Intro So Blanning, in his G1 bio, says that the Great Northern War, complex as it is, is responsible for some of the least coherent scholarship of the period (not disagreeing), but that the Whitworth bio is a particularly clear account. That was what led me to the Whitworth bio.
Where I promptly went, "What one earth are you talking about, Blanning?" I got other useful info out of the book, but as far as the GNW was concerned, I couldn't even keep up with what was going on.
Later on, I discovered that while the Whitworth bio is a terrible introduction to the GNW, once you already understand the general outline of the GNW and the side-switching, it's very valuable for the parts it covers, which is: "Excruciatingly detailed account of the negotiations involving Hanover and Prussia in the last few years of the war." (Which should tell you why it's a terrible introduction.)
So now I'm here to tell you (some of) what Whitworth, Rottembourg, and FW were up to in the late 1710s. I'll do my best to simplify, as it is confusing.
The War Our story starts in 1714. As a reminder:
- C12 has just returned from the Ottoman Empire up to Stralsund, which is besieged. - G1 has just become King of Great Britain. - The War of the Spanish Succession is ending. - FW has just become King of Prussia (1713).
The entire war can be summarized under two points:
Point 1. It starts because Sweden's neighbors want or want back territory that Sweden conquered in its 17th century glory days. Point 2. Most of its complexities (side-switching, etc.) are due to European powers caring about the balance of power.
The balance of power is key here. In the mid 1710s, Sweden has de facto lost most of its overseas territory and is only hanging on because C12 doesn't know when he's beat. Russia is on the rise as a great power and is about to be the big winner of the war.
Motives In the mid 1710s: - Hanover cares about point 1 of the war: get Swedish territory! - Prussia cares about point 1: get Swedish territory! - Russia cares about point 1: get Swedish territory! - Britain is starting to shift the focus of their caring to point 2: keep Russia from dominating the Baltic! - France is with Britain.
When Whitworth is sent to Berlin in 1716 and 1719, he has to navigate these different concerns, two opposing ones being those of his boss, G1 of Hanover + Britain. (I don't envy these ambassadors, seriously.)
FW wants Swedish Pomerania, and most especially Stettin, which is a valuable port on the Oder. (EC2 will later be sent here by Fritz after her divorce from FW2.)
Motive Maps Map 1: Pomerania before 1720 (from Wikipedia):
Notice Gartz, Fredersdorf's home town, also on the Oder in Swedish territory! Berlin is just on the very bottom of the map. To the east is Küstrin. Küstrin is on the Oder. If you follow the blue line up through Schwedt, Gartz, and Stettin to the Baltic, you'll see the territory FW wants, and why Stettin is such an important port.
Map 2: Pomerania through history (possibly copyrighted, so just linking). Focus on the second and third panels, showing what was lost in 1720.
The entire article contains lots of great maps.
G1 (as Elector of Hanover) wants Bremen and Verden, which will give Hanover some coastline along the North Sea.
Map 3: Hanover, Bremen, Verden (from Wikipedia):
Map 4: The Swedish Empire. Focus on the part that borders Russia, east and south of Finland.
This map does a pretty good job of showing why Russia was an early adopter of war on Sweden.
All the medium green stuff off to the east and south of the Baltic--Karelia, Ingria, Estland, Swedish Livonia--will be lost by Charles XII to Peter the Great. St. Petersburg will be built in Ingria. This is why Russia comes out the big winner: Peter can now build a big fleet and dominate the Baltic. What I wish this map did was show national borders, so you could explicitly see that Russia had no Baltic ports in 1700, because the Baltic was little more than a Swedish lake (as it was enviously called at the time).
So what happens in 1714 is Peter the Great has already conquered all that territory, and FW wants in on the divvying up of the Swedish empire! He makes an alliance with Peter in which he will help Peter with the war on Sweden in return for Russia's recognition of Prussian acquisition of as much of Swedish Pomerania as it can get.
But whereas Hanover is focused on map 3, territory Hanover can acquire from Sweden, in the late 1710s, Britain is focused on map 4, territory Russia has already acquired from Sweden. Britain is worried that the Baltic is going to turn into a Russian lake. This is where balance of power comes in.
Whitworth's Job So the Brits send Whitworth to Berlin to try to get FW to leave his buddy Peter, make some territorial concessions to Sweden, and join the alliance in the north that the British are trying to form. That alliance is aimed at making sure Sweden remains a viable force that, with its allies, can keep Russian ambitions within limits.
But while Whitworth is in Berlin, back home there's a huge battle between the Hanoverian ministers ("We hate Prussia! We want territory! No alliance with Prussia, no territorial concessions to Sweden!") and the British ministers ("Win Prussia over! Support Sweden! Preserve the balance of power!"). This makes Whitworth's job extra difficult until the British ministers win out and he finally isn't getting conflicting messages.
You may remember that Whitworth was stationed in Russia in the early 1700s (and dismayed by all the drinking that meant he'd never be able to be influential there). That's where he destroyed the tobacco factory. Well, in those days, pre-Poltava (1709), England wasn't taking Russia seriously as a military or diplomatic power. Whitworth, on site and getting to know Peter, was all, "Serious threat here, people! Alarm, alarm! Do something before he gets too mighty to handle!"
And, of course, Whitworth called it. Ten years later, Britain is now getting on board, although still not as much as Whitworth would like.
So now Whitworth's job is to talk FW into abandoning Russia in favor of Hanover/Britain.
But FW is 1) eager to get all the territory he can out of Sweden, 2) not thrilled about breaking alliances, 3) reeeeally not convinced that Great Britain is in a position to protect him from his big scary powerful and soon to be angry neighbor Russia. His foreign minister Ilgen is more pro-Russia than pro-Hanover. (Ilgen is Ariane's maternal grandfather, father of the Baroness von Knyphausen who gets a cameo in "Lovers lying two and two".)
So FW goes back and forth and back and forth, trying to decide whether he's better off staying friendly with Russia, or abandoning them for the British-Hanoverian alliance and making the best deal with Sweden the British will support. This constant vacillation drives Whitworth and Rottembourg crazy. (More on Rottembourg below.)
British: Maybe we could just let FW have Stettin, but not the surrounding territory, and only for a certain number of years, like 25. Would that be okay, Charles?
Charles: You missed the part where I do not negotiate with terrorists invaders. Stettin is mine. Also, you idiots, if you let Prussian troops garrison a city for years at time, they will not leave it at the end of the agreed-upon time period!
[Mildred: 100% hard agree. Can you imagine telling Fritz in 1745 that he has to give up Stettin?]
After a lot of back and forth like this, suddenly everything happens all at once. Hanover signs a treaty with Sweden, getting Bremen and Verden, right as FW is prepared to sign his own treaty with Sweden, taking a good chunk (but not all) of Swedish Pomerania.
This is good news for British-Hanoverian diplomacy...Except! Except that it's going to be a lot harder to sell the Swedes on accepting their losses to Hanover if they're simultaneously losing territory to Prussia precisely because the British got involved.
So what Whitworth does (we're not sure whose idea it was, but could have been his), is backdate the signing of the treaty in Berlin to the day before the Hanover-Sweden treaty was signed. That way, the British could tell the Swedes, "Sorry, it all happened too fast! The Berlin treaty was signed by the time we made you sign the Hanover treaty." This is a lie, because Whitworth knew damn well the Swedes had already been forced to concede a lot of territory by the time he got the signatures on his own treaty forcing them to concede more territory.
The handwavy explanation was, "Well, FW had already verbally *agreed* to the treaty by that date, it's just that he then got sick with what seems to have been a stress-induced illness caused by his inability to make up his mind over whether it was okay to betray your allies or not."
(Fritz: I will have a lot of stress-related illnesses during my reign, but not that particular one!)
Conclusion So in the end, Sweden lost almost everything but less than it could have, if not for British intervention; Hanover got what it wanted; Prussia got some of what it wanted; Russia got all the things. The alliance directed against Russia petered out because France and Britain were far away, busy with other things, and both hit by economic crashes in 1719/1720, while none of the other powers (like Prussia) were prepared to take on Russia militarily single-handedly just to preserve trade that would benefit the Brits.
Trade Addendum Why does the trade benefit the Brits? As we learned in the Whitworth write-up, the Baltic is of key economic importance to the Brits, because that's where they get the raw materials for their navy: tar, hemp for ropes, wood for their ships... The whole tobacco conflict in the late 1690s and early 1700s was caused by the English, being mercantilists like the rest of Europe, wanting to increase their exports to Russia to balance out the imports, because the imports were so critical they simply couldn't do without them.
The whole part where England/Great Britain imports its raw materials for its navy from Baltic regions drives pretty much all of their foreign policy in the 1710s. Which I have not reported on the details of, but it's worth knowing that was their main concern and why they got involved. Because if there's one thing we know about the Brits during this period, it's that they are a naval power.
France Addendum Toward the end of the Great Northern War, France had closed out the War of the Spanish Succession and had some free time on its hands. One thing they wanted to do was make sure everyone (read: Philip V) agreed to the terms of the peace treaties (read: Spain lost a lot of territory). The easiest way to do this, they felt, was twofold. First, ally with Britain and Prussia. Two, restore peace in the north so that Britain and Prussia would be free to focus their energies on the south (Italy, the Mediterranean, Spain), when Philip V went to war to try to get back the lost territory.
So Rottembourg was sent to Berlin with a twofold mission accordingly. One, try to get Prussia out of the Austrian camp and into the French-British camp. Two, help negotiate the Prussia-Sweden treaty so that there could be peace in the north. France would act as guarantors of the treaty. This meant his job was to help Whitworth with FW.
Whitworth, on his side, had received instructions to work with Rottembourg. One of the reasons G1 had allied with France was to get French guarantees of Bremen-Verden. As we've seen, it was weird to have England/Britain and France allied during the Second Hundred Years' War (1689-1815)! But 1716-1731 was a weird time period, diplomatically, for Europe.
[Blanning is not actually a fan of the 1720s. This passage made me laugh, especially remembering him in a different book complaining about the quality of the scholarship on the Great Northern War. Apparently the whole 1700-1730 period is Just That Complicated (TM).
Even the most gifted narrator would find it difficult to construct an account of the 1720s both coherent and interesting, or indeed either of those things. Only intense concentration and repeated reference to the chronology can reveal which abortive congress was which, which short-lived league brought which powers together, who was allied to whom, who was double-crossing whom, or whatever.]
Coda This will probably be my last post on the GNW, at least for a while. There's one more topic that I'm interested in, and I've started reading the relevant book, George I and the Northern War. It has more side-changing! (Which I spared you guys in this post.) It has lots of references to Lövenörn and Whitworth and Rottembourg! But even in English, it's a long and dense book for someone as sleep-deprived as I am, the lack of e-book format is a definite hassle for me, and when I do have the brainpower to wrestle with something that requires concentration, I keep getting side-tracked by things like "Kloosterhuis' footnotes" and "batshit Medici" and "that August the Strong bio," all of which are in German or Italian (lol). But if I manage to work my way through it, I will report back.
Meanwhile, cahn, I don't expect you to follow the diplomatic maneuverings and lack of gossipy sensationalism in this post without a lot more repetition, but I tried to use it to repeat some things we've already covered. selenak, I hope it's a little more useful for you. Mostly, I'm going to forget all this shortly, so it's good to have it written down so I can put it in Rheinsberg. Big GNW write-up coming up.
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Great Northern War: The Confusingest Part
Date: 2021-11-17 08:12 pm (UTC)Intro
So Blanning, in his G1 bio, says that the Great Northern War, complex as it is, is responsible for some of the least coherent scholarship of the period (not disagreeing), but that the Whitworth bio is a particularly clear account. That was what led me to the Whitworth bio.
Where I promptly went, "What one earth are you talking about, Blanning?" I got other useful info out of the book, but as far as the GNW was concerned, I couldn't even keep up with what was going on.
Later on, I discovered that while the Whitworth bio is a terrible introduction to the GNW, once you already understand the general outline of the GNW and the side-switching, it's very valuable for the parts it covers, which is: "Excruciatingly detailed account of the negotiations involving Hanover and Prussia in the last few years of the war." (Which should tell you why it's a terrible introduction.)
So now I'm here to tell you (some of) what Whitworth, Rottembourg, and FW were up to in the late 1710s. I'll do my best to simplify, as it is confusing.
The War
Our story starts in 1714. As a reminder:
- C12 has just returned from the Ottoman Empire up to Stralsund, which is besieged.
- G1 has just become King of Great Britain.
- The War of the Spanish Succession is ending.
- FW has just become King of Prussia (1713).
The entire war can be summarized under two points:
Point 1. It starts because Sweden's neighbors want or want back territory that Sweden conquered in its 17th century glory days.
Point 2. Most of its complexities (side-switching, etc.) are due to European powers caring about the balance of power.
The balance of power is key here. In the mid 1710s, Sweden has de facto lost most of its overseas territory and is only hanging on because C12 doesn't know when he's beat. Russia is on the rise as a great power and is about to be the big winner of the war.
Motives
In the mid 1710s:
- Hanover cares about point 1 of the war: get Swedish territory!
- Prussia cares about point 1: get Swedish territory!
- Russia cares about point 1: get Swedish territory!
- Britain is starting to shift the focus of their caring to point 2: keep Russia from dominating the Baltic!
- France is with Britain.
When Whitworth is sent to Berlin in 1716 and 1719, he has to navigate these different concerns, two opposing ones being those of his boss, G1 of Hanover + Britain. (I don't envy these ambassadors, seriously.)
FW wants Swedish Pomerania, and most especially Stettin, which is a valuable port on the Oder. (EC2 will later be sent here by Fritz after her divorce from FW2.)
Motive Maps
Map 1: Pomerania before 1720 (from Wikipedia):
Notice Gartz, Fredersdorf's home town, also on the Oder in Swedish territory! Berlin is just on the very bottom of the map. To the east is Küstrin. Küstrin is on the Oder. If you follow the blue line up through Schwedt, Gartz, and Stettin to the Baltic, you'll see the territory FW wants, and why Stettin is such an important port.
Map 2: Pomerania through history (possibly copyrighted, so just linking). Focus on the second and third panels, showing what was lost in 1720.
The entire article contains lots of great maps.
G1 (as Elector of Hanover) wants Bremen and Verden, which will give Hanover some coastline along the North Sea.
Map 3: Hanover, Bremen, Verden (from Wikipedia):
Map 4: The Swedish Empire. Focus on the part that borders Russia, east and south of Finland.
This map does a pretty good job of showing why Russia was an early adopter of war on Sweden.
All the medium green stuff off to the east and south of the Baltic--Karelia, Ingria, Estland, Swedish Livonia--will be lost by Charles XII to Peter the Great. St. Petersburg will be built in Ingria. This is why Russia comes out the big winner: Peter can now build a big fleet and dominate the Baltic. What I wish this map did was show national borders, so you could explicitly see that Russia had no Baltic ports in 1700, because the Baltic was little more than a Swedish lake (as it was enviously called at the time).
So what happens in 1714 is Peter the Great has already conquered all that territory, and FW wants in on the divvying up of the Swedish empire! He makes an alliance with Peter in which he will help Peter with the war on Sweden in return for Russia's recognition of Prussian acquisition of as much of Swedish Pomerania as it can get.
But whereas Hanover is focused on map 3, territory Hanover can acquire from Sweden, in the late 1710s, Britain is focused on map 4, territory Russia has already acquired from Sweden. Britain is worried that the Baltic is going to turn into a Russian lake. This is where balance of power comes in.
Whitworth's Job
So the Brits send Whitworth to Berlin to try to get FW to leave his buddy Peter, make some territorial concessions to Sweden, and join the alliance in the north that the British are trying to form. That alliance is aimed at making sure Sweden remains a viable force that, with its allies, can keep Russian ambitions within limits.
But while Whitworth is in Berlin, back home there's a huge battle between the Hanoverian ministers ("We hate Prussia! We want territory! No alliance with Prussia, no territorial concessions to Sweden!") and the British ministers ("Win Prussia over! Support Sweden! Preserve the balance of power!"). This makes Whitworth's job extra difficult until the British ministers win out and he finally isn't getting conflicting messages.
You may remember that Whitworth was stationed in Russia in the early 1700s (and dismayed by all the drinking that meant he'd never be able to be influential there). That's where he destroyed the tobacco factory. Well, in those days, pre-Poltava (1709), England wasn't taking Russia seriously as a military or diplomatic power. Whitworth, on site and getting to know Peter, was all, "Serious threat here, people! Alarm, alarm! Do something before he gets too mighty to handle!"
And, of course, Whitworth called it. Ten years later, Britain is now getting on board, although still not as much as Whitworth would like.
So now Whitworth's job is to talk FW into abandoning Russia in favor of Hanover/Britain.
But FW is 1) eager to get all the territory he can out of Sweden, 2) not thrilled about breaking alliances, 3) reeeeally not convinced that Great Britain is in a position to protect him from his big scary powerful and soon to be angry neighbor Russia. His foreign minister Ilgen is more pro-Russia than pro-Hanover. (Ilgen is Ariane's maternal grandfather, father of the Baroness von Knyphausen who gets a cameo in "Lovers lying two and two".)
So FW goes back and forth and back and forth, trying to decide whether he's better off staying friendly with Russia, or abandoning them for the British-Hanoverian alliance and making the best deal with Sweden the British will support. This constant vacillation drives Whitworth and Rottembourg crazy. (More on Rottembourg below.)
British: Maybe we could just let FW have Stettin, but not the surrounding territory, and only for a certain number of years, like 25. Would that be okay, Charles?
Charles: You missed the part where I do not negotiate with
terroristsinvaders. Stettin is mine. Also, you idiots, if you let Prussian troops garrison a city for years at time, they will not leave it at the end of the agreed-upon time period![Mildred: 100% hard agree. Can you imagine telling Fritz in 1745 that he has to give up Stettin?]
After a lot of back and forth like this, suddenly everything happens all at once. Hanover signs a treaty with Sweden, getting Bremen and Verden, right as FW is prepared to sign his own treaty with Sweden, taking a good chunk (but not all) of Swedish Pomerania.
This is good news for British-Hanoverian diplomacy...Except! Except that it's going to be a lot harder to sell the Swedes on accepting their losses to Hanover if they're simultaneously losing territory to Prussia precisely because the British got involved.
So what Whitworth does (we're not sure whose idea it was, but could have been his), is backdate the signing of the treaty in Berlin to the day before the Hanover-Sweden treaty was signed. That way, the British could tell the Swedes, "Sorry, it all happened too fast! The Berlin treaty was signed by the time we made you sign the Hanover treaty." This is a lie, because Whitworth knew damn well the Swedes had already been forced to concede a lot of territory by the time he got the signatures on his own treaty forcing them to concede more territory.
The handwavy explanation was, "Well, FW had already verbally *agreed* to the treaty by that date, it's just that he then got sick with what seems to have been a stress-induced illness caused by his inability to make up his mind over whether it was okay to betray your allies or not."
(Fritz: I will have a lot of stress-related illnesses during my reign, but not that particular one!)
Conclusion
So in the end, Sweden lost almost everything but less than it could have, if not for British intervention; Hanover got what it wanted; Prussia got some of what it wanted; Russia got all the things. The alliance directed against Russia petered out because France and Britain were far away, busy with other things, and both hit by economic crashes in 1719/1720, while none of the other powers (like Prussia) were prepared to take on Russia militarily single-handedly just to preserve trade that would benefit the Brits.
Trade Addendum
Why does the trade benefit the Brits? As we learned in the Whitworth write-up, the Baltic is of key economic importance to the Brits, because that's where they get the raw materials for their navy: tar, hemp for ropes, wood for their ships... The whole tobacco conflict in the late 1690s and early 1700s was caused by the English, being mercantilists like the rest of Europe, wanting to increase their exports to Russia to balance out the imports, because the imports were so critical they simply couldn't do without them.
The whole part where England/Great Britain imports its raw materials for its navy from Baltic regions drives pretty much all of their foreign policy in the 1710s. Which I have not reported on the details of, but it's worth knowing that was their main concern and why they got involved. Because if there's one thing we know about the Brits during this period, it's that they are a naval power.
France Addendum
Toward the end of the Great Northern War, France had closed out the War of the Spanish Succession and had some free time on its hands. One thing they wanted to do was make sure everyone (read: Philip V) agreed to the terms of the peace treaties (read: Spain lost a lot of territory). The easiest way to do this, they felt, was twofold. First, ally with Britain and Prussia. Two, restore peace in the north so that Britain and Prussia would be free to focus their energies on the south (Italy, the Mediterranean, Spain), when Philip V went to war to try to get back the lost territory.
So Rottembourg was sent to Berlin with a twofold mission accordingly. One, try to get Prussia out of the Austrian camp and into the French-British camp. Two, help negotiate the Prussia-Sweden treaty so that there could be peace in the north. France would act as guarantors of the treaty. This meant his job was to help Whitworth with FW.
Whitworth, on his side, had received instructions to work with Rottembourg. One of the reasons G1 had allied with France was to get French guarantees of Bremen-Verden. As we've seen, it was weird to have England/Britain and France allied during the Second Hundred Years' War (1689-1815)! But 1716-1731 was a weird time period, diplomatically, for Europe.
[Blanning is not actually a fan of the 1720s. This passage made me laugh, especially remembering him in a different book complaining about the quality of the scholarship on the Great Northern War. Apparently the whole 1700-1730 period is Just That Complicated (TM).
Even the most gifted narrator would find it difficult to construct an account of the 1720s both coherent and interesting, or indeed either of those things. Only intense concentration and repeated reference to the chronology can reveal which abortive congress was which, which short-lived league brought which powers together, who was allied to whom, who was double-crossing whom, or whatever.]
Coda
This will probably be my last post on the GNW, at least for a while. There's one more topic that I'm interested in, and I've started reading the relevant book, George I and the Northern War. It has more side-changing! (Which I spared you guys in this post.) It has lots of references to Lövenörn and Whitworth and Rottembourg! But even in English, it's a long and dense book for someone as sleep-deprived as I am, the lack of e-book format is a definite hassle for me, and when I do have the brainpower to wrestle with something that requires concentration, I keep getting side-tracked by things like "Kloosterhuis' footnotes" and "batshit Medici" and "that August the Strong bio," all of which are in German or Italian (lol). But if I manage to work my way through it, I will report back.
Meanwhile,