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
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 )