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Frederick the Great and Other 18th-C Characters, Discussion Post 31
And in this post:
-![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
luzula is going to tell us about the Jacobites and the '45!
-I'm going to finish reading Nancy Goldstone's book about Maria Theresia and (some of) her children Maria Christina, Maria Carolina, and Marie Antoinette, In the Shadow of the Empress, andselenak is going to tell us all the things wrong with the last four chapters (spoiler: in the first twenty chapters there have been many, MANY things wrong)!
-mildred_of_midgard is going to tell us about Charles XII of Sweden and the Great Northern War
(seriously, how did I get so lucky to have all these people Telling Me Things, this is AWESOME)
-oh, and also there will be Yuletide signups :D
-
luzula is going to tell us about the Jacobites and the '45!-I'm going to finish reading Nancy Goldstone's book about Maria Theresia and (some of) her children Maria Christina, Maria Carolina, and Marie Antoinette, In the Shadow of the Empress, and
selenak is going to tell us all the things wrong with the last four chapters (spoiler: in the first twenty chapters there have been many, MANY things wrong)!-
mildred_of_midgard is going to tell us about Charles XII of Sweden and the Great Northern War(seriously, how did I get so lucky to have all these people Telling Me Things, this is AWESOME)
-oh, and also there will be Yuletide signups :D
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
(and love letters summarized read dull "He says her beauty is beyond compare. She expresses regret about not being with him" etc)
Hee. I suppose the summary of most love letters is probably pretty boring. It's too bad there aren't more quotes though!
Horowski's favourite anecdote about Königsmarck is him building a card house to amuse little SD the younger, age 6, and Grumbkow's future wife (also a courtier's kid the same age) at a party, which we know because both he and their confidant lady in waiting mention it to SD the older in a subsequent letter.
Aw, that's super cute <3
As Horowski points out, one reason for this was simply that since G1 had no official Queen (poor SD the older!), and came already endowed with a mistress, this left no influential court office for the female nobles, and the male nobles, too, had to put up with a lot of Hannover folk. Hence the bitching.
Heeee. IDK, I just find it super amusing that the female nobles are all "rats, he already has mistress, no job for us I guess."
(remember, also the complaints about German mistresses were one big reason why future G2 as part of his and Caroline's campaign to make themselves popular with their future suspects and be unlike Dad took an English mistress, despite not having much interest in her.)
Oh right! Oh G2.
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
If you want to get an idea via English translations, here is the English edition Selena mentions, by Wilkins. (The one that Schnath looks down on because the editor was too lazy to travel to Berlin and include the letters Ulrike stole for Fritz.) Königsmarck's first one - while away on campaign - apparently starts with "I am in extremis, and the only thing that can save me is a few lines from your incomparable hand." So, you know. Love letters! The publication is from 1901, rather dramatically presented (Chapter Title: "The Dawn of Passion"), and I have no idea re: trustworthiness of the narration in between the letters, which I have not checked at all, but the author does give you the original Lund letters. (At least as he deciphered them. The chapter before this one talks about the extensive code they used (nicknames and numbers) and gives a few examples of the author's interpretation. (Schnath probably had things to say about that.) But be that as it may, this mostly affects their talk about other people, not so much the back-and-forth about their own feelings.)
ETA: On page 361 is the SD letter that mentions the card houses for the two kids (via another letter she received, because she wasn't there to witness it). Footnote says that this and the next letter by Königsmarck are the only ones that mention little!SD and G2.
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
...Wikipedia references Britannica as saying that they might be forgeries? Britannica references include this English edition (in full: Briefwechsel des Grafen Königsmark und der Prinzessin Sophie Dorothea von Celle, edited by W. F. Palmblad (Leipzig, 1847); A. Köcher, “Die Prinzessin von Ahlden,” in the Historische Zeitschrift (Munich, 1882); and W. H. Wilkins, The Love of an Uncrowned Queen (London, 1900)) -- is this online people being untrustworthy again??
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
(BTW, Fritz and Ulrike had no doubt about that just a measly few decades after the event, either.)
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
Well, to be fair: it was the additional problem to the main problem that there was no queen, which meant no ladies of the bedchamber and other offices in the queen's household traditionally given to the most prominent/valued female nobility. If one of them had been G1's mistress, this would have compensated somewhat, but the mistress job was also already taken. Now, Caroline as the new Princess of Wales made a point of dismissing all her German ladies except one and hiring English ladies for her personal household, which did help to make her popular, but "lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales" wasn't the same as "lady-in-waiting to the Queen", especially if the Prince of Wales and the King, as became rapidly apparant, had a mutual hate-on going on, which meant that if you positioned yourself in the household of the Waleses you ensured you and your family would have no influence on the King for the time being.
(Reminder: Caroline cultivating English ladies by hiring them included hiring Hervey's mother, Lady Bristol, who'd later become massively enstranged from her son, and Sarah Churchill, the late Queen Anne's ex-favourite, Duchess of Marlborough, who hadn't become any softer in her old age and called Caroline "Madame Ansbach", whereupon Caroline nicknamed the Churchills "The Imperial Family", which still amuses me.)
An anecdote to demonstrate how highly political being a lady of the bedchamber to the Queen was even a century later, when the royals had lost some more power and the PMs had gained it: when young Queen Victoria lost her first PM, Melbourne ("Lord M"), due to his party getting voted out of office, and Sir Robert Peel took over as PM, this also meant Victoria had to replace her ladies of the bedchamber (until then from Melbourne's party, the Whigs), with Tory ladies. She did not want to and refused, seeing it as her business who got to be in her personal household. The indignant Tories insisted. Melbourne ended up having to explain and soothe the young Queen until she accepted the Tory ladies.
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
Huh, that story about Queen Victoria does rather make it evident how political the whole thing is! Interesting that Melbourne got the job of explaining it to her; makes sense that he'd be the one who could actually do it. But it seems like that would have been a funny conversation between Peel and Melbourne, or whoever convinced him to do it.
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
Not on the same scale. I mean, evidently she would have had servants, ladies' maids, dressing women, etc., maybe also readers and musicians, depending on her cultural inclinations, but she would not have had the same kind of representative job a Queen had, and definitely no ladies-in-waiting or ladies of the bedchamber. However, naturally the other noble ladies (and gentlemen) would have made a point of befriending her or at least to win her as a patron so they could win lucrative offices and possibly estates through her. This was an option with a German mistress like Melusine, too, but with someone like Sarah Churchill, you'd have known her and her family and her husband's family for eons, their alliances, their strengths and weaknesses. Melusine von Schulenburg and G1's half sister Sophia von Kielmannsegg were completely new factors, and you had to polish up your French to even talk to them, which evidently not a lot people managed to do well enough to figure out how the later was related to G1.
(With G2's English mistress, remember that at first some people did think of cultivating her with a sigh of relief, whereas Sir Robert Walpole, future PM, was smart enough to bet on the right horse from the beginning, i.e. Caroline, as he could see where G2's affection and trust truly were.)
One thing Horowski keeps pointing out is how relatively monocultural the British nobility was as compared to the continental European nobility who was related across countries and often took jobs and offices across countries as well. The Jacobite exiles being an obvious exception to this rule, hence James Keith first working for the Russians and then for Fritz. However, post-Hannover takeover, another trend started which did not make the British aristocracy very happy: for Britihs princes to marry German princesses. The current Queen's Dad was the first one to marry a British aristocrat since G1 got crowned. And all the rest except for Victoria's son Edward/Bertie who had married a Danish princess married Germans. Wilhelmine's childhood including "how to be a future Queen of England" training (including English language, history) became fairly typical for every female German aristocrat just in case even without SD as a mother throughout the 19th century.
Bedchamber Crisis: see the wiki entry here. I had misremembered a bit; Robert Peel actually refused to form a government if the ladies weren't switched, so Melbourne remained PM for a while longer, but in the subsequent year Victoria married Albert, the next election was pro Tory as well, and this time Victoria did as asked. (Victoria: also marrying a German.) (Without whom you wouldn't celebrate Christmas with nice Christmas trees. *g*)
The Bedchamber Crisis scene from the tv show Victoria, first season: Victoria refuses Sir Robert Peel's request.
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
That may have been true, but note that Melusine could at least read and write English by 1720, as evidenced by her correspondence, and Hatton said she "wrote well" in English. I'm not sure about speaking, but Hatton recounts the following anecdote about her and Sophia von Kielmannsegg. The context is "How much English did G1 know, anyway?"
Lady Cowper, in the early portions of her diary from George's reign, invariably quotes the king's remarks in French; but in 1720 she records an English sentence which – it seems to me – must be a straight quote since it has a wrong plural of the kind often employed by Germans then and since. The topic of her conversation with George was the Townshend-Walpole return to the king's ministry and the sentence, a somewhat grumpy one, runs as follows: ‘What did they go away for? it was their own faults’. That faulty plurals of this kind were a common error among contemporary Germans in England is shown by the following, probably apocryphal, story. Melusine and Sophia Charlotte shared a carriage which was stopped by an unfriendly mob. The following exchange then took place. La Schulenburg [that's Melusine,
Hatton says it's probably apocryphal, but the fact that it exists at all means either it was made up by someone who didn't know them at all, or they could speak some English, and the anecdote was made up on the basis of their English mistakes.
Whether Melusine learned any of her English before moving to England, or whether this only came after, I don't know.
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
Heee. It's a good story, you can see why people told it even if it wasn't true...
Re: Königsmarck and Hannovers
The TV scene really does bring it across, both how Victoria thought it was a nonsensical request and how Peel was bewildered that Victoria could think it was a nonsensical request.