruled by a man named Danckelmann who used to be his teacher, a feeble mind who is teaching his master hypocricy and hatred towards some of his father's ministers. (...) The Elector does not love him, nor does he esteem him. (...) A man from Sweden told the Elector unguardedly that the King of Sweden - against whom the Elector had fought and won battles - says he'll let the Elector of Brandenburg die in peace but that he'll make the Elector's son pay. The Elector himself told me this and added: "The King of Sweden is right; for my son isn't good for anything."
Objectivity, thy name is not Rébenac. More like "Wishful thinking". But while posterity can point out the obvious mistakes here at once (F1 would live on some decades more, he wouldn't get crushed by Sweden, and miserliness isn't a fault he's ever been accused of by posterity), the quote from the Elector about his son has the ring of authenticity to Werner Schmidt and Frank Göse alike.
Meanwhile, young future F1 had one good thing going in his life. As a child and youth, he'd been sent to take the waters in the principality of Hessen-Kassel every year (because the Elector's mother had been from there). There, he'd struck up a childhood friendship with the Hessian princess Elisabeth Henriette, nicknamed Hanette. (There's a letter from child!F1 to her mother thanking the mother for the hospitality and saying all the other Hessian princesses can be married of as long as "the one I love" stays.) And once little Hanette, five years younger than him, was of marriagable age, "weak" F1 lobbied for permission to marry her with both sets of (surviving) parents - and actually managed to pull it off. Thus, he achieved that rarity in the era, a mutual love match between friends. He also got a household of his own granted, in Köpenick (there's a Fontane chapter from the Wanderungen on his and Hanette's time there.) Mind you, the Elector behaved very badly and grumpily about the marriage, making it as insulting to the Hessen-Kassel family as possible by for eons refusing to name a date and then cancelling one agreed on and then, one morning while in bed with his wife, deciding this evening the marriage would happen without a fuss and no ceremony since Hanette was already in town. Young F1 put up with it and hightailed it out of Berlin with Hanette as soon as possible.
Werner Schmidt: But because that's the way his life goes, nothing good ever lasts long. Hanette gives birth to a daughter - his only daughter, as it would happen - and dies after just a few years. And that was the last person to ever truly love my guy. By this comment you may gather I don't like Sophie Charlotte, aka Figuelotte. Who was just like her grandson Fritz: a sarcastic, cold-hearted bitch unable to resist a witty quip no matter how hurtful, with an intellectual superiority complex. Granted, she started out not as bad as that at age 16, which is when she became still not yet F1's second wife. I'll quote Sophie her mother (about whom I'm a bit more positive right until two decades later she makes a sarcastic remark about F1 and his ministers, at which point I'll say she's just like her daughter, because I am A One Man Defense Squad) who writes to one of Liselotte's sisters:
She's not cruel, either, and he's always shown amiability and esteem towards her when her Highness the Princess Elector had still been alive and nobody would have imagined this possibility.
The Kurprinz isn't a handsome man in his figure, but he has a very good temper, and sound reason, and his face isn't ugly; it's a good thing she does like him and doesn't care about the exterior so much, for his highness the Duke and I love her so much that we could follow her own inclination if she'd chosen another suitor.
(As mentioned in the Barbara Beuys biography, future F1 & wife had visited Hannover, and he'd taken to the entire clan like a duck to water.)
Because Figuelotte is a princess of Hannover and has a mother who is quite up to standing toe to toe with the Elector, she gets a proper princely wedding. This does not mean relations between the Elector and his oldest surviving son improve.
Werner Schmidt: Time to defend my guy again. This is when he signs a secret contract with Team Vienna. What's this about, you ask? Well, future F1, no fool, figured that if Stepmom had Louis XIV to back her up, he needed the only other heavy puncher, who was the Emperor, in his corner. Now, Dad the Elector had grown uneasy about his French alliance himself (Louis was about to kick the Huguenots out) and saw the need to reconcile with Vienna, too. On that note, he and the Emperor signed a contract in which Dad Elector agreed Brandenburg-Prussia would drop all claims on Silesia (!!!!) if the Habsburgs would fork over the county Schwiebus which is located in the Silesian duchy of Glogau. My guy F1 simultanously made a secret contract with the Emperor in which in return for the promise to defend F1's rights should Dad attempt to change his last weill, F1 as soon as he'd become F1 would return Schwiebus to the Habsburgs. He's been critiqued a lot for this but what I'd like to know is: how is this different from Dad Elector's secret treaty with Louis years earlier? Also, naturally this was the pretext F2's historians hit upon when he told him to justify his invasion of Silesia. (Their argument being that by Vienna making secret treaties with the son, their treaty with the Elector in which he resigns from his claims on Silesia was non valid.) Which means in a roundabout way it was good for Prussia!
Next up: the Affair of the Poisons, Prussian Edition.
Now, in 1676, the Marquise de Brinvilliers had been executed as a poisoner in Paris. Her discovery triggered the biggest poisoning scandal of the age, the "Affair of the Poisons" which became so notorious because at least one of Louis' main mistresses, the Marquise de Montespan, as well as several other high society ladies at Versailles were all clients of the same poisoner (& soothsayer & abortionist), Catherine La Voisin. Naturally, all of Europe was glued on the latest news from Versailles. And when does young future F1 start to wonder about stepmom? In 1677. It becomes really serious when three things happen:
1) F1 after drinking a cup of mocca coffee at his stepmom's table collapses. Danckelmann (as far as F1 is concerned) saves his life by giving him a digestive that makes him throw up.
2) Ludwig, the last of F1's full brothers, whom he's been close to, dies as well. Ludwig like F1 has been punished by Dad Elector for not being Karl Emil. Rebénac the French envoy reports that Ludwig a day before his death had begged to see his father one more time but the Elector thought he was faking it and, quote: Instead of visiting him, he sent messages complaining of (Ludwig's) weakness and silly fear to die. (...) At last, Sire, he died only three rooms away from his father without having seen the later again.
3) Figuelotte is pregnant again (the first kid has died as a baby already), and Rebénac, no fan of F1's and thus definitely not biased in his favor, has this to report about the event that ensued, in the same letter he talks about Ludwig's death (and assures Louis that no poisoning happened, no matter what future F1 thinks):
A more realistic and far more justified reason to complain on the Kurprinz' part is related to his lady wife. This princess (Sophie Charlotte/Figuelotte), who has all the good qualities which beauty and wit can provide, and who in addition to this has a good temper and virtue, has the misfortune to be disliked by the Elector and the Electress, despite having shown them only humility. She gets treated so badly that even the most dishonorable of women would find it unbearable. It seems the final straw for her and her husband was that the Prince Elector replied to the joyful news brought by the Kurprinz that the princess was expecting again that maybe his daughter-in-law was expecting but that only God knew who caused it. Since then all conversations (by the Elector) only circle around this subject, and I'm told he has started to throw the name of the supposed father around. This is an affair which saddens the Princess deeply but which will not have any consequences. Her conduct has been so spotless, and the accusation so unlikely, that one cannot marvel enough at the Elector's statements.
At which point F1 decides he's had enough and is hightailing it out of Brandenburg with his pregnant wife, using an already scheduled trip to Hessen-Kassel to visit his former in-laws as an excuse. His first stopover is Hannover where his current in-laws reside. Schmidt and Göse both quote the letter from Sophie thatfelis also quoted, only a bit longer (the next sentence makes it clear Sophie also thinks poor dead Ludwig has been poisoned). Unlike the author of the book felis found, neither Schmidt nor Göse think Sophie was meddling and following an evil agenda here.
Schmidt and Göse: we both agree that Dorothea was in all likelihood innocent, but that F1 & Team Hannover were far from the only ones who thought she wasn't. Most of their contemporaries thought the very same thing. Where we disagree is:
Schmidt: I'm blaming Dorothea for poisoning the atmosphere between the Elector and the sons of his first marriage, F1 and Ludwig both, in order to favour her own sons.
Göse: I don't. Firstly, the Elector being awful to his sons is on him, not her. Secondly, I'd like to point out that once the Elector had died and F1 had all the power, he was remarkably unvengeful to Stepmom, and actually got on well with his Schwedt half brothers, inviting them to court etc. If he really thought Dorothea, not Dad had been after his life, that's a bit odd. Methinks he probably thought Dad did but wasn't able to say so, hence blamed Stepmom.
Schmidt: I'm not letting the Elector of the hook! His last change of will, fueled by the anger of F1's public flight and conditions for his return (the guarantee not to be murdered), would have divided Prussia, giving the Schwedt brothers everything except Brandenburg. Like Leipniz said, it's the testament of a housefather, not a monarch, and for that alone the title "great", which his contemporaries gave him already, should have been taken away from him. Luckily, F1 ignored it. He gave his half brothers estate of their own but only as vasals of Brandenburg-Prussia and thus kept the realm together. Without this, his grandson could never have become Frederick the Great, but you wouldn't know it from his constant granddad bashing. Why yes, F2 is my red button in this biography. I'm completely blaming him for 200 years of F1 dissings.
Next, whenselenak has time again: my and Göse's different takes on Sophie Charlotte/Figuelotte, Danckelmann's fall, and whether or not Katte's Granddad Wartensleben deserved the same bad press the other two Ws got. Stay tuned!
Next up: the Affair of the Poisons, Prussian Edition.
Now, in 1676, the Marquise de Brinvilliers had been executed as a poisoner in Paris. Her discovery triggered the biggest poisoning scandal of the age, the "Affair of the Poisons" which became so notorious because at least one of Louis' main mistresses, the Marquise de Montespan, as well as several other high society ladies at Versailles were all clients of the same poisoner (& soothsayer & abortionist), Catherine La Voisin. Naturally, all of Europe was glued on the latest news from Versailles. And when does young future F1 start to wonder about stepmom? In 1677. It becomes really serious when three things happen:
1) F1 after drinking a cup of mocca coffee at his stepmom's table collapses. Danckelmann (as far as F1 is concerned) saves his life by giving him a digestive that makes him throw up.
2) Ludwig, the last of F1's full brothers, whom he's been close to, dies as well. Ludwig like F1 has been punished by Dad Elector for not being Karl Emil. Rebénac the French envoy reports that Ludwig a day before his death had begged to see his father one more time but the Elector thought he was faking it and, quote: Instead of visiting him, he sent messages complaining of (Ludwig's) weakness and silly fear to die. (...) At last, Sire, he died only three rooms away from his father without having seen the later again.
3) Figuelotte is pregnant again (the first kid has died as a baby already), and Rebénac, no fan of F1's and thus definitely not biased in his favor, has this to report about the event that ensued, in the same letter he talks about Ludwig's death (and assures Louis that no poisoning happened, no matter what future F1 thinks):
A more realistic and far more justified reason to complain on the Kurprinz' part is related to his lady wife. This princess (Sophie Charlotte/Figuelotte), who has all the good qualities which beauty and wit can provide, and who in addition to this has a good temper and virtue, has the misfortune to be disliked by the Elector and the Electress, despite having shown them only humility. She gets treated so badly that even the most dishonorable of women would find it unbearable. It seems the final straw for her and her husband was that the Prince Elector replied to the joyful news brought by the Kurprinz that the princess was expecting again that maybe his daughter-in-law was expecting but that only God knew who caused it. Since then all conversations (by the Elector) only circle around this subject, and I'm told he has started to throw the name of the supposed father around. This is an affair which saddens the Princess deeply but which will not have any consequences. Her conduct has been so spotless, and the accusation so unlikely, that one cannot marvel enough at the Elector's statements.
At which point F1 decides he's had enough and is hightailing it out of Brandenburg with his pregnant wife, using an already scheduled trip to Hessen-Kassel to visit his former in-laws as an excuse. His first stopover is Hannover where his current in-laws reside. Schmidt and Göse both quote the letter from Sophie that
felis also quoted, only a bit longer (the next sentence makes it clear Sophie also thinks poor dead Ludwig has been poisoned). Unlike the author of the book felis found, neither Schmidt nor Göse think Sophie was meddling and following an evil agenda here. Schmidt and Göse: we both agree that Dorothea was in all likelihood innocent, but that F1 & Team Hannover were far from the only ones who thought she wasn't. Most of their contemporaries thought the very same thing. Where we disagree is:
Schmidt: I'm blaming Dorothea for poisoning the atmosphere between the Elector and the sons of his first marriage, F1 and Ludwig both, in order to favour her own sons.
Göse: I don't. Firstly, the Elector being awful to his sons is on him, not her. Secondly, I'd like to point out that once the Elector had died and F1 had all the power, he was remarkably unvengeful to Stepmom, and actually got on well with his Schwedt half brothers, inviting them to court etc. If he really thought Dorothea, not Dad had been after his life, that's a bit odd. Methinks he probably thought Dad did but wasn't able to say so, hence blamed Stepmom.
Schmidt: I'm not letting the Elector of the hook! His last change of will, fueled by the anger of F1's public flight and conditions for his return (the guarantee not to be murdered), would have divided Prussia, giving the Schwedt brothers everything except Brandenburg. Like Leipniz said, it's the testament of a housefather, not a monarch, and for that alone the title "great", which his contemporaries gave him already, should have been taken away from him. Luckily, F1 ignored it. He gave his half brothers estate of their own but only as vasals of Brandenburg-Prussia and thus kept the realm together. Without this, his grandson could never have become Frederick the Great, but you wouldn't know it from his constant granddad bashing. Why yes, F2 is my red button in this biography. I'm completely blaming him for 200 years of F1 dissings.
Next, when
selenak has time again: my and Göse's different takes on Sophie Charlotte/Figuelotte, Danckelmann's fall, and whether or not Katte's Granddad Wartensleben deserved the same bad press the other two Ws got. Stay tuned! Werner Schmidt: So in a short while after very soon to be F1 returns amidst reassurances, has a lengthy talk with Dad and is officially reconciled with him, though how deep that went is anyone's guess, the Elector dies. My guy becomes F3 at first, since he's not King yet but Elector. Now, let's talk money! And buildings! And cultural foundations! I'm simply incensed at the double standards everyone has. Take two of F1's contemporaries: Max Emmanuel of Bavaria and August the Strong. Both pump a lot of money into baroque palaces and parties. selenak can show you her pics of Nymphenburg which Max Emmanuel built in Munich, and you've seen Dresden, where August left his mark. Both Max Emmanuel and August also weren't content with being Princes Elector, they wanted to become Kings. Hell, Max Emmanuel wanted to be Emperor! That's how he ended up on the French side in the Spanish War of Succession and Eugene & Marlborough kicked his butt at Blenheim/Blindheim/Höchstedt! Which is in Bavaria, and Bavaria suffered for those armies marching through just half a century after the 30 Years War, which was hardly recovery time! As for August, he changed his religion to get his hands on Poland. That's how eager he was to all himself King! And then he pissed off Charles XII, which resulted in the Scouring of Saxony (Swedish variation). What I'm getting at: August and Max Emmanuel get called art loving powerful Baroque princes.My guy Friedrich, by contrast, gets bashed as a ridiculous money wasting prince making himself the laughing stock of Europe with his wanting to become a King. Yet are the baroque buildings from the F1 era any lesser than those in Bavaria and Saxony, huh? While Brandenburg never ever suffered from being scoured or marched through (until grandson's time anyway). Not for lack of war. F1 was participating in wars for 22 of the 25 years of his rule, which is way more than son and grandson put together. But he participated in other people's wars, ELSEWHERE, and got a crown out of it because the Emperor really needed those Prussian troops. To return to my point: Max Emmanuel, August and F1 were all big baroque spenders. Only Bavarians and Saxons suffered while this was going on, while Prussians profited, yet my guy...
Frank Göse: Excuse me. I also think he got understimated and that he needs to be compared to his contemporaries, not to his son and grandson, but we have to acknowledge that his subjects did suffer in the three W era, despite the lack of an invasion.
Werner Schmidt:. But we're not there yet! For the first 13 years of F1's rule, his PM was Danckelmann. As in, former shouty teacher, prodigy, austere proto Prussian. Since he started as an ordinary citizen, the nobility hated his guts. The Secret Council was jealous as hell, and lobbied against him. But what really did him in was one woman's hate. Yes, Figuelotte, I'm blaming this one on you! Welll, on you and F1's unresolved issues with a teacher he'd admired and feared and who made him translate "Fritz will always be an ass" into Latin.
Frank Göse: While I wouldn't deny Sophie Charlotte came to dislike Danckelmann intensely, I think her part in his downfall was exaggarated by later Hohenzollern historians. As was her political influence in general, as opposed to her cultural one. She also disliked Danckelmann's successor Wartenberg, and Wartenberg remained on top till the last two years of F1's life, and it was her son who did him in.
Werner Schmidt: You're far too easy on her. Let's state for the record she hated Danckelmann because he saw through her. Remember how we've said that primogeniture hadn't become the self evident princple in the German principalities yet and that the Elector near the end of his life was trying to get a secondogeniture thing going? Well, Hannover, newly coined electorate that it was, also had the problem of lots of sons. However, Sophie's husband Ernst August had no intention of letting his newly united realm be hacked into tiny principality pieces once he died. Which is why he changed the law so that his oldest, George Louis, future G1, would inherit it all. Now, this was not in Prussia's interest, since until then Hannover & Brandenburg had been in the same playing field, but an undivided with that intriguing British prospect on the horizon would be more powerful. So Danckelmann encouraged some Hannoverian councillors to make a move preventing primogeniture to become law in Hannover. However, Figuelotte learned about this and warned Mom and Dad what was coming, thereby proving she loved Hannover more. Since Dad had one of the councillors executed, which ended opposition to primogeniture becoming law in Hannover, she also had blood on her hands! And when Danckelmann basically called her a treacherous bitch, she dared to resent him for it!
Frank Göse: I dare say she also resented him for being in charge of FW's educational schedule for the first few years, especially once presented with the results, i.e. Tiny Terror FW.
Werner Schmidt: That's what she claimed in her letters to Mom, but I don't believe her. She was being hysterical and trying to justify her hate. Not very philosophical of this so-called "Philosopher Queen".
Frank Göse: My point stands: while she undoubtedly cheered when Danckelmann fell, she wasn't the primary mover, nor did she profit from it. The guy moving into that power vacuum was Wartenberg, not Sophie Charlotte.
Werner Schmidt: I'm also blaming her for this. If she'd just shown more political interest, F1, who adored her, would not have needed Wartenberg and listened to her instead. But no! Madame preferred having debates with Leipniz and getting on with her Athens-on-the-Spree program .
Frank Göse: Blaming her both for intervening in the political arena (Danckelmann) and not intervening (Wartenberg) as a way of explaining why she disliked both yet only one fell within her life time is a bit illogical.
Werner Schmidt: I also do the psychological thing which you don't and declare that the way Danckelmann fell, the arrest, the years locked up before he was released, the multiple accusations which were plainly ridiculous were not only the the work of his enemies but of F1's subconscious. Freud would have totally gone for the delayed oedipal father figure killing explanation there. Moving on to the three W's. They were scum.
Frank Göse: Beg to differ.
Werner Schmidt: They were! Exploiting my fave woobie because he needed affection and respect and sure as hell wasn't getting it from his wife.
Frank Göse: Incidentally, we both agree that while F1 loved Sophie Charlotte, Figuelotte after the first few years did not love him, only I see this not as coldness on her part but the result of both of them being very different. And growing up. Remember, she'd been only sixteen when she married him. She'd liked him, and he might even have been a romantic figure to her - the persecuted, grieving prince - , papering over the fact he was handicapped, not physically attractive to her, not as quick verbally, a devout Calvinist where she was more into philosophy, someone who rose early while she was a night owl, who loved ceremonies which bored her. In short, he was the EC to her Fritz, only the power differential was the reverse. So she took some tobacco to snuff while he had his coronation ceremony at Königsberg to make fun of all the earnest pomposity -
Werner Schmidt: The most meaningful achievement of his life to him! She hardly could have hurt him more!
Frank Göse: That's your speculation, and you don't provide any quote from him to prove he was hurt.
Werner Schmidt: I don't need it, I know his soul. I also completely believe that story about her making fun of his size and don't consider it apocryphal, unlike you. After all, we do have her calling him "my Aesop" in one of her few preserved letters, and given Aesop had a hunchback, that just shows how she was. Like her grandson, indeed. But let's get on to the scum. Wartenberg:. the worst of the worst. Typical evil favourite. The only good thing he ever did as PM was uniting the various parts of Berlin with each other and making it the Berlin it was in Fritz' time. Otherwise, he just took money and offices, unlike Danckelmann was careful enough to let himself be made Reichsgraf, which meant he was a peer of the HRE, not just Prussia, which meant that when he did fall, he couldn't end up locked up as well. He also promoted his buddies at his side, like awful Wittgenstein, who was already deeply in debt when Wartenberg hired him, and that scum Wartensleben the Katte Granddad.
Frank Göse: Wartensleben wasn't like the other two Ws. My guy FW's liking for him testifies to that! He only got bitched about initially because the local military noblemen were totally jealous that he got promoted to head of the army over their heads.
Werner Schmidt: I don't think so. Watch me tear Granddad Wartensleben a new one while describing him thus to my readers: Wartensleben reccommended himself through the "galant courtier's life as a condottieri he'd lived" (Koch). He'd fought for and against the French, against the Turks and for the Venetians and finally ended up as leader of the army of Saxe-Gotha. Such a flexible and amoral mind ata the head of the (Prussian) army was for Wartenberg the ideal replacement of a stubborn straight-talker like Barfus.
Frank Göse: As for Wartenberg himself: agreed that he was corrupt. But no more so than the top guys at any Baroque court. Can we agree that contrary to what the gossips claimed and what since got repeated by people through the ages, he did not pimp out his wife as a mistress to F1?
Werner Schmidt: Most def. F1 never slept with her, and no, he didn't take her as a titular mistress, either. That woman was scum, though. After Wartenberg died, she plied her trade in Brussels and died a whore. You know how she and Wartenberg met? She was the daughter of a customs inspector, which legend made an innkeeper. Then she married a royal valet who brought her to Berlin, where she became Wartenberg's mistress. Then Danckelmann made Wartenberg marry her, which was the TRUE reason why Wartenberg hated Danckelmann and jointed the rest of the council who wanted to tumble him.
Frank Göse: Not so. I say these are legends. Sure, the woman loved splendor and power, which as the Pm's wife she had, but might I point out Sophie received her in Hannover? Would Sophie have done that if she'd thought La Wartenberg had been her son-in-law's mistress and the rival of her late beloved daughter?
Werner Schmidt: Sophie also received her own husband's mistress and those of her son and grandson, so that's not exactly a good argument.
Frank Göse: Still, her overall positive description of the Countess paints a more differentiated picture.
Werner Schmidt: Still a female Don Juan, though. Though she said that while her conquests were many, the King, much as she'd liked to, never was among them.
Frank Göse: Let's go back to the part where Figuelotte dies young, only in her early 30s, son FW married SD, and then F1 marries for the third time to secure the succession.
Werner Schmidt: we both agree this last marriage was a tragedy. The poor girl was evidently unstable from the get go. Also a fanatic Lutheran. She told F1 he would go to hell because only Lutherans, not Calvinists, went to heaven. And after the White Woman of the Hohenzollern incident, well, that was that. She died insane in Mecklenburg.
Frank Göse: RIP. Let's say something of grandson's two more famous accusations, to wit, that F1 while pumping money into courtly splendour and art didn't give any to his subjects suffering from the plague.
Werner Schmidt: Total slander and untrue. He provided 100 000 Taler, which are 20 Million Deutsche Marks in modern currency (that I don't use Euros tells you my book can't have been published for the first time in 2003), for the plague victims' families and rebuilding of Prussia. Grandson's claim that F1 oppressed the poor to feed the rich is also - well, rich. Look, F2, F1 had his luxury goods made in Brandenburg if at all possible, and thus encouraged the local economy, which took a hit at first when FW took over and immediately cut off all court orders. Also, someone who built his palaces with Silesian marble and brought three wars on Prussia is not in a position to talk about taking care of the poor, F2!
Frank Göse: With you except that we have to grant that the administration was in a terrible state when Wartenberg was toppled and FW needed a lot of work to make up for that. Also, he solved the problem of no more work for artisans, craftsmen, tailors, bakeries etc. by increasing the need for army supplies as we all now.
Werner Schmnidt: Oh, and as for grandson F2 quipping that if only the priests had offered F1 more ceremonies, F1 wouldn't have remained a Calvinist but converted, that just shows you how he sacrificed truth for a quip, truly his grandmother's grandson in this. a) F1 would never have converted. The Pope, having succeeded in making August the Strong a Catholic as the prize for making him a king, did try, holding out the lure of a papal coronation, and F1 said never. He was sincere in his faith.
Frank Göse: So he was. Also, b) you can't beat the Catholics for ceremony, especially for coronations, just ask MT or Joseph. So what's this "if the priests had offered more ceremonies"? F1 knew all about those ceremonies and said no anyway. Grandson was just incapable of granting him a single virtue, even that of sincere religion.
Werner Schmidt: Should we say something about F1's relationship with FW? You do it, because I'm oddly silent on the subject. While you're going on to become an FW specialist.
Frank Göse: Err. Well. I don't say much. Because we don't have much material to judge it on. No famous arguments, unlike in any other generation of Hohenzollern. F1 left the arguing with teachers and the instructing of same to Sophie Charlotte. He worried about his son and was proud of him, but he was a distant Dad, though no more so than usual for a king and a prince. As FW got older, it became ever more blatant they did not enjoy the same things, and FW was drawn to people likeOld Young Dessaur who could provide him with all the manly military stuff his father lacked, but there were no insults said about the father from the son or from the father about the sun. Basically, Crown Prince FW was at Wusterhausen living the country life most of the time. I do think he was more emotionally invested in his mother, for all that he believed in the patriarchy.
Werner Schmidt: I'm ending my book by saying that this lonely man who never found true love again after his first wife died, and who was ridiculed as a cripple all his life - "Humpback Fritz", the people called him - still managed to create a kingdom and solidify it at an age where Louis the supreme honcho of France just kept ruining his with his endless wars, August and Max Emmanuel, see above, and the Medici, let's not even go there. Long live Wobbie F1!
selenak can show you her pics of Nymphenburg which Max Emmanuel built in Munich, and you've seen Dresden, where August left his mark. Both Max Emmanuel and August also weren't content with being Princes Elector, they wanted to become Kings. Hell, Max Emmanuel wanted to be Emperor! That's how he ended up on the French side in the Spanish War of Succession and Eugene & Marlborough kicked his butt at Blenheim/Blindheim/Höchstedt! Which is in Bavaria, and Bavaria suffered for those armies marching through just half a century after the 30 Years War, which was hardly recovery time! As for August, he changed his religion to get his hands on Poland. That's how eager he was to all himself King! And then he pissed off Charles XII, which resulted in the Scouring of Saxony (Swedish variation). What I'm getting at: August and Max Emmanuel get called art loving powerful Baroque princes.My guy Friedrich, by contrast, gets bashed as a ridiculous money wasting prince making himself the laughing stock of Europe with his wanting to become a King. Yet are the baroque buildings from the F1 era any lesser than those in Bavaria and Saxony, huh? While Brandenburg never ever suffered from being scoured or marched through (until grandson's time anyway). Not for lack of war. F1 was participating in wars for 22 of the 25 years of his rule, which is way more than son and grandson put together. But he participated in other people's wars, ELSEWHERE, and got a crown out of it because the Emperor really needed those Prussian troops. To return to my point: Max Emmanuel, August and F1 were all big baroque spenders. Only Bavarians and Saxons suffered while this was going on, while Prussians profited, yet my guy...Frank Göse: Excuse me. I also think he got understimated and that he needs to be compared to his contemporaries, not to his son and grandson, but we have to acknowledge that his subjects did suffer in the three W era, despite the lack of an invasion.
Werner Schmidt:. But we're not there yet! For the first 13 years of F1's rule, his PM was Danckelmann. As in, former shouty teacher, prodigy, austere proto Prussian. Since he started as an ordinary citizen, the nobility hated his guts. The Secret Council was jealous as hell, and lobbied against him. But what really did him in was one woman's hate. Yes, Figuelotte, I'm blaming this one on you! Welll, on you and F1's unresolved issues with a teacher he'd admired and feared and who made him translate "Fritz will always be an ass" into Latin.
Frank Göse: While I wouldn't deny Sophie Charlotte came to dislike Danckelmann intensely, I think her part in his downfall was exaggarated by later Hohenzollern historians. As was her political influence in general, as opposed to her cultural one. She also disliked Danckelmann's successor Wartenberg, and Wartenberg remained on top till the last two years of F1's life, and it was her son who did him in.
Werner Schmidt: You're far too easy on her. Let's state for the record she hated Danckelmann because he saw through her. Remember how we've said that primogeniture hadn't become the self evident princple in the German principalities yet and that the Elector near the end of his life was trying to get a secondogeniture thing going? Well, Hannover, newly coined electorate that it was, also had the problem of lots of sons. However, Sophie's husband Ernst August had no intention of letting his newly united realm be hacked into tiny principality pieces once he died. Which is why he changed the law so that his oldest, George Louis, future G1, would inherit it all. Now, this was not in Prussia's interest, since until then Hannover & Brandenburg had been in the same playing field, but an undivided with that intriguing British prospect on the horizon would be more powerful. So Danckelmann encouraged some Hannoverian councillors to make a move preventing primogeniture to become law in Hannover. However, Figuelotte learned about this and warned Mom and Dad what was coming, thereby proving she loved Hannover more. Since Dad had one of the councillors executed, which ended opposition to primogeniture becoming law in Hannover, she also had blood on her hands! And when Danckelmann basically called her a treacherous bitch, she dared to resent him for it!
Frank Göse: I dare say she also resented him for being in charge of FW's educational schedule for the first few years, especially once presented with the results, i.e. Tiny Terror FW.
Werner Schmidt: That's what she claimed in her letters to Mom, but I don't believe her. She was being hysterical and trying to justify her hate. Not very philosophical of this so-called "Philosopher Queen".
Frank Göse: My point stands: while she undoubtedly cheered when Danckelmann fell, she wasn't the primary mover, nor did she profit from it. The guy moving into that power vacuum was Wartenberg, not Sophie Charlotte.
Werner Schmidt: I'm also blaming her for this. If she'd just shown more political interest, F1, who adored her, would not have needed Wartenberg and listened to her instead. But no! Madame preferred having debates with Leipniz and getting on with her Athens-on-the-Spree program .
Frank Göse: Blaming her both for intervening in the political arena (Danckelmann) and not intervening (Wartenberg) as a way of explaining why she disliked both yet only one fell within her life time is a bit illogical.
Werner Schmidt: I also do the psychological thing which you don't and declare that the way Danckelmann fell, the arrest, the years locked up before he was released, the multiple accusations which were plainly ridiculous were not only the the work of his enemies but of F1's subconscious. Freud would have totally gone for the delayed oedipal father figure killing explanation there. Moving on to the three W's. They were scum.
Frank Göse: Beg to differ.
Werner Schmidt: They were! Exploiting my fave woobie because he needed affection and respect and sure as hell wasn't getting it from his wife.
Frank Göse: Incidentally, we both agree that while F1 loved Sophie Charlotte, Figuelotte after the first few years did not love him, only I see this not as coldness on her part but the result of both of them being very different. And growing up. Remember, she'd been only sixteen when she married him. She'd liked him, and he might even have been a romantic figure to her - the persecuted, grieving prince - , papering over the fact he was handicapped, not physically attractive to her, not as quick verbally, a devout Calvinist where she was more into philosophy, someone who rose early while she was a night owl, who loved ceremonies which bored her. In short, he was the EC to her Fritz, only the power differential was the reverse. So she took some tobacco to snuff while he had his coronation ceremony at Königsberg to make fun of all the earnest pomposity -
Werner Schmidt: The most meaningful achievement of his life to him! She hardly could have hurt him more!
Frank Göse: That's your speculation, and you don't provide any quote from him to prove he was hurt.
Werner Schmidt: I don't need it, I know his soul. I also completely believe that story about her making fun of his size and don't consider it apocryphal, unlike you. After all, we do have her calling him "my Aesop" in one of her few preserved letters, and given Aesop had a hunchback, that just shows how she was. Like her grandson, indeed. But let's get on to the scum. Wartenberg:. the worst of the worst. Typical evil favourite. The only good thing he ever did as PM was uniting the various parts of Berlin with each other and making it the Berlin it was in Fritz' time. Otherwise, he just took money and offices, unlike Danckelmann was careful enough to let himself be made Reichsgraf, which meant he was a peer of the HRE, not just Prussia, which meant that when he did fall, he couldn't end up locked up as well. He also promoted his buddies at his side, like awful Wittgenstein, who was already deeply in debt when Wartenberg hired him, and that scum Wartensleben the Katte Granddad.
Frank Göse: Wartensleben wasn't like the other two Ws. My guy FW's liking for him testifies to that! He only got bitched about initially because the local military noblemen were totally jealous that he got promoted to head of the army over their heads.
Werner Schmidt: I don't think so. Watch me tear Granddad Wartensleben a new one while describing him thus to my readers: Wartensleben reccommended himself through the "galant courtier's life as a condottieri he'd lived" (Koch). He'd fought for and against the French, against the Turks and for the Venetians and finally ended up as leader of the army of Saxe-Gotha. Such a flexible and amoral mind ata the head of the (Prussian) army was for Wartenberg the ideal replacement of a stubborn straight-talker like Barfus.
Frank Göse: As for Wartenberg himself: agreed that he was corrupt. But no more so than the top guys at any Baroque court. Can we agree that contrary to what the gossips claimed and what since got repeated by people through the ages, he did not pimp out his wife as a mistress to F1?
Werner Schmidt: Most def. F1 never slept with her, and no, he didn't take her as a titular mistress, either. That woman was scum, though. After Wartenberg died, she plied her trade in Brussels and died a whore. You know how she and Wartenberg met? She was the daughter of a customs inspector, which legend made an innkeeper. Then she married a royal valet who brought her to Berlin, where she became Wartenberg's mistress. Then Danckelmann made Wartenberg marry her, which was the TRUE reason why Wartenberg hated Danckelmann and jointed the rest of the council who wanted to tumble him.
Frank Göse: Not so. I say these are legends. Sure, the woman loved splendor and power, which as the Pm's wife she had, but might I point out Sophie received her in Hannover? Would Sophie have done that if she'd thought La Wartenberg had been her son-in-law's mistress and the rival of her late beloved daughter?
Werner Schmidt: Sophie also received her own husband's mistress and those of her son and grandson, so that's not exactly a good argument.
Frank Göse: Still, her overall positive description of the Countess paints a more differentiated picture.
Werner Schmidt: Still a female Don Juan, though. Though she said that while her conquests were many, the King, much as she'd liked to, never was among them.
Frank Göse: Let's go back to the part where Figuelotte dies young, only in her early 30s, son FW married SD, and then F1 marries for the third time to secure the succession.
Werner Schmidt: we both agree this last marriage was a tragedy. The poor girl was evidently unstable from the get go. Also a fanatic Lutheran. She told F1 he would go to hell because only Lutherans, not Calvinists, went to heaven. And after the White Woman of the Hohenzollern incident, well, that was that. She died insane in Mecklenburg.
Frank Göse: RIP. Let's say something of grandson's two more famous accusations, to wit, that F1 while pumping money into courtly splendour and art didn't give any to his subjects suffering from the plague.
Werner Schmidt: Total slander and untrue. He provided 100 000 Taler, which are 20 Million Deutsche Marks in modern currency (that I don't use Euros tells you my book can't have been published for the first time in 2003), for the plague victims' families and rebuilding of Prussia. Grandson's claim that F1 oppressed the poor to feed the rich is also - well, rich. Look, F2, F1 had his luxury goods made in Brandenburg if at all possible, and thus encouraged the local economy, which took a hit at first when FW took over and immediately cut off all court orders. Also, someone who built his palaces with Silesian marble and brought three wars on Prussia is not in a position to talk about taking care of the poor, F2!
Frank Göse: With you except that we have to grant that the administration was in a terrible state when Wartenberg was toppled and FW needed a lot of work to make up for that. Also, he solved the problem of no more work for artisans, craftsmen, tailors, bakeries etc. by increasing the need for army supplies as we all now.
Werner Schmnidt: Oh, and as for grandson F2 quipping that if only the priests had offered F1 more ceremonies, F1 wouldn't have remained a Calvinist but converted, that just shows you how he sacrificed truth for a quip, truly his grandmother's grandson in this. a) F1 would never have converted. The Pope, having succeeded in making August the Strong a Catholic as the prize for making him a king, did try, holding out the lure of a papal coronation, and F1 said never. He was sincere in his faith.
Frank Göse: So he was. Also, b) you can't beat the Catholics for ceremony, especially for coronations, just ask MT or Joseph. So what's this "if the priests had offered more ceremonies"? F1 knew all about those ceremonies and said no anyway. Grandson was just incapable of granting him a single virtue, even that of sincere religion.
Werner Schmidt: Should we say something about F1's relationship with FW? You do it, because I'm oddly silent on the subject. While you're going on to become an FW specialist.
Frank Göse: Err. Well. I don't say much. Because we don't have much material to judge it on. No famous arguments, unlike in any other generation of Hohenzollern. F1 left the arguing with teachers and the instructing of same to Sophie Charlotte. He worried about his son and was proud of him, but he was a distant Dad, though no more so than usual for a king and a prince. As FW got older, it became ever more blatant they did not enjoy the same things, and FW was drawn to people like
Werner Schmidt: I'm ending my book by saying that this lonely man who never found true love again after his first wife died, and who was ridiculed as a cripple all his life - "Humpback Fritz", the people called him - still managed to create a kingdom and solidify it at an age where Louis the supreme honcho of France just kept ruining his with his endless wars, August and Max Emmanuel, see above, and the Medici, let's not even go there. Long live Wobbie F1!
Edited 2021-08-04 14:31 (UTC)
also read in the last week while waiting for RMSE: Montesquieu, both the German travels and the Roman history with Fritzian commentary, which was possible since both were short.
The German travels were something of a let down, mostly due to the preface which hypes Montesquieu as super insightful and foreshadowing, and sorry, but no. Even leaving aside that his anti FW rant, as Mildred noted, might have an amusing one liner but completely misses FW is building up the most modern and dangerous army of Europe and strengthening his country's economy (instead, we get the wishful thinking description of Prussia as North Korea, essentially, with everyone in dire poverty and leaving the country by droves - immigrants like the huguenots from France or the Protestants from Salzburg, who were just resettling in Brandenburg, remain unmentioned because Montesquieu has an incredible Catholic bias, more about this in a minute) - even leaving all this aside: he's an amazingly easy sell for propaganda by rulers who receive him. So G2 is a ruler loved by his German and English subjects alike....
Hervey and Walpole the younger, not to mention lots of Scots, well, to be fair, they aren't English: *gigantic coughing fit*
...who easily got the better of FW in their big clash.
(Meanwhile, Hervey in his memoirs: From first to last, they both managed to be equally in the wrong, and no one won.)
The Duke of Brunswick and his family live with their subjects as equals. Which tells you all about Montesquieu the French aristocrat, I suppose, and what he thinks is modesty. Now given all of SD's and Charlotte's disses of EC when EC was engaged to Fritz might lead one to think the Brunswicks were indeed modest, but then again, young AnhaltSophie, aka Catherine the Great, thought that court was the most splendid she saw in her youth, and she did see Berlin in her youth, not to mention that when she's writing her memoirs, she's lived in Russian style and riches for decades.
Also, there's a lot of "ethonographic" stuff, i.e. Germans in general are slower than quick witted French people, and Bavarians are the most stupid, slowest Germans of all. (That would be me.) (More seriously, remember that I mentioned elsewhere Bavaria had the bad luck of suffering for Max Emmanuel's teaming up with the French in the Spanish war of succession (= battlefield country) and still spending money like wild, so I have no doubt it was a more backward principality in general than some of the others. As for Montesquieu's general "slowness" and "thickness" complaints, I'm assuming he spoke French to everyone, meaning most people he talked to were talking in a foreign language, since he didn't talk to Prussian Huguenots or their descendants....
Seriously, though: something downright chilling is Montesquieu thinking the Westphalian Peace which concluded the 30 Years War (again, the bloodiest, most devastating Europe would see until the 20th century), which had depopulated the German realms in some cases by half, in some by a third was a big mistake because "it ruined Catholicism in Germany". He also thinks the Emperor should only promote Catholics and only allow Catholics to serve him, that would get young Protestant nobles to convert quick enough, that the Habsburgs have lost their claim of leading Catholicism in Europe because this isn't the case, and that if you're just tougher on those Protestants again the Catholic religion will triumph after all. It's a constant theme in his letters and notes (due to a lot of German Protestants) which the occasional aphorism, a fascination for federalism and for a good (aristocratic) legislative don't make up for, imo. As aristocratic travellers of the era (first half of the 18th century) go, give me Lady Mary instead any time. Or the Duc de Croy. They also have their likes and dislikes, but they strike me as way more observant and insightful than Montesquieu.
The German travels were something of a let down, mostly due to the preface which hypes Montesquieu as super insightful and foreshadowing, and sorry, but no. Even leaving aside that his anti FW rant, as Mildred noted, might have an amusing one liner but completely misses FW is building up the most modern and dangerous army of Europe and strengthening his country's economy (instead, we get the wishful thinking description of Prussia as North Korea, essentially, with everyone in dire poverty and leaving the country by droves - immigrants like the huguenots from France or the Protestants from Salzburg, who were just resettling in Brandenburg, remain unmentioned because Montesquieu has an incredible Catholic bias, more about this in a minute) - even leaving all this aside: he's an amazingly easy sell for propaganda by rulers who receive him. So G2 is a ruler loved by his German and English subjects alike....
Hervey and Walpole the younger, not to mention lots of Scots, well, to be fair, they aren't English: *gigantic coughing fit*
...who easily got the better of FW in their big clash.
(Meanwhile, Hervey in his memoirs: From first to last, they both managed to be equally in the wrong, and no one won.)
The Duke of Brunswick and his family live with their subjects as equals. Which tells you all about Montesquieu the French aristocrat, I suppose, and what he thinks is modesty. Now given all of SD's and Charlotte's disses of EC when EC was engaged to Fritz might lead one to think the Brunswicks were indeed modest, but then again, young AnhaltSophie, aka Catherine the Great, thought that court was the most splendid she saw in her youth, and she did see Berlin in her youth, not to mention that when she's writing her memoirs, she's lived in Russian style and riches for decades.
Also, there's a lot of "ethonographic" stuff, i.e. Germans in general are slower than quick witted French people, and Bavarians are the most stupid, slowest Germans of all. (That would be me.) (More seriously, remember that I mentioned elsewhere Bavaria had the bad luck of suffering for Max Emmanuel's teaming up with the French in the Spanish war of succession (= battlefield country) and still spending money like wild, so I have no doubt it was a more backward principality in general than some of the others. As for Montesquieu's general "slowness" and "thickness" complaints, I'm assuming he spoke French to everyone, meaning most people he talked to were talking in a foreign language, since he didn't talk to Prussian Huguenots or their descendants....
Seriously, though: something downright chilling is Montesquieu thinking the Westphalian Peace which concluded the 30 Years War (again, the bloodiest, most devastating Europe would see until the 20th century), which had depopulated the German realms in some cases by half, in some by a third was a big mistake because "it ruined Catholicism in Germany". He also thinks the Emperor should only promote Catholics and only allow Catholics to serve him, that would get young Protestant nobles to convert quick enough, that the Habsburgs have lost their claim of leading Catholicism in Europe because this isn't the case, and that if you're just tougher on those Protestants again the Catholic religion will triumph after all. It's a constant theme in his letters and notes (due to a lot of German Protestants) which the occasional aphorism, a fascination for federalism and for a good (aristocratic) legislative don't make up for, imo. As aristocratic travellers of the era (first half of the 18th century) go, give me Lady Mary instead any time. Or the Duc de Croy. They also have their likes and dislikes, but they strike me as way more observant and insightful than Montesquieu.
Edited 2021-08-06 07:53 (UTC)
On to the Romans. This book, which was partly triggered by Montesquieu visiting Italy on the same journey, is way more fun, and not just because of the Fritz notes. In both cases, though, it's worth constantly keeping in mind Montesquieu is writing from the pov of a conservative French aristocrat, who despite all the compliments paid to Louis XIV regrets Louis' declawing of the French nobility to no end. (Louis revoking the Edict of Nantes and persecuting Protestants, otoh, is A plus.) All the observations on Roman decadence thus also have the subtext of criticism of current day France without getting censored for it. (Which, btw, isn't that different from Roman historians putting their present day criticism into the mouth of "barbarian" leaders and/or waxing on on how much better the ancestors did it.) Thus, Rome was doing well when the wise Patrician Senate was in charge, creating the Tribunes was already a step in the wrong direction, and naturally once the Empire came to be and the Senate devolved into a rubber stamp for imperial decisions, while the Emperors were except for five of them no good luxury loving parasites, everything went down the toilet.
Something else striking the modern reader is that Montesquieu except for one remark that comes very late into Roman history (we're talking 4th century AD already), and one earlier remark where he sighs Hannibal should have had a Homer to write him, not a Livy, he's not source critical. The introduction is defensive about this and says of course he didn't doubt his Roman historians were telling the truth, he was an ancient writers loving 18th century guy! To which I say, well, so was Voltaire, and his preface to his Charles XII. history is satiric fun about why he doesn't buy what a lot of ancient historians serve up due to the obvious contradictions, and thus he feels at liberty to go for the most likely (in his opinion) explanation there as in more modern histories. Meanwhile, the preface insists Fritz must have known Montesquieu is the much, much deeper writer than Voltaire and wonders why he made Montesquieu an honorable member of the Berlin Academy but didn't invite him, because surely Montesquieu wouldn't have disappointed him the way a certain shallow other French writer did!
Back to "Greatness and Fall of Rome". It is a very stylish, often witty and always opinionated book, so it's easy to see why Fritz both loved it and mentally argued with it now and then. The reason why we have his underlinings and scribbled marginalia published when we don't with other books from his libraries is this: when Napoleon came to visit Sanssouci after having defeated Prussia, he swiped it as a personal souvenir. I don't blame him. I mean, I do blame Napoleon for other things, but not this. Totally would have done the same thing, though possibly I'd have gone for a Voltaire work instead in the hope of finding more shippy hilarity, but I can see why fanboy Bonaparte was more into Fritz' thoughts on Montesquieu's thoughts about the Romans. Anyway, that's why this copy ended up in a French national library instead of a German one and got published.
When did Fritz write his comments? It's still a guessing game. As the German translator says, some sound as if written by Crown Prince Fritz in Rheinsberg, others more like King Fritz. We do know he's read the first edition since he quotes from it in one of his few letters to Émilie, no less. (This was a problem for the French and German editor alike, because there are some passages in the first eidtion which Montesquieu cut in later editions, but they eventually decided to go with the edition that Fritz had.)
Montesquieu starts with the foundation of Rome and ends with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, though obviously picking and choosing different eras for emphasis. Fritz is mostly interested in the late Republic and the Empire, but does comment occasionally before that. The German edition reproduces his underlinings and his marginalia (he didn't always write a comment when underlining). The mere underlinings can be very telling about Fritz, like this one:
"And since (the up and coming Roman Republic about to conquer Italy) could not imagine existing without ruling, neither fear nor hope could force it to conclude a peace treaty it hadn't dictated."
Or, when Montesquieu writes: "It usually isn't the real loss suffered in a battle (i.e. the one of several thousands of men) who come to cause the state harm, but the assumed loss, and the discouragement which take what strength fate has left from it."
Fritz underlines this and comments: "Very true and very well reasoned! The frightened imagination of the soldiers is a spectre winning more battles than the material strength and superiority of the enemy."
Or, Montesquieu about Hannibal "Conquests are easy to make, since one can use all one's force for them. But they are difficult to hold since one can defend them with only a part of one's force."
Fritz writes: "A proof for this is Louis XIV who conquered the Netherlands quickly and then was forced to withdraw from its towns just as quickly as he'd won them."
(Or, one might say, Fritz in Bohemia in Silesia 2.)
When Montesquieu when talking about the Romans and their system of client kings gives a flashback about Macedonian history pre Romans and inevitably mentions Philip and Alexander, we get these two gems:
Montesquieu: "Their (Macedonian) monarchy wasn't among those developing along predictable lines. Always learning from dangers and events and embroiled in all the arguments between the Greeks, they had to win the most important cities for themselves, to dazzle and blind the people and to separate or unite them by interests. While doing all of this, they were always forced to put their own lives on the line for their cause."
Fritz: These Macedon kings were what a King of Prussia and a King of Sardinia are today.
(Me: You really wanted that Sardinia guy as an ally , then?)
Montesquieu when talking about Antiochos makes a comparison to his national hero Louis XIV and says about Louis, alluding to Louis refusing the "get rid of your grandson on the Spanish throne" condition by the allies when the War of Spanish Succesion turned against him:
I know nothing more noble than the decision of a monarch who has ruled into our time to rather let himself be buried under the wreckage of his throne than to accept conditions which a King cannot listen to. He had too proud a soul to sink any further than the blows of destiny had put him, and he knew that courage can strengthen a crown anew, but never craven humility.
To this, a Fritz who sounds as if he's definitely King Fritz and familiar with several peace treaties with MT, not just one, comments:
This is very well thought of a great King who can face many of his enemies at the same time. But a prince whose military strength and power is lesser has to accomodate his era and circumstances somewhat more.
Now, Montesquieu's basic theory is that the laws by which the Roman Republic had governed itself were no longer workable once Rome had expanded so much that it had become an Empire, and this its own greatness carried the seed of its downfall, making the civil war and then the monarchy inevitable. (This is why Montesquieu still has fans today, since it's a modern pov that doesn't blame/credit just one or two individuals for this development.) Which doesn't mean he does not have opinions on individual Romans and their conduct, and here, Fritz entertainingly disagrees with him.
Montesquieu, on Caesar's famous clemency towards his defeated enemies: Caesar forgave each and everyone. (After the civil war.) But it seems to me that moderation shown after one has taken everything by force doesn't deserve any plaudits.
Fritz: This is an exaggarated critique! Sulla, the barbarian Sulla, didn't show as much moderation as Caesar; a low soul which could have avenged itself would still have done it. But Caesar only forgave. It's always beautiful to forgive, even if one doesn't have to fear anything anymore.
Montesquieu: Caesar, who had always been an enemy of the Senate, couldn't disguise the contempt he felt for this body which had become a mockery of itself since losing power. This is why even his clemency was an insult. One saw he didn't forgive, but that he simply declined to punish.
Fritz: This thought is exaggarated! If one measured all actions of all people by this strict standard, there wouildn't be a heroic deed left. He who proves too much proves nothing!
Fritz also takes the occasional swipe at the current daycompetition people.
Montesquieu: Besides, often great men are forged in civil wars, because in the confusion those who have talent rise to the top, each according to their abilities, while at other times one is put at a place which one is completely wrong for.
Fritz (underlining this and adding): Don Carlos would not have won any fame in the Civil Wars! How few people of rank would have had success back then. The incapable often luck out by blind fortune helping their cause.
Then there are Cicero and Cato. Montesquieu's comparison between the two was one which impressed and irritated Fritz and which he brought up in a letter to Émilie.cahn, to understand the point, it's worth recalling that while both Cato and Cicero had sided with the Senate & Pompey against Caesar in the Civil War, Cato ended up coommitting suicide rather than being pardoned by Caesar, while Cicero did accept clemency, outlived Caesar and then, as the last remaining representative of the old school Senate, made the mistake of thinking that by backing Octavian against Antony, he could get rid of Antony and restore the Republic to its old self, completely underestimating young Octavian (as so many did).
Montesquieu (underlinings by Fritz): I believe hat if Cato had preserved himself for the Republic, he would have been able to give all ensuing events another twist. Cicero who had admirable qualities in a supporting part, was utterly incapable of playing the lead. He had a beautiful mind, but often a somewhat ordinary soul. With Cicero, virtue was often a side thought, while with Cato, fame was secondary. Cicero always saw himself first, Cato forgot himself always. One wanted to save the Republic for its own sake, the other in order to boast of it.
Fritz: If a citizen contributes something good to public welfare: if he does it only for the pleasure of doing good, he's all the more admirable, but if he does it for the sake of fame, the principle isn't as nice, but surely the effect is the same!
Montesquieu uses Cato's suicide to ruminate on how different the Roman attitude towards suicide was than the current day one is (where suicide is treated as a crime and suicidees aren't allowed to be buried with law abiding folk). Fritz has STRONG OPINIONS in his marginalia, of which there are three on one page.
On suicide in general: This is a means which should be used only with great caution, for the obvious reason that you can only do it once.
Montesquieu: Finally it is a great convenience for heroes to be able to end the part they're playing on the world's stage immediately when they want to.
Fritz (underlining the above): Any action which happens with the consent of the people concerned is a legal. If I decide to take my life, I give my consent. So this is not a violent action breaking the law but a voluntary act which thus becomes legal.
Montesquieu: It is a certain that people are less free, less courageous and less ready to commit great deeds than they were in an era where due to the power one had over oneself one could always escape any other power.
Fritz (underlining this): Religion wherever it was spread has weakened the courage of nations. A man who fears killing himself has to fear death. And fearing death means being not courageous. Besides, the fear of the judgments by the canonized Proserpina makes many a man tremble who without this article of faith would have risen above such fear.
Something else striking the modern reader is that Montesquieu except for one remark that comes very late into Roman history (we're talking 4th century AD already), and one earlier remark where he sighs Hannibal should have had a Homer to write him, not a Livy, he's not source critical. The introduction is defensive about this and says of course he didn't doubt his Roman historians were telling the truth, he was an ancient writers loving 18th century guy! To which I say, well, so was Voltaire, and his preface to his Charles XII. history is satiric fun about why he doesn't buy what a lot of ancient historians serve up due to the obvious contradictions, and thus he feels at liberty to go for the most likely (in his opinion) explanation there as in more modern histories. Meanwhile, the preface insists Fritz must have known Montesquieu is the much, much deeper writer than Voltaire and wonders why he made Montesquieu an honorable member of the Berlin Academy but didn't invite him, because surely Montesquieu wouldn't have disappointed him the way a certain shallow other French writer did!
Back to "Greatness and Fall of Rome". It is a very stylish, often witty and always opinionated book, so it's easy to see why Fritz both loved it and mentally argued with it now and then. The reason why we have his underlinings and scribbled marginalia published when we don't with other books from his libraries is this: when Napoleon came to visit Sanssouci after having defeated Prussia, he swiped it as a personal souvenir. I don't blame him. I mean, I do blame Napoleon for other things, but not this. Totally would have done the same thing, though possibly I'd have gone for a Voltaire work instead in the hope of finding more shippy hilarity, but I can see why fanboy Bonaparte was more into Fritz' thoughts on Montesquieu's thoughts about the Romans. Anyway, that's why this copy ended up in a French national library instead of a German one and got published.
When did Fritz write his comments? It's still a guessing game. As the German translator says, some sound as if written by Crown Prince Fritz in Rheinsberg, others more like King Fritz. We do know he's read the first edition since he quotes from it in one of his few letters to Émilie, no less. (This was a problem for the French and German editor alike, because there are some passages in the first eidtion which Montesquieu cut in later editions, but they eventually decided to go with the edition that Fritz had.)
Montesquieu starts with the foundation of Rome and ends with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, though obviously picking and choosing different eras for emphasis. Fritz is mostly interested in the late Republic and the Empire, but does comment occasionally before that. The German edition reproduces his underlinings and his marginalia (he didn't always write a comment when underlining). The mere underlinings can be very telling about Fritz, like this one:
"And since (the up and coming Roman Republic about to conquer Italy) could not imagine existing without ruling, neither fear nor hope could force it to conclude a peace treaty it hadn't dictated."
Or, when Montesquieu writes: "It usually isn't the real loss suffered in a battle (i.e. the one of several thousands of men) who come to cause the state harm, but the assumed loss, and the discouragement which take what strength fate has left from it."
Fritz underlines this and comments: "Very true and very well reasoned! The frightened imagination of the soldiers is a spectre winning more battles than the material strength and superiority of the enemy."
Or, Montesquieu about Hannibal "Conquests are easy to make, since one can use all one's force for them. But they are difficult to hold since one can defend them with only a part of one's force."
Fritz writes: "A proof for this is Louis XIV who conquered the Netherlands quickly and then was forced to withdraw from its towns just as quickly as he'd won them."
(Or, one might say, Fritz in Bohemia in Silesia 2.)
When Montesquieu when talking about the Romans and their system of client kings gives a flashback about Macedonian history pre Romans and inevitably mentions Philip and Alexander, we get these two gems:
Montesquieu: "Their (Macedonian) monarchy wasn't among those developing along predictable lines. Always learning from dangers and events and embroiled in all the arguments between the Greeks, they had to win the most important cities for themselves, to dazzle and blind the people and to separate or unite them by interests. While doing all of this, they were always forced to put their own lives on the line for their cause."
Fritz: These Macedon kings were what a King of Prussia and a King of Sardinia are today.
(Me: You really wanted that Sardinia guy as an ally , then?)
Montesquieu when talking about Antiochos makes a comparison to his national hero Louis XIV and says about Louis, alluding to Louis refusing the "get rid of your grandson on the Spanish throne" condition by the allies when the War of Spanish Succesion turned against him:
I know nothing more noble than the decision of a monarch who has ruled into our time to rather let himself be buried under the wreckage of his throne than to accept conditions which a King cannot listen to. He had too proud a soul to sink any further than the blows of destiny had put him, and he knew that courage can strengthen a crown anew, but never craven humility.
To this, a Fritz who sounds as if he's definitely King Fritz and familiar with several peace treaties with MT, not just one, comments:
This is very well thought of a great King who can face many of his enemies at the same time. But a prince whose military strength and power is lesser has to accomodate his era and circumstances somewhat more.
Now, Montesquieu's basic theory is that the laws by which the Roman Republic had governed itself were no longer workable once Rome had expanded so much that it had become an Empire, and this its own greatness carried the seed of its downfall, making the civil war and then the monarchy inevitable. (This is why Montesquieu still has fans today, since it's a modern pov that doesn't blame/credit just one or two individuals for this development.) Which doesn't mean he does not have opinions on individual Romans and their conduct, and here, Fritz entertainingly disagrees with him.
Montesquieu, on Caesar's famous clemency towards his defeated enemies: Caesar forgave each and everyone. (After the civil war.) But it seems to me that moderation shown after one has taken everything by force doesn't deserve any plaudits.
Fritz: This is an exaggarated critique! Sulla, the barbarian Sulla, didn't show as much moderation as Caesar; a low soul which could have avenged itself would still have done it. But Caesar only forgave. It's always beautiful to forgive, even if one doesn't have to fear anything anymore.
Montesquieu: Caesar, who had always been an enemy of the Senate, couldn't disguise the contempt he felt for this body which had become a mockery of itself since losing power. This is why even his clemency was an insult. One saw he didn't forgive, but that he simply declined to punish.
Fritz: This thought is exaggarated! If one measured all actions of all people by this strict standard, there wouildn't be a heroic deed left. He who proves too much proves nothing!
Fritz also takes the occasional swipe at the current day
Montesquieu: Besides, often great men are forged in civil wars, because in the confusion those who have talent rise to the top, each according to their abilities, while at other times one is put at a place which one is completely wrong for.
Fritz (underlining this and adding): Don Carlos would not have won any fame in the Civil Wars! How few people of rank would have had success back then. The incapable often luck out by blind fortune helping their cause.
Then there are Cicero and Cato. Montesquieu's comparison between the two was one which impressed and irritated Fritz and which he brought up in a letter to Émilie.
cahn, to understand the point, it's worth recalling that while both Cato and Cicero had sided with the Senate & Pompey against Caesar in the Civil War, Cato ended up coommitting suicide rather than being pardoned by Caesar, while Cicero did accept clemency, outlived Caesar and then, as the last remaining representative of the old school Senate, made the mistake of thinking that by backing Octavian against Antony, he could get rid of Antony and restore the Republic to its old self, completely underestimating young Octavian (as so many did). Montesquieu (underlinings by Fritz): I believe hat if Cato had preserved himself for the Republic, he would have been able to give all ensuing events another twist. Cicero who had admirable qualities in a supporting part, was utterly incapable of playing the lead. He had a beautiful mind, but often a somewhat ordinary soul. With Cicero, virtue was often a side thought, while with Cato, fame was secondary. Cicero always saw himself first, Cato forgot himself always. One wanted to save the Republic for its own sake, the other in order to boast of it.
Fritz: If a citizen contributes something good to public welfare: if he does it only for the pleasure of doing good, he's all the more admirable, but if he does it for the sake of fame, the principle isn't as nice, but surely the effect is the same!
Montesquieu uses Cato's suicide to ruminate on how different the Roman attitude towards suicide was than the current day one is (where suicide is treated as a crime and suicidees aren't allowed to be buried with law abiding folk). Fritz has STRONG OPINIONS in his marginalia, of which there are three on one page.
On suicide in general: This is a means which should be used only with great caution, for the obvious reason that you can only do it once.
Montesquieu: Finally it is a great convenience for heroes to be able to end the part they're playing on the world's stage immediately when they want to.
Fritz (underlining the above): Any action which happens with the consent of the people concerned is a legal. If I decide to take my life, I give my consent. So this is not a violent action breaking the law but a voluntary act which thus becomes legal.
Montesquieu: It is a certain that people are less free, less courageous and less ready to commit great deeds than they were in an era where due to the power one had over oneself one could always escape any other power.
Fritz (underlining this): Religion wherever it was spread has weakened the courage of nations. A man who fears killing himself has to fear death. And fearing death means being not courageous. Besides, the fear of the judgments by the canonized Proserpina makes many a man tremble who without this article of faith would have risen above such fear.
Edited 2021-08-06 08:03 (UTC)
Most of these remarks sound like older Fritz (imo, you might disagree). Otoh, here are a few sounding like Crown Prince Fritz to me.
Montesquieu on how once Rome was ruled by the Emperors generals who were too successful were side-eyed suspiciously:
One had to dose one's fame so carefully that it only attracted the attention but not the jealousy of the monarch, and one wasn't allowed to appear in front of him in a splendor which his eyes could not have born.
Fritz: This is a principle which one is forced to adapt even today, as if it wasn't the same to public welfare by which hand it's caused and whose hands seals it.
Montesquieu on Tiberius (the very Emperor whom Frau von Blaspiel compared FW to): Since the hypocrisy and the dark temper of the prince spread everwhere, friendship became regarded as a danger, frankness as foolishness and virtue as unnatural vanity which could have made people recall the happiness of past times.
Fritz (after underlining this very strongly): A tyrant of the soul is a very dangerous being. He is not content with oppressing people, no, he wants that one blesses the hand which forces one on the ground and torments one.
What intrigues me that he didn't underline the very next lines of Montesquieu's text, which are even more adroit:
Montesquieu: There is no more cruel tyranny than the one conducted under the cover of law and painted over by the semblance of justice, for that means to drown people who escaped a ship wreckage even through the wood they're clutching.
After Tiberius, Caligula becomes Emperor, and it gets possibly subtextual again.
Montesquieu about Caligula going from no power to all power: The same mentality which causes somebody to be impressed by absolute power exerted by a ruler means they are no less impressed when exerting that power themselves.
Fritz (underlining and commenting at length): Pure weakness which lets us admire those taking a higher position in the world with enthusiasm. Our eyes are dazzled by the allure of their office and their power. This leads one to admire oneself as well when one has assumed a position which one has feared for such a long time and has been so very eager to assume.
Human beings let their happiness consist to a great deal in the way the public imagines this, and as long as one assumes them to be happy, they don't care they are, in fact, not. They are simply pleased to know they are feared, for this provides them with an idea of the superiority of their person and basically equates them with the Almighty.
(Heinrich: ....)
Montesquieu goes on about how the worst Emperors, Nero, Caracalla, Caligula, Commodus, weren't the most unpopular but on the contrary were loved by the people and missed by them (hence all the fake Neros, for example) since the bread and games tactic totally worked and these Emperors allowed the Romans to channel their worst instincts, very unlike the noble Senate where the noble families (now plundered by the evil Emperors) had ruled and given laws to the people.
Fritz comments, not really apropos what Montesquieu is aiming at: As soon as a prince has laid a foundation of principles, he very easily switches to believing himself to be always right out of self love that makes him dislike anyone who dare to doubt the symbol of his perfection.
Fritz is a bit more source crictical than Montesquieu when it comes to the Emperors and wonders in his comments whether there were truly only five good ones in all those centuries or whether maybe the historians could have been biased: It is still strange that the entirety of Roman history offers a very voluminous catalogue of great men, while the history of the Emperors just explodes with monsters. Maybe there were some exaggarations in the bad qualities ascribed to the Emperors? Or should one only know the Romans as a whole and never as individuals in order to still respect them?
Otoh, Fritz and Montesquieu are united in misogyny when it comes to Theodora the Empress, wife of Justinian.
Montesquieu: Justinian had taken his wife from the theatre where she'd been a prostitute for a long time. She ruled him with an influence unparalleled in history. And since she kept bringing the moods and passions of her sex into politics, she spoiled the most beautiful victories and successes.
Fritz: Any government in which the men show the miserable weakness of allowing women to participate will always feel the consequences of their moods and passions.
MT, Madame de Pompadour, Elisaveta: He had it coming! He had it coming! He only had himself to blame!
These are just some of the lines and quotes. It's a truly interesting document, and I'm glad to have bought it.
Montesquieu on how once Rome was ruled by the Emperors generals who were too successful were side-eyed suspiciously:
One had to dose one's fame so carefully that it only attracted the attention but not the jealousy of the monarch, and one wasn't allowed to appear in front of him in a splendor which his eyes could not have born.
Fritz: This is a principle which one is forced to adapt even today, as if it wasn't the same to public welfare by which hand it's caused and whose hands seals it.
Montesquieu on Tiberius (the very Emperor whom Frau von Blaspiel compared FW to): Since the hypocrisy and the dark temper of the prince spread everwhere, friendship became regarded as a danger, frankness as foolishness and virtue as unnatural vanity which could have made people recall the happiness of past times.
Fritz (after underlining this very strongly): A tyrant of the soul is a very dangerous being. He is not content with oppressing people, no, he wants that one blesses the hand which forces one on the ground and torments one.
What intrigues me that he didn't underline the very next lines of Montesquieu's text, which are even more adroit:
Montesquieu: There is no more cruel tyranny than the one conducted under the cover of law and painted over by the semblance of justice, for that means to drown people who escaped a ship wreckage even through the wood they're clutching.
After Tiberius, Caligula becomes Emperor, and it gets possibly subtextual again.
Montesquieu about Caligula going from no power to all power: The same mentality which causes somebody to be impressed by absolute power exerted by a ruler means they are no less impressed when exerting that power themselves.
Fritz (underlining and commenting at length): Pure weakness which lets us admire those taking a higher position in the world with enthusiasm. Our eyes are dazzled by the allure of their office and their power. This leads one to admire oneself as well when one has assumed a position which one has feared for such a long time and has been so very eager to assume.
Human beings let their happiness consist to a great deal in the way the public imagines this, and as long as one assumes them to be happy, they don't care they are, in fact, not. They are simply pleased to know they are feared, for this provides them with an idea of the superiority of their person and basically equates them with the Almighty.
(Heinrich: ....)
Montesquieu goes on about how the worst Emperors, Nero, Caracalla, Caligula, Commodus, weren't the most unpopular but on the contrary were loved by the people and missed by them (hence all the fake Neros, for example) since the bread and games tactic totally worked and these Emperors allowed the Romans to channel their worst instincts, very unlike the noble Senate where the noble families (now plundered by the evil Emperors) had ruled and given laws to the people.
Fritz comments, not really apropos what Montesquieu is aiming at: As soon as a prince has laid a foundation of principles, he very easily switches to believing himself to be always right out of self love that makes him dislike anyone who dare to doubt the symbol of his perfection.
Fritz is a bit more source crictical than Montesquieu when it comes to the Emperors and wonders in his comments whether there were truly only five good ones in all those centuries or whether maybe the historians could have been biased: It is still strange that the entirety of Roman history offers a very voluminous catalogue of great men, while the history of the Emperors just explodes with monsters. Maybe there were some exaggarations in the bad qualities ascribed to the Emperors? Or should one only know the Romans as a whole and never as individuals in order to still respect them?
Otoh, Fritz and Montesquieu are united in misogyny when it comes to Theodora the Empress, wife of Justinian.
Montesquieu: Justinian had taken his wife from the theatre where she'd been a prostitute for a long time. She ruled him with an influence unparalleled in history. And since she kept bringing the moods and passions of her sex into politics, she spoiled the most beautiful victories and successes.
Fritz: Any government in which the men show the miserable weakness of allowing women to participate will always feel the consequences of their moods and passions.
MT, Madame de Pompadour, Elisaveta: He had it coming! He had it coming! He only had himself to blame!
These are just some of the lines and quotes. It's a truly interesting document, and I'm glad to have bought it.
Edited 2021-08-06 08:04 (UTC)
I'm super proud of this Voltaire/Fritz fic, not least because it's the only fic I've written in this fandom where I did most of the actual writing without major input (that is to say, Mildred was invaluable and had a bunch of great ideas too, like FW's exchange being static in nature, Fritz's email handle, and the big one being Voltaire changing his tumblr name to orangepeel, which YES HE SO WOULD -- I'm just saying that usually she would also contribute large portions of the plot and characterization, and she didn't have to this time). In large part this was because I had access to Voltaire's letters (thank you felis for introducing me to that database!) and because mildred was SO great about finding me letter references, pamphlets, etc. :D
But really I wanted to share a couple of outtakes with you that never made it into the fic :)
(1) As you noticed, Fredersdorf was Very Carefully Not Saying Anything, but he wasn't... very happy about it. When Selena and Mildred were talking about Fredersdorf getting engaged Right Around This Time, I couldn't help but write this, but it didn't make it into the fic because I felt I'd already surpassed the number of characters people who weren't in this fandom had to keep track of...
Subject: Automatic reply: Re: what's going on??
To: MarshalGessler@gmail.com
From: FredersdorfFlute@gmail.com
Henry (MarshalGessler@gmail.com) wrote:
> Mike, do you know what's going on with Fritz? Does he talk to you about it?
> Henry
Hello there! Apologies that I haven't gotten your email and in fact probably won't get it for a while. My fiance Caroline and I are on a well-deserved backpacking trip, and we'll be gone for a couple of months, maybe more depending on how it goes. We won't be reachable by email or phone during this time, so don't even try. If you've emailed me about RWFE with a question or comment or ways to improve it in the future or comments about the tagging, you're probably better off contacting one of the other mods.
Mike
(2) I... might actually put this back in (at the very end of the Tumblr-Pile-On bit) :D I wasn't sure if it was too much (along the same lines as (1) )
wrhamilton reblogged this fromacademypresident and added:
IDK why all you people are making such a big deal about this. Everyone knows that @VariationalLagrange took this idea and ran with it and wrote THE epic fic with this trope, who cares who was the first.
But really I wanted to share a couple of outtakes with you that never made it into the fic :)
(1) As you noticed, Fredersdorf was Very Carefully Not Saying Anything, but he wasn't... very happy about it. When Selena and Mildred were talking about Fredersdorf getting engaged Right Around This Time, I couldn't help but write this, but it didn't make it into the fic because I felt I'd already surpassed the number of characters people who weren't in this fandom had to keep track of...
Subject: Automatic reply: Re: what's going on??
To: MarshalGessler@gmail.com
From: FredersdorfFlute@gmail.com
Henry (MarshalGessler@gmail.com) wrote:
> Mike, do you know what's going on with Fritz? Does he talk to you about it?
> Henry
Hello there! Apologies that I haven't gotten your email and in fact probably won't get it for a while. My fiance Caroline and I are on a well-deserved backpacking trip, and we'll be gone for a couple of months, maybe more depending on how it goes. We won't be reachable by email or phone during this time, so don't even try. If you've emailed me about RWFE with a question or comment or ways to improve it in the future or comments about the tagging, you're probably better off contacting one of the other mods.
Mike
(2) I... might actually put this back in (at the very end of the Tumblr-Pile-On bit) :D I wasn't sure if it was too much (along the same lines as (1) )
wrhamilton reblogged this from
academypresident and added:IDK why all you people are making such a big deal about this. Everyone knows that @VariationalLagrange took this idea and ran with it and wrote THE epic fic with this trope, who cares who was the first.
August 17, 2021 marks not only the well-known 235th anniversary of Fritz's death, but the lesser-known 2nd anniversary of salon! Happy anniversary to my favorite fans, and here's to the next year! <33
Good news: we the salon are now in possession of Wilhelmine's travel diary! The consulting gig hasn't worked out yet, but I got my first raise in 3 years last week, and ten minutes later I was on the internet buying this book, which just arrived.
The tricky part is now going to be getting it out of French and into a language we can read. Half the pages are uncut at the top, as you can see here:
, plus the volume is oversized. It remains to be seen whether the pages will fit in my scanner once I remove them from the book, or whether they'll need to be trimmed further. Fortunately, as you can see, the margins are huge.
I'll let you know once I've got the pages out of the book, onto my computer, cleaned up, run through the translation algorithms, and into the library!
(You can also see my ongoing book digitizing project off to the side in the pics. ;))
The tricky part is now going to be getting it out of French and into a language we can read. Half the pages are uncut at the top, as you can see here:
, plus the volume is oversized. It remains to be seen whether the pages will fit in my scanner once I remove them from the book, or whether they'll need to be trimmed further. Fortunately, as you can see, the margins are huge.
I'll let you know once I've got the pages out of the book, onto my computer, cleaned up, run through the translation algorithms, and into the library!
(You can also see my ongoing book digitizing project off to the side in the pics. ;))
I have a lot of backlog to catch up on with respect to my RMSE reading, which is gonna take a while (partially because of Darth RL, as selenak would say, and partially because my memory is so awful these days that I have to reread to remember what the heck I was going to say). But today I wanted to talk about Pamela! Recall that during RMSE I bribed mildred to write a script to bundle all the Pamela letters together (and machine translate) so that I could read them as a set, because I wanted to see what that would be like. (Mildred will at some point, when she's a little less busy, post this in the library.)
So honestly I would never have guessed this was not a straight series of letters if Magnan hadn't pointed it out. And also there is probably a LOT I'm not getting. (I'm guessing that I'm missing a metric ton of his references and discussion that don't strike me as particularly relevant but in fact are. Buuuuut even that being said, there are definitely things that pop out once one knows about the Pamela background.
-The beginning (Letter 2102, July 1750) is very ... how should I say this, praeludium-like. It does read more like the beginning of a novel or a play than like a random letter. The poem heading it says in its first stanza "It is to you that I am addressing This jumble of prose and verse, This story of my long journey"... and then he even lampshades it: "I am not yet at his court, and we must not anticipate anything: I want order even in my letters." I JUST BET YOU DO VOLTAIRE
-There is definitely some reworking to make through-lines to the letters, like La Mettrie and the orange peel (of course) showing up several times. (I... honestly find myself unwilling to believe he totally made up the orange peel -- it sounds like real emotion to me -- but perhaps he's just a good fiction writer :P )
-And then there's the bit about the rising and setting sun (Voltaire being the setting sun, and his student d'Arnaud being the rising sun). A few letters later, this is tied up neatly: d'Arnaud is kicked out and Voltaire, the setting sun, keeps keeping on with Fritz. ("The rising sun has gone to set.") But of course it's also foreshadowing the blowup Voltaire will have with Fritz...
-Maupertuis, lol. A quarter of the way in he's introduced: ""Maupertuis is not of very engaging ways; he takes my dimensions harshly with his quadrant: it is said there enters something of envy into his data." [Note: mildred sent this quote to me when I asked her for Maupertuis quotes early on in the game, and this particular translation is from Carlyle rather than Google, which mangles it a bit.] And he's mentioned once or twice... and then the whole Koenig thing blows up. [I didn't consciously follow exactly this structure in my fic, but I probably subsconsciously did!]
-Voltaire: "Maupertuis is TOTALLY spreading these STORIES about me saying that whole thing about Fritz's dirty laundry!!"
...huh, I just reread that bit and you know what he doesn't say?! He doesn't say that the dirty laundry story is false! He just, you know, implies and insinuates that it's false. But he doesn't come out outright and say it. Hmmmmmm.
-Koenig: lol, "This Koenig is in love with a geometry problem, like the old paladins of their ladies." That's... one way to describe the principle of least action, Voltaire. (Émilie: It is a really cool geometry problem!) Anyway, Voltaire is like "so, yeah, Maupertuis was Super Mean to Konig" and a few letters later he's like "so, Fritz wrote this pamphlet against Koenig, against me..." and he skips everything in between!... IDK, maybe I missed it, but I don't think it's until a bit later that he slips in "I unfortunately find myself an author too, and in the opposite party." Uh-huh, Voltaire. (I love the phrasing, like, he suddenly found himself having written his own pamphlet without knowing how it had happened! Maybe he wrote it in his sleep!)
-"Coquettes, kings, poets are accustomed to be flattered. Frederic unites these three crowns." LOL FOREVER
-The last letter in the set (2624: July 9, 1753) does also read like the conclusion to a story/tragedy. Voltaire rehashes the Frankfurt incident (which... I wouldn't be surprised if this was what tipped Magnan off to begin with, as it is by far the most suspicious part of the entire thing to me: if this were a real letter ...why would he have recited so carefully the entire story, given that she was, in fact, there?!) , washes his hands of Fritz, and ends: "Farewell; may I die in your arms, ignored by men and kings!"
-Because I was worried about missing letters, I asked mildred to pull a couple more than this, but Letter 2624 is such a clear ending that, well.
-I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that, given that Voltaire was reworking everything, that so many good quotes/bits are from here. The dictionary for the use of kings! The orange peel! The description of Maupertuis! I suspect basically all the Voltaire quotes historians/biographers pull from these years are in here, because they're so quotable.
-I would love to read Magnan's writing on this, if Royal Detective can get her hands on it :D
So honestly I would never have guessed this was not a straight series of letters if Magnan hadn't pointed it out. And also there is probably a LOT I'm not getting. (I'm guessing that I'm missing a metric ton of his references and discussion that don't strike me as particularly relevant but in fact are. Buuuuut even that being said, there are definitely things that pop out once one knows about the Pamela background.
-The beginning (Letter 2102, July 1750) is very ... how should I say this, praeludium-like. It does read more like the beginning of a novel or a play than like a random letter. The poem heading it says in its first stanza "It is to you that I am addressing This jumble of prose and verse, This story of my long journey"... and then he even lampshades it: "I am not yet at his court, and we must not anticipate anything: I want order even in my letters." I JUST BET YOU DO VOLTAIRE
-There is definitely some reworking to make through-lines to the letters, like La Mettrie and the orange peel (of course) showing up several times. (I... honestly find myself unwilling to believe he totally made up the orange peel -- it sounds like real emotion to me -- but perhaps he's just a good fiction writer :P )
-And then there's the bit about the rising and setting sun (Voltaire being the setting sun, and his student d'Arnaud being the rising sun). A few letters later, this is tied up neatly: d'Arnaud is kicked out and Voltaire, the setting sun, keeps keeping on with Fritz. ("The rising sun has gone to set.") But of course it's also foreshadowing the blowup Voltaire will have with Fritz...
-Maupertuis, lol. A quarter of the way in he's introduced: ""Maupertuis is not of very engaging ways; he takes my dimensions harshly with his quadrant: it is said there enters something of envy into his data." [Note: mildred sent this quote to me when I asked her for Maupertuis quotes early on in the game, and this particular translation is from Carlyle rather than Google, which mangles it a bit.] And he's mentioned once or twice... and then the whole Koenig thing blows up. [I didn't consciously follow exactly this structure in my fic, but I probably subsconsciously did!]
-Voltaire: "Maupertuis is TOTALLY spreading these STORIES about me saying that whole thing about Fritz's dirty laundry!!"
...huh, I just reread that bit and you know what he doesn't say?! He doesn't say that the dirty laundry story is false! He just, you know, implies and insinuates that it's false. But he doesn't come out outright and say it. Hmmmmmm.
-Koenig: lol, "This Koenig is in love with a geometry problem, like the old paladins of their ladies." That's... one way to describe the principle of least action, Voltaire. (Émilie: It is a really cool geometry problem!) Anyway, Voltaire is like "so, yeah, Maupertuis was Super Mean to Konig" and a few letters later he's like "so, Fritz wrote this pamphlet against Koenig, against me..." and he skips everything in between!... IDK, maybe I missed it, but I don't think it's until a bit later that he slips in "I unfortunately find myself an author too, and in the opposite party." Uh-huh, Voltaire. (I love the phrasing, like, he suddenly found himself having written his own pamphlet without knowing how it had happened! Maybe he wrote it in his sleep!)
-"Coquettes, kings, poets are accustomed to be flattered. Frederic unites these three crowns." LOL FOREVER
-The last letter in the set (2624: July 9, 1753) does also read like the conclusion to a story/tragedy. Voltaire rehashes the Frankfurt incident (which... I wouldn't be surprised if this was what tipped Magnan off to begin with, as it is by far the most suspicious part of the entire thing to me: if this were a real letter ...why would he have recited so carefully the entire story, given that she was, in fact, there?!) , washes his hands of Fritz, and ends: "Farewell; may I die in your arms, ignored by men and kings!"
-Because I was worried about missing letters, I asked mildred to pull a couple more than this, but Letter 2624 is such a clear ending that, well.
-I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that, given that Voltaire was reworking everything, that so many good quotes/bits are from here. The dictionary for the use of kings! The orange peel! The description of Maupertuis! I suspect basically all the Voltaire quotes historians/biographers pull from these years are in here, because they're so quotable.
-I would love to read Magnan's writing on this, if Royal Detective can get her hands on it :D
Der Spiegel with a long and good article about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which is mainly focused on her as a pioneer in the fight against smallpox (the article is from this year, obvious parallels are obvious), but also contains a mention of her falling in love with Algarotti; his bisexuality and relationship with Fritz both are mentioned without euphemisms. Progress indeed!
So, it's that time of the year again, and despite our general business and still glowing from RMSE, I would like to hash out nominations with fellow salon members, and not just in 18th century matters. For you see, when reading up on Charles V. et all these last months, the wish to write about some of these awesome ladies that keep showing up - the three Margarets (of York, of Austria, of Parma), and Barbara Blomberg (she who defended her wine, men and song widowhood life style succcesfully against the Duke of Alba and Philip of Spain) grew and grew and grew. And cahn, you said you'd love to read about Barbara squaring off against Alba. I even pondered a good moniker for the fandom that would allow these ladies to be entered and wouldn't be too general for Yuletide, and thought: 16th Century Habsburg RPF should do it. What do you think?
If four characters per nominator are still allowed, I would nominate two of the Margarets - Austria and Parma -, Barbara Blomberg, and Charles V. If one of you aided me by nominating Philip of Spain, Juan d'Austria, the Duke of Alba and Juana the maybe or maybe not mad but definitely doomed, that would be lovely, and allow requests for all types of messed up family encounters for me. I realize this is is entirely selfish of me, but would in turn offer to nominate characters in a fandom of your choice.
Now, re: Fredericians - here I plots I still want to tackle at some point:
- Bodyswitch tale (either Fritz and Madame de Pompadour, with Voltaire and Émilie co-starring, or Fritz and Heinrich would be fun, though I'm currently more drawn to the Fritz/Pompadour switch on account of how this would give both parties a very good reason to switch back in the end, and would allow me to write an Émilie in the position to blackmail Fritz-as-Pompadour into making Louis XV change the rules to allow female Academy members before she helps him to get his body back, and tense three way sarcasm between Fritz, Voltaire and Émilie.
- Alternate first encounter between Fritz and Fredersdorf at Frankfurt for Christmas
- Voltaire to the rescue AU
- Rokoko babysitting fic
This would mean nominating Fritz, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Pompadour, and one of you also nominating Émilie and Heinrich. Other nominations for plots you want to write/read more than very welcome! One which I would use as a prompt for someone else to write and for me to request, for example, should Wilhelmine and MT be among the nominated characters would be the Wilhelmine & MT lunch of legend. Just the lunch. Or, if someone nominates FW, I'd ask for the FW/G2 Duel that happens AU. Or the Murder at the Wusterhausen Express AU. :)
Thoughts?
cahn, you said you'd love to read about Barbara squaring off against Alba. I even pondered a good moniker for the fandom that would allow these ladies to be entered and wouldn't be too general for Yuletide, and thought: 16th Century Habsburg RPF should do it. What do you think? If four characters per nominator are still allowed, I would nominate two of the Margarets - Austria and Parma -, Barbara Blomberg, and Charles V. If one of you aided me by nominating Philip of Spain, Juan d'Austria, the Duke of Alba and Juana the maybe or maybe not mad but definitely doomed, that would be lovely, and allow requests for all types of messed up family encounters for me. I realize this is is entirely selfish of me, but would in turn offer to nominate characters in a fandom of your choice.
Now, re: Fredericians - here I plots I still want to tackle at some point:
- Bodyswitch tale (either Fritz and Madame de Pompadour, with Voltaire and Émilie co-starring, or Fritz and Heinrich would be fun, though I'm currently more drawn to the Fritz/Pompadour switch on account of how this would give both parties a very good reason to switch back in the end, and would allow me to write an Émilie in the position to blackmail Fritz-as-Pompadour into making Louis XV change the rules to allow female Academy members before she helps him to get his body back, and tense three way sarcasm between Fritz, Voltaire and Émilie.
- Alternate first encounter between Fritz and Fredersdorf at Frankfurt for Christmas
- Voltaire to the rescue AU
- Rokoko babysitting fic
This would mean nominating Fritz, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Pompadour, and one of you also nominating Émilie and Heinrich. Other nominations for plots you want to write/read more than very welcome! One which I would use as a prompt for someone else to write and for me to request, for example, should Wilhelmine and MT be among the nominated characters would be the Wilhelmine & MT lunch of legend. Just the lunch. Or, if someone nominates FW, I'd ask for the FW/G2 Duel that happens AU. Or the Murder at the Wusterhausen Express AU. :)
Thoughts?
Reminder: mildred is hosting this here
So I've read this now? (I read only part of it for RMSE, not realizing that that Decree of the Inquisition of Rome and Judgment of the professors of the college of Sapienza were also parts of the same pamphlet, or even if they're not, they're all making fun of Maupertuis.)
The very first part, where Voltaire is all "well obviously anyone who wrote all this stuff must be very young" is hilarious partially because then he refers to Maupertuis in the entire remainder of this pamphlet as a "young student" and similar.
The first part of Doctor Akakia I don't really get -- is this supposed to be making fun of Maupertuis's physics in a way that's too subtle for me to get, or did Maupertuis also talk about doctors and biology?
I'm actually kind of confused by this part generally speaking, because first he says "It is proper to inform [Maupertuis], that experience is the only mistress of man in discovering the salubrious virtues of herbs and plants" which okay, could maybe be a reference to experimental physics being a thing (e.g., that whole thing Leibnitz was trying to do with trying to explain the world from first principles) but then he says "Our young Logician pretends that physicians should henceforth be only empirics, and advises them to banish all theory" which seems to be a totally different/opposite point?!
I would fain know whether the young spark... has ever done such service to mankind, as he who unexpectedly rescued Marshal Saxe from the jaws of death after the battle of Fontenoy.
...okay, someone explain this to me, I know this is a dig :P
Decree of the Inquisition of Rome: this I understood a little more of!
We declare that the laws on the collision of bodies, perfectly hard, are puerile and imaginary, since there is no such thing that we know of as a body perfectly hard, except it be thick skulls, on which we have in vain endeavored to operate.
In physics, a common way to simplify a collision problem is to assert that it's "perfectly elastic" (no energy is absorbed by the colliders, which corresponds I think to Voltaire saying "perfectly hard") which means that kinetic energy (and momentum) is preserved. (So this goes back to the whole force vive debate about kinetic energy vs. momentum.)
The assertion, that the product of space by velocity is always a minimum, appears to us false; for the product is sometimes a maximum, as Leibnitz thought, and as it has been since demonstrated. It seems that the young author borrowed only half of Leibnitz's idea, and herein we discharge him from the imputation of having taken the entire notion from Leibnitz.
I'm not sure where Leibniz said this (in the disputed letter, maybe?) and it's not my understanding of how the principle of least action developed historically, but it's certainly true that the calculation of variations is used in the context of both minima and maxima... though that was some time later. So I think Voltaire does have something of a point here, but possibly by accident? I'm not sure though because I am not sure what Leibnitz said.
We are afraid lest the author should inspire his fellow students with some slight inclination of searching after the philosopher's stone; for he says, in whatever light we consider it, we cannot prove the impossibility of it.
...I am on Maupertuis's side here, sorry Voltaire :P Maupertuis was making a point of logic, not a point of sensibleness.
let him not upon every occasion, whether to the purpose or not, mention the polar circle.
Heh, I can just see Voltaire getting really annoyed with Maupertuis' conversation... ("But why isn't he talking more about ME?")
If any of his comrades should propose in a friendly manner a different opinion from his, if he should have the confidence to tell him that he builds upon the authority of Leibnitz, and some other philosophers, if he should particularly show him a letter of Leibnitz, and formally contradict our young student, let him not imagine, without any reflexion, nor publish to all the world, that his comrade has forged a letter of Leibniz to rob him of the glory of being an original.
HA. (And then it goes on like that for a while.)
So I've read this now? (I read only part of it for RMSE, not realizing that that Decree of the Inquisition of Rome and Judgment of the professors of the college of Sapienza were also parts of the same pamphlet, or even if they're not, they're all making fun of Maupertuis.)
The very first part, where Voltaire is all "well obviously anyone who wrote all this stuff must be very young" is hilarious partially because then he refers to Maupertuis in the entire remainder of this pamphlet as a "young student" and similar.
The first part of Doctor Akakia I don't really get -- is this supposed to be making fun of Maupertuis's physics in a way that's too subtle for me to get, or did Maupertuis also talk about doctors and biology?
I'm actually kind of confused by this part generally speaking, because first he says "It is proper to inform [Maupertuis], that experience is the only mistress of man in discovering the salubrious virtues of herbs and plants" which okay, could maybe be a reference to experimental physics being a thing (e.g., that whole thing Leibnitz was trying to do with trying to explain the world from first principles) but then he says "Our young Logician pretends that physicians should henceforth be only empirics, and advises them to banish all theory" which seems to be a totally different/opposite point?!
I would fain know whether the young spark... has ever done such service to mankind, as he who unexpectedly rescued Marshal Saxe from the jaws of death after the battle of Fontenoy.
...okay, someone explain this to me, I know this is a dig :P
Decree of the Inquisition of Rome: this I understood a little more of!
We declare that the laws on the collision of bodies, perfectly hard, are puerile and imaginary, since there is no such thing that we know of as a body perfectly hard, except it be thick skulls, on which we have in vain endeavored to operate.
In physics, a common way to simplify a collision problem is to assert that it's "perfectly elastic" (no energy is absorbed by the colliders, which corresponds I think to Voltaire saying "perfectly hard") which means that kinetic energy (and momentum) is preserved. (So this goes back to the whole force vive debate about kinetic energy vs. momentum.)
The assertion, that the product of space by velocity is always a minimum, appears to us false; for the product is sometimes a maximum, as Leibnitz thought, and as it has been since demonstrated. It seems that the young author borrowed only half of Leibnitz's idea, and herein we discharge him from the imputation of having taken the entire notion from Leibnitz.
I'm not sure where Leibniz said this (in the disputed letter, maybe?) and it's not my understanding of how the principle of least action developed historically, but it's certainly true that the calculation of variations is used in the context of both minima and maxima... though that was some time later. So I think Voltaire does have something of a point here, but possibly by accident? I'm not sure though because I am not sure what Leibnitz said.
We are afraid lest the author should inspire his fellow students with some slight inclination of searching after the philosopher's stone; for he says, in whatever light we consider it, we cannot prove the impossibility of it.
...I am on Maupertuis's side here, sorry Voltaire :P Maupertuis was making a point of logic, not a point of sensibleness.
let him not upon every occasion, whether to the purpose or not, mention the polar circle.
Heh, I can just see Voltaire getting really annoyed with Maupertuis' conversation... ("But why isn't he talking more about ME?")
If any of his comrades should propose in a friendly manner a different opinion from his, if he should have the confidence to tell him that he builds upon the authority of Leibnitz, and some other philosophers, if he should particularly show him a letter of Leibnitz, and formally contradict our young student, let him not imagine, without any reflexion, nor publish to all the world, that his comrade has forged a letter of Leibniz to rob him of the glory of being an original.
HA. (And then it goes on like that for a while.)
Mildred provided our salon with a copy from the story of Kiekemal by a local historian and descendantn of the original settlers, Emmi Wegfraß, which turns out to be the source of the story I first came across in Fahlenkamp's book, which you can read discussed at length here.
To repeat the key charge as Fahlenkamp phrases it: On April 9th 1757, Fredersdorf gets dismissed from his office as Chamberlain for, as it is said, dishonesty together with the Kriegs and Domänenrat Johann Pfeiffer when buying Kiekemal near Mahlsdorf. Kiekemal was then an empty dispopulated era in the south east of Berlin. The King had provided money for the resettling of this era, which however ended up being pilfered by the director of the Ressettling Commmission of the Kürmärkische Kammer, Johann Friedrich Pfeiffer (1717 - 1787) into his own pockets, under the cooperation of Frederdorf. That his closest confidant Fredersdorf took part in this must have been a heavy blow to Friedrich. The whole thing - an affair that dragged on for years - was discovered when several of the colonists complained, who had been lured from Würtemburg to Brandenburg with the promise of land and no taxes and had ended up being stuck in miserable huts for which they had to pay rent.
Emmi Wegfraß goes into way more detail about this, to which I'll get in a moment. First, something that remains completely unresolved is the contradiction which I spotted when googling Johann Friedrich Pfeiffer after reading Fahlenkamp's book, which starts with the dates, and this is even more puzzling in Wegfraß' book, and ends with what's said about the conclusion. Every biographical entry online I found on Pfeiffer says he was commissioner until 1750, and that he then left Prussia after the "unjustified" (wiki) charge. This article mentions a short stint in prison while the trial was ongoing but also says his name was cleared and that the trial ended in his favour, that he was "freigesprochen" (declared innocent). Emmy Wegfraß, by contrast, says that the commission in charge of investigating the entire affair delivered their report to Fritz on March 31st 1756, declaring that Pfeiffer was guilty, which results in Fritz ordering Pfeiffer's possessions were to be liquidated to compensate for the damage. She also quotes a cabinet order from June 4th 1756 by Fritz in which it says "Pfeiffer has executed the commission entrusted to him badly and derelict of duty and brought everything in great confusion". She then claims that Pfeiffer spent four years under arrest while the commission was investigating, then in 1758 when the "Berliner Kriminal Senat" sent a confirming judgment he got condemned to a further two years imprisonment, and then banished from Prussia. This is at a time when all the online dictionaries say he had already left Prussia and was working elsewhere. This made me wonder for a while whether in fact there were two Pfeiffers and I had the wrong man all the while, but no, in a short "who died when" at the end of the opening section she grudgingly admits that after "the judgment was spoken about him in Prussia", Pfeiffer "occupied himself practically and as a writer with the Cameralwissenschaften" and died a professor in Mainz, so, it is indeed supposed to be the same guy from the dictionaries. (She does not, however, mention what he was writing about, or that his post Prussia CV was that of a liberal innovator; he's a 100% villain in her book.) Since she quotes dated documents from the archives like the cabinet order, I'm still at a loss as to where the date divergence from all the dictionaries comes from.
Now, Fredersdorf. Re: his particular involvement in the entire affair, I'll get to what she quotes from letters and documents from, and what conclusion she drwas. Where she gets speculative is concluding that the lack of Fritz letters to Fredersdorf after 1956 is because of Kiekemal, saying that Fritz dismissing him (as opposed to Fredersdorf retiring) on April 9th 1757, and saying Fredersdorf died of grief for his lost honor (in January 1758). (She seems to be the source for this bit in wiki.) I checked her bibliography, and on Fredersdorf, she solely has Fontane's Wanderungen, which contains nothing of the sort, it just has the story which she also has that supposedly Fredesdorf wanted to be buried with his cartridge bag from his Küstrin uniform (Fontane was a believer in the "they met at Küstrin" variant), and Voltaire's memoirs (she quotes some of his comments on Fredersdorf). Considering I've seen no other source for "died in grief for his lost honor", I'm now tempted to go with the idea that this was her original conclusion (because Fredersdorf's death followed relatively soon after his dismissal/retirement) which was subsequently accepted as fact. She does not mention his various illnesses and doesn't appear to know he got consulted by his successor re: Glasow when that affair went down in the spring and summer of 1757.
However, the woman really did solid research re: the whole settlement story. I don't necessarily always agree with her conclusions, but here's what she can document, and how the story went in her account:
- Johann Friedrich Pfeiffer from Köpenick appointed as Comissioner in 1748. In the same year, he clashes with the Bock family from which he has rented a dairy, as he denounces one of the Bocks for illegally keeping 100 sheep more than declared to the administration; thereafter, the Bock family hates on Pfeiffer and refers to him only as "Secretary Informer Pfeiffer"
- Pfeiffer, who is in charge of colonisation projects (that's what he's the commissioner for as of that year, fitting with his life long speciality), after viewing the ca. 32 hectar land around the Müggelsee decides they're fit for colonisation and asks Bock whether he'd sell to the sate
- Bock, hating on Pfeiffer for the sheep matter, see above, says "Hell no!"
- Pfeiffer ends his renting the dairy from Bock's brother, and in August 1750 suggests the area as suitable for 2 to 3 foreign colonists; he also approaches Fredersdorf with the idea
- in December 1750, Fritz invites Pfeiffer to make a personal report to him at Potsdam
- In a letter by Präsident von Gröben (a relation to the lieutenant of FRitz' youth?) from February 22 1751, Commissioner Pfeiffer gets instructed to officially assess the area in terms of whether it can be settled by 2 - 3 foreign farming families
- in the original plan, each farmer is supposed to get a certain amount of land, and can own up to 100 sheep plus 6 - 10 cows. After six tax free years (to attract settlers and to get the whole thing going) he's supposed to pay rent and tax thereafter
- however, since the commission doesn't have money to finance building farms and providing animals etc. for the farmers in the first place, there should be a private entrepeneur involved who will finance the entire business at first and gets a share from the profits from the farmers till his original investment is covered, plus interest
- as said entrepeneur, Commissioner Pfeiffer suggests Colonel Johann Ferdinand von Trachenberg, who in turn provides Pfeiffer with a document enabling Pfeiffer to negotiate a contract on his behalf; however, this document isn't signed by Trachenberg but by Fredersdorf; it gets accepted by the Köpenick city administration
- The Bocks are pissed off and still don't want to give up the land; however, they themselves have rented it from the state, and their contract is about to run out; they petition to have it prolonged
- in May 1751, the document empowering Pfeiffer on Trachenberg's behalf is questioned because Fredersdorf has signed it, not Trachenberg. Trachenberg himself then shows ups and personally delivers the declaration demanded to the commission
- on July 6th 1751, the ministry responsible for land says that the contract to the Bocks has run out, and the Kiekemal territory can now be used to colonisation; however, Trachenberg hasn't yet delivered the money
- Fredersdorf then provides 4 000 Reichstaler from his personal money; because of her later involvement, Emmi Wegfraß speculates the money may alternatively have come from Frau von Marschall, widow of the late Samuel von Marschall, and was loaned to Fredersdorf in turn, but if so, there aren't any document proving this
- after Fredersdorf has provided the money, the plans can now get signed off, and advertisement to potential settlers starts
- At the start of 1752, the Bocks sell their brewery to Trachenberg; they later will say they were pressured into it. This is the brewery the settlers will later get their beer from. As you might recall, Fredersdorf among other things was invested in breweries.
- on December 24 1751, Trachenberg via Pfeiffer makes the offer to provide money for the settlement of six more families if there is additional land; this gets greenlighted by Fritz
- on July 7th 1752, Colonel von Trachenberg transfers all his claims on the Bock property plus the Kiekenmal land to Fredersdorf; this contract is co-signed by the Köpenick administration
- in August 1752, the chamber for agriculture confirms the transfer
- on December 21st 1752, a cousin of Pfeiffer's buys additional land at the Müggelsee next to the colonisation land so far, which thus further expands
- on January 17th 1753, Fredersdorf writes to Frau von Marschall to offer her the Kiekemal land. He says there will three full time farmers to work on the land as leaseholders
- Frau von Marschall asks whether there will be tax and rent free years; Fredersdorf replies that since hte farmers will get cattle, houses, and land provided to them right from the beginning, there will not be tax and rent free years; this is of course a direct contrast to the original intention
(Wegfraß doesn't say this, but I do: since Fredersdorf at this point has provided the money for most of the aquisitions and the land, it could be argued he's entitled to change the rules, but it IS a significant change from how the whole project started)
- on March 27th, 1753, Fredersdorf signs a contract with Frau von Marschall, selling her the Kiekemal territory along with all the houses built so far as well as the cattle bought (6 oxes, 5 cows, one bull, 160 sheep with ca. 60 lambs) and farming equipment, for 4 000 Reichstaler (i.e. his original investment)
- on June 24th 1753, the three colonist families from Würtemberg arrive; however, they don't have a written contract, and the news that a) the land they're supposed to settle on is owned by Frau von Marschall, and b) Frau von Marschall wants to charge interest immediately instead of waiting for 6 years, which means essentially they'll work for her, not themselves, is a big shock
- cue a year of clashes between the three farmer families and Frau von Marschall, ending in the farmers refusing to work
- on June 28th 1754 Commissioner Ockel is supposed to check out the situation and complaints, and seems to blame the settlers more than Frau von Marschall, since the settlers he says let horses starve despite Frau von Marschall having given each 10 Reichstaler to help them over the winter
- Frau von Marschall writes indignant letters to the commission, calling the settlers lazy; Emmi Wegfrass says this is unfair (since settlers are refusing to work for her is their only way to fight against being exploited, given they were promised tax and rent free years they now don't get), but speculates she might vent her personal misery on them, since of her seven children, all but two are dead, one son is in debt and shocks his mother by leaving the country and becoming a Catholic, the other also is into gambling and acquiring debts
- the mulberry trees and silk spinning houses which Pfeiffer was supposed to plant and build, respectively, haven't yet been done or finished
- on November 23rd, 1754, Colonel von Ingersleben (tea cup guy or a relation?) reports to the King that Pfeiffer has mishandled the situation and has personally enriched himself
- on November 25th, 1754, Pfeiffer gets arrested under this charge; a commission is supposed to investigate the actual state of things at Kiekemal
- Spring 1755: Fritz dismisses his valet Anderson without a pension and confiscates Anderson's correspondence with Pfeiffer; Anderson had been given the estate Philippsthal by Pfeiffer
- August 1755: Fredersdorf writes a letter to Frau von Marschall, saying he's heard the commission is supposed to investigate the following complaints:
1) The Colonists complain that they don't get the tax- and rent free years promised and that instead their rye harvest has been confiscated
2) The local administration hasn't received the 500 Reichstaler bail
3) The beer comes from Dahlwitz instead of Köpenick
4) The sheep farming is conducted in Dahlwitz and not by the colonists
5) the House for spinning hasn't been finished yet despite the wood having been provided
He advises her to come to terms with the Köpenick administration and the farmers, and says he won't interfere any further, he's done with the entire business.
To repeat the key charge as Fahlenkamp phrases it: On April 9th 1757, Fredersdorf gets dismissed from his office as Chamberlain for, as it is said, dishonesty together with the Kriegs and Domänenrat Johann Pfeiffer when buying Kiekemal near Mahlsdorf. Kiekemal was then an empty dispopulated era in the south east of Berlin. The King had provided money for the resettling of this era, which however ended up being pilfered by the director of the Ressettling Commmission of the Kürmärkische Kammer, Johann Friedrich Pfeiffer (1717 - 1787) into his own pockets, under the cooperation of Frederdorf. That his closest confidant Fredersdorf took part in this must have been a heavy blow to Friedrich. The whole thing - an affair that dragged on for years - was discovered when several of the colonists complained, who had been lured from Würtemburg to Brandenburg with the promise of land and no taxes and had ended up being stuck in miserable huts for which they had to pay rent.
Emmi Wegfraß goes into way more detail about this, to which I'll get in a moment. First, something that remains completely unresolved is the contradiction which I spotted when googling Johann Friedrich Pfeiffer after reading Fahlenkamp's book, which starts with the dates, and this is even more puzzling in Wegfraß' book, and ends with what's said about the conclusion. Every biographical entry online I found on Pfeiffer says he was commissioner until 1750, and that he then left Prussia after the "unjustified" (wiki) charge. This article mentions a short stint in prison while the trial was ongoing but also says his name was cleared and that the trial ended in his favour, that he was "freigesprochen" (declared innocent). Emmy Wegfraß, by contrast, says that the commission in charge of investigating the entire affair delivered their report to Fritz on March 31st 1756, declaring that Pfeiffer was guilty, which results in Fritz ordering Pfeiffer's possessions were to be liquidated to compensate for the damage. She also quotes a cabinet order from June 4th 1756 by Fritz in which it says "Pfeiffer has executed the commission entrusted to him badly and derelict of duty and brought everything in great confusion". She then claims that Pfeiffer spent four years under arrest while the commission was investigating, then in 1758 when the "Berliner Kriminal Senat" sent a confirming judgment he got condemned to a further two years imprisonment, and then banished from Prussia. This is at a time when all the online dictionaries say he had already left Prussia and was working elsewhere. This made me wonder for a while whether in fact there were two Pfeiffers and I had the wrong man all the while, but no, in a short "who died when" at the end of the opening section she grudgingly admits that after "the judgment was spoken about him in Prussia", Pfeiffer "occupied himself practically and as a writer with the Cameralwissenschaften" and died a professor in Mainz, so, it is indeed supposed to be the same guy from the dictionaries. (She does not, however, mention what he was writing about, or that his post Prussia CV was that of a liberal innovator; he's a 100% villain in her book.) Since she quotes dated documents from the archives like the cabinet order, I'm still at a loss as to where the date divergence from all the dictionaries comes from.
Now, Fredersdorf. Re: his particular involvement in the entire affair, I'll get to what she quotes from letters and documents from, and what conclusion she drwas. Where she gets speculative is concluding that the lack of Fritz letters to Fredersdorf after 1956 is because of Kiekemal, saying that Fritz dismissing him (as opposed to Fredersdorf retiring) on April 9th 1757, and saying Fredersdorf died of grief for his lost honor (in January 1758). (She seems to be the source for this bit in wiki.) I checked her bibliography, and on Fredersdorf, she solely has Fontane's Wanderungen, which contains nothing of the sort, it just has the story which she also has that supposedly Fredesdorf wanted to be buried with his cartridge bag from his Küstrin uniform (Fontane was a believer in the "they met at Küstrin" variant), and Voltaire's memoirs (she quotes some of his comments on Fredersdorf). Considering I've seen no other source for "died in grief for his lost honor", I'm now tempted to go with the idea that this was her original conclusion (because Fredersdorf's death followed relatively soon after his dismissal/retirement) which was subsequently accepted as fact. She does not mention his various illnesses and doesn't appear to know he got consulted by his successor re: Glasow when that affair went down in the spring and summer of 1757.
However, the woman really did solid research re: the whole settlement story. I don't necessarily always agree with her conclusions, but here's what she can document, and how the story went in her account:
- Johann Friedrich Pfeiffer from Köpenick appointed as Comissioner in 1748. In the same year, he clashes with the Bock family from which he has rented a dairy, as he denounces one of the Bocks for illegally keeping 100 sheep more than declared to the administration; thereafter, the Bock family hates on Pfeiffer and refers to him only as "Secretary Informer Pfeiffer"
- Pfeiffer, who is in charge of colonisation projects (that's what he's the commissioner for as of that year, fitting with his life long speciality), after viewing the ca. 32 hectar land around the Müggelsee decides they're fit for colonisation and asks Bock whether he'd sell to the sate
- Bock, hating on Pfeiffer for the sheep matter, see above, says "Hell no!"
- Pfeiffer ends his renting the dairy from Bock's brother, and in August 1750 suggests the area as suitable for 2 to 3 foreign colonists; he also approaches Fredersdorf with the idea
- in December 1750, Fritz invites Pfeiffer to make a personal report to him at Potsdam
- In a letter by Präsident von Gröben (a relation to the lieutenant of FRitz' youth?) from February 22 1751, Commissioner Pfeiffer gets instructed to officially assess the area in terms of whether it can be settled by 2 - 3 foreign farming families
- in the original plan, each farmer is supposed to get a certain amount of land, and can own up to 100 sheep plus 6 - 10 cows. After six tax free years (to attract settlers and to get the whole thing going) he's supposed to pay rent and tax thereafter
- however, since the commission doesn't have money to finance building farms and providing animals etc. for the farmers in the first place, there should be a private entrepeneur involved who will finance the entire business at first and gets a share from the profits from the farmers till his original investment is covered, plus interest
- as said entrepeneur, Commissioner Pfeiffer suggests Colonel Johann Ferdinand von Trachenberg, who in turn provides Pfeiffer with a document enabling Pfeiffer to negotiate a contract on his behalf; however, this document isn't signed by Trachenberg but by Fredersdorf; it gets accepted by the Köpenick city administration
- The Bocks are pissed off and still don't want to give up the land; however, they themselves have rented it from the state, and their contract is about to run out; they petition to have it prolonged
- in May 1751, the document empowering Pfeiffer on Trachenberg's behalf is questioned because Fredersdorf has signed it, not Trachenberg. Trachenberg himself then shows ups and personally delivers the declaration demanded to the commission
- on July 6th 1751, the ministry responsible for land says that the contract to the Bocks has run out, and the Kiekemal territory can now be used to colonisation; however, Trachenberg hasn't yet delivered the money
- Fredersdorf then provides 4 000 Reichstaler from his personal money; because of her later involvement, Emmi Wegfraß speculates the money may alternatively have come from Frau von Marschall, widow of the late Samuel von Marschall, and was loaned to Fredersdorf in turn, but if so, there aren't any document proving this
- after Fredersdorf has provided the money, the plans can now get signed off, and advertisement to potential settlers starts
- At the start of 1752, the Bocks sell their brewery to Trachenberg; they later will say they were pressured into it. This is the brewery the settlers will later get their beer from. As you might recall, Fredersdorf among other things was invested in breweries.
- on December 24 1751, Trachenberg via Pfeiffer makes the offer to provide money for the settlement of six more families if there is additional land; this gets greenlighted by Fritz
- on July 7th 1752, Colonel von Trachenberg transfers all his claims on the Bock property plus the Kiekenmal land to Fredersdorf; this contract is co-signed by the Köpenick administration
- in August 1752, the chamber for agriculture confirms the transfer
- on December 21st 1752, a cousin of Pfeiffer's buys additional land at the Müggelsee next to the colonisation land so far, which thus further expands
- on January 17th 1753, Fredersdorf writes to Frau von Marschall to offer her the Kiekemal land. He says there will three full time farmers to work on the land as leaseholders
- Frau von Marschall asks whether there will be tax and rent free years; Fredersdorf replies that since hte farmers will get cattle, houses, and land provided to them right from the beginning, there will not be tax and rent free years; this is of course a direct contrast to the original intention
(Wegfraß doesn't say this, but I do: since Fredersdorf at this point has provided the money for most of the aquisitions and the land, it could be argued he's entitled to change the rules, but it IS a significant change from how the whole project started)
- on March 27th, 1753, Fredersdorf signs a contract with Frau von Marschall, selling her the Kiekemal territory along with all the houses built so far as well as the cattle bought (6 oxes, 5 cows, one bull, 160 sheep with ca. 60 lambs) and farming equipment, for 4 000 Reichstaler (i.e. his original investment)
- on June 24th 1753, the three colonist families from Würtemberg arrive; however, they don't have a written contract, and the news that a) the land they're supposed to settle on is owned by Frau von Marschall, and b) Frau von Marschall wants to charge interest immediately instead of waiting for 6 years, which means essentially they'll work for her, not themselves, is a big shock
- cue a year of clashes between the three farmer families and Frau von Marschall, ending in the farmers refusing to work
- on June 28th 1754 Commissioner Ockel is supposed to check out the situation and complaints, and seems to blame the settlers more than Frau von Marschall, since the settlers he says let horses starve despite Frau von Marschall having given each 10 Reichstaler to help them over the winter
- Frau von Marschall writes indignant letters to the commission, calling the settlers lazy; Emmi Wegfrass says this is unfair (since settlers are refusing to work for her is their only way to fight against being exploited, given they were promised tax and rent free years they now don't get), but speculates she might vent her personal misery on them, since of her seven children, all but two are dead, one son is in debt and shocks his mother by leaving the country and becoming a Catholic, the other also is into gambling and acquiring debts
- the mulberry trees and silk spinning houses which Pfeiffer was supposed to plant and build, respectively, haven't yet been done or finished
- on November 23rd, 1754, Colonel von Ingersleben (tea cup guy or a relation?) reports to the King that Pfeiffer has mishandled the situation and has personally enriched himself
- on November 25th, 1754, Pfeiffer gets arrested under this charge; a commission is supposed to investigate the actual state of things at Kiekemal
- Spring 1755: Fritz dismisses his valet Anderson without a pension and confiscates Anderson's correspondence with Pfeiffer; Anderson had been given the estate Philippsthal by Pfeiffer
- August 1755: Fredersdorf writes a letter to Frau von Marschall, saying he's heard the commission is supposed to investigate the following complaints:
1) The Colonists complain that they don't get the tax- and rent free years promised and that instead their rye harvest has been confiscated
2) The local administration hasn't received the 500 Reichstaler bail
3) The beer comes from Dahlwitz instead of Köpenick
4) The sheep farming is conducted in Dahlwitz and not by the colonists
5) the House for spinning hasn't been finished yet despite the wood having been provided
He advises her to come to terms with the Köpenick administration and the farmers, and says he won't interfere any further, he's done with the entire business.
Edited 2021-09-03 17:36 (UTC)
On December 11th 1755, the commission talks to the three farmers without Frau von Marschall (whereas earlier, they'd talked to her but not them). It is noted down the colonists do not have a written contract to prove their entitlement to the tax- and rent free years, but they say they can't continue as it is and will leave again unless the rent is lowered, they get paid more for their work, and one of them gets ten Reichstaler for the cow which Frau von Marschall had confiscated when he didn't want to pay interest. Frau von Marschall gets a copy of the protocol on December 14th, and she's asked for a copy of her contract with Fredersdorf re: the sale of the property.
Emmy Wegfraß says that since the contract proves the changed conditions (no tax free years, higher interest) as opposed to the original plan, the guilt of Fredersdorf is proven, and clearly Fritz' letters stop because of this.
On March 31st, 1756, the investigating commission sends its concluding report to Fritz. Now here Emmy Wegfraß writes: "Johann Pfeiffer must admit he has taken 8061 Reichstaler 3 Groschen from the King's money" - which I found confusing since the money for the original investment into Kiekemal hadn't come from the state, as she herself said, but presumably this refers to Pfeiffer taking that much salary and writing off expenses - and broken broken his oath not to buy any of the colonist's stuff (when his cousin bought lands next to the Müggelsee) .
And that's it in terms of Fredersdorf's involvement. I already remarked on the inconsistency of her dates vs the dates of Pfeiffer's CV from the encyclopedias, and most of all the contradiction between the encyclopedias reporting thath he was found innocent and Wegfraß saying the commission(s) found him guilty. Like I said, as opposed to all the actual Kiekemal matter, which she quotes documents for, her conclusion that Fredersdorf got dismissed a year later because of this and died then out of grief for his lost honor comes without quotes and is her own interpretation. (She also thinks that coming after Voltaire's financial shady dealings, it no doubt heightened Fritz' cynicism about humanity to find himself thus let down by yet another friend.)
So, what do we make out of all this? The whole Trachenberg - Fredersdorf - Marschall transfers do look pre arranged and shady, but if Fredersdorf sold the lands to Frau von Marschall for the same sum he originally provided, then it looks to me that the one personal profit he made out of this was via the brewery and making the colonists buy his beer. That he told Frau von Marschall she wouldn't have to give them rent- and tax-free years was dastardly towards the colonists, but not profitable to him personally, as he no longer owned the lands in question by the time the colonists started to work on them. There's also far more documented Fredersdorf than Pfeiffer stuff, so I'm surprised she makes Pfeiffer her main villain and speculates he did all of this because he wanted to build himself a manor at the Müggelsee (he didn't) to spite the Bock family originally.
Your take?
Emmy Wegfraß says that since the contract proves the changed conditions (no tax free years, higher interest) as opposed to the original plan, the guilt of Fredersdorf is proven, and clearly Fritz' letters stop because of this.
On March 31st, 1756, the investigating commission sends its concluding report to Fritz. Now here Emmy Wegfraß writes: "Johann Pfeiffer must admit he has taken 8061 Reichstaler 3 Groschen from the King's money" - which I found confusing since the money for the original investment into Kiekemal hadn't come from the state, as she herself said, but presumably this refers to Pfeiffer taking that much salary and writing off expenses - and broken broken his oath not to buy any of the colonist's stuff (when his cousin bought lands next to the Müggelsee) .
And that's it in terms of Fredersdorf's involvement. I already remarked on the inconsistency of her dates vs the dates of Pfeiffer's CV from the encyclopedias, and most of all the contradiction between the encyclopedias reporting thath he was found innocent and Wegfraß saying the commission(s) found him guilty. Like I said, as opposed to all the actual Kiekemal matter, which she quotes documents for, her conclusion that Fredersdorf got dismissed a year later because of this and died then out of grief for his lost honor comes without quotes and is her own interpretation. (She also thinks that coming after Voltaire's financial shady dealings, it no doubt heightened Fritz' cynicism about humanity to find himself thus let down by yet another friend.)
So, what do we make out of all this? The whole Trachenberg - Fredersdorf - Marschall transfers do look pre arranged and shady, but if Fredersdorf sold the lands to Frau von Marschall for the same sum he originally provided, then it looks to me that the one personal profit he made out of this was via the brewery and making the colonists buy his beer. That he told Frau von Marschall she wouldn't have to give them rent- and tax-free years was dastardly towards the colonists, but not profitable to him personally, as he no longer owned the lands in question by the time the colonists started to work on them. There's also far more documented Fredersdorf than Pfeiffer stuff, so I'm surprised she makes Pfeiffer her main villain and speculates he did all of this because he wanted to build himself a manor at the Müggelsee (he didn't) to spite the Bock family originally.
Your take?
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