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

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.