Frederick the Great and Other 18th-C Characters, Discussion Post 31

[cahn]

And in this post:

-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

Comments

Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises

[mildred_of_midgard]

Agreed! The alchemy requires question asking, because the one thing I really suck at is asking questions.

That said, the reason I haven't replied to this wonderful question is that I've been waiting for selenak. She's much better at putting her knowledge into a big-picture summary than I am. It's not that I don't have the knowledge, it's that organizing it into a big picture take is like pulling teeth for me, always has been. So part of the alchemy is that Selena and I make a good team with our different focuses. (I suspect many of the things I do would be like pulling teeth for her, that's why salon is so great.

I have the same alchemy at work with my new boss, where he's prioritizing what projects get done when based on business needs, while I'm busy making sure all the boxes get checked and t's get crossed when we work on whatever we work on.)

Question-asking is also like pulling teeth for me, that's why it's so great to have people who I admire for just doing it!

My strength is "So where exactly was the Brüner Tor located in Wesel?" i.e. what we call detective work, which you saw in action when I tracked down the text of the bill that told us exactly what legal stance a captured BPC would have had in 1746. :)

And the questions you ask are not necessarily questions I would ask (Me: Can I have more gossip on X, Y, and Z? lol, I am a simple woman)

LOL! If not for your dedicated pursuit of the gossip, would the three of us have sustained a 2.7 million word interest over the last 2+ years? I beg leave to doubt it. :D

Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises

[luzula]

Well, my question here was maybe too vague, as of course that sort of thing (attitudes towards religion and politics) varies over time and between places, and "religion" and "politics" are huge and varied things in themselves! But yeah, I get the point: asking questions is good. : )

My strength is "So where exactly was the Brüner Tor located in Wesel?" i.e. what we call detective work, which you saw in action when I tracked down the text of the bill that told us exactly what legal stance a captured BPC would have had in 1746. :)

I was quite impressed by that! : ) I mean, it wasn't obvious that the answer would be in a bill at all, it all could just have been contained in informal discussions between the main Hanoverian actors so that we would never know, or was contained in archived letters. But nope, actually debated in Parliament.

Meanwhile, I am getting nowhere on your question about the primary sources for BPC:s conversion to Anglicanism. : ( Searching Google books and Google scholar for keywords gets me nothing, but what I can say is that pretty much every book about BPC contains this claim, including lots of books from after the 90's, which is when you heard doubts of it. Most often there are no references for the claim. When there are, it's to some older book which I can't get hold of. The closest I've come to primary sources is Duffy, who quotes a letter from William King, who is one of the people who met BPC on his visit to England in 1750. But the letter doesn't directly mention his conversion, it's just about King's opinion on BPC in that meeting in general.

At this point I think I'd have to email one of the historians involved to ask what the primary sources are. I myself am inclined not to doubt it--it seems quite reasonable that if several people met BPC in London in 1750 and one of them was an Anglican priest who witnessed his conversion, that they would leave letters or other writings behind which confirm it, especially as I've seen quotes from a letter from one of these people. It seems unreasonable to me that reputable historians would keep claiming it if the evidence wasn't there, if it was questioned in the '90:s--but maybe I'm too trusting that historians will do their job. : )

I have also now read that BPC re-converted back to Catholicism around 1760 when he wanted the papacy to pay his bills.