Entry tags:
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: The Great Northern War: Overview
Also looking forward to your eventual take on Charles XII's sexuality: gay or not gay?
I recently read the 1908 gay romance Imre by Edward Prime-Stevenson, who happily appropriates Charles XII as gay. The novel isn't about him, he just turns up as an example of Manly Men in History Who Were Homosexual. (The same author also wrote the 1887 novel White Cockades, which is a gay historical romance where the original male character gets together with BPC. It is rather sweet but, um, not notably historically accurate.)
ETA: This is when England and France team up for almost the only time of their lives!
Heee. There are also those small, insignificant conflicts called WWI and WWII? : D But I suppose we're keeping to the 18th century.
Re: The Great Northern War: Overview
Oh, right! I'd managed to forget in the last couple weeks that you're Swedish, lol. Definitely supplement with anything, even tangentially related and modern, that you know!
Also looking forward to your eventual take on Charles XII's sexuality: gay or not gay?
Well, I TRIED researching exactly that, but then this nonsense happened!
The books I've read so far have been like "nope, heterosexual or asexual," but I've read too much no homoing of Fritz to take that at face value.
(The same author also wrote the 1887 novel White Cockades, which is a gay historical romance where the original male character gets together with BPC. It is rather sweet but, um, not notably historically accurate.)
Oh. Wow. I feel better about my unfinished 15-yo-self's novel about time traveling Mary Sue winning BPC's war for him and proceeding to take over the world!
Heee. There are also those small, insignificant conflicts called WWI and WWII? : D But I suppose we're keeping to the 18th century.
I said almost! :P More seriously, not strictly the 18th century, but we are in the second Hundred Years' War, and given the first Hundred Years' War...what I had in mind when I wrote this was Selena wondering if Rottembourg and Whitworth were helping each other out because Rottembourg was bribing Whitworth, and I had to explain about the brief "diplomatic revolution" between 1715 and the early 1730s in which France and Britain were allied, to the surprise of everyone!
Part of the reason they allied was the Great Northern War, but more on that when I have a chance to refresh myself.
Oh, the Whitworth and Rottembourg discussion happened before you started spending more time with us, right. So if you're like "Whitworth who? Rottembourg what?", Whitworth was a British diplomat, Rottembourg a French diplomat in the 1710s-1720s. Both were stationed at Berlin at the same time, and they became friends (and bonded over their frustration with FW's foreign policy). Rottembourg details are here, and Whitworth here and here. And I just realized I forgot to put the last one in Rheinsberg. The second one is incorporated into the first one, but possibly easier to read as a separate post, since I don't bother to explain in Rheinsberg who Whitworth is. (Rheinsberg as a copy-paste dump of excerpts from realtime conversations has a few shortcomings...)
Re: The Great Northern War: Overview
OMG. *boggles* Well, I hope you find better sources.
Oh. Wow. I feel better about my unfinished 15-yo-self's novel about time traveling Mary Sue winning BPC's war for him and proceeding to take over the world!
It's here, if you want to check it out! : D
And thanks for explaining!
Re: The Great Northern War: Overview
I mean, I'd totally buy "sublimated sexual drive into being CRAZY" after reading about Kalabalik, but anyway :)
Re: The Great Northern War: Overview
Re: The Great Northern War: Overview
BUT.
So again with "I don't know what the source for this is," but, more than one of my books has said that Charles, when he was younger, told someone that he was absolutely interested in (het) sex, but he was afraid of going near it, because whatever he did, he did ALL THE WAY, and he couldn't afford the distraction while the war was on.
So that's why I was *totally* having Charles channel his sex drive into the Kalabalik!
More seriously, him repressing his sex drive (of whatever orientation) is a possibility. But after seeing what happened with centuries of Fritzian historiography, I'm reserving judgment on his orientation until further notice.
It's actually kind of amazing how the "austere, war-only" persona I keep seeing re Charles reminds me of the Fritzian bios of the same era. Now maybe Charles was actually like that! But Fritz turned out not to be, so I'm reading everything with a great deal of caution (though I'm less cautious about reporting it). Just take it as said that *none* of the handful of bios I've read strikes me as anything I'd put a high degree of confidence in.
Re: The Great Northern War: Overview
Just going to Swedish Wikipedia here. Here's a quote (run through Google translate), which is attributed to Charles, apparently said in conversation with an Axel Löwen:
"Henry IV married but had too much weakness for his mistresses and was too fleeting for a real love, that I would feel capable of if I once attached myself to anyone. I have decided not to have any connection, as long as I am in the field, to avoid all distraction. All princes who cannot control their passions are not worthy to rule over others. The feeling for beautiful women is no less in me than in you, but I know how to control it."
The reference is to a 2019 book in Swedish (Dybelius, Anders (2019). Möten med personligheten Karl XII), which is in my university library. This Dybelius is at least a historian and not a journalist or something. But Wikipedia of course doesn't tell you what primary sources this book is quoting (something written by this Axel Löwen, I suppose?). If all else fails you, I guess I could go look at the book.
Re: The Great Northern War: Overview