18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

[cahn]

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

Comments

Re: Agony Aunts (and Uncles)

[selenak]

Anyway, Eleonore was "merely" lower nobility, and she wasn't considered by class snobs like Liselotte to be a good match for Georg Wilhelm.

She wasn't, but in addition to snobbery, there was another element here which you didn't mention, and that was that Georg Wilhelm didn't offer to stay single and childless out of the goodness of his heart/because Sophia and Ernst August bullied him into it. Georg Wilhelm had been engaged to Sophie and then changed his mind, and offered her a trade of fiance to get out of it, to wit, his youngest brother. Who, being the youngest, was also the one who had absolutely the least inheritance of all the brothers to expect. This was a significant downtrading and status losing, and I suspect that if she hadn't a) already been in her later 20s, and b) herself the youngest (and twelfth) surviving child of the penniless exiled Winter Queen, she might not have gone for it. As it was, she didn't agree until he offered, in writing, the promise that Ernst August's and her kids would inherit from him because he'd stay single. So basically Eléonore and her daughter were the walking, talking proof of Georg Wilhelm first dumping her and then pulling a fast one on his written pledge. Given that Liselotte was partly raised by Sophie (escaping the non-stop marital war between her parents for five solid years that way, remember, Karl Ludwig's wife was the one who bit into the finger of his mistress in one big scene Sophie describes in her memoirs), I'm not surprised she was 100% Team Sophie here and absorbed all the attitude.

Which isn't to say she'd have been non-snobbish if Georg Wilhelm had never made that pledge, but it did play a role. The interesting thing is that Liselotte while being anti- bastards and anti higher rank/lower rank marriages as a rule made a big exception for all her own half siblings. (Karl Ludwig since his wife refused to divorce him and refused to move out did a Henry VIII and said since he was the head of the Palatine Protestants, he was divorcing himself. But the legality was regarded as questionable by the rest of the German princpalities, and so Liselotte's half siblings didn't get the titles they otherwise would have - they were "Raugräfin" and "Raugraf", respectively, with the "Rau" indicating the questionable legitimacy. And they - who were many - are the significant exceptions to the Mausdreck rule for Liselotte, since she loved them dearly, and one half brother, nicknamed Carl-Lutz by her - Lutz is short for Ludwig - was her favourite relation other than Sophie.

Anyway, in that Q & A I combined two things - Liselotte's "Mausdreck" snobbery as documented apropos the Celle branch of the family, and her (very much requited) hate-on for Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's mistress and morganatic wife who had started as the governess of his children. (Louis is the questioner.) Liselotte despised her for many reasons, some valid - certainly Maintenon was a case of "convert becomes more Catholic than Catholic and encourages fanaticism thereafter" - , and some not (regarding the quondam Francoise Scarron as lowborn, etc.).