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: Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Kidnapping, Trial, and Religious War

[mildred_of_midgard]

Speaking as the granddaughter of a Catholic from Aachen (that's Aix-La-Chapelle, btw, [personal profile] cahn, if you're only familiar with the French name) who married a (Lutheran) Protestant from Osnabrück, I am doubly faszinated by this tale I was hitherto unfamiliar with.

Oh, neat! I knew this story would be of interest to cahn in her mixed marriage, but I didn't know it would hit so close to home to you as well! (One set of my grandparents were in a mixed marriage, but most of the drama revolved around the ethnicity/race aspects, not the religion.*)

All the kidnappings at the start remind me of the event where some of FW's troops were either in the process of returning with their volunteer when assaulted by a mob or lording with their gang-pressed victim which was liberated by the people, depending whom you believe, also at the Dutch border, I think.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this also happened at the Hanoverian border, the Saxon border, the Danish border, the Mecklenburg border if I'm not mistaken, and probably several others. FW's foreign policy was to keep the diplomats busy over his recruiting practices. :P

If it was, it might be worth checking Leopold's correspondence for mentions of this mini religious war, because as a staunch Catholic, he's bound to have An Opinion on this.

Ooh, nice connection! Yeah, there might be something interesting there.

* The only story I have about religion in that marriage is that the kids were supposed to be raised Catholic, and my loosely Protestant grandmother was fine with that...until one day a Catholic priest told her she should have as many kids as possible, because God could always take away the ones she had. Now, my grandparents were committed to only having the 2 kids they could afford on their income. Outraged, my grandmother said she was never taking the kids to a Catholic church again. To which my grandfather's response was, "If they're not going a Catholic church, they're not going to any church." And that is the story of how churchgoing in my family died a generation and a half back. ;)