Clearly so, if Frederdorf is supposed to pick the prettiest faces for him. :)
Giuliano Dami: How come I got the bad press for the same job?
You know what I'm stuck on? Peter's presence at the parade the next day.
It could also be that Fritz invited him/told him to come to the parade right at the start, before the actual encounter. Moreover, I don't expect the whole thing to have gone badly in the sense that they quarelled. Not least because you don't argue with newly crowned Kings. Even Wilhelmine took the care to address Fritz as "Sire" in her first post ascension letter until he told her she could continue addressing him as her brother. (Heinrich: Mom told us to treat him as the future king in the previous year already, but I still kicked him under the table!)
No, what I think happened was something perfectly polite, but given that when last they met, in January 1730, it was presumably all youthful passion and intensity, and now, ten years and a lot more trauma later, it's polite sovereign and subject looking for cues of how to behave, it's almost bound to have left both parties somewhat dissatisfied. I don't think Peter, from what we know of him, would have been the type to take the initiative, do something like offer a hug. He may have been more informal than your avarage Prussian courtier as Lehndorff noted later - with other courtiers. But with the new King, whom he hasn't seen in ten years? I don't think so. Though of course in his dreams Fritz would have dismissed everyone and hugged him. And if his looking for cues of how to behave with this new version of Fritz came across as poentially calculating to Fritz the paranoid, it would have made him even more formal.
I mean, yes, Fritz wrote to Algarotti (and Duhan!) a passionate "come now to me!" type of letter, but he'd seen Algarotti only the previous year and Algarotti had never known Fritz the abused, while Duhan was his old teacher and not a likely candidate to a power grabbing favorite. Given how Fritz reacted when Peter was suggested by the Brits as a potential envoy a few years later, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd wondered whether Peter was now working for England, so to speak. Which, btw, would have made sense from Team Hannover Cousins' pov! (To use him as a spy, that is. After all, Caroline had shown him considerable favor, he owed them.)
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Re: News from 1740
Date: 2021-11-20 05:16 pm (UTC)Giuliano Dami: How come I got the bad press for the same job?
You know what I'm stuck on? Peter's presence at the parade the next day.
It could also be that Fritz invited him/told him to come to the parade right at the start, before the actual encounter. Moreover, I don't expect the whole thing to have gone badly in the sense that they quarelled. Not least because you don't argue with newly crowned Kings. Even Wilhelmine took the care to address Fritz as "Sire" in her first post ascension letter until he told her she could continue addressing him as her brother. (Heinrich: Mom told us to treat him as the future king in the previous year already, but I still kicked him under the table!)
No, what I think happened was something perfectly polite, but given that when last they met, in January 1730, it was presumably all youthful passion and intensity, and now, ten years and a lot more trauma later, it's polite sovereign and subject looking for cues of how to behave, it's almost bound to have left both parties somewhat dissatisfied. I don't think Peter, from what we know of him, would have been the type to take the initiative, do something like offer a hug. He may have been more informal than your avarage Prussian courtier as Lehndorff noted later - with other courtiers. But with the new King, whom he hasn't seen in ten years? I don't think so. Though of course in his dreams Fritz would have dismissed everyone and hugged him. And if his looking for cues of how to behave with this new version of Fritz came across as poentially calculating to Fritz the paranoid, it would have made him even more formal.
I mean, yes, Fritz wrote to Algarotti (and Duhan!) a passionate "come now to me!" type of letter, but he'd seen Algarotti only the previous year and Algarotti had never known Fritz the abused, while Duhan was his old teacher and not a likely candidate to a power grabbing favorite. Given how Fritz reacted when Peter was suggested by the Brits as a potential envoy a few years later, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd wondered whether Peter was now working for England, so to speak. Which, btw, would have made sense from Team Hannover Cousins' pov! (To use him as a spy, that is. After all, Caroline had shown him considerable favor, he owed them.)