18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More 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!

Comments

Re: "Empress Elizabeth" and "Five Empresses" by Evgenii Anisimov - I

[selenak]

To answer the later one first, SD/FW and Peter (I)/Catherine (I) are two very different couples in very different countries. I agree that if SD had cheated on FW, he'd have locked her up like G1 did her mother, at the very least. Whereas her not having sex with him after all those kids was something no one else guessed and thus didn't make him look face, and since there were ample male offspring around, it didn't threaten the kingdom.

However, FW/SD was a typical royal marriage (well, in its set up - not how it worked out), made for political and alliance reasons. SD brought considerable capital into the marriage, so to speak - as daughter and sister of powerful monarchs with an impeccable bloodline going back to the time of Charlemagne. The only reason why FW wasn't socially beneath her was that he was her first cousin and the son of a Hannover princess himself, not because of the Brandenburg heritage. Meanwhile, Peter/Catherine was the opposite of typical. She was so far below him on the social scale as it was possible to be, him making her his maitresse en titre was unusual enough, but the actual marriage was near unheard of. Now presumably if she'd been infertile he might not have married her but left it at the mistress stage - he did want non-Alexei children, and Catherine having a plenty (even if many of them died) did provide these. But still, the main reason why they were together was that he'd fallen in love with her.

Now, both her taking another lover and her refusing to have sex with him would have hurt and gone the assumption she loved him back. BUT firstly, Peter as a Russian Czar could do what he wanted in a way FW, even as an absolute monarch, just couldn't. See also Anna Ivanova making Russian princes her court fools. FW might have been able to do that with a non-noble university professor, but if he'd tried it with, say, someone like Katte, I think his nobililty would have seen it as far worse than executing Katte by overriding the tribunal's sentence and seen it as an insult to them all and gotten rebellious. And Catherine, as a former peasant, didn't have any powerful clan to back her up. Meaning: Peter could have done whatever he wanted with her. And her lover. If she cheats on him, that's awful, but he can kill the boytoy and assume that's it, things can get back to normal at some point. They're both passionate, energetic people, after all. If she refuses to have sex, and/or stays indifferent during it, that would go to the core of what originally brought them together, and might mean to him there's no future for them.

re: Philippe the Regent's daughter - we mentioned her a couple of times before, actually. It was this lady, whom Voltaire in his first big satire said he had an incesteous relationship with, thus earning his first stint in the Bastille, though both Philippe the Regent and his daughter Marie Louise Elisabeth made a point of visiting the premiere of Voltaire's play about Oedipus after that. While the incest is sheer speculation and probably not true, her father was extremely lenient with her, let her do whatever she wanted, whether this was having lovers, attending orgies, eating too much or drinking too much. At twenty, she was already at times in her bed for days unable to get up but gorging herself with all the food she ordered brought to her. (When she died, people found yet more food beneath her bed). Now, various illegitimate pregnancies didn't help, and early on she tried a diet now an then until giving up any attempt to lose weight for good, plus she had ulcers, so there wasn't just one particular cause of death. But all the food definitely was one of the main contributing factors.

Re: "Empress Elizabeth" and "Five Empresses" by Evgenii Anisimov - I

[mildred_of_midgard]

Meaning: Peter could have done whatever he wanted with her. And her lover. If she cheats on him, that's awful, but he can kill the boytoy and assume that's it, things can get back to normal at some point. They're both passionate, energetic people, after all. If she refuses to have sex, and/or stays indifferent during it, that would go to the core of what originally brought them together, and might mean to him there's no future for them.

Yep, this. And let me remind you, cahn, that the way to get rid of an unwanted wife in Russia in this period is to have the wife be "voluntold" to join an Orthodox nunnery. The original idea was that there was no divorce, marriage lasted until death. But if a woman had a religious calling, she could leave the secular world behind and become legally dead, at which point her husband was legally widowed.

Of course, it took about 0.001 microseconds for powerful men to realize that here was a giant loophole for divorcing unwanted wives (much like consanguinity in the Catholic west). The Church authorities protested. "That's not what we meant! We meant genuine religious calling!" But Peter had already done this to his first wife, Alexei's mother Eudoxia, who did not want to go into a nunnery, but was eventually pressured into saying that she did.

So if you can keep your husband convinced that you still want to live together as husband and wife, you've got a chance, whereas once you announce you're done with him, he might decide to marry someone else, at which point you need to be made legally dead.