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cahnMore diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
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Date: 2022-07-18 07:35 am (UTC)Selena: thanks for the links to the Lehndorff write-ups, I'll check them out! I don't know much about Heinrich's personality, but perhaps, even if Lehndorff was too intense for him and he had to keep him at a distance sometimes, maybe Lehndorff was also good at giving Heinrich emotional support? And his constancy might have been an ego-boost, too.
In pagan times, they would have made him a god, in our time, all who know him build altars to him in their hearts.
OMG. I have never been so deep in love that I was lost to the truth that, to other people, my crush was just an ordinary person.
Could Lehndorff not just have...quit his job and gone to London with his lover? But I guess if he did that he would be in disfavor and not have been able to come back to court?
Oh, and here's another bit from the Mrs Calderwood journal:
I saw the Countess of Coventry at Ranelagh. I think she is a pert, stinking-like [haughty] husy, going about with her face up to the sky, that she might see from under her hat, which she had pulled quite over her nose that nobody might see her face. She was in dishabile and very shabby drest, but was painted over her very jaw-bones.
This is Maria Gunning whom I wrote about in a previous comment! Her sister is Elizabeth Gunning who was married to two Dukes and turned down a third one because he didn't want her to associate with her sister. Anyway, the interesting thing about the quote is that Maria Gunning likely died from using too much make-up, and this (judgy) quote does show that she is wearing an unusual amount of make-up.
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Date: 2022-07-18 07:50 am (UTC)He could not! Not legally, anyway! Nobles and royals had to have their monarch's permission to travel abroad, much less to move. It took Heinrich forever just to get permission from Fritz to travel abroad, and he had to use a certain amount of sleight-of-hand to make it happen.
Yes, you *could* try to illegally emigrate, and people did (some even succeeded), but just like illegal immigration today, there were consequences if you tried and failed. (Fritz tried and failed when he was 18. He got locked up in prison and had to watch his bff/lover's head get cut off for helping him.) And even if you tried and succeeded, there might be consequences for your family left behind, or for anyone who was suspected of being in the know.
It's one of those things we take for granted now, but, for that matter, consider how "easy" it was to defect from Soviet Russia to the west in the twentieth century. Not just a matter of quitting your job and not being able to go back.
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Date: 2022-07-19 08:23 am (UTC)Ah, okay! Even if he was just a younger son? Was this common in Europe at the time? I know I'm terribly insular (ha ha) and reading mostly about British history, but I can't recall such instances there...
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Date: 2022-07-21 06:21 am (UTC)Not as far as I know. I could be wrong, and am currently not in a position to look it up, but I think it might have been a Brandenburg/Prussia speciality, mostly designed to prevent foreign nobles and monarchs to gain a claim on some Prussian estate via an emigrating noble. It's worth keeping in mind that Prussia was near broke just a few decades ago before FW changed this via a massive austerity program, the rebuilding of the economy, a massive military build up and a rewriting of an entire mentality. Pre Friedrich Wilhelm I., whether or not your avarage Prussian noble send one or several sons to the military was an individual decision. Post FW, not having served in the army at least for some time if you were healthy was a shameful thing for sons of the nobility, and if you didn't serve the state somehow, you're equally side-eyed. (One of many reasons why I amuse myself now and then contemplating the scenario where young FW does indeed get adopted and made his heir by William of Orange. The English nobility faced with a workoholic puritan control freak with a massive temper problem who expects each of them to serve the state would be a sight to behold.)
Anyway, I think Lehndorff not just as an English or French noble but also as, say, a Bavarian or Saxon noble would not have had that problem.
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Date: 2022-07-21 09:30 am (UTC)Looking at the examples I can think of where leaving the country was a problem, it's not clear to me that Lehndorff would have been in the same position in another country, but it's not clear that he wouldn't.
France: McKay's description of why Eugene of Savoy was chased when leaving the country goes like this:
On 26 July Eugene and his close friend the prince of Conti fled from Paris without Louis's permission. Because Conti was a French prince of the blood efforts were made by the king's agents to stop the pair as they crossed Germany. They were caught at Frankfurt. Conti was persuaded to return, but Eugene refused and went on.
The preceding page makes it look like Eugene had not yet joined the French army but had asked for permission to join it and been refused, so it doesn't sound like the problem here is desertion. It sounds like he was supposed to ask for permission in the first place, even as a random noble, and if he hadn't made it to Germany, he would have been dragged back, but because he wasn't a soldier committing desertion, there wouldn't have been a death penalty.
This matches my impression of people asking permission to leave, although of course right now
I can't think of specific examples!
Russia: One of the essays I read on Tsarevitch Alexei's flight says: "With his flight abroad, he committed desertion as a soldier and treason as a civil servant." Like Fritz, Alexei hadn't asked to be either of those things. But he was also a royal, which might be different from random nobles.
My impression is that Peter the Great would not have been okay with random nobles, even younger sons, leaving the country without permission; like FW, he was big on creating a culture of service among the nobility. The difference was that Peter's problem with the nobility was more usually that he was forcibly shipping them abroad to learn Western ways and they kept trying to sneak back!
Portgual: Manuel, who had to sneak aboard an English ship, and the English ambassador offered to chase him down for João, was a prince of the blood. (Btw, we celebrated his not getting married, but now that I'm looking at the book again, it says that according to his sister-in-law, he was very keen to get married!)
It's not clear to me from this whether random nobles were allowed to leave or travel Portugal without permission.
I'm also of the impression that holding a court office like Lehndorff's wasn't technically at-will employment, meaning you were supposed to get permission from most monarchs (at least the absolute ones) before you left, not just hand in your resignation and leave. Augustus III was not pleased with even civilian foreigner Algarotti handing in his resignation without asking permission, although because he was a foreigner and already outside the country, there was little Augustus (who was pretty chill about such things) could do. And Louis XV had to give permission for Voltaire to join Fritz's court, even though he wasn't a noble, because he held a court office.
So my impression is that in most absolute monarchies of the period, it would have been at least somewhat problematic for Lehndorff to go, "Nah, don't want to be chamberlain any more, bye!" and leave. Actual consequences? Well, not the death penalty, but if the monarch cares enough, they can probably drag you back.
But whether younger noble sons without an office could just leave without permission like in Prussia...my impression is no in France and Russia, but that's an impression. I would not be surprised if it was a thing in Spain and Portugal, maybe even somewhere like Tuscany or Savoy.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Joseph II tried this in Austria, if it wasn't already a thing there. It tends to go hand-in-hand with creating a culture of service among the nobility (which is partly why I think that was Fritz's dominant motive in denying Lehndorff).
Charles XI of Sweden definitely tried to create a culture of service among his nobility, but the nobles retained more power there than in other countries, and they managed to reverse absolutism in 1719, so I kind of doubt having to ask the monarch for permission was a thing after 1719, and I'm not sure if Charles XI or XII had the time to do it before then.
I know I'm terribly insular (ha ha) and reading mostly about British history, but I can't recall such instances there...
I can recall an instance of the reverse: before becoming king, George I had to agree not to leave England (for Hanover, in practice) without getting Parliament's permission first! IIRC, after a few years, they realized that was impracticable, so revoked it.
ETA: Ah! Googling gets me a modern, unreliable book that matches my impression for Russia:
In Russia even the nobility (deemed essential for military service), had to get the tsar or tsarina's permission to leave the country.
I seem to recall Victor Amadeus of Savoy cracking down on nobles joining other country's militaries without permission, but I'm not sure about civilians going abroad to live with their lovers.
One thing that's tangentially related: in France, not just nobles but as far as I know anyone had to be thirty before they could marry without their parents' permission. Diderot got locked up at the age of 29 to prevent him from marrying someone unsuitable.
ETA 2: I found the relevant passage in Blackstone, confirming that in England you did have the right to travel by default:
And at present everybody has, or at least assumes, the liberty of going abroad when he pleases. Yet undoubtedly if the king, by writ of ne exeat regnum, under his great seal or privy seal, thinks proper to prohibit him from so doing; or if the king sends a writ to any man, when abroad, commanding his return; and, in either case, the subject disobeys; it is a high contempt of the king’s prerogative, for which the offender's lands shall be seized till he return; and then he is liable to fine and imprisonment
But it was not always thus:
By the common law, every man may go out of the realm for whatever cause he pleaseth, without obtaining the king’s leave; provided he is under no injunction of staying at home, (which liberty was expressly declared in king John’s great charter, though left out in that of Henry III.:) but, because that every man ought of right to defend the king and his realm, therefore the king at his pleasure may command him by his writ that he go not beyond the seas, or out of the realm, without license; and, if he do the contrary, he shall be punished for disobeying the king’s command. Some persons there anciently were, that, by reason of their stations, were under a perpetual prohibition of going abroad without license obtained; among which were reckoned all peers, on account of their being counsellors of the crown; all knights, who were bound to defend the kingdom from invasions; all ecclesiastics, who were expressly confined by the fourth chapter of the constitutions of Clarendon, on account of their attachment in the times of popery to the see of Rome; all archers and other artificers, lest they should instruct foreigners to rival us in their several trades and manufactures. This was law in the times of Britton, who wrote in the reign of Edward I.: and Sir Edward Coke gives us many instances to this effect in the time of Edward III. In the succeeding reign the affair of travelling wore a very different aspect: an act of parliament being made, forbidding all persons whatever to go abroad without license; except only the lords and other great men of the realm; and true and notable merchants; and the king’s soldiers. But this act was repealed by the statute 4 Jac. I. c. 1.
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Date: 2022-07-23 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-23 04:35 pm (UTC)The difference was that Peter's problem with the nobility was more usually that he was forcibly shipping them abroad to learn Western ways and they kept trying to sneak back!
While this was true, the reverse was also true. Peter tried to impose mandatory service on all the nobles; two thirds in the army and one third in civil service. They all had to register and report for service, and they did not like it at all. Many tried to escape abroad (sometimes inventing urgent errands that took them out of the country), enter monasteries, or disappear into the wild when census-takers came knocking. (Russia having more land than people, it was easier to disappear than in, say, Prussia.)
Massie doesn't say whether they had to get permission to go abroad on their invented errands, but based on that passage I found in my previous comment, plus my *sense* from my reading that Catherine the Great would not have gone for nobles leaving the country without permission, I'm going to guess either yes, they already did, or else this is when and how that rule started.
The easiest way to illegally emigrate, of course, is the same way as the easiest way to illegally immigrate today: to get permission from the relevant government and then just stay in the new country forever. (Also what Algarotti did in his Frexit, of course, and of course many Soviet defectors (which is why so many celebrities had KGB escorts when they traveled to the West).)
ETA: It occurred to me to check Catherine and Diderot, and I found this relevant passage:
Over time all individuals were bound to other individuals, to the state, or both. This was the case for the nobility, who were obliged to serve the state in administrative or military capacities, as well as for town dwellers, who, unlike nobles, required permission to move from one town to another. As Isabel de Madariaga drily notes, in eighteenth-century Russia “all that was not specifically authorized was forbidden, and only that could be done which was specifically authorized.” [Followed, of course, by a discussion of serfdom.]
Still no definitive answer on nobles and leaving the country, but the obligation to serve is pointing in that direction.
ETA2: More Russian findings, from a more reliable looking book (The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Violence in Russia):
It was impossible for a nobleman of the Petrine era to avoid service by legal means, and the illegal routes were interdicted by very harsh decrees, threatening nobles with public punishment and publication of the names of “no-shows” on special boards nailed to gallows. More terrifying than moral humiliation for the nobleman was the confiscation of holdings for refusal to serve. Decrees promised to give part of the holdings of the “no-show” to delators.
And:
Compelled to perform lifelong service in the army and the state offices, the nobles persistently begged for at least long leaves in order to establish order on their estates, where only old men and children remained.
Compulsory education:
The decree of 20 January 1714 is unique in Russian history: the nobleman who has not acquired the basics of knowledge necessary for service is forbidden to marry: “Dispatch to all the guberniias [provinces] several persons from the mathematical schools to instruct noble sons, except the single homesteaders and those of bureau rank, in ciphering and geometry and establish such a punishment that he will not be free to marry until he is schooled.”
These draconian measures were increasingly not enforced under Peter's successors, and Peter III revoked compulsory service entirely in 1762. Then Catherine, who first revoked Peter's reforms and then re-implemented them under her own name because they were so obviously badly needed (and she needed the nobility's support), lightened up restrictions on the nobility, but it's not clear to me whether this included travel abroad.
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Date: 2022-07-24 08:11 am (UTC)Russian nobility
Date: 2022-07-24 11:18 am (UTC)The (Russian) author of the more reliable-looking book on Peter's reforms I just cited makes the case that during Peter's time, at least, the nobles were *not* the ruling class, they were a differently oppressed class:
In this regard a question arises: can one call this bureaucratized, regimented nobility that was obligated to study in order then to serve and to serve in unlimited military and civil service (even those discharged from service “for old age and for wounds” for which they had often been examined by the autocrat himself were assigned to garrisons or “whoever will be suited to whichever occupation”), the ruling class-estate in the sense that we understand this, as applied to the times of Catherine the Great and Nicholas I?
It may be objected, to the contrary, that the nobles were the ruling class, for they enjoyed the right of owning lands settled by bondaged peasants whom they exploited. This is true, of course, but as applied to the Petrine era serf ownership was not the exclusive right of the noble class. Bondaged peasants and even slaves could be owned in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries by representatives of the service estate and the merchantry. Only subsequently did the nobility succeed in gaining the monopoly right on owning settled lands.
Ah! Looking at the coverage of Alexei in this book, it says "he decided on a terrible crime for a Russian subject--fleeing abroad, which was state treason." That's broader than the "civil servant committing treason and soldier committing desertion" description from that essay I cited in my original post.
Judging by some other things he says, that may actually have been one of the things changed by Catherine, I'm not sure. But since she didn't come into power until the 1760s, that's still a good half of the century.
Mecklenburg
Date: 2022-07-24 06:31 pm (UTC)Given that the imperial execution was placed on him that year and shortly thereafter he had to leave the country, at which point FW and G1, followed by FW and G2, started wrangling over who should occupy Mecklenburg in his absence, that might not have been enforced after 1717, but it does show that he tried!
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Date: 2022-07-18 09:10 am (UTC)Mildred told you already why Lehndorff as a Prussian noble couldn’t just quit and go to London with Hotham without royal permission. Incidentally, there’s also a question of finances. Lehndorff at this point of his life was a younger brother without any income of his own if he quit his office as chamberlain and gets cut off by his older brother from the estate revenues (which said older brother would have had to do if he didn’t want to risk royal disgrace himself. Now, since Lehndorff, who is handicaped due to a lame foot, isn’t part of the army, he doesn’t risk the death penalty if he leaves without permission, but he certainly risks finding himself broke abroad and utterly dependent on his lover. Who is all of 21 and presumably also dependent on a father or uncle for his income.
Heinrich’s personality is in many ways that of his oldest brother, i.e. Fritz, which is why the two clash so often. There are some differences, too, of course, partly through their different life circumstances - first crown prince, then King vs 13th and last-but-one child of a large royal brood - and partly because Fritz is a warning example, but they do have a lot of eerie similarities. They’re both gay, loving music and (French) literature with more than avarage-for-a-noble passion, both start out hating the dullness of military drill (but not being in the military isn’t an option anymore for a Prussian prince once their father has changed the Prussian mentality in his image) and the hierarchic soldier life, and end up as superb generals anyway; they’re both sharp tongued, believe themselves immune to flattery but are anything but; and then there’s the part where Fritz deliberately has the 14 years younger Heinrich recreate parts of his life, which alas includes forcing him to marry as a disciplinary measure just as their father has forced him, but also includes giving him Rheinsberg, his favorite place to be, with the caveat that Heinrich isn’t actually allowed to live there until he’s submitted properly by marrying. Both Fritz and Heinrich were also terrible husbands to their unwanted wives, being constitutionally incapable of seeing the actual woman as opposed as a symbol of their humiliation and the tight hold Dad/Big Brother has on them.
Key differences include the part where Heinrich could actually delegate (like I said, Fritz is a warning example), and also the part where while contemporaries and historians never stopped debating how much or little sex Fritz actually had, hardly anyone thought or thinks Heinrich’s relationships with his (male) favourites were platonic. They were also different types of general, which was really lucky for Prussia in the 7 Years War. Fritz excelled at ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK, winning against the odds but with incredibly high losses of life; Heinrich was good at exhausting and tricking his enemies before there ever was a battle, and for being able to choose the ground he wanted (because he could run the usually superior enemy ragged first).
Emotional support is definitely something Lehndorff offered through the decades, and it’s probably not a coincidence that while they had known each other for two years already at that point, with Lehndorff friends of all three of Fritz’ younger brothers, Heinrich becoming closer to him and him falling in love with Heinrich happened in the year of Heinrich’s marriage. (Like I said, two years after they’ve met, so, not a case of love on sight.) And that’s when the accolades in the diary start. Of course, this was an emo age and flattering royalty was what courtiers did, but even within that caveat, Lehndorff well and truly stands out in his smitten-ness. He later notes down Heinrich’s less flattering traits as well (though his worst trait in Lehndorff’s eyes will always be falling for the wrong men), but as the entry quoted in this post shows, never entirely loses the part where you feel he’d have drawn sparkly hearts around Heinrich’s name if that had already been an option in the 18th century.
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Date: 2022-07-19 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-25 03:52 am (UTC)Yes, I would totally buy that!
Anyway, the interesting thing about the quote is that Maria Gunning likely died from using too much make-up, and this (judgy) quote does show that she is wearing an unusual amount of make-up.
Oh, that is interesting! Heh, judginess in general is certainly more hilarious from a couple hundred years distance...