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!
For completeness sake: Frexit Letter in March, with two replies from Fritz in March (where he says that apparently, one of the Marwitzes at Bayreuth tried to set up a marriage for Pöllnitz, which fell through) and April (see below) / retraction letter in July, with a reply from Fritz where he installs the condition that, among other things, Pöllnitz isn't allowed to talk to foreign envoys about things that happened at the King's table anymore.
Thank you for the details! And the satirical job reference is hilarious.
Obvious question is obvious: did he expect Pöllnitz to obey?
I have to point out that Voltaire was also made to sign an agreement not to satirize members of Fritz's court, and we don't know what on earth Fritz expected there! :P
Dorothée = Dorothea Sophie (WHY? she wasn't even from Hanover! :P
It's not just Hanover! Katte's mom was Dorothea Sophia von Wartensleben!
Re: the poisoning suspicion - independent of whether or not it is true, it's definitely not just Pöllnitz who brought it up...This comes up, among other things, when Fritz is interrogated after the escape attempt and points to the precedence of Granddad as crown prince getting the hell out of Prussia. (To which FW said it had been totally different since his father had been afraid of poison as far as I recall.)
When felis mentioned the poisoning story, I remembered that you'd told us on more than one occasion that F1 had accused his stepmother of poison and fled, but the interrogation protocols were the only primary source I could name, and that's a couple generations later. Do you know of more contemporary sources, Selena?
Yeah, terrible medicine and court rumour mills seem like a perfect combination for fostering poisoning theories...
It's not just Hanover! Katte's mom was Dorothea Sophia von Wartensleben!
But Katte's mom was the daughter of a chief courtier of F1's, and thus presumably could have been named after any of the Hannover Sophies. F1's stepmom has no excuse!
Btw, Original Sophie tells us how that name came to pass in her snarky memoirs. You may recall that she was the twelfth child of the Winter Queen. (And would be the youngest surviving child). Her brothers' names for the most part read like a check list of whoever Elizabeth Stuart would help her (hence, for example, a Gustavus Adolphus among them) in the 30 Years War and her exile. The girls were given the usual Stuart family names. But by the time No.12 arrived, they had simply run out of names and supposedly did a lottery of sorts with the few ladies in waiting asked to write a name on a bit of paper. Presto, Sophia/Sophie, first of her name in either family (i.e. the Stuarts and the Palatine Wittelsbachs). But not the last by far. :)
I have to point out that Voltaire was also made to sign an agreement not to satirize members of Fritz's court, and we don't know what on earth Fritz expected there! :P
Verily. I mean. Presumably people who never met Voltaire and hadn't read a word of his writing would have expected him to stick to that agreement, but...
Do you know of more contemporary sources, Selena?
Alas Sophie's memoirs end before that bit of scandal (which indirectly would lead to her becoming F1's mother-in-law since it was to Hannover he fled), and the Schnath-edited letters between Sophie and Team Hohenzollern start afterwards. The letter from F1 to Sophie I've repeatedly quoted doesn't mention poison, it just illustrates he had a bad relationship with his stepmother. However, his German wiki entry details the poison accusation story at length and doesn't reference Pöllnitz as source; the footnotes are all to modern biographies, and I guess I'll have to put those on my list, too, to see what they use as source material.
(The German wiki entry also says that right until the 20th century, Fritz' opinion on Granddad was taken as gospel by historians, and only the later 20th century went "hang on, it wasn't that simple".)
Another possibility to check would be Liselotte's letters. Of course she could only provide hearsay, being in France, but presumably the fact future F1 wanted a guarantee in writing he couldn't get killed before returning to Brandenburg would have made waves enough for her to hear about it. However, any edition of the letters is slanted by whatever the editor in question thought would be good for their audience, and the free one on kindle is a 19th century one with an eye on German nationalism and French decadence, so something not flattering to the Hohenzollern clan like that might not have made the cut. I'll check anyway.
Sophie wrote the following to Lieselotte's sister Karoline (June 1687):
Der gutte Courprins bekombt aber ein hauffen böe brif von Dero Herr Vatter, welger I. L. verfluchen wollen, wan sie nicht widerum nach Berlin gehen, welches I. L. gern thun wolten, wan die poudre de succession nicht thar ihm schwang ging undt I. L. schon selber in gefhar tharvon weren gewessen‚ aber doch durch ein hauffen contrepoisen sein errett worden undt sich nun gottlob recht wol befinden.
[ETA: English translation, because that's not exactly easy German: The good electoral prince [?] is getting a lot of angry letters from his father, who wants to execrate him if he doesn't go back to Berlin. Which the prince would like to do if there wasn't succession powder [nice] going around and if he hadn't been in danger himself already, getting rescued through a bunch of antitoxin and feeling well now, thank God.]
See here, page 48, and it looks like there's also a Lieselotte letter on the topic, but not quoted. The book is a dissertation about the Schwedt line and unfortunately, the poisoning chapter has inconvenient gaps in the google preview, but it's clear that the author thinks it's all BS and Dorothea was unfairly judged in general. He also isn't a big fan of F1 or Sophie it seems, but the book might still be worth a look at some point, not least because he seems to have included a lot of unpublished letters from the state archive.
Excellent detecting! (Also, LOL about Sophie's baroque German.) Looking at your link, I also see he thinks the "Pride of the Welfes" (that's House Hannover, cahn) has ruined two Hohenzollern father/son relationships, i.e. Great Elector/F1 and FW/Fritz, which automatically gets my hackles up. Do I think SD and her insistence on the English marriage project is partly to blame for the unfolding disaster that was FW/his oldest two children? Yes, but not nearly as much as FW, and the letters from young SD (both the ones you quoted and the ones I saw in the Sophie correspondence) convinced me she really did try her utmost to be a "good wife" as the era understood it and to help her children with FW before things went beyond dysfunctional and she and FW were at warfare point. And even if she hadn't insisted on the British project, Fritz and his father would still have had a terrible relationship if FW hadn't tried a very different type of parenting. That wasn't the "pride of the Welfs".
As for F1 & the Great Elector, I haven't read a biography of either yet, and the Barbara Beuys covers it from the Sophie(s) angle and hence probably has bias in the other direction, but by the time Sophie met young future F1, he was already an adult married man (to his first wife, the one who died even younger than Sophie Charlotte would). Beuys thinks one reason why F1 took to the Hannover clan even before marrying into it was that he didn't get much affection from Dad (independent from the stepmother question), and given he was son No.3, physically handicapped and was expected to die young through much of his childhood, I wouldn't be surprised if she was right.
Mind you, I'm completely prepared to believe Dorothea the stepmother was innocent of any poisoning. As can be seen from the other examples I listed several replies ago, it really was the go to suspicion and accusation in several cases where today we're as sure as can be no such thing happened, and it was bad medicine and illness instead. But otoh I also can see why people got the suspicion(s) in the first case in several if not all of these situations. Dorothea's children would only have a chance at the Elector title if all of his sons from his previous marriage were dead, and since both the two older ones and the younger brother from the earlier marriage died, leaving only F1, I can see him getting paranoid, especially if he'd had the suspicion that his father would rather have a manlier, healthy successor to begin with. He didn't need his in-laws for that.
BTw, I'm reading a book about Elizabeth Stuart and her daughters, "Daughters of the Winter Queen", and what do you know, as a young guy, the Great Elector romanced Sophie's older sister Louisa! (The one who was a gifted painter, and ended up a Catholic abbess at Maubisson much to her mother's horror. Sophie and little Sophie Charlotte visited her en route to Versailles.) Alas his parent had an eye on money, of which the Winter Stuarts didn't have much. So no young Elector/Louisa match.
Yes, A+ detecting, Holmes! And thank you for the translation, haha, because I was going to ask you for one. I gave it my best shot, and at the end, I was like, "Help." Now that I have the translation, I see what everything is, but on my own I was having to translate into modern German and thence into English, and I was getting about half of it.
Anyone who wants to read a Great Elector and/or F1 bio has my vote!
Btw, Original Sophie tells us how that name came to pass in her snarky memoirs...But by the time No.12 arrived, they had simply run out of names and supposedly did a lottery of sorts with the few ladies in waiting asked to write a name on a bit of paper. Presto, Sophia/Sophie, first of her name in either family (i.e. the Stuarts and the Palatine Wittelsbachs). But not the last by far. :)
Ahhh, cool, I didn't know that. Thank you for sharing!
But by the time No.12 arrived, they had simply run out of names and supposedly did a lottery of sorts with the few ladies in waiting asked to write a name on a bit of paper.
Ha! That's awesome. (Also they should have done that more :P )
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timeasmymeasure
Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-25 05:26 pm (UTC)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!
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-25 06:23 pm (UTC)For completeness sake: Frexit Letter in March, with two replies from Fritz in March (where he says that apparently, one of the Marwitzes at Bayreuth tried to set up a marriage for Pöllnitz, which fell through) and April (see below) / retraction letter in July, with a reply from Fritz where he installs the condition that, among other things, Pöllnitz isn't allowed to talk to foreign envoys about things that happened at the King's table anymore.
Thank you for the details! And the satirical job reference is hilarious.
Obvious question is obvious: did he expect Pöllnitz to obey?
I have to point out that Voltaire was also made to sign an agreement not to satirize members of Fritz's court, and we don't know what on earth Fritz expected there! :P
Dorothée = Dorothea Sophie (WHY? she wasn't even from Hanover! :P
It's not just Hanover! Katte's mom was Dorothea Sophia von Wartensleben!
Re: the poisoning suspicion - independent of whether or not it is true, it's definitely not just Pöllnitz who brought it up...This comes up, among other things, when Fritz is interrogated after the escape attempt and points to the precedence of Granddad as crown prince getting the hell out of Prussia. (To which FW said it had been totally different since his father had been afraid of poison as far as I recall.)
When
Yeah, terrible medicine and court rumour mills seem like a perfect combination for fostering poisoning theories...
Indeed.
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-26 05:24 am (UTC)But Katte's mom was the daughter of a chief courtier of F1's, and thus presumably could have been named after any of the Hannover Sophies. F1's stepmom has no excuse!
Btw, Original Sophie tells us how that name came to pass in her snarky memoirs. You may recall that she was the twelfth child of the Winter Queen. (And would be the youngest surviving child). Her brothers' names for the most part read like a check list of whoever Elizabeth Stuart would help her (hence, for example, a Gustavus Adolphus among them) in the 30 Years War and her exile. The girls were given the usual Stuart family names. But by the time No.12 arrived, they had simply run out of names and supposedly did a lottery of sorts with the few ladies in waiting asked to write a name on a bit of paper. Presto, Sophia/Sophie, first of her name in either family (i.e. the Stuarts and the Palatine Wittelsbachs). But not the last by far. :)
I have to point out that Voltaire was also made to sign an agreement not to satirize members of Fritz's court, and we don't know what on earth Fritz expected there! :P
Verily. I mean. Presumably people who never met Voltaire and hadn't read a word of his writing would have expected him to stick to that agreement, but...
Do you know of more contemporary sources, Selena?
Alas Sophie's memoirs end before that bit of scandal (which indirectly would lead to her becoming F1's mother-in-law since it was to Hannover he fled), and the Schnath-edited letters between Sophie and Team Hohenzollern start afterwards. The letter from F1 to Sophie I've repeatedly quoted doesn't mention poison, it just illustrates he had a bad relationship with his stepmother. However, his German wiki entry details the poison accusation story at length and doesn't reference Pöllnitz as source; the footnotes are all to modern biographies, and I guess I'll have to put those on my list, too, to see what they use as source material.
(The German wiki entry also says that right until the 20th century, Fritz' opinion on Granddad was taken as gospel by historians, and only the later 20th century went "hang on, it wasn't that simple".)
Another possibility to check would be Liselotte's letters. Of course she could only provide hearsay, being in France, but presumably the fact future F1 wanted a guarantee in writing he couldn't get killed before returning to Brandenburg would have made waves enough for her to hear about it. However, any edition of the letters is slanted by whatever the editor in question thought would be good for their audience, and the free one on kindle is a 19th century one with an eye on German nationalism and French decadence, so something not flattering to the Hohenzollern clan like that might not have made the cut. I'll check anyway.
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-26 08:59 am (UTC)Der gutte Courprins bekombt aber ein hauffen böe brif von Dero Herr Vatter, welger I. L. verfluchen wollen, wan sie nicht widerum nach Berlin gehen, welches I. L. gern thun wolten, wan die poudre de succession nicht thar ihm schwang ging undt I. L. schon selber in gefhar tharvon weren gewessen‚ aber doch durch ein hauffen contrepoisen sein errett worden undt sich nun gottlob recht wol befinden.
[ETA: English translation, because that's not exactly easy German: The good electoral prince [?] is getting a lot of angry letters from his father, who wants to execrate him if he doesn't go back to Berlin. Which the prince would like to do if there wasn't succession powder [nice] going around and if he hadn't been in danger himself already, getting rescued through a bunch of antitoxin and feeling well now, thank God.]
See here, page 48, and it looks like there's also a Lieselotte letter on the topic, but not quoted. The book is a dissertation about the Schwedt line and unfortunately, the poisoning chapter has inconvenient gaps in the google preview, but it's clear that the author thinks it's all BS and Dorothea was unfairly judged in general. He also isn't a big fan of F1 or Sophie it seems, but the book might still be worth a look at some point, not least because he seems to have included a lot of unpublished letters from the state archive.
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-26 05:11 pm (UTC)As for F1 & the Great Elector, I haven't read a biography of either yet, and the Barbara Beuys covers it from the Sophie(s) angle and hence probably has bias in the other direction, but by the time Sophie met young future F1, he was already an adult married man (to his first wife, the one who died even younger than Sophie Charlotte would). Beuys thinks one reason why F1 took to the Hannover clan even before marrying into it was that he didn't get much affection from Dad (independent from the stepmother question), and given he was son No.3, physically handicapped and was expected to die young through much of his childhood, I wouldn't be surprised if she was right.
Mind you, I'm completely prepared to believe Dorothea the stepmother was innocent of any poisoning. As can be seen from the other examples I listed several replies ago, it really was the go to suspicion and accusation in several cases where today we're as sure as can be no such thing happened, and it was bad medicine and illness instead. But otoh I also can see why people got the suspicion(s) in the first case in several if not all of these situations. Dorothea's children would only have a chance at the Elector title if all of his sons from his previous marriage were dead, and since both the two older ones and the younger brother from the earlier marriage died, leaving only F1, I can see him getting paranoid, especially if he'd had the suspicion that his father would rather have a manlier, healthy successor to begin with. He didn't need his in-laws for that.
BTw, I'm reading a book about Elizabeth Stuart and her daughters, "Daughters of the Winter Queen", and what do you know, as a young guy, the Great Elector romanced Sophie's older sister Louisa! (The one who was a gifted painter, and ended up a Catholic abbess at Maubisson much to her mother's horror. Sophie and little Sophie Charlotte visited her en route to Versailles.) Alas his parent had an eye on money, of which the Winter Stuarts didn't have much. So no young Elector/Louisa match.
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-26 07:36 pm (UTC)Anyone who wants to read a Great Elector and/or F1 bio has my vote!
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-26 11:02 pm (UTC)ROFL!
Btw, Original Sophie tells us how that name came to pass in her snarky memoirs...But by the time No.12 arrived, they had simply run out of names and supposedly did a lottery of sorts with the few ladies in waiting asked to write a name on a bit of paper. Presto, Sophia/Sophie, first of her name in either family (i.e. the Stuarts and the Palatine Wittelsbachs). But not the last by far. :)
Ahhh, cool, I didn't know that. Thank you for sharing!
Re: Pöllnitz: Secret Keeper?
Date: 2021-07-27 05:16 am (UTC)Ha! That's awesome. (Also they should have done that more :P )