18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 36

[cahn]

Starting a couple of comments earlier than usual to mention there are a couple of new salon fics! These probably both need canon knowledge.

felis ficlets on siblings!

Siblings (541 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758), Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758)
Summary:

Three Fills for the 2022 Three Sentence Ficathon.

Chapter One: Protective Action / Babysitting at Rheinsberg (Frederick/Fredersdorf, William+Henry+Ferdinand)
Chapter Two: Here Be Lions (Wilhelmine)

Unsent Letters fic by me:

Letters for a Dead King (1981 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen (1726-1802)
Characters: Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802)
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Love/Hate, Talking To Dead People, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family
Summary:

Just because one's king and brother is dead doesn't mean one has to stop writing to him.

Comments

Six Degrees

[mildred_of_midgard]

Some more connections of the type Horowski delights in and that make it easier for us to play Six Degrees to Francesco Algarotti. ;)

Among the things I'm currently reading is a collection of essays on Russo-Austrian relations in the early 18th century, with a focus on the flight of Tsarevitch Alexei. (cahn, if you need a refresher, selenak did her usual great summary here.)

One of the tutors of young Alexei is German Heinrich von Huyssen (remember that Peter felt about Germans much the same way Fritz felt about the French). According to the biographical essay I'm reading, Huyssen made a name for himself in the 1690s and got a lot of good job offers, but he really wanted to work in Berlin. He had close ties to Eberhard von Danckelmann, including the fact that he went to university (Utrecht) with Danckelmann's son, but Danckelmann's fall in 1697 meant Huyssen didn't get the job he wanted at F1's court.

Danckelmann, remember, was the shouty teacher of F1 who made him translate "Fritz will be an ass" into Latin, then got promoted to prime minister, then got overthrown (historians debate the role of Sophie Charlotte in his fall).

So instead, in 1702, a Livonian nobleman named Johann Patkul, who is in Russian exile working for Peter the Great, brings to Huyssen's attention that Peter is recruiting experts from the west to come modernize Russia. And thus Huyssen ends up in Russia charged with a number of responsibilities:

- Attract more westerners, especially ones competent in the Czech and Polish languages.
- Translate Peter's recruiting advertisement into various languages and have it published and distributed abroad.
- Convince western authors, especially of works of history, politics, and mechanics, to dedicate their works to Peter, his son Alexei, and/or Peter's ministers.
- Improve the postal service connections between Russia and other countries.

Then he gets promoted to the position of Alexei's tutor in 1703.

Now, Patkul is another name we've encountered in salon: he's the guy who started the Great Northern War. He was a nobleman living in Livonia, modern-day Latvia and Estonia, a place that had been conquered by the Swedes, and the Swedish crown was busy appropriating noble estates. After unsuccessfully trying to get them to stop, Patkul ended up under a death sentence in Sweden and had to flee abroad. Where he more successfully convinced August the Strong, Peter the Great, and Frederik IV of Denmark to combine forces in waging war on Sweden, because Charles XII was only an inexperienced teenager and what was he going to do about it?

Fast forward several years, Charles XII is occupying Poland and Saxony, and he forces August the Strong to hand over Patkul for execution. Patkul gets a very gruesome execution in 1707, inspiring one Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel to write a diatribe to Saxon minister Flemming about abuses of monarchies!

10 years later, Alexei flees to Austria and ends up stashed in Tyrol, then Naples, before returning home and dying gruesomely under torture ordered by his father, inspiring a lot of people to write diatribes about the abuses of one monarch in particular.

Re: Six Degrees

[selenak]

Incidentally, I keep wondering how much Alexei's gruesome fate contributed to saving Fritz' life. Not just in the instance Wilhelmine describes in her memoirs, during FW's brutal homecoming where SD's lady in waiting impressed him with her "don't be like Peter the Great and Philip of Spain, remember what happened to their bloodline!" Because FW was just supertitious - or if you like, religious - enough to believe that Peter's younger sons all dying after he had Alexei killed, with the result that his successors in FW's life time were basically all women (shock! Horror!), was God's judgment. And that something similar might happen if he caused his own oldest son's death.

Conversely, Alexei's death might also have contributed to all those European monarchs writing "don't kill your son!" letters to FW, knowing there was precedent, I mean. I do wonder how MT's mother felt about the whole Alexei situation, though. Because he was her brother-in-law and had made her sister's life hell in those few years of marriage, and Charlotte died at only 21 years of age. So she might not have been that heartbroken when he left his Austrian exile. (German wiki's entry on Charlotte - that's Alexei's wife - claims that 50 years after her death, gossip showed up that claimed she'd faked said death and escaped to live as a French officer's life in the American colonies, then returned to spend her last years financially secure due to her niece, MT, in Europe. Sounds like a better fate than dying in the aftermath of childbirth at 21, but alas is entirely invented.

Re: Six Degrees

[cahn]

Incidentally, I keep wondering how much Alexei's gruesome fate contributed to saving Fritz' life.

Because FW was just supertitious - or if you like, religious - enough to believe that Peter's younger sons all dying after he had Alexei killed, with the result that his successors in FW's life time were basically all women (shock! Horror!), was God's judgment. And that something similar might happen if he caused his own oldest son's death.

Ooooof, yeah, I can totally see that. Like, not even necessarily at a conscious forebrain level, but lurking in the back of his head.

(okay, I did laugh at the "shock! Horror!" bit)