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cahnAnd including Emperor Joseph II!
from Derek Beales: Joseph II, Volume 2: Against the World, 1780 - 1790:
Joseph's alleged comment to Mozart about the Entführung, "Too many notes", has been taken as evidence of his ignorance. But he probably said something like, "Too beautiful for our ears, and monstrous many notes." It is always necessary to bear in mind, when appraising the emperor's remarks, his peculiar brand of humor or sarcasm. He was usually getting at someone. And he did not use the royal "we". The ears in question were those of the Viennese audience, whom he was mocking for their limited appreciation of Mozart's elaborate music.
(though not gonna lie, I think it is a LOT of notes)
from Derek Beales: Joseph II, Volume 2: Against the World, 1780 - 1790:
Joseph's alleged comment to Mozart about the Entführung, "Too many notes", has been taken as evidence of his ignorance. But he probably said something like, "Too beautiful for our ears, and monstrous many notes." It is always necessary to bear in mind, when appraising the emperor's remarks, his peculiar brand of humor or sarcasm. He was usually getting at someone. And he did not use the royal "we". The ears in question were those of the Viennese audience, whom he was mocking for their limited appreciation of Mozart's elaborate music.
(though not gonna lie, I think it is a LOT of notes)
Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-11 05:21 pm (UTC)(A chapter later, she does quote some Grandma Sophie gushing about child FW, but claims this is representative for Sophie being blind to FW's faults for the rest of her life. Lady, I've read the letters. She did hear about his temper as he grew older, and tried to help, tactfully, but she did try. (It's not her fault the "Eugene as role model" approach did not work.)
Now, leaving Sophie's emotions aside for a moment, presumably SD and G2, like their offspring, had governors and nurses and servants. This doesn't have to mean they were loved by the staff, maybe the stuff was utterly indiffernent or hated their guts, but before making such a general claim as "weren't loved in their childhood and youth at all", I would like to have the possibility discusseed. As for Sophie: like I said, I've read the letters. One of the earliest to SD after her marriage describes G1 and says, paraphrased, see, I told you your Dad does love you, even if he has difficulties showing it, I knew you were concerned re: that, which is why I'm telling you now - he does love you". If Sophie noticed how young SD worried re: Dad, she didn't just raise her froma distance. She also sounds consistently affectionate in her letters herself. Oh, and K F-P accuses her of not writing a single word to SD re: SD's first dead child. Now, she might not have mentioned it in the very next letter - presumably because she did not yet have the news - but she did write plenty to SD about her dead children in later letters, asking for copies of the portraits of the babies which SD had made.
That kind of sloppiness continues. Presumably because sources on SD after Fritz became King are way rarer than before, we get an entire chapter devoted to the AW/Sophie von Pannwitz (later Voß) saga, despite the fact the author herself admits we have no idea whether SD even noticed the entire matter (there's nothing in the memoirs of Madame de Voß to indicate she did), and in said chapter, we learn Wilhelmine made up the story about FW hitting on Fräulein von Pannwitz and getting punched because little Sophie was just a toddler in 1733. Except that Wilhelmine never provides us with a first name for the lady (hence us first assuming it was the wife when it was the sister of Katte's commander) in the memoirs and definitely doesn't give any other indication that she means AW's crush. (If news about said crush even made it to Bayreuth.)
On the Clement/Klement saga, she's only read Pöllnitz and Wilhelmine and thus confidently informs us that not only was Klement the illegitimate son of Philippe d'Orleans the Regent but that this mysterious affair never was REALLY cleared up. Sure, the guy admitted that he made it all up for cash and influence, but that can't be the truth, so maybe it was SD behind the scenes, sponsoring Klement, trying to get rid of her enemies Grumbkow & Dessauer this way. (Now there's a theory I hadn't heard before and which not even FW came up with!)
Gundling: he had two sides, serious, even impressive scholar, and alcoholic, being a weak character, and thus a target for everyone's "rough pranks" including FW's. But FW having him buried in a vine barrel is clearly a false legend, because FW would never.
(The book was published in 2014. She has no excuse, unlike 19th century FW defenders without access to a) Stratemann's reports on Gundling's funeral, and b) the letters of a Pastor about his pleading with FW not to do this and all the pastors' refusal to go along with this.)
A more interesting and vaguely plausible theory of hers is how the SD/Dessauer feud started. Our author thinks that in addition to FW worrying because of SD's mother,
OldYoung Dessauer is to blame for young FW in his first few years of marriage being paranoid that his Fiekchen might be cheating on him. Dessauer's motive? He was against the FW/SD marriage, wanting FW to marry one of his sisters instead, and for as long as SD and FW had no living son hoped to influence his buddy to the point where the marriage would be dissolved. Here, we even get a quote, of SD decades later when hearing Old Dessauer had snuffed it; she writes to Fritz she's only sorry he didn't die 20 yeasr earlier.Now, that's still pretty thin, but at least it's a bit more likely than "SD was the woman behind Klement!"
Something that's also not implausible: since the tone of SD's letters to FW changes from alarmed and begging when he is jealous shortly after the marriage to confident and playing on his emotions later on, our author concludes that once SD figured out that FW wants to be loved by his Fieke and his children and does not want to hear anything else, she goes with that, but still our author throws up her hands at SD's repeated assurances little Fritz is totally into the military and a super brave boy, because, says K F-P, she had to know that once FW is back from the Nordic War, and at the latest once Fritz becomes 7 and FW is in charge of his education, the truth will be exposed. Dear author, you just said it yourself - she figured out you do not tell FW anything but what he wants to hear as a marital survival technique early on!
However, I did manage to lodge a few new-to-us facts out of this unreliable mess, which come with letter quotes:
1.) Caroline sent Fritz a ring made of Amalie/Emily's hair (! not the older sister) when Fritz was 3 and the English marriage project was still considered a possibly good idea but the Hannover cousins.
2.) In the summer 1747, i.e. a year after the Marwitz affair, Heinrich discovers even dinner with Fritz is risky, for:
Fritz to SD, June 10th 1747: Yesterday, my brother Heinrich gave me quite a fright. We were at my vineyard, and in the evening, when we wanted to sit down at the table, suddenly a bit of the frame of a painting loosened and hit him on the head. Luckily, he only has a slight scratch, but my dear Mama, you may imagine how afraid for him I was.
SD to Fritz, June 12th, 1747: You, my dear son, have sent me the most beautiful fruit of the world, which taste delicious. I thank you a thousand times, also for informing me of the accident my son Heinrich has had. How fortunate that everything went so well. But my dear son, I am familiar with your good heart and all the kindness you show to him, and I have no doubt that you're taking care of him just like a father.
And this, mes amies, is why Heinrich never asked SD for help when things went beserk between him and Fritz. Not that K F-P says so. (She quotes the passage just to demonstrate SD and Fritz getting along fine when he's King, despite SD not having any say in politics.) Heinrich otherwise shows only briefly, described as ugly, as much into the military as FW, and "probably" gay, in any event not interested in his poor wife. Cultural interests of his aren't mentioned, but then, this is an SD biography, and kid No.13 really did not figure large into her life, not compared with the first borns. Anyway, behold SD, of all the people, writing without any irony or sarcasm that Fritz takes care of Heinrich just like a father. You can't make this people up.
Sidenote: though clearly Fritz expected her to care that Heinrich got hit on the head, otherwise he wouldn't have mentioned it, which proves she did pay some attention to the young 'uns.
3.) Charles XII (of Sweden)' Über minister Görtz briefly pursued the cunning plan of getting Prussia out of the anti Swedish alliance by offering marry Wilhelmine to Charles. Which is when six years old Wilhelmine wrote to Dad on April 29th, 1716: I take the liberty to urgently ask my dear Papa not to marry me to the King of Sweden, since I believe he does not love me and fear distress. When we know when my dear Papa finally returns, my brother and myself will receive him with trumpets like King David. Now, I think K F-P is probably right to conclude that letter was dictated by SD to her daughter, but otoh it amused me we have another indication Wilhelmine did want to be loved in marriage, despite this not being par the course for princesses. Also, the idea of a Wilhelmine/Charles match is... something.
4.) Another marriage project which never happened, this one initialized by Peter the Great in 1718: his niece Anna Ivanova (future Czarina and ice palace builder, at this point 25 and single) and Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg-Schwedt, nephew of Old Dessauer on his mother's side and of FW by being the son of FW's half brother. This is the Schwedt cousin who ends up married to poor Sophie (thus becoming Ferdinand's father-in-law), but in 1718, when SD is sent by FW to talk Old Dessauer's sister Johanna Charlotte (who is indeed designed as "die Markgräfin Philipp") into this match, Johanna Charlotte bursts into tears and says no way is her boy going to marry Anna Ivanova, the age gap is just too much... but how about him/Wilhelmine instead?
SD: ....
FW: That's actually a great idea! I'll keep it in mind.
SD: NO SCHWEDT COUSINS FOR MY DAUGHTER EVER. BRITANNIA RULES THE WORLD.
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-11 06:27 pm (UTC)Ahahaha, indeed. I read a couple of quotes and reviews and thought, nah, there are better things I could spend my money on. Isn't she the one who really dislikes Wilhelmine, too?
so maybe it was SD behind the scenes, sponsoring Klement, trying to get rid of her enemies Grumbkow & Dessauer this way
!!! What.
clearly a false legend, because FW would never
Sigh. This is actually WORSE than I gave her credit for.
ETA: Ooops, hit post button too soon! Wanted to add that the Heinrich anecdote is rather nice (when was it again that Heinrich was sulking and cold and not talking? I thought around then...) and we do know that Fritz also always included updates on his brothers when he wrote to her during the Silesian wars.
re: 3 - yeah, that letter does sound like SD had a hand in it - although we also know that Wilhelmine was quite far early on.
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 09:41 am (UTC)Indeed she is. Some of the criticism isn't per se wrong - Wilhelmine was a snob, she was very jealous re: other people Fritz was close to (with the glorious exception of Voltaire, I'll say something about Wilhelmine the shipper in the reply to your other comment) and the memoirs are one long venting about just about anyone - but even there she's inconsistent; when it's something furthering her own agenda, she treats the memoirs as an impeccable source, when it's something going against her ideas, Wilhelmine clearly made it up. And the later accusation usually comes with a snide remark, as when she mentions the bit in the memoirs where Wilhelmine says Dad for a short while (i.e. during the Dresden visit) considered marrying her to August the Strong. After declaring there's nothing about this in other sources, and that FW would never have married his daughter to a decades older guy (um, Sophie/Schwedt Cousin?), K F-P adds that Wilhelmine clearly made it up because "she could not stand being not the center of attention".
(Sidenote: I have no idea whether or not FW considered this at the time of the Dresden visit, but given young Fritz gives Wilhelmine a detailed "hot or not?" description of August the Strong in his first preserved letter, I don't think it's impossible that Wilhelmine and Fritz thought this might be in the offering.)
Which is fairly representative. On the other end of the scale, Charlotte is her favourite, and after (correctly) stating Charlotte had a way of interacting with FW and SD that was utterly lacking the tensions and dramas of the Fritz and Wilhelmine interactions with their parents, she adds that in addition to having a sense of humor, Charlotte pleased FW by not being into dresses, make-up and jewelry the way Wilhelmine was. Which, um. Maybe not while she was still living with Dad, but going by the childhood and youth chapters of the Anna Amalia biography I've read, Charlotte enjoyed the fashionable life in Braunschweig as much as the next Duchess once she was away from Dad.
Oh, and there are so many avoidable minor errors. Like naming Peter Karl Christoph von Keith ("offspring of old Scottish nobility") as the page whom Fritz tells to get a horse etc. during the escape attempt and who spills the beans. A confusion of Keiths is easy in this fandom, admittedly, and fiction of course frequently makes the two Keith brothers into one, but an author who keeps publishing Hohenzollern biographies really should not.
SD, Klement sponsor: :) I knew that would leave an impression. (K F-P really has no idea who the guy was beyond his appearance in Berlin, there is nothing about his backstory in Hungary, Austria and Saxony.)
Wanted to add that the Heinrich anecdote is rather nice (when was it again that Heinrich was sulking and cold and not talking? I thought around then...)
Checking my old write-up of their correspondence again, yes, that was in 1746. So either Fritz indulged in a bit of rethorical exaggaration when accusing Heinrich to not have talked to him for six months despite living in the same house with him that same year, or they were about to have dinner in silence when the painting frame got loose. Then again, you discovered Heinrich was with him in Pyrmont that same year, so Fritz clearly made an effort to spend some time with him (and/or wanted to keep an eye on him after their Marwitz bust-up).
and we do know that Fritz also always included updates on his brothers when he wrote to her during the Silesian wars.
What makes it all so compellingly messed up is that he really did try to act like a responsible family patriarch with his siblings (see also the new education schedule once he became King)... but could not resist following the obvious role model in the long term.
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 11:30 am (UTC)I seemed to remember something about christmas presents from your Stratemann report and yes, there it is, 1730: Princess Charlotte, our Prince of Bevern's bride, received an expensive jewel, some silver kitchen supply, shovels and pliers, and a few pretty things to dress herself up.
Checking my old write-up of their correspondence again, yes, that was in 1746.
Okay, so those were all before the 1747 dinner incident then. (But then again, I had a look at Trier and saw that all these 1746 letters have no further dates and even the year is just Preuss conjecture, so who even knows.)
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 02:25 pm (UTC)Charlotte: well, it was already obvious via her Gundling funeral denial K F-P can't have read Stratemann, but yeah, that passage flies right in the face of the idea of Charlotte the modest Spartan who doesn't want fine dresses or jewelry. Since she lists Charlotte Pangels in her bibliography, I'm assuming that might have been her source. (She also lists Ziebura's AW and Heinrich biographies, which is persumably why she doesn't follow Pangel's "no one but Voltaire ever claimed Fritz was gay, and Heinrich was straight, too!" assertion, but dumps an entire chapter of AW/Sophie von Pannwitz on us despite this having nothing to do with SD.
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 06:24 pm (UTC)Ugh, yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense -- changing things on the surface, like encouraging education and music, but following the underlying behavior because that's what he has the role model for. Sigh.
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 07:45 pm (UTC)And Algarotti! And Suhm!
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 07:59 pm (UTC)a) with Suhm, I don't think she ever saw him as a boyfriend. I mean, the interactions she could have observed between him and Fritz were when Fritz was still a teenager, so she certainly put him in the friendly older mentor category, like Duhan.
b) Algarotti: probably was that irresistably charming. Also not one of the settling sort, and thus not genuine competition for Fritz' affections. And while she wrote friendly about him to Fritz from Italy, she didn't try to get them back together again the way she lobbied for Brother Voltaire.
(As you once put it, Wilhelmine clearly was able to identify a Hohenzollern soul in an Arouet body.)
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-13 09:22 pm (UTC)It's funny 'cause it's true. :D
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 06:12 pm (UTC)Woooow!
Gundling: he had two sides, serious, even impressive scholar, and alcoholic, being a weak character, and thus a target for everyone's "rough pranks" including FW's.
Mmmmph, I guess at least he got a mention as a scholar :P
I have no doubt that you're taking care of him just like a father.
Anyway, behold SD, of all the people, writing without any irony or sarcasm that Fritz takes care of Heinrich just like a father. You can't make this people up.
Quoted for truth, omg!
but then, this is an SD biography, and kid No.13 really did not figure large into her life, not compared with the first borns.
I'm figuring Ferdinand doesn't even get this much ;)
Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-13 07:59 am (UTC)Re: Karin Feuerstein-Praßer: Sophie Dorothea von Preußen
Date: 2022-02-12 07:33 pm (UTC)Ha! You are a public service and a godsend. <3
You know what salon needs? Salon needs a marketing department, so that authors around the world know that we're available to beta-read manuscripts before publication! I mean, we weren't in 2014, but we are now!
(It's not her fault the "Eugene as role model" approach did not work.)
Hahaha, trufax.
we learn Wilhelmine made up the story about FW hitting on Fräulein von Pannwitz and getting punched because little Sophie was just a toddler in 1733. Except that Wilhelmine never provides us with a first name for the lady (hence us first assuming it was the wife when it was the sister of Katte's commander)
It being the sister was in Ziebura! That's where we learned it from. She has no excuse!
Klement: WOW. Would say more, but pressed for time. Basically: what you said!
Old Young Dessauer is to blame for young FW in his first few years of marriage being paranoid that his Fiekchen might be cheating on him. Dessauer's motive? He was against the FW/SD marriage, wanting FW to marry one of his sisters instead, and for as long as SD and FW had no living son hoped to influence his buddy to the point where the marriage would be dissolved.
This is straight out of Wilhelmine's memoirs, although she says niece rather than sister.
The prince of Anhalt could not forgive the princess royal her having been preferred to his niece; he feared, lest she might obtain possession of the heart of her consort. To prevent this, he attempted to sow the seeds of discord between them; and availing himself of the prince's disposition to jealousy, they [Dessauer and Grumbkow] endeavoured to render him jealous of his spouse.
Caroline sent Fritz a ring made of Amalie/Emily's hair (! not the older sister)
Does not surprise me. I was looking through* Oncken when we were researching this, and as late as 1730, what the Hanovers are consistently saying is "one of our daughters." At different times, one or another might have been foremost in the negotiations, but they didn't really care which.
*Looking through rather than reading, because FONT.
Anyway, behold SD, of all the people, writing without any irony or sarcasm that Fritz takes care of Heinrich just like a father.
Doesn't surprise me. Society imposes a narrative on us about how family relationships work, and people say the socially right thing in the face of their own personal experience, either because too much truth is unacceptable or because they've half-convinced themselves of what they're supposed to believe. Have done it myself.
Über minister Görtz briefly pursued the cunning plan of getting Prussia out of the anti Swedish alliance by offering marry Wilhelmine to Charles.
This is ringing a bell, but I didn't know about the letter, thanks!
Johanna Charlotte bursts into tears and says no way is her boy going to marry Anna Ivanova, the age gap is just too much... but how about him/Wilhelmine instead?
Again, the existence of these proposals is ringing a bell, but not with this level of personal detail.
Johanna Charlotte (who is indeed designed as "die Markgräfin Philipp")
Ha! I am pleased my deductions, after failing to turn up a Markgräfin Philippine, were correct. (There was an illegitimate daughter Philippine, but no wives that I could find.)
Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-13 07:22 pm (UTC)So I've been giving this some thought, and this is what I've come up with.
I think we've got several things going on here.
1. There's hoping to be loved by your arranged marriage husband, for emotional/romantic reasons.
2. There's trying to make your arranged marriage husband fall in love with you, for pragmatic reasons.
3. There's wanting to be loved so much that it influences who you choose to marry.
4. There's falling in love with your arranged marriage husband and being heartbroken when he doesn't reciprocate.
5. There's paying lip service to the idea that husbands and wives love each other, because of a societal narrative that says they're supposed to, even if everyone knows in practice it doesn't always work out like that.
1. Hoping to be loved for emotional/romantic reasons
I'm willing to bet AnhaltSophie/Catherine (she who took lovers because she, in her own words, "couldn't bear to be without love for an hour) went into her marriage hoping her husband would love her. I'm also willing to bet Wilhelmine, sensitive and emotionally needy, also hoped for love.
Let's also remember that Catherine's freedom to take lovers was an anomaly, that she wouldn't have expected this going in, and that, like most women, if she wanted romantic/sexual love, she must have assumed that her husband would likely end up her only acceptable option.
2. Trying to make your arranged marriage husband fall in love with you
Given that these women were dependent in every way on their husbands, and that if the marriage failed you knew it was going to be perceived as the woman's fault no matter what, nearly every woman in an arranged marriage who didn't want to be sent back home (hi, Marguerite-Louise), locked up in a nunnery, or otherwise sidelined, had an incentive to want her husband to fall in love with her. Given Catherine's precarious position in Russia, she had every reason to try to make Peter fall in love with her. When she realized that wasn't going to happen, she spent all her energy trying to make herself well liked at court. This eventually paid off, though it did make Elizaveta suspicious and hostile for a while.
Making their husbands fall in love with them worked so well for Caroline of Ansbach, and Philip V's (the frog) two wives, that it's impossible to tell how they themselves felt.
3. Choosing love over power
What Wilhelmine said, in hindsight, that she wanted to do, and what I think we can all agree that Catherine would rather have died than do.
4. Falling in unrequited love
What EC did, what Violante (Gian Gastone's sister-in-law) did, what someone (Ziebura?) said Mina did, what Catherine in her memoirs said she had way too much pride to do.
5. Lip service
I'm not going to be able to think of all the examples off the top of my head, but I have been a little taken aback in my reading in the last couple of years by the sheer amount of expectation that arranged spouses should fall in love after marriage. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of it is saying the right thing.
So when Horowki says the adorable moppet (Louis XV's child fiance, the one sent back to Spain) was told by her caretakers that Louis would fall in love with her after they married, I doubt they had that much confidence he would. They were trying to reassure her, because teenage Louis was showing zero interest in this six-year-old kid (as you'd expect!), and she was starting to worry. But the point is, this princess was raised being told, and presumably believing wholeheartedly, at least for a while, before she got older and more realistic/cynical, that arranged marriage spouses naturally fall in love and that she should expect this to happen.
I think SD is using the narrative of love being part of marriage to get the arranged marriage outcome she wants. Not because a princess was supposed to choose love over a good marriage, or even that they were supposed to be in love before they were married (the same people who told adorable moppet that her husband would fall in love were scandalized by their counterparts in Spain already being in love and lusting after each other before the marriage), but because a loveless marriage was seen as narratively inferior (again, not necessarily in practice).
In the same way that FW, when Fritz was pushing for the Amalia marriage, was like, "Oh, FFS, you've never even met, there's no way you're in love with her." That wasn't his real reason, any more than it was SD's reason for rejecting Charles as a marriage candidate for Wilhelmine, but the absence of love was part of the ammunition their society gave them for rejecting a marriage proposal.
I think this goes along with what you guys convinced me was Fritz saying the socially right thing rather than the true thing, namely telling Heinrich that he loved his mother more than his sister. Because you're supposed to love your mother the most. And I think that's exactly what SD is doing when she says, unironically, that Fritz is acting like a father to his siblings. She's supposed to tell him that he's doing what he's supposed to do, namely treating his orphaned siblings the way a father is supposed to treat his children. Their own personal experience aside, this is the accepted narrative.
Likewise, I forget where I've read this or what, if any, the primary source is, but I've seen in several places that FW is said to have "shed the tears conventional upon a father-in-law's death" when G1 died. Not because he was personally overwhelmed with grief for G1, but that he's supposed to revere his father-in-law. Just as everyone is supposed to say that he was moved by grief, even if in practice, everyone knows it's an agreed-upon social fiction in this case.
On a personal note, I can still remember being a kid and blurting out to my visiting grandmother once that I'd missed her, then instantly feeling really awkward because I'd only met her a few times, barely knew her, and figured she would know that I was telling a white lie. Because it was that obviously a social fiction. To the point where I wasn't sure she even expected me to miss her. But I still--and this is me, not known for white lies!--felt compelled on that occasion to follow the narrative.
Ekaterina
In conclusion, I've forgotten what Ekaterina has Catherine doing, but if it's some combination of 1, 2, and 5, and not 3 or 4, then I think it checks out. If they've got her acting like she's in unreciprocated love with Peter, or that she'd rather marry Saltykov and give up the throne (as opposed to falling in love with Saltykov and wishing she could marry him, but preferring to keep her position as Grand Duchess), then that's super OOC. (Though if we're pointing out that Wilhelmine is writing with the benefit of hindsight, it's possible that our emotionally needy Catherine fell in unrequited love with Peter at first and was too proud or pragmatic to admit it afterwards, especially after she'd had him overthrown and was widely suspected of having had him killed.)
ETA: I suppose the TLDR here is that expecting to be allowed to marry for love, MT-style, was rare in princesses, but expecting or hoping for love in marriage, including having romantic dreams about it, probably much less so.
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-14 08:07 am (UTC)- as coincidence would have it, today there's an article in my favourite newspaper about the new publication of the love letters one of the 18th Century Wittelsbach princesses wrote to her brother-in-law through the decades, which looks like it contribute a bit on the subject
- re: expecting to be allowed to marry for love, MT-style, was rare in princesses: And even MT would presumably not have expected to marry FS if he'd not been a Duke with several royal ancestors and relations in his perdigree (remember, grandson of Liselotte and Philippe the Gay). Ditto for daughter Mimi allowed to marry Albert, who might have been a younger son and not a rich one, but was a prince. Now Old Dessauer/The Apothecary's Daughter was a truly class smashing completely unexpected marriage for love, but I'm trying to think of an example where a princess, not a prince, married a non-noble for love in the 18th century and am failing
- in the Renaissance, otoh, you have several high ranking noble ladies after being widowed marrying their stewards for love, who weren't commoners, exactly, but defnitely below rank and thus regarded as unsuitable
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-14 02:13 pm (UTC)Anything interesting? Is it paywalled?
And even MT would presumably not have expected to marry FS if he'd not been a Duke
I cannot *imagine* her being allowed to marry a non-ducal FS! She had the good luck of falling in love with someone extremely suitable for her. And that was largely because of a perfect storm of political considerations. Namely, she *wasn't* supposed to leave home and marry the highest-ranked guy she could get, in which case she would never have met him, because Europe would never stand for the highest-ranked guy getting the Holy Roman Empire. So she got to marry a lower-ranked guy who'd been hanging out at her court for years, where she could get to know him before marriage. Highly unusual circumstance here.
I'm trying to think of an example where a princess, not a prince, married a non-noble for love in the 18th century and am failing
Both Elizaveta and Catherine are suspected of having morganatically married non-nobles or petty nobles for love--Razumovsky and Potemkin respectively--but they were Tsarinas, and in both cases the alleged marriage was so secret that to this day it's contentious whether it happened at all.
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-15 06:47 am (UTC)Ha, yes, Razumovsky is the guy who narrates all the "now we will time-jump seven years" bits. He's actually possibly my favorite character in Ekaterina, although he seems a lot more politically savvy in the show than Massie thought he was. And then there's the TV subplot where Elizaveta secretly marries him (yes, sure, secret marriage seems dramatically plausible) and then she says she's decided he's going to be emperor when she's dead and is writing this in her will.
Me: What?
Razumovsky: What??
I've just got to Elizaveta dying, but Peter is yet to be confirmed, and Razumovsky is all, "Will? What will? No will to see here!"
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-16 01:33 am (UTC)Re the discussion of marrying non-nobles, I should add that Elizaveta had the example of her father, Peter the Great, marrying a Lithuanian peasant (mother of Elizaveta and Peter III's mother), who then became Tsarina after Peter died. Will or no will, Razumovsky could have at least made a bid for power. But one thing the show gets right is that he didn't want to play the game of thrones, in which you win or you die.
ETA: forgot to mention her name. That's Catherine I, 1725-1727.
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-17 07:47 am (UTC)Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-14 05:54 pm (UTC)Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-18 03:52 pm (UTC)I will say that Ekaterina mostly sticks with your (1), (2), and (5), and manages not to do (3) and (4), but there's something about the way they paint Catherine as naive/sentimental in the early episodes that kind of grates on me. Like, she asks Johanna, doesn't she love her husband? in one of these episodes, and... idk, even not-very-aware 15-year-old me wouldn't have been as shocked by the answer being "what? are you crazy?" as Catherine clearly seems to be. (The background here is that my parents did not marry for love, they had a quasi-arranged marriage, and sometimes it shows. Now, I think when one of us -- probably my sister, I don't think I would have, and she was and is the sentimental one of the two of us -- asked them a similar question at a similar age, their actual answer was to basically quote Fiddler on the Roof back at us:
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought with him, starved with him
If that's not love, what is?)
I think I would say that Ekaterina seems to cast Catherine as expecting to be loved (not just hoping to be loved), and that's where I wonder if they are taking liberties. I mean... given the weight of (5), maybe not? And she was 15, and I certainly was a lot more idealistic and sentimental at 15 than at 33! But my sense is that the showrunners are going as far as they can in that direction while still staying in the range of possibility, in order to maximize audience sympathy (well, except for me, I guess) with Catherine and make her turning against Peter in the end more sympathetic.