Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30

[cahn]

In which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)

Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:

The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.

Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.

The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P

Comments

Aunt Melusine, Cousin Petronella

[mildred_of_midgard]

Completely unrelated to what I've been describing to my partner as the Book of Wrongness in my rants, the Kindle sample of the George I book has something I've been looking for for a while now: more detail on Katte's Aunt Melusine, mistress to G1. Not a lot is known about her, apparently. But I got more than is in Wikipedia.

First, I discovered in the detailed "how I rendered their names" section (the one that says "Braunschweig" is too foreign :P) that not only did Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg go by her second name, so did her daughter Petronella Melusine. (I admit, I was very confused by Goldstone calling the older Melusine "Ermengarde", and not just because of the Ehrengard/Ermengarde!)

So the woman who had a fling with Katte whom we've been calling Petronella actually went by Melusine too, just to make it that much harder for writers of fiction. :P [ETA: This is why I was going to follow everyone else's lead in fix-it fic and call her Petronella, but now I'm going to have a harder time doing that. Hypothetically. In the AU where I actually finish it. :P]

The three daughters were not only never recognized by G1, Hatton is very unsure whether they even ever knew who their parents were. They were, remember, passed off as the daughters of Melusine's sisters' and she was passed off as their aunt. Which is why Hervey is able to think that one of them is the mistress rather than the illegitimate kin of G1, G2, and Fritz of Wales.

Hatton says there's some evidence the daughters knew they were the children of G1 and Melusine, but some counterevidence (but that could just be them observing the proprieties).

That was news to me! I thought since Wikipedia lists them as the children of G1 and Melusine that it was common knowledge to contemporaries, but apparently this was a deduction by "recent" (book published in 1978) century scholars based on documentary evidence, like Melusine's will.

As to why the will doesn't say they're her nieces (but also doesn't say they're her daughters, again, this is a deduction), Hatton speculates:

We know that the duchess of Kendal (the title by which Melusine was known in England after 1719) was a regular churchgoer, at least in her later years, and the phraseology of the religious preamble to the will is less stereotyped than those usually encountered. It would seem, therefore, that the solemnity of the occasion made it impossible for her to perpetuate the lie which had been forced upon her by circumstances.

As to why G1 never acknowledged them, she gives these speculative reasons:

1. When he was a young man, he fathered an illegitimate child. His parents, Ernst August and Sophia, came down on him hard and said he could have mistresses, but no scandals. They had an electorate to win! So after this, no more acknowledged illegitimate children.

2. The first two were born before the divorce, which meant there would have been a scandal.

3. After the divorce (this is G1 placing SD's mother SD of Celle under house arrest, cahn, and the disappearance of her lover), the divorce itself was a big scandal that endangered the quest to get recognition for the electoral status of Hanover, so no acknowledging any children that would have raked up the divorce scandal again.

Character portraits of Melusine and her daughters, for those who might want to write fic:

[Melusine] was pliant and patient, a welcome relief to George from his wife's petulant and stormy personality. She tried to please and to soothe, she shared his interest in music and the theatre, she studied him and his moods, and learnt to manage him. That she was useful to George after 1714 is clear from the way she took the initiative in making friends with English ladies known to have influence with their husbands in high positions, and in the manner in which he permitted her to become a kind of sounding-board for ministers in matters where they were reluctant to approach him directly. Her devotion to George was never doubted by his family, or by hers.

It is implied in the letters of George's mother and youngest brother and in those of Melusine's eldest brother; it is made explicit in the section which George's Prussian granddaughter, Wilhelmine, devoted in her memoirs to the lady she was brought up to accept as her grandfather's morganatic wife.54 Wilhelmine's characterization of Melusine as a person ‘without either vices or virtues’ must of necessity be second-hand, derived from her mother – George's daughter – who often visited Hanover and was friendly with Melusine (using her at times, like the British ministers, to figure out the best way to broach a subject with the king-elector), and from the many courtiers, men and women, who travelled between Hanover and Berlin on various missions. It is in any case curiously incomplete.

Melusine's kind disposition is not in doubt. The Gräfin zu Schaumburg-Lippe, who knew her well both in Hanover and in England, praised her concern ‘to do all the good she can’, but Melusine was not as meek and mild as both descriptions might seem to imply. She was intelligent and well-educated, though clearly not as clever as either George's mother or sister. Her French spelling was near perfect, far better than that of George's daughter-in-law, Caroline, and she wrote well also in English. She knew how to sum up people and amused George by cleverly cut paper figures of ministers and others at court which she sometimes exaggerated to the point of caricature. She was, or became with experience, shrewd, and her letters are not without their pointed remarks when she deemed this necessary. In 1720 she let Aislabie know, if politely, that she felt he had mismanaged her South Sea Company stock; and in 1730 she asked Robert Walpole, somewhat tartly, to transfer to her, since she ‘had need of it’, the whole of the sum which had been left in trust with him on her behalf by the late king.

The daughters:

Three daughters were born of their union, [Anna] Louise in 1692, [Petronella] Melusine, who like her mother always used her second baptismal name, in 1693, and [Margarethe] Gertrud, known in the family as Trudchen or Trutjen, in 1701 – beautiful enough to earn the soubriquet die scköne Gertrud among Hanoverian courtiers in England. The eldest daughter was also reckoned a great beauty; as for the middle girl, our sources tell us that she was good-looking and that she was spirited enough to speak her mind to George on issues, even political ones, where she disagreed with him. That they formed part of George's close family circle even before all three came to England with Melusine is clear from the letters which George's youngest brother, Ernst August, wrote to a friend between 1703 and 1726. From 1707 onwards he makes a number of references to them: Louise goes to the opera with Melusine; young Melusine becomes a Hoffräulein with the dowager electress; Trutjen at the age of six reads the newspaper to George at Pyrmont with the gravity of an adult, at twelve she – always George's favourite – is permitted to join his hunting-party at Göhrde, she is a real tomboy, hoping to be a soldier when she grows up.

And that's what I've got from the Kindle sample. I'll probably get the book at some point, but I've got a few others to get through first.

Oh, it does have a completely different, more George-exonerating and SD-blaming take on how that went down than is usual (even according to to the author, who says that everyone, starting with contemporaries, blamed George). Now, according to me, you shouldn't be able to lock up your wife for adultery, and especially if you're committing it yourself, omg. But there are some actual differences of fact that, if true, are interesting, and I will share them when I have time.

Oh, totally unrelated, did we discuss the claim that the story that William III considered adopting FW was totally an unfounded legend? I feel like I ran across this in a book that I can no longer remember which one it was, and I didn't bring it up, but maybe I read it here and that's where I'm remembering it from?

Re: Aunt Melusine, Cousin Petronella

[selenak]

re: Petronella: I can se why Michael Roes still picked this name to call her buy, though. It does make a novelist's life easier not to call two important characters by the same first name in an era where so many royals insist on having the same first name anyway. I mean, we're calling Mina Mina for just that reason, given the plethora of Wilhelmines in that century.

They had an electorate to win! So after this, no more acknowledged illegitimate children.

There's also the part where his future wife, SD the older, daughter of Ernst August's brother Georg Wilhelm who'd given Sophie a written promise not to marry, started out as an illegitimate child, only to be legitimized and become her father's heir later. So his parents would have been very touchy on the whole issue.


Thank you for all these quotes! Really interesting, since most other sources I've read don't include anything about what the daughters were like, and Wilhelmine's memoirs just a few terse remarks like the one quoted, which, as has been pointed out, were second hand from SD the younger.


Oh, it does have a completely different, more George-exonerating and SD-blaming take on how that went down than is usual (even according to to the author, who says that everyone, starting with contemporaries, blamed George)

Not Georg von Schnath in his introduction to Sophie's correspondance with the Hohenzollern. :) Remember, he thought that while G1 was a cold fish to both wife and legitimate offspring (he does make that legitimate qualification, so must have been aware relations were way better with Melusine's daughters), SD was to blame for her reckless adultery and undutifully wanting to run away with the guy. However, anyone else I've read definitely sees SD of Celle as the Princess Diana of popular feeling of her day: marrying into a family of cold royals who all look down on her, with a husband who has his mistress from day 1 and does not love her at all, with the added indignity that when it all goes down in flames, they kill the lover, imprison her and keep her dowry.


ETA: Oh, and William III: otoh, the contemporary source I've seen claiming he had this intention was Morgenstern, who wasn't around to witness it and only could know about it from hearsay. Otoh, I once thought Morgenstern was wrong about young FW wanting to marry Caroline and being hurt of "losing" her for that reason, and then it turns out that FW did want to marry Caroline and we have it in writing through the Sophie and F1 letters which Morgenstern couldn't have known about. So presumably FW at the tobacco parliament of the later 1730s might indeed have grumbled about both Caroline and how he had wanted to become William's heir and William wanted to do it, too, for a while, just as Morgenstern claimed he did.

Re: Aunt Melusine, Cousin Petronella

[mildred_of_midgard]

re: Petronella: I can se why Michael Roes still picked this name to call her buy, though. It does make a novelist's life easier not to call two important characters by the same first name in an era where so many royals insist on having the same first name anyway.

I agree, it's obvious why people do it! I might have to do it anyway, but some part of me will know. :P

Really interesting, since most other sources I've read don't include anything about what the daughters were like, and Wilhelmine's memoirs just a few terse remarks like the one quoted, which, as has been pointed out, were second hand from SD the younger.

Exactly! I was hoping this book would have more details, and I was delighted that they were in the free sample.

I was especially shocked to realize that the daughters might not have known their parentage. It extremely changes the picture I had, and means if Katte shows up in England and runs into his aunt Melusine and old fling Petronella, I might not want to have the parentage be casual knowledge.