cahn | 18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 32

You're viewing

cahn's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

:) Still talking about Charles XII of Sweden / the Great Northern War and the Stuarts and the Jacobites, among other things!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mildred_of_midgard

this is why I'm excited you'll read about Ivan the Terrible at some point so you can tell me what stuff is actually true!)

Caveat: I *may* read about Ivan the Terrible. I also don't promise that I'll do enough of a deep dive to tell you what's true. It's much more likely to end up being like Charles XII, where I'm like, do I read Swedish? Do I read Turkish? Have I even read the primary sources that are in French or German? Hell, no. This is what modern historians are telling me, Selena may come along to say that Saxons were probably actually very unhappy with Charles!

(This is why I keep trying to get

alley_skywalker to join!)

(Whereas I totally want to learn Italian for real and have studied Florence before and intend to study its glory days again someday, so you're getting the critical analysis on the 18th C Medici.)

Wooooow. And he still wanted to reconcile, huh?

Scandals! If for no other reason, he was trying to make Hanover into an electorate, and SDC was definitely an Achilles' heel.

ETA: Note also that this was never a marriage of love. This was marrying him to his first cousin to keep the inheritance in the family. G1's parents were not just trying to make Hanover an electorate, they were trying to do away with the German practice of dividing up the inheritance among the sons (see also: why the HRE has 1 billion tiny principalities) and move toward instituting primogeniture (which really pissed off the younger sons). This is one reason I'm totally willing to believe Königsmarck was the better lover: G1 was doing his family duty, Königsmarck was in love!

Son of ETA: The point is, while I'm sure he was mortally offended, he at least wasn't also heartbroken.

Hm, is it actually "inescapable" that the money was hush-money? I mean, it certainly seems plausible, but...

I had exactly the same thought. :) I generally think her scholarship is worthy of respect, as far as I'm qualified to judge, in terms of her reading the right sources and thinking critically, but frequently I find her confidence in her conclusions much stronger than I'm comfortable with.

Edited Date: 2021-11-21 01:41 am (UTC)

From:

cahn

ha, okay, fair! At least you'll tell me when you're skeptical, though!

Ah, that makes sense about wanting to avoid scandal, and also makes sense that presumably SDC had a little more leverage than zero because of it (I was wondering how she was able to demand anything, even if she didn't/wasn't going to get it.)

From:

selenak

Also, SDC's father Georg Wilhelm - the one whom G1's mother Sophie DIDN'T marry - was the oldest Hannover brother. Still alive, and with all the money, hence the G1/SDC marriage to begin with. Now Georg Wilhelm actually as far as I know didn't do anything for his daughter, as opposed to his wife (and ex mistress), but he could have done. Sophie's husband Ernst August had been the youngest Hannover brother, and the reason why he ended up as boss and as the first Prince Elector of Hannover was due to a combination of external factors and conscious policy of uniting the various Hannover heritage bits, not least through the marriage of future G1 and SDC.