cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

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From:

selenak

And now I'm wondering whether the "König Moltke" moniker goes back to anything other than this book, because right now I have three sources for that claim:

- 20th century romanticizing biographer Barz
- John Brown's propaganda
- A mid-19th century book that thinks that John Brown is a perfectly fine source to cite

well, that doesn't look good in terms of reliability. Otoh, it's a very plausible nickname for any all powerful favourite to be called, so I wouldn't write it off yet.

The Grimms would be very happy for you to know them through their linguistic work, especially Jacob, since that was their main work. Note I'm not saying "their main job". Nobody paid them for it. Jacob first earned his daily bread not just for himself but also for Wilhelm AND for the younger sibs (there were several) as librarian of the Prince of Hesse-Kassel, and then came Napoleon, who reordered and restructured the ca. 200 German principalities into just roughly around 20) (I think? Going by memory here), at which point Hesse-Kassel became part of a larger state which entailed Würtemberg and Münster as well and which he named Würtemberg and had ruled by his youngest brother Jerome, which is when Jacob had the choice to either become penniless or work as Jerome's librarian as well. (Incidentally, in post Napoleonic years, Jacob said Jerome was always perfectly decent to him, though evidently he didn't speak a word of German.) Wilhelm did not have a paying job during the Napoleonic years, though past Napoleon when Hesse-Kassel became its own principality again he also became a librarian. This didn't last forever, though, not least because the Grimms did not get salary raises, so they moved on to becoming university professors in Hannover (the principality, not the city itself - they went to Göttingen, the university of which, founded by G2, btw, which is why it's the Georg-Augustus-Universität, was becoming rapidly the most modern and well reputed in Germany). Alas this was when the personal union between Hannover and Britain ended beause Women Do Not Rule In Salic Lands, and so Victoria became Queen of GB and the last of G3's no good aging lothario sons became Prince of Hannover, refusing to respect the constitution and thus creating one of our most famous 19th century incidents, a bunch of university professors (including both Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm) vs the Prince Elector of Hannover: the "Göttinger Sieben". Which is when the Grimms had to move again and ended up moving to Berlin, becoming university professors again. (FW4 wasn't the most liberal of German monarchs, but he was better than this particular Hannover Cousin.) What they didn't live from all the time: their book sales, not even the fairy tales, and most definitely not the works on linguistics. But they're basically the founding fathers of the subjects in Germany.

Brown crushing on Christian like Zimmermann crushing on Fritz: well, Zimmermann at least met Fritz, and more than once, so let's not be unfair to Zimmermann. Could Brown have met Christian if he visited Denmark post Struensee? I mean, we don't know when he was born from his wiki entry, and maybe he was really old when he committed suicide, but if he wasn't, I think the chances that he could have met Christian (as opposed to hearing about him from other people) are practically zero, yes? Not that this stops a crush, of course. See also lots and lots and lots of Germans & Der Einzige König.

Speaking of Zimmermann, when I looked up Lehndorff's diaries for Denmark references, I came across an entry on the good Doctor. It's just one, in the third volume, shortly before Ulrike arrives from Sweden, but here we go: Currently a Herr Zimmermann, Doctor from Hannover, is staying here, who has conducted a marvellous surgery on Herrn Schmucker. The King who wanted to meet him ordered him to come to Sanssouci. His Majesty was lying in bed, and Herr Zimmermann was allowed to enter the King's room unattended as it's the custom when the King wants to talk with someone. The stranger who didn't spot anyone in the room was very embarassed. At last, he heard a voice call and then saw immediately the King lying in bed wearing his hat, which disturbed him; for he did not know the King is never wearing a night cap. He never wears slippers, either. When he gets out of bed, he immediately pulls on his boots, puts on his hat, and a short jacket.

And that's it, the next sentence is about Frau von Dörnberg. Now, considering Lehndorff wasn't present at this first encounter, he must have had this description from Zimmermann himself, and the difference in tone to the gushing way Zimmermann puts it in his various writings is notable. Also, Lehndorff can't have been too impressed by Zimmermann himself. I mean, this is Lehndorff, if he either likes someone or finds them interesting or is upset about them, you get either ravings or rantings or detailed pen portraits or both, which is why we know about Wartensleben the sugar hoarder and Kaphengst's double chin in later life, and not just when they're royalty, but here, not a word about what he thinks of famous Dr. Zimmermann from Hannover. Hmmmmm.

Also: what is it with Fritz first meeting people lying in bed?

Letters to Moltke: what you said, plus "Nie mahlen wieder tun" (niemals wieder tun in modern German) really does sound like a child promising never to be naughty again, but coming from an all powerful monarch, it's... yeah. If Moltke was König Moltke, he put up with a lot for that Kingdom...

cahn - Date: 2023-03-06 06:13 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

On a note of "be the change you want", and bearing Mildred's and my conversation about (lack of) shipping manifestos in Blannings' biography (and other biographies) in mind, I hereby suggest to you, mes amies, that Salon does a neat, accessible shipping manifesto/list for the most important Frederician ships. We can then post it at Rheinsberg and link it all over the place. I'm thinking of the following template for the individual ships, taking Fritz/Katte and Fritz/Fredersdorf as examples:

Who is the ship: Fritz/Katte

Do they have a trope? Starcrossed lovers

The story in short: Abused prince wants to escape with tragic boyfriend, both get caught, tragic boyfriend is executed in front of abused prince by tyrannical king.

Key quote(s): "Forgive me, my dear Katte! A thousand times, forgive!" "Nothing to Forgive, my prince - I die for you with joy in my heart!" (We can agree about the ideal version for the manifesto later)

Tell me more: here we mention or link good posts/biographies/films

Who is the ship: Fritz/Fredersdorf:

Do they have a trope?: Magnificent Bastard/Trusted Lieutenant, Life Partners

The story in short: Imprisoned Prince meets musical soldier, musical soldier becomes faithful servant, prince becomes king (and magnificent bastard), faithful servant becomes Consigliere, both become life partners until Consigliere retires for health reasons and dies.

Key Quotes: The "come to the window, I want to see you when I ride out, but keep the window closed and the fire on" letter of course. Though I'm also fond of:

"I thought you loved me and wouldn't want to cause me grief by killing yourself. Now I don't know what to believe! But you must believe I only want what's best for you and that the diet and the medicine is only prescribed so you can recover your health again. I beg you, listen to me, and remember you promised me! Please recall Rothenburg who killed himself by infecting himself with podagra through drinking Hungarian wine and eating a hot soup. Your illness is no laughing matter, and if you don't follow a correct diet and take the right prescribed medicine, you'll die! Think about how this would grieve me! If you love me, then listen exactly to the prescriptions! God keep you! Don't write back!"

Tell me more: link to Rheinsberg posts and AO3 stories.

And so forth. Now, I think dividing the post into big ships (Fritz/Katte, Fritz/Voltaire, Fritz/Fredersdorf, Fritz/Algarotti) and rare ships (Fritz/Keith, Fritz/Suhm, Fritz/Keyserlingk, Fritz/Casanova - I wouldn't include the last one except that they did meet and there are A03 stories with people bearing their name and having none of their personalities) makes sense - anyone else?

And of course yours truly would make a platonic subsection for the two sibling ships, i.e. Fritz & Wilhelmine, Fritz & Heinrich. While in all justice, we should also add Fritz & dogs, and by we I mean that part would have to be written by Mildred who surely has a good quote or several at hand.

Edited Date: 2023-03-04 02:27 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

cahn

I think I'll have more time to catch up tomorrow, but in the meantime:

AW: Charles I and Cromwell, seriously? "Dearest sister, I should hope that your cause is more just than that of Charles, and that you are far from the tyrannical frame of mind of Cromwell, who under the name of protector became one of the worst tyrants England ever had."

Go AW <3

On a very different note, behold this fanart depicting the first meeting between Fritz and Voltaire!

Heeee! Also I am unexpectedly having feelings about them again?!

But, you know, even when it's not a child talking about a parent, "evil advisors" is THE great psychological balm. That's why Liselotte has her hate on for Madame de Maintenon; if she blames her for all the stuff Louis XIV does wrong, she can excuse him. And let's not forget this even works when the power structure is in reverse, as with Fritz going from still bitching about AW in his letters to Wilhelmine and firing off ungracious letters to telling Catt only months later, once AW is dead, that he was angry just that one time and he would have totally reconciled with AW and AW with him if not for those evil advisors interfering between brothers and stopping AW from making up with him, because he needs to rewrite the immediate past into something he can live with, especially since he damn well knows the rest of the family is blaming him.

I mean, it was even in That Letter! From your writeup at

rheinsberg: "I am all the more crushed as I have always loved him tenderly, and I have always blamed all the trouble he has caused me on his weakness for bad advisors and his choleric temper which he could not always curb."

(The "bad advisors" were some of his best generals and Heinrich himself.)

OH FRITZ.

"Now wretch," said the furious queen, her eyes flashing fire, "thou shalt feel the full weight of my vengeance; thy limbs shall be broken on the wheel for having attempted to poison the crown prince: the proofs of thy guilt are now in thine hands."

Woooooow this is a great story! Poor Juliana.

So: Jacob did the language job, Wilhelm exchanged evil mothers for evil stepmothers and, while he was at it, also edited out stuff like Rapunzel's pregnancy as the giveaway for the sorceress. But the first edition did have all those evil mothers.

Not edited out, because apparently no one had a problem with it: the considerable violence. Hacked off limbs (Cinderella), being drowned in hot lead, dancing to your death in shoes of hot iron (Snow White) - that kind of thing survives all revisions. Until Disney.

This is fascinating, thank you! I found a copy of Grimm in middle school (until then, had mostly been exposed to the Disney versions, or at least less violent versions) and was fascinated by the hacked off heels and toes and dancing to death in shoes of hot iron, lol. Which I guess says something about how they survived revisions :)

aka the story covered in Alan Bennet's play The Madness of George III, which as a film got named "The Madness of King George" so American viewers would not get confused and wonder whether they'd missed parts I and II

I am totally WTFing at this, lol. My history is bad but it's not that bad!

One reason why Victoria left such a mark in the public consciousness is that she (and Albert) practically reinvented the monarchy and how people saw it, presenting an impeccably devoted married couple with adorable children instead of aged libertines screwing around.

This... makes so much sense! This is one of the things I love about you talking about history, btw, that you put together bits and pieces that I had some cultural awareness of (like, I definitely had some conceptions of English monarchs that fit into that picture, haha!) but wasn't able to synthesize like you can.

it has become our natural history museums that the memory of him has been most strongly attached.

I think it's cool when someone in the right place at the right time (and of course with money and/or luck) can really make a difference in this way. This reminded me of the Smithsonian museums in the US, without which I certainly would not have heard of Smithson!

If and when you and Mildred make it to Germany, and I get to show you Bamberg, we can do to the magnificent tomb of Henry and Kunigunde in our cathedral.

These were amazing pictures!!

BTW, I have just gotten to the point in the podcast where the Schleswig-Holstein question has been brought up for the first time! The podcaster asserts that he will make it so I can understand it without going mad. WE SHALL SEE.

From:

selenak

I mean, it was even in That Letter!

Yep. Hence why, wonderful Yuletide presents not withstanding, I don't think Heinrich would have killed Fritz in rl. If he didn't do it after that letter at their Dresden reunion, he just wouldn't. Mind you, Heinrich isn't immune to using the Evil Advisors excuse himself, only he phrases it a bit differently, when saying in old age that Kaphengst went to the dogs because of all the bad company.

Incidentally, re: his choleric temper - looking up Fritz quotes for the shipping manifesto(s), I was reminded again that as late as 1739, FW has a fall back into full "wretched son!" mode, and Wilhelmine evidently asked Fritz via letter what was up with rumors FW would try to change the succession somehow after all, for he writes her this about AW (not useable for the manifesto, just interesting and a bit heartbreaking by itself):

The news you are being told about my brother is not at all founded; it is a city noise, which owes its birth to the empty head of our coffee politicians. Reconciliation with England may have given rise to it; imagination invented the rest. My brother has the best character in the world, he has an excellent heart, a just mind, feelings of honor and is full of humanity; he has the will to do well, which gives me a lot of hope for him. His face conceals nothing, his eyes can not only spell; his manners are ingenuous rather than polite, and in all his maintenance there is a certain je ne sais quoi of embarrassment which does not warn in his favor, but which does not deceive those who prefer the solidity of merit to a brilliant facade. I love him very much, and I can only praise myself for the friendship and attachment he has for me. He does me all the little services he can do, and shows me on all occasions the feelings that are only found in real friends. You can count on what I write to you about him; I write without prevention and without envy what all those who know him particularly will have noticed in him.

I don't think he's lying, either subconsciously or consciously; the slightly patronizing fondness and faith in AW keeping faith with him (despite being Dad's fave) is very real. That's another part of the tragedy. At the same time, I also think AW having been FW's fave was eating at him, but it was buried so deeply it didn't erupt until much, much later.

This... makes so much sense! This is one of the things I love about you talking about history, btw, that you put together bits and pieces that I had some cultural awareness of (like, I definitely had some conceptions of English monarchs that fit into that picture, haha!) but wasn't able to synthesize like you can.

It has to be said that the Brits aren't the only case where the (surviving) monarchies had to reinvent themselves as embodying admirable middle class virtues in family life and marital fidelity.

(FW: I was a pioneer and tried to do this a century earlier!)

And of course there had been British monarchs who had a good relationship with their spouse before. But Charles I. after the death of Buckingham being a model husband to Henrietta Maria and seeing far more of their children than other royal fathers did did not work in his favour with the public, to put it mildly, given just about every other historical circumstance at that time. Victoria coming as a pretty young woman after a never seen anymore mad old King, his elderly increasingly heavy wannabe libertine son, and then the other actual libertine elderly son was refreshing per se, and while Albert was at first distrusted (another German! At this point the Brits really must have wondered whether their monarch would ever marry anyone local again), he won people over by all the social interest he showed, and of course he was young and good looking as well. And as long as the children were children and no one knew more about them than the first family daguerotypes getting into print, it really must have looked like they were a family right of the end (not the beginning!) of a Dickens novel.

It's not that the royals weren't venerated in earlier centuries when they had actual power. But I dare say even before Henry VIII started to make everyone pay for his lack of a legitimate son, nobody would have looked at him, or expected him to be, a role model in terms of marital fidelity or family life. He was supposed to be a good Father To His People and so forth, and yes, a good Christian, but those are different expectations.

BTW, I have just gotten to the point in the podcast where the Schleswig-Holstein question has been brought up for the first time! The podcaster asserts that he will make it so I can understand it without going mad. WE SHALL SEE.

LOL, okay. When I heard that, I also thought: Challenge accepted! :) I'm looking forward to your impressions of the Salians and many a road leading to Canossa.

Re: Catching up to the last post

From:

cahn - Date: 2023-03-06 06:54 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

Listening to both the Byzantium and the Germans podcasts made me conclude that life for child Emperors could go in very different ways in the ninth and tenth century, and Otto III really lucked out with having Theophanu and Adelheid. Because:

Constantine VII "the Purpleborn": remember me, little C? Leo's kid, whom he had to marry four times for to get? My mom Zoe was kicked out of the palace twice when Dad died - there's a heartrendering story of me wandering through the rooms the first time this happened, calling for her -, once by Uncle Alex, who only reigned a year before dying, and then by the Patriarch, whom she managed to subsequently defeat, whereupon she finally became regent. Sadly, things didn't go well for Mom for long, because her general, Leo Phokas, got defeated by the Bulgars, for which the people promptly blamed her. Majorly unfair, I thought, because Leo Phokas was one of the best generals available at the time - btw, keep an eye on the Phokas family, they'll be back - , and it wasn't like she was in the field, but no one asked me. It was just "of course, a WOMAN led us wrong", and the Patriarch organized deposing her as regent. But not by making himself Regent again, oh no. Instead, he got chummy with Admiral Romanos Lekapenos, who became Regent, kicked out Mom, made me appoint him as my Caesar, married by then 13 years old me to his daughter Helena and, you guessed it, became Romanos I., reigning emperor.

I will say this for old Romanos: all previous ursurpers had emperors and other sons of the previous dynasties castrated and/or blinded and put into a monastery. Not him, he went for the marrying me to Helena option instead, thereby starting a new tradition. The next few years were powerless but okay for me, and luckily I liked Helena. But I had the distinct feeling Romanos meant for his oldest son Christopher to succeed him and basically have me fade away in the background. I mean, when Romanos sired a bastard son, he had that kid, Basil by name, castrated, and you usually do that only if you want to disqualify someone from the throne. However, Christopher died in the field. And then it got really interesting for the Macedonian/Lekapanos family. Because Romanos wasn't much into his next two legitimate sons, or at least that's what they thought. So my two brothers-in-law staged a coup of their own, deposing their Dad in the middle of the night, tying him up and sending him to that monastery won the Prince's island where we Bzyantines usually send our deposed Emperors. Well, upon hearing this, the people of Constantinople rioted, but not, note, for Romanos, no, they wanted to make sure I was okay, because they not unreasonably thought I might be next on the fraternal duo's hit list, and I was, if I may say so, pretty popular - the People's Prince. So my brothers-inlaw had to show me alive and waving to the populace before things calmed down a bit. But they were planning to do me in. Luckily, their sister and my wife Helena plus illegitimate brother Basil the eunuch told me all about it, and we got rid of my brothers-in-law, sending them to the same island they had send their Dad Romanos to. Who greeted them upon arrival with: "So nice of you to join your old father, boys! And how wise of you to send me ahead so I'd make sure the monks know how to treat Emperors!"

Anyway, I then had a good reign, crowned my son Romanos II in time as my Co-Emperor, saw him grow up, marry young commoner Theophano the tavern owner's daughter and died content in the knowledge the two were already having kids of their own - young Basil the future II, and another Constantine, and Theophano was pregnant again with Anna her ownly daughter. I mean, what could possibly go wrong at this point, right?

Basil II.: ...yeah. I might have ended up as the longest reigning Roman Emperor ever, East or West, but when Dad died while I was still a toddler, I got a good nice illustration of what letting powerful families get jobs as generals can result in. First there was Nikopheros Phokas, aka "The White Death of the Saracens", aka "The Bringer of Victory". Never lost a battle, major factor in making us Romans a feared factor in the Middle East again. Mom was pretty clear he'd do a Romanos and depose her if she didn't win him around, so she offered him marriage. This was actually somewhat tricky religious wise, because it was a second marriage for them both, and he was my godfather, another Mom thing from a few years back to ensure his loyalty, making him a spiritual relation of ours. Anyway, the Patriarch wasn't the one who struggled with Empress Zoe decades earlier, of course, but he didn't like Empresses any better. Still, in the interest of avoiding civil war, he gave in. Nikopheros Phokas kept winning victories, but he went from everyone's hero to being loathed within four years, on account on putting all the money into the army, including the Church's money, and that made the Patriarch stop liking him right then and there. The first time he got booed at instead of applauded in the capital, he treated it like an occupied city by bringing in his favourite Armenian soldiers and building an extra wall between the palace and the city. Basically, he gave the impression of loathing Constantinople, so Constantinople loathed him right back. And he had also managed to fall out with his nephew John Tsimtsikes over John winning a victory against orders. I mean, Nikopheros Phokas knew what successful generals could do, so you probably couldn't blame him for some paranoia. But John then organized another coup, and killed Nikopheros Phokas, becoming John I Tsimitzikes. Did he do so with Mom's help? I wouldn't know. I will say the story of her leaving the Imperial bedchamber unbolted ignores it wasn't in the Imperial bedchamber Nikopheros was killed, he was killed in the chapel, praying. Anyway, no riot after that one because Nikopheros had lost most people's favor, but the Patriarch said he'd only crown John if John punished those who aided him, and there was to be no marrying Mom. I guess killing a praying guy with your own hands is forgivable as long as you blame a woman for it. So that meant Mom being sent into monastery on an island, and us kids hoping John wouldn't do likewise with us. Which he didn't. He married Constantine's daughter Theodora for greater legitimacy - and incidentally, got her out of a monastery this way, because old Constantine had put all his daughters into one, including the one Judith Tarr named Aspasia - and went on to rule for another decade or so uncontested, winning more military victories but avoiding the mistake of treating civilians with disdain. When he died, I was 17 or so and ready to rock, but did that happen? Nope. Great Uncle Basil Lekapenos - remember him? castrated bastard son of Romanos Lekapenos, served in every administration since? - took over. The only thing he let me do what I wanted to do is calling Mom back from her island nunnery. She died a few years later with us kids next to her. I will say this for Great Uncle Basil - he may have become incredible rich in those years, but he also was the primary patron of every writer and artist of the era. When I eventually managed to depose and banish him in order to rule myself in my mid 20s, literature and art took an according nose dive. In my defense, I had to deal with a civil war, because yeah, during those eight years Great Uncle Basil reigned for me, the two major families, Phokas and Skleros, thought they wanted the throne as well, so it was Bardas time. Meaning Bardas Phokas and Bardas Skleros. First Uncle Basil could use one against the other, but when I got rid of Uncle Basil, they teamed up. Now obviously, neither Nikopoheros nor John had let me anywhere near the army, and Great Uncle Basil didn't, either, so unsurprisingly, despite my later legendary military prowess, my first few battles weren't amazing, which is why rumor has it that the stroke of Luck that had Bardas Phokas die of a heart attack just when he, the far more experienced commander, was riding into battle against me, was really me poisoning him. And by rumor, I mean those scribes paid by the Phokas family who also blamed Mom for just about every imperial death since she married Dad. They'd presumably have blamed her for Bardas Phokas, too, if she hadn't died already. Anyway - after Bardas P. died, Bardas S. gave up and surrendered, and I was finally uncontested ruler. No, I never married or had kids the illegitimate way. As one historian put it, I married my army instead, though without pissing off the populace back home. And I never, ever, allowed any general but me to lead the army to victory.

Henry IV HRE: Lucky you. In fact, lucky both of you. When my Dad died, Mom was in over her head, and then I got kidnapped by my nobles. To be specific, bloody Hanno of Cologne who wanted to be Regent instead. They lured me under pretenses on a ship and made off with me. I tried to foil him by jumping into the Rhine despite not being able to swim, thus proving my stubbornness early on, but the count who jumped after me fished me out of the Rhine and returned me to Hanno. Whose idea of regency was to get even richer and let every noble do what they want. When I celebrated my Schwertleite as a 13 years teenager, I used that sword to go after Hanno, you better believe it, but nooooo, Mom held me back. The nobles around us looked aghast. And then they wouldn't grant me a divorce two years later. I will say that in retrospect, I'm glad Bertha and I stuck it out, and not just because she came with me to Canossa, but good lord, did I ever dislike most of my nobles. And vice versa. As for your Patriarchs, they sound like jerks, sure, but compared with HILDEBRAND FALSE MONK AND NOT POPE - count yourself lucky, is what I'm saying.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I never responded to a comment by

selenak in a previous post:

Incidentally, Luh also mentions that in peace time, Fritz spent up to eight hours on the table during dinner, BUT that he most likely wasn't eating but talking and monologuing during said hours, since there was no comparable weight gain. He did like to eat, but during those Sanssouci Tableround meals, he talked more than he ate, and all the food ordered (which we have the receipts for) wasn't for him alone but for all the guests.

See, my mental image of a Sanssouci meal during the early 1750s: Voltaire and Fritz do most of the talking, with some Algarotti, Marquis d'Argens and La Mettrie thrown in. Maupertuis glowers. The brothers Keith just tuck in all the great food and send their compliments to the chef. It's not surprising Voltaire remained thin as a reed and Fritz didn't gain additional weight!

I didn't reply before we switched to a new post, but what I was thinking was:

Yes, I can't imagine dinners went any other way! We know Fritz (and Voltaire, when he was there) did most of the talking. As Horowski wrote, when talking about how 18th century monarchs didn't make speeches on occasions when we would expect them too:

If an early modern monarch could talk well, that was a wasted stroke of luck among born rulers. How gladly would Frederick the Great have given speeches! But there were practically no opportunities, and so his entourage alone bore the full weight of his monologues.

And I can't find the quote now, but I swear I read in one of my English-language bios at the beginning of salon, MacDonogh or Blanning or someone, that Fritz liked conversation as long as he could provide the bulk of it.

Well, I was reading British Diplomacy and Swedish Politics, another one of my foreign policy reads (and the closest to Denmark I could get after reading Hartmann), and I found this, which reminded me I'd meant to reply to Selena's comment on roundtables:

Goodricke was accordingly presented to the great man by Sir Andrew Mitchell (who plainly regarded him as Sir Joseph's toady); and endured a dinner at the royal table which lasted four hours, during which time Frederick did most of the talking.

The author footnotes it: Yorke also commented on the length of the dinner: Yorke, 111:202; and Mitchell noted that he seemed not pleased because Frederick talked all the time: Add. MS 6,867, fo.83.

Goodricke is the would-be British ambassador to Sweden, who's trying to find out on what terms Fritz is willing to make peace in 1758. After leaving Berlin, Goodricke will be denied entry to Sweden because Sweden is at war with Prussia, who is Great Britain's ally, and Sweden is pissed off that Goodricke went to Berlin on his way to Stockholm. So Goodricke will get stalled in Copenhagen and spend the rest of the war there. He'll spend his time studying the Swedish language and Swedish politics, as well as acting as the de facto British ambassador in Copenhagen, being the first stop for ministers like Bernstorff and Moltke, because the official ambassador is sick and/or not especially active. When Goodricke finally arrives in Swden, he'll be the best prepared British ambassador to Sweden yet, and several leading Danes will regret that he's not to stay as official ambassador in Copenhagen. He wrote a "lucid digest" of the Schleswig-Holstein question to send back home to Britain!

Sir Joseph is General Yorke, whom we have met before. The British wanted to replace Mitchell with him in the middle of the Seven Years' War, but Fritz was having none of it. Boswell also mentions him:

July 14: I rumbled in the Journaliere to Berlin having for company amongst others Mademoiselle Dionsicus, daughter to the cook of Prince Ferdinand of Prussia. I talked words of German to this lass. I dined at Froment's, & after dinner went to Mr. Mitchell's. We talked of Sir Joseph Yorke, whom he calls Sir Joe. I told him that he seemed so anxious lest people should not know that he was Ambassador, that he held his head very high & spoke very little. And as in the infancy of painting people generally wrote 'this is a cow'. So from Sir Joe's mouth commeth a label with these words 'I am an Ambassador'. What a difference between this buckram knight & the amiable Mr. Mitchell.

As does Lehndorff:

1758, April 1st to 7th. Marwitz had another adventure. He made the crossing from Hamburg to England with Williams, the English ambassador in Petersburg, who for several years had been our declared enemy, but six months ago became such a keen admirer of our King that wherever he saw a portrait of His Majesty, he climbed on a chair to kiss it. This same Williams has gone so mad that when he got to London they had to lock him up. Marwitz returns with General Yorke. who has been sent to our king with a special mission. He is still a young man, but he seems to be quite amiable.

Williams is of course Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. Btw, Selena, if you have time and interest, I'm curious if The Life of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, poet, wit and diplomatist is any good. 1928 is just slightly too late to be public domain.

Finally:

The brothers Keith just tuck in all the great food and send their compliments to the chef.

It explains James' double chin in all the depictions I've seen of him from this period!

From:

selenak

I reviewed a book about Georgian courtiers and my journal, which was enjoyable to read and features several old acquaintances of hours (in addition the Hannover cousins, I mean) and some new ones. I already talked at my journal of how this puts Lady Hervey aka Molly Lepell into a new light. Now, because of our wondering how G2 marrying Hervey's teenage daughter would have fared, you can imagine how I felt when coming across the following saga, taking place long after Hervey's death, though (Hervey died in the early 1740s).

Background: when Caroline died, G2 famously swore he would never marry again, he would have mistresses. Now, he already had one, whom he'd picked up during his most recent vacation at Hannover, but brought to Britain only after Caroline's death. Because of the small collection of names to choose from (sarcasm alert), she was called Amalie, Countess von Waldenburg, and later Lady Yarmouth. By all accounts placid, pretty, and able to put up with G2's temper as well as being actually a pretty good inofficial stepmom to his children, making peace (she even tried with Fritz of Wales, but that was just impossible) after family quarrels. However, the English courtiers regarded the fact he picked a German as much as a national insult as they had done when G1 arrived with Melusine in tow, and every time G2 had a brief fling with an English lady, said Brit was immediately declared to be the one who would oust the German and become Maitresse en Titre, because everyone knew Germans were boring in bed, and how could G2 NOT prefer an Englishwoman!

His first short time English mistress was Mary Deloraine, who was the former governess of his daughters (who were horrified by this), but that was a disaster which quickly ended when one of the courtiers pulled the chair away from her while she sat down and G2 laughed, upon which Mary D. retaliated by pulling the chair away from him the next time he sat down to see how he liked it, forgetting he had haemmorids. It was incredibly painful and the instant end of their relationship, to the great disappointment of the English courtiers.

A few years later, and here we return to the Hervey clan...

Elizabeth Chudley first entered court circles when she was appointed as Maid of Hnour to "Princess Prudence", Augusta, who was married to 'poor' Frederick, Prince of Wales. Shoon afterwards sh met Augustus Hervey, Molly's sailor son. In a strange echo of Molly's own story, in 1744 Augustus and Elizabeth entered into a rushed and passionate marriage, a 'scrambling shabby business' that was kept secret from both of their families bevcause it was a form of financial suicide for both of them. Jut like Molly, Elizabeth would have lost her job as Maid of Hnour if she were known to be married.
In September 1747, Elizabeth obtained a short leave of absence from her post in order to give birth secretly to a short-lived son. Augusts was now spending long periods at sea. By New Year 1749, he and Elizabeth had decided to split. (...) Later the couple would deny that they had ever been married, but a few witnesses insisted otherwise. (Elizabeth would go on trial for bigamy; the Victorian Hervey descendant who cut out the Fritz of Wales passages from his memoirs also wielded the scissors in Augustus' diary, so while it's clear he and Elizabeth were an item it's not clear whether or not they ever married.)
The Year 1749, and the rodwy celebrations of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, brought Molly's daughter-in-law (or daughter-in-sin) to prominence. Still claiming to be an unmarried Maid of Honour, Elizabeth created a sensation at a m asquerade at Sumerset House by appearing in a vestigial costume as Iphigenia, ready (un)dressed for the sacrifice at Aulis.
The masquerade included an old man who asked if she would be kind enough to let him give her a squeeze. The king's disguise failed to conceal his identity, so Elizabeth took advantage of the situation for a piece of charming cheek. Grabbing his hand, 'she replied that she would put it to a still softer place, and immediately raised it to his royal forehead'.
Invevitably George II was smitten, and with this a new claimant to the title of chief mistress entered the running. The insolent Elizabeth was overheard declaring that Amalie was dismissed and that she was delighted to belong 'to a King who turns off an old mistress when he has a new one' rataher than keeping both of them on the go simultanously. (...) Elizabeth' smother was awared the lucrative position of housekeeper at Windsor Castle, and Elizabeth herself was distinguished in a drawing-room circle, 'against all precedent', with a kiss from the king. Marvellous vistas of power openened up: 'why should not experience and a charming face on her side, and near seventy years on his, produce a title?'
But Mistress Chudleigh had overreached herself. Amalie was not dismissed, George II tired of his liason - if indeed it really was one - , and Elizabeth had to console herself with the second string on her bow, the Duke of Kingston, whom she now persuaded to marry her. And she enjoyed life as a duchess, at least until the unresolved matter of her possible previous marriage to Augustus Hervey came to light. London was thrilled by Elizabeth's subsequent trial for bigamy.

The immediate next sentence touches on Molly's relationship with her adult children: Fortunately MOlyl remained on speaking terms with the foolish but lively Augustus. After various rows, her dull and decorous son Frederick and daughter Lepell had cut themselves off from her completely. Given that, see my review, according to this book Molly actually wasn't fond of children per se, all of this puts Hervey's last will with its clause re: having his children raised by someone else into something of a new light. In any event, while Hervey did not become G2's father-in-law, his sort of daughter-in-law did briefly become G2's mistress!

Edited Date: 2023-03-12 10:38 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Wow, this book is definitely bringing the British gossipy sensationalism! The likely-bigamy was really something.

because everyone knew Germans were boring in bed, and how could G2 NOT prefer an Englishwoman!

Haha, poor Germans always getting the short stick. I bet Montesquieu would agree.

while she sat down and G2 laughed, upon which Mary D. retaliated by pulling the chair away from him the next time he sat down to see how he liked it, forgetting he had haemmorids.

Woooow. Ouch. But I say he still had it coming!

the Victorian Hervey descendant who cut out the Fritz of Wales passages from his memoirs also wielded the scissors in Augustus' diary

We hates him, precious, we hates him forever!

In any event, while Hervey did not become G2's father-in-law, his sort of daughter-in-law did briefly become G2's mistress!

Some days salon is just the 18th century royal tabloids!

Re: Royal Affairs

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-03-12 04:52 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: Royal Affairs

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-03-12 04:57 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: Royal Affairs

From:

cahn - Date: 2023-03-14 06:04 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Royal Affairs

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-03-14 03:36 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Some time ago, I reported that Struensee lived on the edge of the ghetto.

selenak went, "Hang on a minute, what ghetto where? Hamburg didn't have a ghetto."

To which I replied:

Barz (not confirmed by Wikipedia) says that they built a ghetto in Altona.

I don't have Struensee's address, but if salon has taught me one thing, it's that we'll find it sooner or later, if we care enough or maybe even by accident. ;)

Through a combination of the two, we have found it! And I have cleared up our confusion about the ghetto.

1. The internet tells me there was indeed a law passed in 17th century Altona whereby Jews did not have to live in a ghetto.
2. The internet and Winkle tell me that the Jews of Altona built a synagogue on Klein Papagoyenstraße, and that it was the largest Jewish place of worship in Germany at the time.
3. Winkle says Struensee's house was "on the corner of the ghettolike Klein Papagoyenstraße."
4. The internet tells me the synagogue was at Papagoyenstraße 5-9, and that Struensee's house was on the corner of Kirchenstraße 13 and Klein Papagoyenstraße.
5. They both agree Struensee's house was deemed unstable and ripped down in 1934, but you can see a picture of it here.
6. Today, Kleine Papagoyenstraße no longer exists, it's where Captain Schröder Park is now located. But now that I've found it on Google maps, there's a Struenseestraße a block away (and oh, hey, an Amundsenstraße parallel to it).

So that answers the question: no formal ghetto, but a lot of Jews living around the synagogue, Struensee living nearby.

Edited Date: 2023-03-15 01:42 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

So in the 18th and late 17th century we see a whole bunch of kids whose parents are obsessively religious, and their kids turn out the opposite: freethinkers, libertines, or both.

- We all know about FW and his free-thinking kids. Even AW, whom he was relatively nice to, had the attitude that too much religious ostentation was a bad thing, although so was mocking religion *cough* Fritz.

- We know about Cosimo III de Medici and his two libertine sons (and GG was something of a freethinker until his deathbed conversion).

- We have recently learned about Pietists Christian VI and Sophia Magdalena of Denmark and their libertine children, Frederik V and Louise the possibly-pregnant-out-of-wedlock. Frederik, incidentally, was not a Deist, there are a lot of references to God and praying in his letters...but let's just say he was not his parents when it came to religion.

- Struensee's father was Francke's successor as pastor in Halle. Struensee, talking to a pastor before his execution, said his father was much too hard on him. Winkle, the academic biographer I'm currently reading, just says that that was normal. He also says that FW was a perfectly normal father, and that nothing that happened to Fritz was unusual.

More convincingly, Barz, the romanticizing biographer, says Struensee père was the kind of authoritarian father whose children have to either turn out exactly like him or exactly opposite him, no middle ground. And sure enough, one son turned out just like him and the rest abandoned religion and became Deists or atheists. Struensee also had a reputation as a libertine; he seems to have been pretty sexually active, although rumors of his decadence in other ways may have been exaggerated.

But there are also some cases where a more liberal upbringing resulted in a child who felt the need to go in an extreme religious direction. This write-up is mostly about Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, but there's also the other obvious case: Tsarevitch Alexei, murdered son of Peter the Great. We'll cover Ferdinand's education in the first post, since I have far more detail about it, and then do a compare-and-contrast with Alexei's in the second post.

Ferdinand of Parma's Genealogy
Who was Ferdinand, Duke of Parma? He was the younger brother of Isabella of Parma (ViennaJoe's wife). As you may remember, that means his mother was the favorite daughter of Louis XV, the one who kept wanting to go back to Versailles and bug Dad for money, and her father was Don Philip, the younger son of Philip V "the Frog" of Spain and Isabella Farnese of Parma. As part of the conclusion to the War of the Austrian Succession, Parma was given to Don Philip as a sort of French client state. You may remember that Isabella had been fighting for her Parma inheritance since she married Philip way back in 1714, because she wanted something to pass on to her sons (Philip the Frog already having a son from his first marriage to inherit Spain).

Ferdinand was born in 1751, died in 1802, and married MT's daughter Maria Amalia. He is thus also first cousin to butt-groping Ferdinand over in Naples, because Naples-Sicily went to Philip and Isabella's oldest son Don Carlos (future Charles III of Spain) as a result of the War of the Polish Succession.

Ferdinand's younger sister Maria Luisa will marry her first cousin, Don Carlos's son, future Charles IV of Spain, and she will become queen of Spain in 1788.

Ferdinand himself, being the only son of his parents, will become Duke of Parma at the age of 14, in 1765.

How Ferdinand's education was supposed to go
His parents wanted a modern, enlightened prince. So they made the surprising, especially in Italy, choice not to involve the Jesuits in his education. The idea was that he should be a good Catholic but not a bigot, and be prepared for ruling a principality, not for theological debates.

Instead, they got, among other people, the Abbe de Condillac, who was admired by Voltaire, and who influenced Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, and the encyclopedia.

Condillac sets out to teach via a new method, which he describes as involving cooperation rather than authority. A child learns by having their natural curiosity stimulated, and the student should understand what they're learning, not just memorize and recite. They should learn to think.

Now, the philosophes of this era are big believers in education. They subscribe to a "tabula rasa" theory, in which the child is a blank slate and only their upbringing governs how they will turn out. As Leibniz says, training makes everything possible, even to teaching bears to dance.

So you can imagine the philosophes are very excited that one of them is in charge of the upbringing of a prince. They keep a close eye on developments in Parma, and all the news about young Ferdinand that comes out of there is discussed in salons in Paris.

No pressure.

How Ferdinand's education actually went
So this whole idea about an education where the teacher isn't an authority figure but more of a guide who helps the student learn to think for themselves sounds great. But what happens when the student does things that you don't want him to do, like

1) being excessively religious,
2) hanging out with the lower classes, doing lower class things,
3) speaking the Parmesan dialect of Italian,

? And worse, LIES about it, because you've forbidden all these things?

Why, you have to beat him, of course. A lot.

Ferdinand wrote a "my life so far" when he was about 20 or so. A major portion of it consisted of "Man, I was beaten a lot by my tutors. I know I deserved it, because I was always sneaking off and lying about it, but I was kicked and punched and yelled at all the time."

Mom: "My son is great, even though he needs to be beaten a lot."

Older sister Isabella (future ViennaJoe's wife), "If I were raising a child, I would not beat them up, because it just backfires, and you get a defiant child." She writes a very-modern sounding treatise on her child-rearing opinions, at the age of like 16, which you can only imagine is based on her role as surrogate mom to Ferdinand and observing how he was being treated and how that was turning out.

She denounces the dangers of that excess of power that makes children violent, impatient, and stubborn, and the dangers of intransigence, which comes from hard-heartedness and meanness. It "does not mend, inspires no respect..., arouses hatred, revenge, and distrust, encourages deceit, kills all sensibility, makes hard and callous, and capable of all malice." On the other hand, she contrasts gentleness, "which is despised these days," but capable of winning the hearts of children, begetting approval, affection, and sincerity, training their minds and feelings, and making them agreeable and docile.

Ferdinand: "The happiest time of my life was when I was inoculated for smallpox, and I had to be quarantined for a few weeks from my tutors who had never had smallpox. Happiest. Time. Ever."

Why he was so into religion
So Ferdinand grows up into someone who is absolutely obsessed with religion. He will spend as much time as possible praying, venerating holy relics and icons, traveling from church to church, talking to clergy. He writes that he has a calling in life to become a monk.

He also writes that every time something terrible or stressful happened in his life, religion made him feel better. And a lot of stressful things happen, like:

1. He struggles to learn to read.
2. His mother spends most of her time in France, then dies.
3. His older sister/surrogate mom gets shipped off to Austria about a year after his mother dies.
4. His absentee dad dies by the time he's 14, leaving him alone in Parma.
5. He doesn't say this, but he gets beaten a lot.

Also, he doesn't complain about the workload, but it's immense, and other contemporaries side-eyed it.

Here's Condillac's syllabus for a six-to-seven year-old:

A multitude of religious writings; plays by Racine, Molière and Corneille; L'art poétique by Despréaux; works by Voltaire; Des tropes by Du Marsais; De l'origine des lois (Investigations into the Origin of the Laws) by Goguet, the textbooks Grammaire and L'art d'écrire; Newton's philosophy, in Emilie's translation, especially in the phenomena of the world and their explanation, which the Marquise provides; Maupertuis's Traité de la sphère and his Voyage au Nord "and all that he wrote about the system of the world", and the second part of Voltaire's Newton.

And Condillac promises everyone that the kid totally understands this! He brags that Ferdinand grasped the basis of philosophy in one month.

Meanwhile, said kid, looking back, says he struggled to learn to read, but one day he went and prayed to a saint about it and kissed an image of the saint, and then he was able to read. Relics also helped his stomachaches.

I'm going to armchair diagnose here, and propose that we have a very stressed child (later adult) here for whom religion is one of his self-soothing techniques. And he does it to excess in the same way some people drink to excess, gamble, visit prostitutes, take out their anger on other people, etc. Any time you see someone doing something to excess, there's a good chance it's taking their mind off their incredibly stressful life, and they don't have better coping methods.

So, of course Ferdinand turns into an adult who brings back the Inquisition in the 1760s when it's becoming outmoded, and who cares more about his religious duties than his secular duties.

How everyone reacted to how Ferdinand turned out
His tutors were very upset at him being so religiously obsessive. As noted, they beat him when they caught him, and even when he was older, Condillac wrote him letters scolding him. He should be a good Christian, Condillac said, but he should go into his room and pray quietly, not visit every church in the neighborhood and prostrate himself at the altar. Even the Pope wouldn't approve if he knew, says Condillac!

The letters REEK with classism. It's amazing. Like, you want to sympathize with the "enlightened" guys, but the "lower class" people Ferdinand spends his time with are probably not BEATING him and also making him read Newton at age 6.

Meanwhile, the tutors are showing off Ferdinand to visitors and writing letters to the rest of Europe about how great the educational program is going. These letters are, of course, passed around and read aloud in salons. The philosophes rejoice! Rousseau, d'Alembert, Voltaire, all of these people believe in the power of education!

But behind the scenes, Condillac is writing to Ferdinand, "Look, I tell everyone how great you are, but I leave out all the bad parts. You need to shape up or you're never going to be a good prince."

Understandably, Ferdinand does not "shape up," and word gets out that the much-vaunted modern education produced a pious bigot who would rather join a monastery and live in the 17th century.

Awkward.

Do the philosophes question their methods? No. Of course not.

In fact, Voltaire, who started out quipping that "The Infante of Parma will be in good company. He will have a Condillac and a Leire (a renowned atheist) with him. If he still manages to be pious, God's grace must be very strong indeed," ends up saying, "I hoped for a little from the Infante, the Duke of Parma, considering the good education he had; but where there is no soul, education can do nothing either; I heard that this prince spends the day visiting monks and that his Austrian and superstitious wife will be in charge. O poor philosophy! what will become of you? Still, we must stand firm and fight to the end." (Emphasis Badinter's.)

According to Badinter, the philosophes never actually acknowledge the contradiction between the "tabula rasa" theory they've been espousing and their sudden belief that there's something in the child that cannot be shaped by a philosophe armed with the right methods.

Condillac writes a summary of "the course of study for the instruction of the prince of Parma" repeating what he said in the 1740s, before Ferdinand was even born. Much like Fritz digging out his anti-German pamphlet from Rheinsberg, Condillac's post-Ferdinand summary doesn't take into account anything that happened in the intervening decades, except to comment at the end that "There are thankless situations; there is a certain ground in which it is very difficult to lay the foundations: one may even make a mistake and the building collapses altogether."

But, you know. Carry on like nothing happened.

Diderot, of course has the luxury of claiming he believed in phrenology all along, and the anatomical differences in skulls and diaphragms show that there must be some inborn differences.

Mostly the philosophes just pretend Parma never happened. Certainly no one ever entertains the possibility that a different education would have produced a different child.

Except some people who meet Ferdinand and aren't fancy philosophes prove to have common sense. The French envoy tells Ferdinand, "If I'd been your tutor, I would have made you visit 6 churches a day once you started going through this phase," and Ferdinand laughs and admits that would have totally turned him off religion.

And MT's envoy has this opinion:

The Infante had a good character spoiled by his upbringing. "He has aptitudes of mind and understanding, but under the semblance of a brilliant upbringing these aptitudes have been spoiled and this understanding overwhelmed." He even credits him with an exceptional memory and "a great desire to learn." Instead of nurturing these talents, "he was forced by undignified methods to study diligently astronomy, navigation, and mathematics... He was smothered in history full of metaphysics... which he could not mentally digest. Hence his aversion to any kind of study and his flight from all diligence. The poisoning of his original respect for the two teachers by an extremely violent, deeply felt hatred has corrupted his heart. That taught him to be evasive and false."

The Marquesa de González said he admired the work of the philosophes, but this kind of workload is how you get a ten-year-old man and a twenty-year-old child. And sure enough, Ferdinand is taking heat in his twenties for childish pranks and wanting to play rather than work (heavy dose of classism here; it's the "lower-class" guards and servants who are teaching him these pranks).

And, of course, we've seen Isabella's opinion of his education when he was still a child.

So basically, the philosophes don't come off very well in this story.

How much of it was real anyway
There's also the question of how much of Ferdinand's precociousness when he was a kid was real. When he was being shown off to visitors, was he just prepped in advance and could only handle questions he'd been told to expect in advance? How much did he understand of what he was saying?

Contemporary accounts differed, and apparently we can't actually tell. He had some interest in literature and the sciences when he got older, was willing to be inoculated (I mean, his sister had just died of smallpox the year before, and his mother had died a few years before that), supported astronomy, etc. But he remained one of the most passionate supporters of the Church in the most throwback possible way.

So, he is full of contradictions, accounts of his life and personality are full of contradictions, the philosophes are full of contradictions when their theories run up against reality...and the one contradiction Badinter never addresses to my satisfaction is that his tutors supposedly endorsed education that treated the teacher more as a friend and supporter than as an authority figure to be feared...and yet were beating him regularly. All she says is that this was normal, everyone got beaten in those days, no one except Isabella ever questioned it. Which is not totally satisfactory to me.

Edited Date: 2023-03-15 02:39 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

As chance would have it, Elisabeth Badinter wrote another MT book, this one specifically about MT's relationship with her children, which got a harsh review in my local paper the SZ by none other than Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger. Basically it goes thusly:

"MT wrote detailed teaching instructions for her children and kept a tight supervision on them. This according to Badinter proves she was a bürgerliche Mutter more than an aristocratic one. Not true! She knew the kids would have to represent Team Habsburg and that's what they were educated for! Doesn't mean she didn't love them, but Badinter is taking all the 18th century effusiveness way too literally and is sentimentalizing MT, and also, what's this with reproducing judgey statements from the sources without checking, like Joseph's second wife being ugly? Boo, hiss."

Ferdinand's younger sister Maria Luisa will marry her first cousin, Don Carlos's son, future Charles IV of Spain, and she will become queen of Spain in 1788.

You know, before you wrote this, I never put it together that this younger sister, aka the same one Joseph would have married if his "if I have to marry again, only a sister of Isabella!" offer had been accepted, was the Queen who is an important supporting player in Feuchtwanger's Goya novel "This is the hour", the same Queen famously portrayed by Goya in an unidealized fashion in his family portrait of the Spanish Bourbons along with the rest of the familyl, but it's extremely noticiable for Maria Luisa, especially if you compare Goya's painting with the standard pretty princess painting taken of her when she was still unmarried. Granted, Goya painted her 14 pregnancies (half the kids survived) and partial loss of teeth later, but royal portraits used to ignore such rl business, and thus it is still a revolutionary portrait, from the official court painter, no less. Despite her looks, Maria Luisa is supposed to have had lots of love affairs and had one particular favourite lover, Manuel Godoy, whom she made de facto Prime Minister. Alas, he was completely over his head, especially since he was the one who had to deal with Napoleon Bonaparte, and thus the Spanish royals ended up first in French polite imprisonment/exile and then in Rome. After Napoleon's defeat, Maria Luisa's oldest surviving son did become King but explicitly said he did not want his parents plus Manuel Godoy (still living with Maria Luisa and Carlos) back in Spain, so they all died in Rome.

So you ssee what I mean about the art revolution in an age of revolutions - Maria Luisa, standard court painting portraying her shortly after her marriage:

Maria Luisa, portrayed by Goya in 1789, the very year of the French Revolution:

The famous Bourbon family portrait by Goya:

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-04-01 11:58 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Comparison of Ferdinand and Alexei
So that was Ferdinand of Parma, religious fanatic of the late 18th century. Earlier in the century, there was another child who got a brutal, modernizing upbringing and turned into a religious reactionary who wanted to turn the country back to the 17th century: the Tsarevitch Alexei.

Let us remember that Peter the Great set out to single-handedly bring Russia into the modern age at the turn of the 18th century. Let us also remember that his first wife was sent to a nunnery so he could marry Lithuanian peasant Marta, future Catherine I, and that Alexei was the product of the first marriage. This is going to shape his sympathies somewhat. There are two parties in Russia: the ones who support Peter's Westernizing efforts, and the "OMG WTF are you doing Peter???!" that used to carry around their forcibly shaven off beards in their pockets so that on Judgment Day, they could show God that they had never willingly been separated from their beard. So reactionary, is what I'm saying.

It's worth noting here that there were similarly two parties in Parma: the French party, that leaned toward the Enlightenment, and the Italian party, the reactionaries. Ferdinand's mother was French, and his Spanish father was apparently on board with the more modern and liberal approach to education too. Ferdinand himself liked hanging out with Italians, both the ultra-conservative clergy, and the servants and soldiers, who were inclined to a more "simple" faith that the philosophes looked down on. As noted, I suspect these were the people who were NICE to him. And I suspect the same was true to a certain extent for Alexei.

Now, unlike Ferdinand, I'm not aware that Alexei's tutor was awful to him. His tutor, at least according to the essay I read, seems to have relatively little time and influence on him. My impression was that if anyone was awful, it was his father Peter, and in much the same way as FW: he wanted to be the fun friendly dad, but when he realized his life's work was going to be destroyed, he got harder and harder on the kid. And Peter expected his son to have 1) his commitment to a life of service to the state, 2) his exact superhuman levels of energy for physical activity. Much like FW, he could not cope with his child being different from him.

The tutor wanted to teach Alexei book learning and proper behavior, but Peter kept pulling Alexei away from him to come join Peter at the army and do practical things. And Menshikov, who is basically Peter's Old Dessauer, supposedly undermined all the tutor's efforts to teach Alexei anything, because Menshikov didn't want the heir to the throne being a threat to him after Peter died, Menshikov wanted to continue being the powerful favorite. (Selena could have told him what his odds were.) Now, I don't know that this is true, but this is what the essay author said contemporaries said about Menshikov.

What *was* similar between Alexei and Ferdinand was that the tutor wrote letters to all the publishers in Europe about how Alexei's education was coming, so they could publish his updates in newspapers and books for the reading public, and the answer to how the education was coming was always "just swimmingly." While at the same time, writing Alexei letters about how he'd better shape up and learn to behave himself, because character defaults were harder to correct the older you got.

I was particularly struck by the tutor's criticism of the "grimaces" Alexei always made, and how he should have a relaxed, natural, pleasant facial expression. Isn't that exactly what FW wrote to young Fritz in one of his diatribes?

Anyway, apparently if you look at the state of his actual education and the claims that were being published in western European countries, there was a big discrepancy. So exactly like Ferdinand.

Unlike Ferdinand, I don't have evidence that the intellectual education was super burdensome...but his father's idea of how much energy he should have for being exactly like Peter was definitely burdensome, and I suspect the Russian reactionary party, and his mother's people, and his mother when he got to see her, were much more chill. And we know that Peter drank a lot, had a vicious temper, was over 2 meters tall, and was physically violent with pretty much everyone.

So it's really not all that hard to see how Alexei got driven into a reactionary camp just like Ferdinand.

Addendum on Alexei's tutor
I don't actually know that the tutor *wasn't* awful to Alexei too, I'm just presuming innocence until he's proven guilty. What I do know about him may be of some interest to salon:

His name was Heinrich von Huyssen. He was a Protestant German from Essen (western Germany, near the Rhine). He had close ties to "Severus Snape" Danckelmann and went to university with his sons, ad he'd hoped for a position in Brandenburg, but after Danckelmann's fall in 1697, all doors were closed to him in Brandenburg. So when Peter the Great started recruiting Westerners to help modernize Russia at the turn of the century, Huyssen was all in. His application was passed to Peter by none other than Johann Patkul, whom you may remember as the guy who helped convince Peter and August the Strong to go to war against Karl XII and set off the Great Northern War, and who was brutally tortured and executed when Karl got his hands on him. That incident inspired Manteuffel to write a diatribe against monarchs.

So Patkul recommends Huyssen to Peter, Huyssen gets to come to Russia, and his initial jobs are:
1. Help recruit more Westerners!
2. Translate Peter's "come join my country!" manifest into Western languages and get them printed in the West.
3. Convince Western publishers to dedicate their books to Peter and Alexei for the good PR.
4. Improve the postal service between Russia and the West.

If you are sensing a theme here, it is indeed the driving theme of Peter's life and the thing that his son ended up being a reactionary against.

Then Peter's like, "Well, I had to fire the last German tutor I had for Alexei, but I'm sure as hell not letting my heir be raised by a Russian tutor, so how about you?"

Huyssen: "How about no? Menshikov is going to fuck this up for me. You should put him in charge and not hold me responsible for the outcome."

Peter: "No, you'll do fine, I have full confidence in you! P.S. Do everything Menshikov says."

Huyssen: *facepalm*

Menshikov: *after years of undermining Huyssen, apparently finally gets him sent on diplomatic missions to Berlin and Vienna, far, far away from Alexei*

Then Huyssen comes back, but no time for book learning, it's time to take Alexei on a grand tour and arrange an unhappy marriage with him to a princess from Brunswick! Then he's officially an adult and doesn't need a tutor any more.

Huyssen continues working for Peter in various capacities until Peter's death; then his star falls. Finally, he wants to go home, but like Suhm, he sets out sick and dies on the way.

Sources
Der Infant von Parma: oder Die Ohnmacht der Erziehung, a monograph by Elisabeth Badinter, whom

selenak reminded me was the author who once wrote a biography of MT without learning German. So, you know, grain of salt about her scholarship, but at least this one isn't set in Germany. (There's not a lot of Italian in her bibliography, but a little.)

"Heinrich von Huyssen (1666–1739) als Hofmeister des russischen Thronfolgers Aleksej", an essay by Svetlana Korzun, in the collection of essays Die Flucht des Thronfolgers Aleksej: Krise in der „Balance of Power“ und den österreichisch-russischen Beziehungen am Anfang des 18 Jahrhunderts," edited by Iskra Schwarz. I was hoping for more on the flight of the crown prince Alexei from this collection, but it's more about the crisis in the balance of power and Austrian-Russian relations at the beginning of the 18th century. So a lot of stuff I already knew.

Johann Friedrich Struensee: Arzt, Aufklärer und Staatsmann; Beitrag zur Kultur-, Medizin- und Seuchengeschichte der Aufklärungszeit, a book by Stefan Winkle, which I have only just started, but got far enough in to talk about Struensee's upbringing and also the ghetto or lack thereof in Altona. ;)

Edited Date: 2023-03-16 01:14 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

I was particularly struck by the tutor's criticism of the "grimaces" Alexei always made, and how he should have a relaxed, natural, pleasant facial expression. Isn't that exactly what FW wrote to young Fritz in one of his diatribes?

Indeed it is, and given FW was early on raised by Danckelmann's choice of tutor before SC had her showdown with Danckelmann, and that the tutor was a Danckelmann buddy, chances are "don't make grimaces" were a Prussian dogma. This said, probably not just Prussian. Looking gracious, pleasant, relaxed in most unnatural circumstances as court etiquette inevitably produces was a constant ideal for royals to live up to in that century.

My impression was that if anyone was awful, it was his father Peter, and in much the same way as FW: he wanted to be the fun friendly dad, but when he realized his life's work was going to be destroyed, he got harder and harder on the kid. And Peter expected his son to have 1) his commitment to a life of service to the state, 2) his exact superhuman levels of energy for physical activity. Much like FW, he could not cope with his child being different from him.

I had the very same impression.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

You may remember that I finally gave in and bought Braubach's 5 volume magnum opus on Eugene of Savoy, with the intention of reading the most interesting parts of each volume.

I just got to the part where Eugene is leaving France, so we've covered a lot of Olympia. Here's Braubach's take:

Now what was true in all this? There can be no doubt that Olympia was engaged in astrology and spiritism. She was a child of her time and, above all, a true child of her family: it is said of her father that he was "a great astrologer" and Mazarin's superstition, which incidentally is said to have attached particular importance to the horoscopes provided by his brother-in-law Mancini, was world-famous. There are also reports of strange "séances" in the house of the Countess, in which apparitions were conjured up and a child was used as a medium in order to experience simultaneous events elsewhere. So it can also be assumed that she actually visited Voisin, and it can even be assumed to be true that cheeky remarks were made on her part. But it is questionable whether what she asked or said was meant seriously at all, and that she was still at that time thinking of the possibility of regaining the heart of the king is very unlikely.

So after she's exiled, she travels around a bit, and for a while she stays in Spain at the court of Carlos II. He's the one Selena calls "the genetic wonder": the super inbred one with the Habsburg chin and a host of physical and mental defects, and his death without heirs triggered the War of the Spanish Succession.

I knew from Wikipedia that he was nicknamed "the bewitched" because he had so many problems that it was believed this couldn't possibly be ~~inbreeding~~ natural, there must have been an evil spell cast on him. What I didn't realize is that he specifically accused Olympia of bewitching him and ordered her to leave the country.

She was later, by people like Saint-Simon, accused of poisoning Carlos's first wife, Marie Louise (daughter of Liselotte and Philippe le Gay), who died suddenly at age 26, but Braubach says Saint-Simon, who is describing stuff that happened in a different country when he was only 14, gets all his facts extremely wrong *and* that the motives were not there (the queen was the only reason Olympia was even welcome in Madrid), and that even contemporaries who thought Olympia dabbled in witchcraft and could kill with her eyes, didn't accuse her of that particular suspicious death.

Wikipedia, btw, says Marie Louise probably died of appendicitis, Braubach says she could have been poisoned, but not by Olympia.

On the subject of Eugene's activities in France, Braubach points out the same thing Selena says: that Eugene's name is never mentioned in the big scandals. So where Pigaillem (who, unlike Braubach, does not believe in footnotes or source citing) is getting his info, I don't know.

Braubach does, predictably, say that pretty much only Liselotte ever accused Eugene of being gay, and she was upset about him making war on "her second homeland," whereas Pigaillem at least cites a contemporary envoy report from before Eugene left France. I imagine Braubach is probably the one everyone else, like McKay, is getting this argument from.

The logistics of the escape: Pigaillem says Eugene and Conti fled France "disguised as women from head to toe." Braubach says, "die der Postillon anfangs für verkleidete Mädchen gehalten hatte," which I can only read as, "whom the postillion had originally taken for girls in disguise." That sentence confuses me. Selena, ca that mean that they were disguised as women and thus the postillion originally took them to be women? I.e. wearing women's clothes? Because my first reading would be that they were wearing men's clothes but were so effeminate-looking the postillion thought they were girls dressed up as men. But that's not what Pigaillem says.

Okay, why am I asking Selena when this is Braubach and he indulges my every scholarly whim with hundreds of footnotes per chapter? The original is not in German, the original would be in French.

...

Found it! The original text from Louvois--thank you, Google Books--reads:

...que deux hommes y étant arrivés dans un carrosse de louage, dont l'un avoit un justaucorps rouge, se bottèrent et montèrent à cheval; le postillon crut que c'étoit deux filles.

...that two men having arrived there in a hired carriage, one of whom had a red coat, got into their boots and mounted their horses; the postillion thought it was two girls.

It's not entirely clear to me that they were disguised as women from head to toe, Pigaillem. I think my original Braubach reading is closer. For *some* reason, the postillion took them for girls, either because they had effeminate bodies and/or presentation in men's clothes, or because they were wearing women's clothes. But now that I know they were mounting their horses when this happened, I'm inclined to think they were somewhat feminine-looking but wearing riding breeches, and the postillion thought they were women who had put on breeches to go riding, a la Caroline Mathilde!

So in conclusion, while I'm willing to believe the envoy report Pigaillem turned up that said Eugene was gay, I'm skeptical of a number of his other claims about Eugene's habits (not that disguising yourself as a woman to escape says anything about your regular habits anyway, ask BPC and Flora MacDonald), until further evidence emerges. Especially since Selena's reading of the eyewitness reports didn't turn up any evidence of his presence.

Not that Braubach would be inclined to include it; he goes all homophobic when saying that even though we have very little evidence outside of Liselotte, it's entirely possible Eugene had some unfortunate inclinations that he indulged when he was young and surrounded by a bad crowd in Paris, though he grew up into a very respectable ("manly chaste ~~Prussian~~ Savoyard-Austrian", to borrow a phrase from Selena) general. ETA: I meant to add that this book was published in 1963.

Anyway, that is the latest from Braubach, will let you know if anything else interesting turns up (or in Pigaillem, whom I do occasionally still read, although Danish has really taken over my French study time the last few weeks).

Edited Date: 2023-03-15 10:00 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Marie Louise (daughter of Liselotte and Philippe le Gay),

Not in the biological sense, though Liselotte did the majority of the raising. It's one of the two surviving daughters of Minette and Philippe le Gay.

Braubach does, predictably, say that pretty much only Liselotte ever accused Eugene of being gay, and she was upset about him making war on "her second homeland,"

Sigh.

It's not entirely clear to me that they were disguised as women from head to toe, Pigaillem. I think my original Braubach reading is closer.

*nods* Same here. I.e. Braubach appears to be better at translating Louvois than Pigaillem. The Postillon thought they were women. (Meaning at the very least young Eugene and young Conti were shaved and not into moustaches, btw.)

I meant to add that this book was published in 1963.

I figured, though there's always Charlotte P. the sibling basher and user of the "only Voltaire ever accused Fritz of being gay" argument in the 1970s, and I believe some of your Fritzian No-Homo'ing English language biographers published later than the 60s as well. But for a five volumes biography of Eugene, a later publication date would have been somewhat unlikely. (Though of course not impossible.)

Incidentally, I seem to recall, though alas I don't know where I've read it, that Seckendorff (the older, the Grumbkow buddy) asked Eugene whether he still gets erections and Eugene said no when everyone was getting bored on the Rhine in the mid 1730s. Which would imply that (Seckendorff thinks that) Eugene is familiar with the sensation and not from decades ago at least...

Re: Braubach on Eugene and Olympia

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-03-16 05:26 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: Braubach on Eugene and Olympia

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-03-17 07:12 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Braubach on Eugene and Olympia

From:

cahn - Date: 2023-04-01 11:07 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

I'm curently reading the 1920s Charles Hanbury-Williams biography, and while I'm far from finished yet, I definitely have more than enough quotes on our Prussian lot (and one Frenchman, three guesses who and the first two don't count) for a post. I'll talk about the biography and H-B's life separately; this is just a comment to collect the best of list of descriptions he gave during his stint as British envoy in Berlin. One word about the biography in general, though: of course there's censorship. I figured as much when the forward talked about the coarse times of the first two Georges, and G3 thankfully bringing morality back (for a while), the "bawdy" poetry quoted is exclusively straight (the "Hephaistion" essay or the Hervey biography or both quote a very non straight doggerel from H-W), and syphilis is the illness which shall never be named. When the biographer went through some contortions re: our hero's breakup with his wife and why she was so offended by him, with cryptic remarks like "he knew he'd done her an injury" (but if I hadn't known what this was about, I would have assumed it referred to his cheating or emotional enstrangement), I thought, hang on, wihat will you do with his death, skipped forward, and yes, the mysterious illness which made Sir Charles' mental and physical facilities decline remains mysterious. But more about this in a separate post once I'm through with the biography.

Now, just how much an impending disaster Charles Hanbury-Williams' tenure in Berlin would be was in hindsight predictable from how during his previous post - as envoy in Saxony, where he must have been the only one to find the Saxons didn't party enough for him though he was impressed by all the splendor, he already wrote some hostile comments about Fritz the lying liar and begged Newcastle & Fox not to send him to Berlin, but no such luck. Meanwhile, Horace Walpole, Lady Mary hater, notable Richard III defender and as "Courtiers" told me bff with Molly Lepell, Lady Hervey, in her later life, was a big fan of the guy, almost in Poniatowski proportions, and wrote:

Sir Charles Williams is the present ruling star of our negotions. His letters are as much admired as ever his verses were. He has met the Ministers of the two angry Empresses, and pacified Russian savageness and Austrian haughtiness. He is to teach the Monarch of Prussia to fetch and carry, unless they happen to treat in iamibcs, or begin to settle the lmits of Parnassus instead of those of Silesia.

....Yeah. No prizes for guessing this won't happen. Good lord, Brits.

It took eons before Fritz ever received hiim, but in the meantime, he met the rest of the envoys and the entire royal family. One big immediate problem was that there were a lot of Jacobites around, not just both brothers Keith but also the current French Ambassador, Lord Tyrconnel, who was an Irishman who due to siding with Team Stuart had gotten his father's estates forfeit.

A heavy man. Those that know him say he has sense, but he is very new in business and, I believe, ignorant of our trade. The false title he assumes, and which his wife is very fond of, makes it almost impossible for us to converse together.

(H-W at this point still did not speak any German - though he employed a secretary from Hannover who did -, and was still working on his French, so you'd think English speaking expatriates would be good know, but not if they're Jacobites.)

He meets both Queens, SD and EC, and thinks EC looks like her brother the Duke of Brunswick (Charlotte's husband) and still has a fine figure. SD, as G2's sister, welcomes him warmer than anyone else, but he's not much impressed by her and later will say so in greater detail. Otoh, he does take a shine to Amalie (still living with Mom): Handsome nad more agreeable than anything I have seen in Berlin." (The biographer here adds a footnote saying this description of Amalie conflicts with the one given by Newcastle writing to Titley in Copenhagen of Amalie that: "I am informed this princess is disagreeable in her person, ill-natur'd, proud, and wiht all these qualities a coquette." (Lehndorff, of course, could tell you that both descriptions are true - see his own various takes on Amalie - , Williams, but as your later letter on EC will show, you don't notice Lehndorff exists.)

While visiting SD, H-W is also presented to AW and wife Luise.
AW: He speaks with great modesty and sweetness. But as on the one side he has not the parts or the quickness of the King, so on the other he has not that contempteous insolence with which H(is) P(russian) M(ajesty) speaks to everyone.

SD: The Queen-Mother talked a great deal to me about England, about hte late King, about religion and about everything in the world; and at last told me she was afraid I should think her a great talker, which I answered by telling her two great lies at once. The one was that I did not think so at all; the other was that I was charmed whenever I heard her open her mouth. H.M. repied that my conversation was so agreeable to her that she did not know how to rise from table. With these compliments we finished the supper.

Luise he likes. Sure two such amiable Princesses as she and the Queen deserve a better fate, for the P(rince) of P(russia) likes every woman better than his wife.

Can't argue with you there, Charles Hanbury-Williams.

Count Finckenstein, who during this time is appointed Deputy-Minister for Foreign Affairs and will be the one whom Fritz during his one week breakdown will together with Heinrich entrust the Kingdom to in the 7 Years War: He has very much the air of a French petit maitre manqué, and is extremely affected in everything he says and does. (...) Count Fink, as everybody called him, is very like the late Lord Hervey, and yet his face is the ugliest I ever saw.

The highlight and most consedquential event for H-W is of course meeting young Poniatowski, but he doesn't know that yet. As many an envoy, he collects anecdotes, like when he meets a Madame Brandt, former mistress of the Elector of Cologne (note to

cahn: the Elector of Cologne by necessity is always a Prince Bishop - MT's youngest son will get that title later this century). Her clerical boyfriend had given her quite a lot of jewelry:

When she came back to Berlin laden with these bijoux she was stopped at the gates; and the CustomHouse officers insisted she should pay duty for them, upon which she presented a ptetition to the late King, to beg H.M. to remit that duty. The King debated the matter at his Tabacgie, and after almost all the hard-hearted company had declared against the lady, the King said that they ought to consider that what was proposed to be taxed had been earned by the sweat of the lady's own body, and that what was gained in that manner ought to be exempt from all duty. He therefore ordered that the lady should have her good sdelivered back duty free.

ZOMG. What has gotten into you, FW? This sounds more like a Fritzian than like a FW act. FW avoidingn the chance to make cash and call someone a whore? But if he heard it from the lady herself...

As Newcastle has instructed H-W to avoid George Keith, Earl Marischal, HW when George Keith introduces himself while they're at the same social occasion is very cold and put on a sullen dignity and eat my pudding, and held my tongue.

Otoh, when he finds himself at a gathering with James Keith and James' Finnish mistress Eva, he ends up drinking with both of them until two in the morning. Another Scot called Hume "of very suspicious principles" shares gossip about the Brothers Keith with H-W:

Hume told Sir Charles that the Prince of Wales was an intmate correspondence with the King of Prussia, and that he had promised to assist the Earl Marischal, when he came to the throne. The two brothers, he hadded, had formerly lived together, but had quarrelled through the idiosyncrasies of their respective mistresses. Consequently, the Earl Mrischal, whose lady was 'a Turk unbaptised', had moved to another house.

(Sidenote: It's news to me Fritz and Fritz of Wales exchanged letters. Also, the only Turkish lady I'm aware of was the one whom James had rescued as a girl and whom George then took as his ward after James' death and whom Boswell met during his mid 1760s journey. Methinks Hume fleeced H-W for false gossip.)

When Fritz finally returns from Silesia, H-W meets him at a levée or rather intends to, because Fritz doesn't bother to come as far as the room where H-W stands. (The biographer is as indignant as H-W.) But Voltaire is here, and H-W decides that since he, too, is a poet, he might as well call upon V. Before meeting him, H-W had reported the following gossip about Voltaire to Newcastle:

About four days ago, Mr. Voltaire, the French poet, arrived at Potsdam from Paris. The King of Prussia had wrote to him about htree months ago to desire him to come to Berlin. Mr. Voltaire answered His Prussian Majesty, that he would always be glad of an oppportunity of throwing himself at His Majesty's feet, but at that time he was not in circumstances to take so long a journey; upon which the King of Prussia sent him back word he would bear his expenses. But Mr. Voltaire, not caring to trust the King of Prussia, would not leave Paris till His Prussian Majesty had sent him a bill of exchange upon a banker in that town for 4,000 Reichstaler, and he did not begin the journey till he had actually received the money. All that I now write your Grace was told me by the Princess Amalie.

So H-W invites himself over at Voltaire's

Found out by that vain, talkative Frenchman the reason why the King of Prussia had been so generous to him; for his has given hm the gold key of Chamberlain, the Order of Merit, and 5, 000 Taler per annum for life, two of which are to revert to a niece of his after he dies, for her life. This poet's chief business is to correct, and in some places totally alter, the King of Prussia's miscellaneous poems, which he has lately printed under the following title, Ouevres melées du Philosophe de Sans Souci, and his vanity could not help showing them to me. The works are printed with the largest margin I ever saw; and that margin in some polaces is filled up entirely with Voltaire's own handwriting. He gave me his new tragedy of Catiline to read.

H-W is also present at the performance where Voltaire plays Cicero, Heinrich plays Catiliine and Ferdinand and Amalie play minor roles, but says no one other than Voltaire could act. (Ouch.) When Henry Fox (brother of Stephen Fox the beloved of Lord Hervey, used to be also friends with Hervey, now tight friends with H-W who hates Hervey) sends H-W a copy of "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" by Gray, H-W shows this work of English poetry to Voltaire, and gets a letter from Voltaire back written in English, which among other things shows Voltaire's still great fluency in English:

Sir, I return you with many thanks the gloomy but noble copy of verse you was pleased to lend me for some days. I think a Muse would be better inspired in your house than in a churchyard, and your conversation would be more useful to me than the prose and the poetry of all your priests. Pray, Sir, do not forget me, when you write to my Lord Chesterfield and to Mr. Forx; and tell my Lord Chesterfield that King Frederic writes in another way than King James. He is not so great a Divine, but, by God, he is every way a better scholar.

That's James VI and I. of Scotland and England Voltaire is referring to, and his book on hunting witches. About the rest of the Sanssouci Round Table, H-W writes to Lord Chesterfield (he of the famous Letters to his Son, ancestor of Zeithain's fictional narrator and married to Katte's supposed one time crush Petronella:

There are at present but two sorts of inhabitants in this town, soldiers and wits. The first of htese bodys, consisting of fourteen thousand, is too great to send you a list of their names. But the latter, which is made up of the choice and master spirits of the age, is as follows. The King, Rex idem et Vates, Voltaire, Maupertuis, Algarotti, D'ARgens, D'Arget, D'Arnoud, La Mettrie and Pöllnitz. These are the nine he-Muses that adorn this German Parnassus, for no female is allowed to approach this court. Males wash the linen, nurse the children, make and unmake the beds. I may, more at my leisure, send you the historical anecdotes of all the above-mentioned geniuses, the various intrigues they form, the lies they tell, the villainies they commit, the verses they make and deny afterwards, and those they own though they did not make them. I hope it will prove amusing to you, becuase I can't imagine any more entertaining than a faithful narration of the civil wars of nine jealous wits.

Chesterfield replies: Of your nine male Muses, I know but two personally, Voltaire, who is undoubtedly a poet, though one would hardly think so by the bargain he has made for himself, than which Peter Walters or Lord Bath could not have made better. The other is my friend Algarotti, whom you and I both knew here many years ago as a led wit of the late Lord Hervey's, but whom I always considered as having but just parts and reading enough to make him a consummate coxcomb. What I have read of Marquis d'ARgens is below mediocrity, as what I have read of La Metrie is below either wit or philosophy. (...) Voltaire and Maupertuis, by what littlet I know of the latter, will, I think, be your chief companions. Voltaire has certainly parts and genius, Maupertuis has certainly knowledge.

Yeah, no. H-W meets all of the gang only rarely, though Voltaire when things with Fritz go south is just nice enough as to secure himself a possible British getaway, though H-W leaves first in the end. Writes the biographer:

Of Pöllnitz; "that worst of authors', Sir Charlers aid that he had written stupid Memoirs and had changes his relgion seven times. With Algarotti, however, he was soon on good terms. They had mutual friends to talk of, to wit, Fox and Chesterfield. 'My compliments to Voltaire,' wrote Fox on December 9. 'I knew Algarotti too when he was in England and liked him, though I never thought his parts comparable to the others. But indeed I can form no good judgment of him, for I never saw him but in Lord Hervey's company, which was as a false light to a picture, his Lordship's affection mix'd so with and gave such a clour to all conversation that he joined in.

Edited Date: 2023-03-18 01:07 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-03-21 09:12 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

Wilhelmine visits, and thus we get a H-W written portrait of her:

She is a lady above playing at cards, qu ne fait point de noeuds, detests all rural amusements, has got the better of all human fashions except that of doing mischief, loves metaphysics and hates ... - there is a Bitch Royal for you. Besides all this, she is an atheist, and talks about fate and destiny and makes jokes of a future state. She peaks of dying as of going to dinner, and says, if she was condemned to die the next day, she would not sleep a bit the worse for it. She wishes very much she could look into futurity and read the Book of Fate. She thinks all time lost that is not spent with books, or with such people as she has heard other people say are learned. She looks upon beauty as a thing which does not tend to make people agreeable; but says that wit and good sense are all we ought to admire in them; that they are never quite perfect unless they are learned; and that she may be in that number she passes her whole time between conversing with her brother's beaux esprits and writing volumes with her own hands, and being read to, for as she has weak eyes, she cannot read herself anymore. I am told that is very amusing to hear books of metaphysics read to her by her Maids of Honour, and French poetry by her German pages, so that those who read do not understand one word of what they are reading. But she that is read to pretends to be mightily edified by the lecture. She has a most sovereign contempt for her husband, who is a very good sort of Prince, but much addicted to those passions which brutes enjoy equally with man, but who knows nothing of Descartes or Sir Isaac Newton: and as she cannot bear such low company, she won't return to Bayreuth, but pretends to be sick, in order to stay at Berlin to converse with the master spirits of the age. At supper conversation never stood still for the 20th part of a second. H.R.H's conversation exceeded any comedy of Molière. I never met witha woman so learnedly ignorant or so seriously foolish in all my life. She went to bed at 11 o'clock; and I came home laughing all the way in the coach by myself.

(A footnote paraphrases another remark of H-W on Wilhelmine where he says she pretends to be able to write books, but of course someone like her never could, it's all pretense and wannabe intellectualism. One wonders what he'd think about the fact his poetry is forgotten while her trashy memoirs are still in print...)

First time I hear of "contempt for her husband", or Wilhelmine being unable to read anymore. The rest isn't that different from Lehndorff's description during the same visit, though with considerably more malice. No idea what ... - mean, whether this is biographer censorship or H-W himself. So instead of making firmer friends and gaining useful contacts, H-W finds himself ever more distanced from the people he did meet (I wonder why...) and his reports get accordingly more bitchy:

Nothing can make a worse figure than I do at this court. Shun'd and avoided by everybody; most people having orders not to visit me; the common civilities that are paid to other Ministers not paid to me. Hardly a house that dares to let me in, look'd upon as a dangerous spy and an enemy to HIs Prussian Majesty's views, and treated accordingly.

And now for the big letterly explosion. Our biographer tells us this rant on why Fritz sucks, sucks, sucks, is so "outspoken as to be partly unpublishable", because clearly he agrees with Georg Schnath on the tender sensibilities of 1920s readers. Still, what we get is:

Now for a little about the completest Tyrant that God ever sent for a scourge to an offending people. I had rather be a post horse, with Sir J. Hind-Cotton on my back, than his First Minister, or his brother, or his wife. He has abolished all distinctions. There is nothng here but an absolute Prince and a People, all equally miserable, all equally trembling before him, and all equally destesting his iron governoment. There is not so much dstance between your footman and you, or between an English soldier and his captian, or between a curate and a Bishop, as there is between the King of Prussia and his immediate successor, the Prince of Prussia, who dares not go out of Berlin one mile without his Tyrant's leave, nor miss supping every night wiht his Mamma upon any account. Another of his brothers is at this moment sent into banishment to a country town; and the third is in frequent danger of being put in irons, for daring in conversation sometimes to have an opinion of his own. It is knokwn that Princess Amalie has a mind to be married to the Duke of Deux Ponts. But he, Nero, told her the other day, that shemust never marry. And his reason is that she is to be the Abbess of Quedlinburg, which is worth about 5000 pounds per annum. He will have her spend that money in Berlin. Besides that, he does not care to pay her her fortune, which is not quite 20,000. He does not even allow her the interest of it, but gives her, to find herself in everything, 340 per annum, and not a shilling more. He serves his brothers in the same manner. The Prince has 20,000 per annum; but the King thinks that is too much, though he has a wife and two sons, and t herefore allows him but 10,00 per annum.
He makes a great rout with his Mother; but people that know him well, know he does not love her, and that the duty he has accustomed himself to pay her makes Berlin disagreeable to him; and therefore it is that he resides so much in Potsdam. All the outward show of respect to his Mother is a homage that he pays to himself through the belly that bore him. She is an old gossip, with all the tittle-tattle of that sort of people, and she is reckoned to have a large share of ill nature.
One would think that the wretched life that the King and Queen-Mother led under the late King of Prussia's reign (for he used one like a dserter in everything but shooting him, and the other like a kitchen wench), would have taught them humanity. Instead of which, they seem only to have learnt the art of making those under them as miserable now as they themselves were formerly.
The least that passes in a private family must undergo the royal inspection. And he keeps several persons at Berlin, who daily write him journals of all that passes there, and send them to Postdam. And at the head of this tribe of newswriters is Her Sacred Majesty, the Queen-Mother.
Children here are literally born to slavery; for they are marked at their birth, and the parents are obliged to produce certificates of their deaths or the children (I mean male ones, for he has nothing of any sort to do with female ones), at foruteen years of age, in order to be made soldiers.
NO man can sell an estate, marry a child, go out of the country or go out of his town, without special leave; not even Count Podewils himself, who mast have special permission from the King every tme he goes to his own country house. (...)
The thing His Prussian Majesty has in the greatest abhorrence is matrimony. No man, however great a favourite, must think of it. If he does, he is certain never to be preferred.
There are many persons in this country in want, by being obliged to pay money that they raised for the King while Prince Royal, and which he hever has repayed them. The wretched Queen, his wife, is in the number. He allows her about six thousand pounds a year to keep her court, out of which she is obliged to pay her whole establishment, her table, her stables, and five hundred pounds a year interest for money that she borrowed for him while Prince, at the time when no one would lend him a halfpenny. It is amelancholy sight to see this Queen. She is a good woman, and must have been extremely handsome. It is impossible to hate her; and though his unnatural tastes won't let him live with her, common humanity ought to teach him to permit her to enjoy her esparate state in comfort. Instead of this, he never misses an ooportunity of mortifying this inoffensive, oppressed Queen. And the Queen-Mothe assists her dearly beloved son in this, to the utmost of her power, by never showing her common civility, or ever hardly speaking to her.
But it is not only matrimony that His Prussian Majesty has an eversion to. He hates in general to see people happy. For his sway is founded on vexation, and in oppression is his throne established. HIs inhmanity extends to the dsturbing happy lovers. The Empress' late Minister here had for some time been well with a most amiable lady of this place. Upon the Tyrant's hearing of this, he sent her am essage to forbid her seeing her lover any more.
(...) (H-W complaints that Berlin has no social life since he never gets invited anywhere anymore.)
The one place that is open is the courts of the two Queens. If you go to the Queen-Mother, you are asked to supper and seated over against Her Inquisitive Majesty, who puts you to the question all supper-time. If you go to the Queen-Consort, there is nobody there but four stiff-rump ladies that are invited to play with the Queen, and half a dozen maids of honour. (Like I said, H-W evidently did not notice Lehndorff's existence.) Their two Majesties vye with one another who shall have the handsomest maids, in order to fill their court the better by it. There is a little decency kept up at the Queen--Consort's, but the Prussian Nero himself says that, 'La Cour de ma Mère est le Bordell de mes frères,' and the pretty Princess Amalie, being forbid to marry, begins to be of the maids of honour party...

This outburst comes shortly before H-W and Prussia are finally put out of each other's misery and he gets transferred. I find the whole rant fascinating in its mixture of good points and complete inaccuracies. Also, want to take any bets that he had a crush on Amalie and that she must have vented at him at least once about Fritz not paying her her dowry? ((Ulrike had the same problem, she is still trying to get AW to get Fritz to pay her remaining dowry in the mid 1750s) I guess the brother banished to a provincial town is Ferdinand getting Fritz' old post at Ruppin, and the brother daring to have his own opinion now and then is Heinrich. EC providing Fritz with money directly is news to me, though I think I recall she begged for him with FW more than once. And of course it's very much not true he didn't pay his (monetary) debts back, or that no one else would lend him money. (All those volumes of the Life of Prince Eugene...) But anyway, you can see why C-W was prized by those who liked him like Catherine and Poniatowski as raconteur full of humor whle those who couldn't stand him (tout Berlin, by the end) thought he was a self important self obsessed prick. Useful for "no one but Voltaire ever accused Fritz of being gay" people: H-W writing about Fritz' "unnatural tastes". Though I have to say, coming from a man who wrote the following lines, which you definitely won't find quoted in this biography, it's a case of pot and kettle:

Come to my Breast, my Lovely Boy!
Thou Source of Greek & Roman Joy!
And let my Arms entwine 'ye;
Behold my strong erected Tarse,
Display your plump, & milk-white Arse,
Young, blooming, Ligurine!

Otoh, his sympathy for EC and Luise is symphathetic, though again, given how he treated his own wife, pot, kettle.

Edited Date: 2023-03-18 01:13 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

First time I hear of "contempt for her husband", or Wilhelmine being unable to read anymore.

Same on both counts!

I had rather be a post horse, with Sir J. Hind-Cotton on my back

I recognize this from MacDonogh, who footnotes it, "Sir John Hynde-Cotton, Jacobite MP and evidently a very fat or cruel baronet."

I would assume fat based on the specific language of "on my back". His wikipedia article doesn't make it totally clear, but he is certainly fat (although not immensely so), and if you assume either the painter does the usual thing and tone it down a bit, and/or he's put on some more weight in the 10 years after that portrait was made, I'm going to say Wikipedia probably supports my guess.

He makes a great rout with his Mother; but people that know him well, know he does not love her, and that the duty he has accustomed himself to pay her makes Berlin disagreeable to him; and therefore it is that he resides so much in Potsdam. All the outward show of respect to his Mother is a homage that he pays to himself through the belly that bore him.

Wow. That last line especially is scathing.

One would think that the wretched life that the King and Queen-Mother led under the late King of Prussia's reign (for he used one like a dserter in everything but shooting him, and the other like a kitchen wench), would have taught them humanity. Instead of which, they seem only to have learnt the art of making those under them as miserable now as they themselves were formerly.

Yeah, that is how the cycle of abuse often works. :/

Also, I note that the Brits shoot their deserters, apparently.

Like I said, H-W evidently did not notice Lehndorff's existence.

Lehndorff, meanwhile: *is hanging out with the Divine Trio*

I'm just saying, there may have been a reason. :P EC did have to scold him for not showing up to his actual job enough!

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams Tells It All: II

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Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams Tells It All: II

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Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams Tells It All: II

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From:

selenak

This is still not the write up on the book as a biography, but more quotes. As mentioned elsewhere, H-W was that rarity, an envoy who succeeded in making himself unpopular in Vienna and Berlin to the same degree. As with Fritz, he came with an already formed opinion, slightly revised it upon being received by FS & MT (as opposed to Fritz, they received him quickly), and then went back into critique. Of course, he had the problem that just when he was in Vienna (after his time in Berlin), Kaunitz was coming back from Versailles with a great idea which no one told Sir Charles about for obvious reasons. Also, the Brits were absolutely convinced MT owed them her survival and her throne back in Silesia 1 and never ceased to be amazed that she wasn't properly grateful. The conflict du jour was about the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), which the Maritime Powers (England and Holland) wanted to make sure Austria did not profit trade wise from, which was one reason why the Team Habsburg tried to get rid of them again for decades if they didn't try to find their way around the Brits. But while this, and H-W lecturing MT, was one reason for the way things went south, another was the undercurrent of Britain never stopping thinking MT owed them for being her ally in Silesia 1 & 2. (Which undoubtedly helped, but I think the Hungarians would like a word as to how crucial that support was.) One big difference to how things went in Berlin was that H-W was actually personally taken with MT and even wrote a romantic poem.

So, what he thought before being received, based on meeting other courtiers:

That Court is, as it has always been, intolerable. My suspicions of those that advise there go very far. They pay no court but to their enemies, and all their opposition is to their friends. They are too weak and too poor to do anything for themselves and too proud to let others do it for them. (...) The Emperor is the most covetous man upon earth. He is very rich, and lends his money out upon interest. But he will have good security, even of his wife, to whom he won't lend a thousand pounds wihtout a pawn, nor then thousand without a mortgage.

Another misunderstanding was that through all those years, Britain thought it had the solution for all Continental troubles: in exchange for voting for Joseph as King of the Romans and thus FS' designated succcessor as Emperor, MT should give the Electors what they want. MT, of course, had other ideas - Joseph getting elected wasn't worth most of this bunch wanted to have, and Britain kept overestimating how eager Team Austria was for that election. (In the end, Joseph wouldn't get elected until after the end of the 7 Years War.)

When H-W meets the Imperial couple, he modifies his opinion to:

Their Imperial Majesties were extremely gracious to me in the audiences which I had of them, and all their Ministers give me great dinners one after another, and show me numberless marks of distinction.

As opposed to Team Prussia, of course. Also, there are hot women, and H-W lists a couple (Princess Liechtenstein, Princess Kinsky and Countess Clary), and if those names sound vaguely familiar, they should - looks like H-W was either into the mothers-in-law or into Joseph's Circle of Five ladies themselves. However, as with Dresden, he's disappointed that partying beyond 10 pm is only done in private houses. And he writes on the MT: hot or not? question.

The manner of living here is agreeeable enough, and would be more so, if there was a supper to be had int he whole town. But all societies disperse at ten o'clock, and everybody retires to his own house at that time. I think there are as many handsome women here as ever I saw. There is a Countess Clary, that is as beautiful and amiable as Nature can form a woman. The Empress herself is what she represents, and has, as Milton says, "in every action, dignity and grace'. She speaks well, and has a peculiar sweetness in her voice; and I was enchanted in all she said to me in my first audience.

So far, so promising. H-W writes a poem of which only two verses survive as they are quoted in someone else's letter: O Regina orbis prima et pulcherima! ridens
Es Vinus, incedens Juno, Minerva loquens.
But alas, all that charm can't disguise she doesn't listen to him/King George. So now we get H-W's revised opinion on the Imperial Couple, which actually is a pretty good portrait for the most part. Scholarly footnote: "Etiquette of the House of Burgundy" - the famous Spanish Etiquette. Had its origin, as H-W correctly says, in Burgundy, and thus child! Charles V HRE was raised with it, and imported it to Spain, where it calcified, and where MT's Dad picked it up again in his unsuccessful attempt to become King of Spain centuries later.)

HIs Imperial Majesty seems to me more formed for what he was born to than for what Fortune has since thrown in his way. Nature designed him to be Duke of Lorraine, but never to be Emperor. His honours sit awkwardly upon hm, and he is visibly uneasy under his dignities. The Etiquet of the House of Burgundy is the thing in the world the most contrary to his dispositions. He suffers in all proceedings and ceremonials of which the court abounds, but he is happy when he gets privately out of the Palace, to walk on the ramparts with his sister or some of his companions without any attendance, and I think also his talents are more suited to a private life than to that high station in which he is placed.
From all the political discourse I have had with him, I am convinced that hemeans perfectly well. France is as odious to him as Prussia is to the Empress-Queen, and he seems to have just sentiments of the necessirty of preserving the strictest friendship with the King. (I.e. G2)
I endeavoured by every method I could think of to find what share the Emperor really had in the management of affairs, and though I discovered that every thing was communicated to him and nothng hid from him by the Empress' special command, and though I am persuaded that Her Imperial Majesty would take it extremely ill of any Minister who should attempt to keep a secret from the Emperor, yet I am equally convinced that the Emperor's opinion has not the greatest weight at the court in affairs of concern, but that the Empress does govern, and govern solely. (...) The Empress will be supreme in her vast territories. (...)
I now come to the Empress-Queen. Her person was made to wear a crown, and her mind to give lustre to it. Her countenance is filled with sense, spirit and sweetness, and all her motions accompany'd with grace and dignity. She is a peson of superior talents, great application to business, and strong passions, which she does not seem to wish to disguise, and which are very sibile in the frequent changes of her countenance. Had her education been suited to her situation and to the part that was designed for her to act upont he Theater of Europe, or had she at her Father's death fallen into the hands of able and honest Ministers, she would have made as great a figure as Elizabeth of England or Isabel of Castile. But during the life of Charles the Sixth she was carefully kept ignorant of all publick affairs. That Emperor took all hte paints imaginable to producre her the succession of great kingdoms and provinces, and at the same time did all that in him lay to render her incapable to govern them.

H-W goes on to blame Count Bartenstein as the worst of ministers who is leading poor, well intentioned MT astray from the path Britain wants her to tread. Bartenstein does this by the dastardly method of sending her all the papers and dispatches instead of letting someone write summaries for the poor, misguided woman.

No extracts, no abridgements were ever made, to save her eyes or her time. But as the Empress's application to business is very great, she read every paper that she received, which took up so much time that she had but very little left oconsider them; and so in the end was always governed by Bartenstein's advice, the effects of which your Grace has but too melancholy proofs of.

But wait! There's this new guy Kaunitz, back from France, looking to replace hateful Bartenstein! Surely this will make MT see the light of how to follow British policies...

It was not difficult to perceive in the conversations which I had the hnour of having with Her Imperial Majesty, that her intentions are to live in the strictest union with the King. But I had the misfortune often to differ with Her Imperial Majesty about the means of cementing that union. Her jealousy of being governed broke out very often, and particularly in the whole story of the Maritime Powers having signed the Preliminaries at Aix without her. Upon this I took the liberty to talk with great freedom to Her Iimperial MJajesty. I recapitulated int eh strongeest manner the many obligations she had to the King, and concluded what I had to say by tellling Her Imperial Majesty, that I believed she was the only person leftin Europe who was not of opinion that the signing those Preliminaries had been the salvation of the House of Austria. (...)
The Empress-Queen was warmed by what I had said, and seemed to take it very ill. But I could not depart from what I was convinced was true. Your grace had ordered me to talk with freedom; and I did so.
Our conversation was still more animated upon the aiffair of the Barrier. As I am convinced that till that point is settled the connection between the House of Austria and the Maritime Powers is but precarious, I was resolved to do my utmost to persuaide Her Imperial Majesty of the necessity of her giving the Maritime Powers satisfaction upo9n that head, and of the injustice with which they had been treated. This I did with a decent freedom. But I am sorry to say I found Her Imperial Majesty so prejudiced in this affair, that reason had very little share in all she said. The notion of being the independent sovereign of the Low Countries is so fixed in her, that it will be difficult to redadicate it. I took the liberty to tell Her Majesty in so many words, that she was far from being the independent sovereign of the Low Countries, that she was lmited by her treaties with the Martime Powers, which I hoped for the future would no more be violated. This Her Imperial Majesty seemed also to take very ill, and insisted loudly, so loudly that the people in the next room heard her, that she was the Sovereign of the Low Countries, and that it was her duty to project her subjects who had been too long oppressed by the Barrier Treaty and deprived of the natural priviileges which all other nations enjoy.

MT isn't done yet:

To England, by the alteration of the old tarriff, to which we have an undoubted right till a new Treaty of Commercie is made and a new tariff settled. To Holland, the non-payment of the subsidy, to which they are justly entitled, and without which they will not be able to maintain their 12, 000 men in the Low Countries.
To this Her Imperial Majesty said that we had not complied with the obligation of the Treaty ofBarrier, that a new treaty and tariff ought o have been made a great while ago, and that it was hig time for her to think of encouraging the trade and manufacturers of her subjects in the Netherlands. That the Barrier towns had been so ill defended in the late war and wer at present in so miseralbe a condition that it was very unsafe to trust the defence of the Netherlands to such precarious aid, and that therefore she was resolved to keep up so large a body of troops in Flanders as should prevent France from over-running that country at pleasure, and that, to enable her to keep up that great body of troops, she could not pretend to continue the full payment of the Dutch subsidy.(...)
I again repeat to your Grace that I think the Empress-Queen a person of superior parts and of strong passions, born to govern, but wishing to extend that government over her Allies as well as her own subjects.

So no, that diplomatic posting isn't a roaring success, either. Exit Charles Hanbury-Williams. Russia awaits!

Edited Date: 2023-03-18 06:29 pm (UTC)

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selenak

H-W despite sharing Hervey's and basically all of the Brits' opinion that Hannover is a drag, that G2 worrying about his Electorate and acting to Hannover's benefit is a curse on British politics, and ugh, Hannover, gets more and more interested in continental politics and in 1744 makes his very first anti Fritz mention in a letter:

The Lord confound the King of Prussia's armies and designs. As to his writings I could do that myself. (I don't doubt it, H-W. Except for the Voltaire correspondance.) What an impudent fellow tis, to say he does not directly make war upon the Queen of Bohemia, and yet at the same time sends his troops to attack and besiege Prague. Nobody under a King could have the face to say such things.

(Our author(s) share Macauly's stance, unsurprisingly, that whenever Fritz fights against someone allied to England, he's wrong, but when he's fighting in alliance with England, he's of course in the right.)

Of course, his opinion of his own royals isn't high, either: Two hopeful sons are sprung from George's loins,
And one in folly, one in dullness shines;
From Freddy's lips the Royal nonsense flows,
And fools and ladies catch it as it goes
More solid Will, in beef and pudding deep,
Makes love and governs armies in his sleep.
But when, by our inexorable fate,
Our Mon- rots with C- the great,
Speak, Britons, speak, who then will be your head,
The prattling monkey or the lump of lead?

H-W is in the country when the 45 happens, and among those country gentlemen hastily forming their own militia in case BPC actually makes it further south. He's also present at the executions of two Jacobite lords about whom he writes with great sympathy (they die very bravely), though he otherwise has no time for the Jacobite cause. I'll write up and post the descriptions separately, for

luzula's benefit and Mildred's, as it's very long. Then, in 11746, H-W's bff Thomas Wimmington dies which breaks his heart. Conversely, Henry Fox has been appointed Minister of War. As H-W also gets into trouble over satirzing one of the younger Marlboroughs, he basically pushes for an envoy job on the continent as a kind of escape, and gets it. It's off to Dresden with the guy who does not speak a word of German and still brushing up his French, but scoffs at other people's pretense at education. (He does get a series of Hannover born secretaries though to help with the languages.)

Dresden, as a city, finds his approval except for the "early" time of 11 pm when everyone retires. It's gorgeous - which it is - and there's much splendour. H-W also likes the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, August III, son of August the Strong, for being nice and art loving, though he notes A3 is totally under Brühl's thumb. He's less impressed by the Queen (she who will remain in Dresden during the 7 Years War, Maria Josepha, daughter of HRE Joseph I. and thus first cousin to MT; August the Strong had married his son to her with probably an eye on Team Saxony claiming the Imperial throne):

Her Majesty is very devout, but not a bit better for her devotions. She does nothing but commit small sins, and begs forgiveness for them. She is ugly beyond painting, and malicious beyond expression. Her violent hatred to the Empress-Queen, and her great love to all her enemies, makes me rejoice that she has not the least influence at this court. She has much impotent aversion to Count Brühl; he hates Her Majesty in return, but then he makes her feel his power.

By "her enemies" he doesn't mean Fritz, he means France, which apparantly Maria Josepha is much in favour of.

This royal couple's son has just married Maria Antonia of Bavaria, or "Antoinette" as our author(s) call her, aka pen pal to MT and Fritz (on musical matters), also librettist of various operas and music lover in general.

Her person is extremely bad, but her manner is engaging. She does not want parts, but they are strangely turned. She has a desire to be admired beyond the rest of her sex. ...She has read a great deal, but her whole study has been love as it is described in French romances. She write s agreat deal, all upon the same subject, and I am sure all her poetical works would make a small folio. During the late Emperor's reign she meddled in politics, in which she varies as much as in her lovers; an t is its from them she chiefly takes her plie, for she is neither capable of forming a scheme herself, nor adhering to a plan that anybody else should prepare for her for four and twenty hours together.

(If you're by now under the impression that MT and Catherine are the only higher ranking women H-W doesn't ridicule, you would be right.)

But of course the main person at court to pay attention to is Brühl.

He is the son of a gentleman of Thuringe. The family is good. Count Brühl's father was Marshall of the court of Saxe-Weissenfels. The present Count Brühl was page to the Duchess-Dowager of Weissenfels (mother of the present Duchess of Courland) who lived hte latter end of her life at Leipzig. The late King of Poland, who always came to the (Book) Fair, used constantly to visit her Highness of Weissenfels; and it was in those visits that he first saw Count Brühl, who, as page, used to light him upstairs. HIs Polish M. observed he was a very assidious boy, and took a fance to him, and upon the Duchess' recommendation made him his Page de la Chambre. For a great while his P M employed him as his secretary in his amours, but thinking that he saw great talents in him, he resolved to breed him pu to be a Minister, and began by making him spy upon all his other Ministers, which post he executed to the K's satisfaction, who in the last years of his life applied himself very much to business. And at his Polish Majesty's death his affairs whore wholly (having then no declared Minister) in Count Brühl's hands; who from being a page was in two years become Privy Councillor, Ministre de Conference and Gt Master of the Wardrobe. He was the only MInister that was with the King of Poland at Warsow when he died, and all the secret transactions of that critical time were in his hands. He, immediately upon the King of Poland's death, came back to Dresden, and found the present King of Poland entirely governed by his faovurite, Count Sulkokwski, who was the most ignorant and the most incapable of business of any man in Saxony. To this person Count Brühl united himself, and they together persuaded the King to go no more to council, nor to suffer his Privy Councillors to approach HIs Polish M's person; after which Count Brühl alone (for Count Sukowski was against it) persuaded his master to attempt the crown of Poland; and the success that attended that attempt was the first thing that gave the present K of Poland a good opinoin of Count Brühl. But he would never have arrived at the post of favourite, if Count Sulkowski had not destroyed himself by being the most absurd, the most insolulent, and the most brutal man upon earth, who took more pains to lsoe the King of Pland's favour than ever any Minister did to gain the confidence of any other prince.

(See also: Sachsens Glanz und Preußens Gloria.)

Count Brühl in his figure still has a a great deal of a page, which neither diomonds nore embroideries can efface. He is extremely polite and civil, but his civility is without distinction, which destroys the merit of it.

(I.e. he's nice to everyone, not just H-W.)

His vanity is beyond all bounds, and his expense has no l miits; neither does the King of Poland set any to it, for he permits him to take whatever he pleases out of the revenues of Saxony. His house is a palance, and his family a court. He has every vice and expense that would each of them singly undo any other person. Gambling, building, equipage, horses, books, pictures an a mistress, are extravagances that he has pushed to the highest degree.

And so forth, which, btw, is a contemporary testimony to Brühl's money wasting reputation that predates Fritz bashing him in his histories. Ironically, what frustrates H-W most about Brühl is that he seems to be afraid of pissing off Prussia. (Which, lest we forget, has invaded Saxony already once at this point, in Silesia 2.) At the same time, Brühl loathes Fritz right back, and relations to Vienna are cool because Maria Josepha thinks she should be Archduchess and Empress, whereas noble Britain wants to reconcile everyone (according this book), only to find out that the German princes want to be paid subsidies if they're to do as England wants. H-W is not happy. There's a lot of negotiating with the Poles, too, considering the question as to whether or not young future Elector also becomes the third Saxon King of Poland in a row (spoiler: he won't be), which brings H-W first into contact with Polish nobles. He keeps pondering Fritz from afar:

One must judge the King of Prussia's future by his past behaviour. (...) We have not only seen him twice abandon his allies, the French, the instant he perceived that his interest required such perfidy to support it. But also we saw him towards the end of the year 1743 promiting a peace with the greatest warmth, though at hte same time the advantages he daily gained over his enmeies gave him, to all appearance, the greatest encouragement to continue the war.

Dresden is very expensive, though, even for Sir Charles, and H-W is angling for another job, to wit, Turin, at the King of Sardinia's court. Alas, Cumberland "The Butcher" wants his friend Lord Rochefort there, so Henry Fox floates the idea of H-W going to Berlin instead. He's less than keen at first. He also is involved in the final negotiatons for the Peace of Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle that concludes the Austrian War of Succession, and consequently is regarded as good at diplomacy by an admiring Walpole who thinks he'll teach Fritz to fetch and carry, I already gave you the quote. So it's off to Berlin for H-W, supposed master negotiator after all, and disaster ensues. Except for meeting Poniatowski. Now, you may have wondered why I didn't include any Poniatowski relevant quote in the Prussian post. It's because all the quotes regarding the H-W/Williams relationship save for some very late letter near the end of H-W's time in Russia and one single comment by one of his daughters come from Poniatowiski's own memoirs, which frustrated me - I mean, not that the quotes aren't good, but I was hoping to find out how Williams saw the developing relationship without the virtue of hindsight. (The late quote where he does say how he feels for P is quite moving, though.) Also I have already done a write up of Poniatowski's memoirs.

After his less than glorious departure from Berlin, H-W has the additional trouble of his oldest daughter Fanny's marriage to be arranged to his satisfaction, and his younger daughter Charlotte scandalizing her mother by reading Tom Jones. As mentioned, upon meeting young Essex he's first a bit sceptical because the fellow doesn't mention his daughter a lot, and is Team Love Match. Otoh, once he realizes Fanny does want the Essex guy, he sets himself to mentoring him.

OUr country is the country of Liberty. We have restraint of all sorts, an dpersons of the first rank will not permit those of inferior classes to enjoy ease beyond them in anything. And as persons of small fortunes that have no equipages, walk out in a morning wihtout any attendances, those of higer station have imagined that tis more easy and agreeable to walk out unattended than attended; and as people of fashion are generall known in London streets, they don't lose their dignity by such proceedings. But this is not to be done in foreign countries, where you are known and considered but by the exterir figure that you make. In those countries we are but birds of passage. Every Englishman of rank must keep up the outward show, or he will hardly meet with outward civility. And should a man of quality in Italy see you walking in the streets without a footman, it would not be an easy matter to persuade him afterwards that you was really the Earl of Essex.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

It's off to Dresden with the guy who does not speak a word of German and still brushing up his French, but scoffs at other people's pretense at education.

Oh, Brits.

George I: *cough*

Dresden, as a city, finds his approval except for the "early" time of 11 pm when everyone retires.

I had a feeling that Elizaveta stayed up later, and indeed, flipping through Anisimov, I see supper is starting at 11 pm. Now, that's more up H-W's alley! I have a feeling that was a regular thing. Let me see if I can find it.

According to the court record book, this is how Elizabeth spent January 1751: January 1st--a New Year celebration, 2nd--a masquerade, 3rd--visiting Aleksandr Buturlin, 4th--Christmas Eve, 6th--a French tragedy, 7th--a French comedy, 8th--a court masquerade, 9th--a carriage ride and visit to Sumarokov, 13th--a liturgy at the church, Courtag at the Palace, 15th--a court ball, 18th--a public masquerade, 20th--Courtag, a French comedy, 22nd--a court masquerade, 24th--a Russian tragedy, 25th--a French comedy, 28th and 29th--courtiers' weddings.

Aha, Montefiore is what I'm remembering:

She often partied until 6 a.m., sleeping till midday and sending for jewellers and ministers in the middle of the night. “Nobody ever knew the hour Her Imperial Majesty would deign to have dinner,” recalled Catherine, “and it often happened that the courtiers having waited playing cards till 2 a.m. and gone to sleep were awakened to attend Her Majesty’s supper.” If they were too sleepy to speak, they were likely to get a slap.

I put it to you that H-W was in a better mood in Russia and thus more inclined to look on the young people fondly and want to mentor them.

He is extremely polite and civil, but his civility is without distinction, which destroys the merit of it.

(I.e. he's nice to everyone, not just H-W.)

Hahaha, this is great. Wasn't that one of MT's good points according to visitors, that she was uniformly gracious? Yeah, last paragraph here.

Perhaps H-W didn't notice this trait of hers when he was praising her. :P

but I was hoping to find out how Williams saw the developing relationship without the virtue of hindsight

Aww, yeah, that's too bad.

And as persons of small fortunes that have no equipages, walk out in a morning wihtout any attendances, those of higer station have imagined that tis more easy and agreeable to walk out unattended than attended...And should a man of quality in Italy see you walking in the streets without a footman, it would not be an easy matter to persuade him afterwards that you was really the Earl of Essex.

I keep saying this, but I'm loving these little insights into contemporary thinking, which are useful for fanfic too!

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: Anglo among Saxons (The Life, II)

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-03-25 09:21 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

While this is going on, our old friend Melchior Guy Dickens is English envoy in Russia, and in late 1752, he commits a diplomatic blunder by misinterpreting/misrepresenting one of the treaties H-W has negotiated.

He announced that England was willing to subscribe to a Declaration, which it was suggested should be made by the Czarina if Austria and England would join with her in it, promising to defend the King of Poland, in case he should be set on by Prussia. No such obligation in effect existed, as far as England was concerned, unless Augustus was directly attacked for making the treaty in question - almost an impossibility under the circumstances; and Dickesn was taken to task accordingly.

This meant Guy Dickens lost cred with Elizaveta, though, and was major reason why he had to be replaced as envoy. When H-W heads off to Russia, he thinks he will there accomplish his political masterpiece; a treaty between England and Russia to totally confine Prussia and tame Russa, and ensure the Austrians don't get too haughty. Speaking of haughty women, here's H-W offering advice to his daughter Fanny on how to be a proper wife:

Remenber a nother rule, an unerring one, which I have often in discourse given you, and hwich is, that no m arried woman ought to pretend to make a figure or shine but through her husband. His rising must drwa you up after him; your imagining to make a separate figure may hurt him, and will infallibly sink you. Tis from facts that I could mention that I learnt this rule, facts that I could tell you; and depend upon it the maxim is right. I have known wives who thought it clever to be able to set their husbands right when they thought them in the wrong, and this in a room full of company; and who, when they have got the better in an argument, imagined that they had gained a victory. But believe me, Fanny, such gains are losses. The really sensible woman will take the contrary part and assist her husband to her utmost, even when he has the worst of the argument; such a conduct gains confindence and affection. And that you may ever continue in Lord Essex' confidence as well as effection shall be my constant prayer, wish and endeavour.

By the rules of their society, he's not wrong, though I find it hilarious that the young woman whose Suhm he's going to become is just about the least person who can ever be described as shining through her husband.

Now, the Catherine/Charles Hanbury-Williams correspondence is preserved because while he returned every one of her letters to her after reading it with the reply mail so she could destroy it (if these letters had been intercepted, she'd been in so much trouble with Elizaveta and Peter!), he had it copied, as he did all his outgoing letters. (A sound believer in diplomatic immunity, Sir Charles.) When I say he becomes Catherine's Suhm, I speak advisedly. The affection in the letters, the "you're so great/You're so wondeful" is similar, he helps her out with money, and of course Catherine does need an older confidant. (She had a good relationship with her father as opposed to Fritz, but her father is dead, her relationship with her mother was terrible, and with the Czarina it's always a tightrope balance. And she's just delivered Paul, whom Elizaveta took immediately.) Now, given H-W's track record, the question has apparantly arisen as to why he doesn't go for an affair instead of the affectionate mentor relationship and instead introduces her to Poniatowski. Our author(s) defend him against the charge of having lobbied to have Poniatowski (a non-Brit, non-Hannoverian) appointed as his latest secretary and thus bringing him to Russia just when he realizes the relationship between Catherine and Saltykov (her first lover) is over for good, and say he'd never pimp, it was from the affection of his heart and also Poniatowski needed something to do. Now I don't doubt H-W cared for both Catherine and Poniatowski, but I also think since he was still compos mentis, he was very aware what it would do both to his personal relationship with Catherine and to his grand England/Russia treaty project if he infected her with syphilis as he'd done his wife.

so, here's H-W's reporting to Holdernesse on Catherine (and her husband): I often have conversation with the Grand-Duchess for two hours together, as my rank places me at supper always next to her Imperial HIghness, and almost from the beginning of my being here she has treated me with confidence, and sent me word by the Great Chancellor that he would do so. Since her coming into the country, she has by every method in her power endeavoured to gain the affection of the nation. She applied herself with diligence to learn the language, and speaks it at present (as the Russians tell me) in the greatest perfection. She has also succeeded in her other aims, for she is esteemed and beloved here to a high degree. Her person is very advantageous, and her manner very captivating. She has a great knowledge of this Empire and makes it her only study. She has parts and sense; and the Great Chancellor tells me nobody has more steadiness and resolution. (...)
AS to the Great-Duke, he is weak and violent; but his confidence in the Great-Duchess is so great, that sometimes he tells people that though he doesn ot understand things himself, yet his wife understands everything.

Catherine about meeting H-W in her memoirs: Our conversation was gay and agreeable. He had wit, was aquainted by many people, and knew Europe well, so to converse with him was no difficult matter. I learnt afterwards that he enjoyedh imself that evening as much as I did, and that he spoke of me with high praise.

Indeed he did. His bosses back in England want to know how the charming Grand Duchess talks of Fritz, since Fritz is partly responsible for her being future Czarina and her husband is such a fan. Will she, too, be a Prussian tool?

She has of late declared herself openly to me with respect to the King of Prussia. She is not only convinced that he is the formidable and natural enemy of Russia, but I find she hates him personally. She told me lately, in speaking of the Prince of Prussia, that he had not His Prussian Majesty's understanding, and, as to his head, it could not be so bad as his brother's, because the King of Prussia's was certainly the worst in the world. (Report from October 2, 1755)

Could it be Catherine tells H-W (still seething about Fritz himself) what he wants to hear? Perish the thought. (I mean, I totally believe she thought Prussia/Russia were competitors and to be wary of her husband's idol, and that AW would be a way easier monarch to deal with, but I doubt she had actual animosity towards the man she only met once and then it was a good meeting.)

H-W as you may have noticed doesn't think much of future Peter III, and our authors, with Catherine's and Poniatowski's memoirs as their sole foreign sources on H-W's time in Russia, don't, either. But even if he had a better opinion, I doubt this would have restrained him for helping out with the Catherine/Poniatowski affair which promptly unfolds. (Forwarding letters, arranging chances to meet, since Poniatowski lives with him.)

Of course, while H-W' negotiates away on the England/Russia treaty, London simultanously negotiates with Fritz for an England/Prussia treaty. Which H-W isn't told about for eons, though he perceives something might be in the air. Our authors think the treaty happened mainly because G2 was defensive of Hannover again (as Prussia promises to help if Hannover is attacked by French troops, which is ironic, as a big clause of the England/Russia treaty is the promise that Russia would help if Hannover is attacked by Prussian troops.) H-W even agrees that the Austrians as allies are more trouble than they're worth with all their haughtiness and lack of gratitude. But he knows that Elizaveta, who means this treaty to be ANTI Fritz, will not be happy to find herself indirectly in an alliance with him. No kidding. Basically, H-W's diplomatic masterpiece proves to be dead upon arrival, and it breaks his heart, and this, his biographers want you to know, is the main reason for his mental and physical decline which starts showing just about this time. That, and all the stress. Nothing else, you hear!! (They partly quote, partly paraphrase Poniatowski's description of H-W freaking out on him in a completely unprecedented way from the memoirs.) Poniatowski, btw, doesn't say "syphilis", either, he speaks of "infirmities", but he's writing about his adored mentor in his memoirs. Since Sir Charles takes to his bed more and more as the 7 Years War has started, this is when we get more and more letters and also an incident which I didn't mention in my Poniatowski write up, as H-W's young friends now are concerned for him:

The intimacy of the Grand-Duchess with Poniatowski assisted her to keep up frequent communications with Sir charles, especially during his illness. Stanislas speaks of having begun to prove of real service to him, both in his work and in his leisure hours. He quotes an instance how one evening he was dining with the Ambassador, who was plunged into the depth of gloom at the news of the recent reverse of the British army in Minorca, the catastrophe for which Admiral Byng paid so dearly with his life. At the end of the meal, a packet was handed him from his father, enclosing Voltaire's La Pucelle, a work which the poet, for various reasons, had kept back from the world up to that time. Sir Charles's delight at this unexpected treat was intense. HIs troubles were forgotten: he became that evening the Sir Charles of by-gone days.

La Pucelle: Seriously, everyone BUT Fritz gets their hands on that work.

Poniatowski, alas, can't stay in Russia for much longer due (see P write up), and by the time he can come back, now as Envoy in his own right (for Saxony), H-W is in such a bad condition that he's about to be recalled for good. In the meantime, he has to put up with the political changed situation, and it's worth noting that all the suggestions as to whom to bribe at Elilzeveta's court so she will be pro Prussian which show up in Mitchell's reports and in Fritz' letters from 1756/1757 do come from him. But there is no portrait kissing mentioned. Definitely Not Having STD H-W consoles himself with writing to Catherine (whom he addresses in the male form for greater security, hence "Monsieur"):

What do you wish for, Monsieur, in answer to your letter? Do you wish for protestations, assurances, and even oaths, or do you prefer a frank, sincere, straightfoward answer, the advice of a humble, faithful and dsiinterested friend - in short, a continuation of my past conduct towards you?
My devotion to you, Monsieur, has no limits, save that of a higher duty. That is how the faithful Minister should speak. The private individual may speak differnetly; my services, my life, as a private individual are yours to command. These are preliminaries; an dI do not like such things.

From another letter:

One world form you is my most sacred law. When I think of you, my duty to my Master grows less. I am ready to carry out all the orders you can give me, provided they are not dangerous to you; for in that case I shall disobey with a firmness equal to the obdedience with which I would carry out all others.

And here's one which is both moving and intriguing, because it envisions a time when Catheirne is Czarina but does NOT mention Peter being Czar:

This is my castle in the air, which I built some time ago, and with which I very often amuse myself. When you are settled on the throne, if I am not there, I shall come at once. I hope that you will ask my Master for me as English Minister at your court. I should prefer to come with the rank of Ambassador in my pocket, but do not desire to produce it, because that would oblige me to keep u a station and ceremony which would weary me. I pride myself that I shall then live a great deal with you as a faihtful servant and a humble friend. I should like the right to come and go and to profit by your leisure hours: for I shall always love Catherine better than the Empress. I should ask you for the blue ribbon, in order to wear some portiojn of your livery and I should ask for your portrait, which I would carry all my life and would entail on my family, that so great an honour may continue to the last of my name. That is my ambition; do you condemn it?

It's not all emotional talk, though. In a letter trying to convince Catherine to use what influence she has to keep Elizaveta from joining MT irrevocably, he writes:

Let us examine for a moment the consequences of the war which you are about to cmmence, even if it should be successful. If the King of Prussia is conquered, and the iunion betwen France and Austria will become closer, and once the House of Brandenburg is beaten down, there will no longer by any power on the continent which will be capable of resisting that union, and which will not be forced to bow down to their will. Russia being no longer of any use to htem, will be set aside, and will have nothing forther to say in the affairs of Europe. I am afraid, too, of another result, the universal establishment of the Catholic religion, and am afraid of it with good reason. What I tell you is not a day-dream, it is a scheme, which is already prepared.

This is an impressive use of realpolitik and propaganda showing he still was able to use his faciliities (at least mostly) at this time. I mean, Austria and France going on re-Catholizing crusade together is utter nonsense, of course, but Fritz used that same claim very effectively at the same time to style himself as the Protestant hero, and both he and H-W neatly avoid mentioning very Prrostestant Sweden fighting at the side of Team Habsburg and Team Bourbon. But Catherine of course didn't have any influence (yet) on Russia's policies.

Edited Date: 2023-03-25 12:43 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

By the rules of their society, he's not wrong, though I find it hilarious that the young woman whose Suhm he's going to become is just about the least person who can ever be described as shining through her husband.

Ha! Truer words were never spoken.

(A sound believer in diplomatic immunity, Sir Charles.)

Whereas Suhm did not trust diplomatic immunity around FW, not even a little bit. August the Strong had to scold him into going back to Prussia after he ran away.

I also think since he was still compos mentis, he was very aware what it would do both to his personal relationship with Catherine and to his grand England/Russia treaty project if he infected her with syphilis as he'd done his wife.

Oof, yeah. That could have changed history!

Could it be Catherine tells H-W (still seething about Fritz himself) what he wants to hear? Perish the thought...but I doubt she had actual animosity towards the man she only met once and then it was a good meeting.)

Yeah, I was surprised by that! Isn't that story of their meeting from her memoirs anyway? Which would indicate she retained a positive impression of it years later.

But he knows that Elizaveta, who means this treaty to be ANTI Fritz, will not be happy to find herself indirectly in an alliance with him. No kidding.

WHOOPS.

Basically, H-W's diplomatic masterpiece proves to be dead upon arrival, and it breaks his heart, and this, his biographers want you to know, is the main reason for his mental and physical decline which starts showing just about this time. That, and all the stress. Nothing else, you hear!!

It was surprisingly hard to write history in the Roaring Twenties...

La Pucelle: Seriously, everyone BUT Fritz gets their hands on that work.

Ha!

The Catherine and H-W letters were really interesting! This book is definitely worthy of an 8(+?) part write-up!

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: Russia (The Life III)

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-03-26 02:16 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: Russia (The Life III)

From:

cahn - Date: 2023-04-02 08:59 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: Russia (The Life III)

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-04-03 06:12 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

When Poniatowski comes back as Saxon envoy, he can't live with H-W anymore, and that throws a spanner into the works. Of course, he could visit when Catherine is visiting, but that would look very suspicious. Not to mention that Saxony and England are now at two different sides of the war.

Poniatowski to Catherine: I shall avoid any appearance of intercourse with La Sagesse, whom I impolore you to convince of the absolute necessity of this for the good of all three of us, an din order to be able in time to become even more useful to him, a service hwich I certainly owe him from gratitude, and one which I wish from the bottom of my heart to perform. It is hard for me and very cruel to be forced to act like this, but I appeal to his honesty, and at the same time to his good sense. Both will speak for me.

Sir Charles understands, but it is hard for him. When he and P finally manage to meet, it's only after H-W's recall has been an established fact, and he needs to set up his replacement.

H-W to Catherine about P: I shall receive him as my son. I shall not speak one word to him of politics. OUr conversation will turn to you, on himself, on his family. I know beforehand that tears will come into my eyes when I embrace him. I am satisfied that he loves me, and that is enough.

H-W to P, after that last meeting: I love and adore you, as a child whom I have brought up: remember that.

Later meetings are attempted but have to be cancelled because the Russian Chancellor objects. And here's another very intriguing letter by H-W to Catherine about P:

We shall find means of communicating our thoughts to one another; and I am so certain of his devotion to me that I think only of means to help him. This is what I think about him. I flatter myself that, one day, you, Monsieur, and the King of Prussia as your lieutenant, will make him King of Poland.

The biographer(s) wonder whether H-W had the gift of prophecy or gave Catheirne this idea. I wonder whether that letter is authentic and not forged because it's so accurate. But it's farewell time now, and this is Catherine's letter to H-W, dated two days before Sir Charles leaves St. Petesburg:

Monsieur,
I am in despair at being deprived of the pleasure which I should have had in seeing and talking freely to you. Your generous friendship for me and for the Grand-Duke is unexampled. My heart is scarred by the hearsh treatment which you have received; but my deepest gratitude will be for ever yours. May happier times allow me to prove its full extent! It is equal (and that is all that can be said) to the debt which I owe you and the boundless esteem which is due to the nobility of your character. Farewell, my best, my dearest friend.

Our auithor(s) argue that while cynics may claim Catherine was just using H-W, she meant it, she would have called him back if he'd been still alive by the time she became Czarina, and that for him, in turn, she was the "purest" love of his life.

H-W's journey back is described including a mental breakdown in Hamburg. Again, no mention of syphilis. Instead, we leanr that vulnerable Sir Charles manages to attract an enterprising adventuress named Julie John or Johnes who manages, after three days of acquaintance, to extract a marriage pledge and a grant of 10,000 roobles. She will actually show up in England later waving the marriage pledge at his family and will have to be paid off. Says the book: Whether from noxious drugs or from more natural causes, Sir Charles became completely deranged during those days in Hamburg.

Aaand he's off, with another member of the Marwitz clan as escort. He's not locked up in the proverbial attic in England but cared for in a nice house, and his daughters visit, which he reports in a short letter showing he can pull himself together that much. But basically, it's the end for Charles Hanbury-Williams.

Edited Date: 2023-03-25 12:33 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-04-11 03:49 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

In addition to the "authorized biography", I also loaned a book Stabi algorithm recced, which comes pretty much to the opposite conclusions: "Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams and European Diplomacy" by D.B. Horn, 1930. It is pretty withering, and its final conclusion representative:

After a brilliant beginning his embassy to Petersburg had proved as futile and unsuccessful as his earlier missions ot Dresden and Berlin, Warsaw and Vienna. Few diplomatists have such a record of unmitagated failure. At every court to which he was sent Williams sooner or later rendered his recallimperative. He quarrelled with Frederick the Great; he wrangled with Maria Theresa and Kaunitz; after some years' residence at Dresden he broke violently with Brühl; at Petersburg, he offended the Empress, quarrelled with the Great Chancellor, and, but for the sound advice of the Grand Duchess, would probably have followed a line of conduct which would have led to his own expuslion from Russia and would have embroiled the relations of Britain and Russia. The mere enumeration of these facts proves that Wiliams was pre-eminently unsuited for the tiplomatic life. NOmatter how bad the relations of his Govenrment were with the courts at which he resided, it was surely unnecessary for the British minister, by quarelling personally with the sovererigns and ministers with whom he had to transact business, to make relations worse.
A distinction must, however, be drawn between his failure at Berlin and Dresden, which was due almost entirely to his own fault, and at Vienna and Petersburg, for which his Government was largely responsible. HIs mission ot Vienna was a fool's errand, and no good could have come of it no matter how skillful the envoy. At Petersburg, after success appepared to be within his grasp, the volte-face of his own Government deprived him of it, and the rashness and folly of the King of Prussia made failure irredimable. The growing coldness between Britain and Russia lay in thelogic of events after Frederick had invaded Saxony and Britain had definitely decided to support Prussia, which Russia, with the hlep of Austria and the connivance of France, was determined to crush. Williams' conduct intensified this coldness, but not not exercise a decisive influence on the relations of Britain and Russia, and the coldness increased rather than diminished after Williams had been succeeded by Robert Keith.

The author also uses the dispatches and a Berlin Journal which H-W (like Mitchell later) used as a big dispatch rather than a private diary, and some quotes underline the sexual censorship of the biography. For example, the quote about being cold to George Keith continues: "So I put on a sullen dignity, ate my pudding and held my tongue. I went away very soon after dinner to see Celia." (His mistress du jour.

Something else that's clearer there is that London was deeply worried Fritz would support another Jacobite rising and that this is what him hosting all those Jacobite exiles was all about. Him sending George Keith as envoy to France put those fears in overdrive, because at this point the Prussia/France alliance was still a thing, and so basically Newcastle and Uncle G2 were wondering whether Fritz was about to stage a Franco-Prussian-Jacobite invasion of England. H-W sending dispatch after dispatch about how Fritz was the worst rather heightened that fear.

Something else I learned from this book and not from the other one is a new fact that finally enlightened me why SD, Mrs. I Want My Kids to Marry Their English Cousins, and G2 are at odds as they're reported to be both by a French envoy report in the 1750s and according to Hervey, who said G2 had hostility and contempt for his sister, with her deserving the later but not the former, something I never understood.

Well, remember that G2 surpressed G1's last will because of its clause concerning the idea that Britain and Hannover should be in the future split up if a reigning King has more than one son, with one getting England and one Hannover? G1 wrote this BEFORE G2 and Caroline produced future Cumberland, so he meant it to apply for Fritz of Wales as yet unborn kids. However, by the time G1 died, William "The Butcher" Cumberland existed, and so the will could have been used for him to get Hannover and FoW England, when G2 and Caroline wanted rather the reverse, if they couldn't get FoW out of the picture altogether? Okay, something I never considered but in retrospect is logical - that will contained other legacies, of course. And SD was absolutely convinced G2 was cheating her out of something their Dad wanted to leave her by surpressing the Will. The footnote in the book doesn't mention it, but I bet both FW and Fritz thought so, too.

More zingers: Instead of proceeding with caution and reserve, Williams showed a complete lack of self-control. He flung himself headlong into the arms of Frederick II's bete noire, Gross - the Russian envoy - and together they followed a policy of espionage and intrigue.Worse still, Williams could not conceal the hurt inflicted onhis vanity by the little notice which was taken of him at court. His picque led him to behave, according to his own confession, in a way entirely unsuited to his official position. To take one example, Williams mentions in his diary on 30 July that the Tartar envoy 'in his dirty boots' was placed at the upper end of the table. Williams promptly seated himself at the foot, explaining in al oud voice he did not wish to associate with canaille.
"The respect of the Prussian ministers to his Tartar Excellency," he continues, "put me in mind of the ceremony of making a Mamamouchi in Molière's Bourgois Gentilhomme. I immediately communicated my thoughts to Count Puebla - the Austrian envoy - who, in the company of his neighbours, immediately burst out into a fit of laughter, which laughter according to the best of my observation made Count Podewils - Prussian foreign minister - rather angry than merry to my no small satisfaction".

....How to win friends in high places, indeed.

Edited Date: 2023-03-19 02:53 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

That's the other book I wanted to ask you about! Only you've stated that you're not as interested as I am in foreign policy, and reviews of it indicated that it wasn't strong on the human interest angle. So I only asked you to check out the biography, but I'm grateful that you decided to grab this one too. Unfortunately, it is not to be found online for sale, at any price.

In other news, I found an article online that I think you'd be interested in,

selenak, "'In the Greatest Wildness of my Youth': Sir Charles Hanbury Williams and Mid-Eighteenth-Century Libertinism," from 2016. If you can't access the link, let me know and I'll put it in the library for you.
It definitely fleshes out the picture, as well as including a critical historiography on the subject of treatments of Hanbury-Williams, and a decent bibliography in the footnotes.

From said footnotes, I notice the author published a book length treatment of Poniatowski and his Anglophilia, The Last King of Poland and English Culture in 1998, which looks worth reading. Alas, not to be had for less than $122, but there's the Stabi link if you have time and interest.

ETA: Because of reasons, I will probably not be able to reply to the rest of the amazing H-W write-ups immediately, but I will! and

cahn and I were marveling at you again in email this morning. :)

Edited Date: 2023-03-19 05:50 pm (UTC)

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-03-21 01:52 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal

From:

cahn - Date: 2023-04-11 04:33 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal

From:

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Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-04-11 03:43 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

mildred_of_midgard

We of salon are now in the possession of:

1. The Peter Keith protocols from 1730. It's possible all have been published already, but maybe not, and even if we learn nothing new, the cool factor cannot be beat.

2. The Leining-Fredersdorf correspondence. I have sent

prinzsorgenfrei the first 5 pages already with a request for a transcription of the part that's in the box bill project. I notice, browsing through, that Leining continues to correspond with Fredersdorf and to address him as "Monsieur et tres chere compere" until July. In one early letter, he's "Monsieur mon tres chere ami et tres chere compere." Maybe this is how you address your predecessor who has just been dismissed and is dying of disgrace, but I think MAYBE NOT. :P

I can see Glasow's name in one of the pages I've requested a transcription of, I'm very excited!

3. The letter informing Fritz of Algarotti's death, the one that Preuss didn't see fit to publish because it wasn't by Fritz or Algarotti. The handwriting is going to be a bit of a struggle, I think I would need to work through it word by word, but I was able to make out a bunch of consecutive words just by staring at them, so I think it can be done.

4. The thing I was MOST hoping for: the letter informing Fritz of Suhm's death, the one that Preuss didn't see fit to publish because it wasn't by Fritz or Suhm, is included in this batch of Fritz-Suhm correspondence (I thought it might be, but I wasn't sure), AND, Nicolas Suhm has lovely, Peter Keith-like handwriting!! I have already sight-read this letter. :D It was actually even easier than Peter, or maybe Peter just gave me some necessary practice.

Unfortunately, Nicolas' letter didn't include what I most wanted, a description of Suhm's symptoms so I could take a guess at what he died *of*, or at least write historically accurate fanfic, but at least I know that that information *isn't* lingering in this unpublished letter, which is the next best thing. Furthermore, I got two interesting tidbits out of what he did write.

One, Suhm, when he realized he was dying, wrote to his brother Nicolas asking him if he could come to Warsaw and see him before he died. Unfortunately, Nicolas did everything he could to get there in time, but when he got to Warsaw, he discovered Suhm had died THE DAY BEFORE.

Omg, that poor guy: he wants to join Fritz, but he's "shipwrecked in harbor," to use his own phrase, and then he wants to see his brother one last time before he dies, but his brother arrives ONE DAY too late. :(

Two, the good news is, I think we have more evidence that Suhm's kids (and therefore his sister Hedwig) were living in St. Petersburg with him and traveled with him to Warsaw. Nicolas writes:

Je fais conduire le corps du défunt en Saxe, pour ou je parts avec sa famille, a fin d'y regler les affaires de ces orphelins et les menner sans delais a Berlin

I am having the body of the deceased taken to Saxony, for which I am departing with his family, in order to settle the affairs of these orphans there and take them to Berlin without delay.

I think "pour ou" and "ces" means he's setting out from Warsaw to Saxony with the kids in tow, not that he's going to Saxony to meet the kids there. This would be consistent with the one (1) mention of kids I saw in Suhm's Fritz correspondence, that he had a "child in each hand" when crossing the dangerous rivers on the way to St. Petersburg.

This is the other thing I wanted to know for fanfic purposes. It's possible some of the later, harder-to-read correspondence asking about pensions and stuff will make it 100% clear, but for now, I'm going with the interpretation that Suhm, his sister, and his kids all lived together as a family until his death. Which at least means he had the *most* important people with him when he died.

Sadly, Suhm himself, possibly because he's in terrible health--I only have the letters from his final journey from St. Petersburg to Warsaw--has terrible handwriting. Fortunately, the letters are mostly published, so I'm planning to compare Preuss's transcription against the letters and see if I can figure out if he left anything interesting out (I'm pretty sure I've seen some ellipses). If I get the hang of Suhm's handwriting, who knows, I might order more letters, as there are more batches in the catalogue.

Wheeeee!

A future order has been placed requesting Peter Keith genealogy-related documents, and the unpublished Lt. Groeben letters.

More updates when Prinzsorgenfrei and I have deciphered more!

Edited Date: 2023-03-20 06:20 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Hooray for everything!

I notice, browsing through, that Leining continues to correspond with Fredersdorf and to address him as "Monsieur et tres chere compere" until July. In one early letter, he's "Monsieur mon tres chere ami et tres chere compere." Maybe this is how you address your predecessor who has just been dismissed and is dying of disgrace, but I think MAYBE NOT. :P

It does sound unlikely. What intrigues me is the French address. Is it just the address and the rest is in German (which is how Wolfgang Mozart often corresponded with Dad Leopold), or is the entire letter in French? If the later, it would be a strong indicator that Fredersdorf did learn French at least well enough to exchange professional letters in it with people not Fritz, and that would make Fritz writing to him exclusively in German even more of an affectionate gesture and remarkable than it already is.

AND, Nicolas Suhm has lovely, Peter Keith-like handwriting!!

Good for him (and us)!

I think "pour ou" and "ces" means he's setting out from Warsaw to Saxony with the kids in tow, not that he's going to Saxony to meet the kids there.

Same here. And yes, that means that while Suhm doesn't see his brother or Fritz again, he does have his children (and very likely sister) with him when he dies. As I said elsewhere, I'm unsurprised they don't come up in the Fritz correspondence more often, between the Fritz need to be the emotional priority and the practice of editors to cut out to them irrelevant family stuff is the family members aren't famous royals, see also the first volume of Lehndorff's diaries vs the rest.

What was Nicholas Suhm's day job?

Re: The Prussian archives deliver again!

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Re: The Prussian archives deliver again!

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Re: The Prussian archives deliver again!

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Re: The Prussian archives deliver again!

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From:

selenak

This book, "transcribed from the original manuscript at Ickworth and edited by David Erskine" as the front page says, was published in 1754 when David Erskine, a 20th century Hervey descended, talked his grandmother, the then owner of the Hervey papers, into letting him do this. His amusing and very well written introduction proves he has the Hervey literary gift, and I wish I could quote it entirely, but a few choice quotes and paraphrases about the maddest Herveys will have to do. (Lord Hervey the memoirist isn't one of them, and not because David Erskine straightwashes him.)

What the edited manuscript is not: an actual diary. It's evidently based on one, but as Erskine footnotes, you can tell it was written years after the fact not just because Augustus Hervey occasionally interjects remarks like person such and such being dead eight months later, but because he sometimes uses titles the people in question at the time he's ostensibly writing in did not yet have, as for example "Lord Holland" for Henry Fox (who didn't get elevated to that peerage until the end of the 7 Years War, and no, it wasn't inherited, so Augustus at the time could not have known he'd be called that a few years later. Very occasionally, he also leaves out key information which Erskine then provides in a footnote to make himself look better, like leaving out humbling himself and seeking favours from Newcastle whom he just ranted on for page after page after page as the worst and utter scum. The manuskript breaks off mid sentence decades before Augustus' life ends. More censorship by Mr. Victorian Descendant? Augustus didn't continue with transcribing and editing his diaries and/or writing his memoirs - it's not clear which of the two he meant to do? We'll never know. After the manuscript proper, Erskine provides some addenda in the form of letters most interestingly between Lady Hervey (Molly Lepell, widow of Hervey the Memoirist) and Henry Fox (not yet Lord Holland) as well as between Augustus and Henry Fox, all concerning Admiral John Byng, with whom Augustus served at the Battle of Minorca that opened the 7 Years War even before Fritz invated Saxony.

cahn, you may or may not recall from Candide that Voltaire alludes to Byng's execution when he has Candide witness an executuion at Portsmouth and is told "in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others".

What happened according to Erskine was essentially that the government made a major miscalculation - they thought the French would try to invade England, so most of the maritime resources were focused there, while Byng was understaffed and under equipped when the actual French attack came at Minorca and lost. Simultanously, there were food riots and other political problems in England. All of this resulted in the blatant scapegoating of Byng by the government. He was blamed completely, put on trial and while the jury found him innocent of cowardice, he was still condemned for not having "done his utmost" and condemned to death. Augustus was a passionate defender of the Admiral, and goes into great detail about the whole affair - not only was he present at the battle and its aftermath, he also testified as a witness in Byng's favour at the trial, though all in vain. Now, the only goverment member he knew because his late father, Hervey the memoirist, had been bff with the Foxes, was Henry Fox, and so Augustus had written to him while still at sea only to find Henry Fox as determined as the rest of the government to serve up Byng as a scapegoat to the populace in order to keep their own jobs. Fox forwards Augustus' letters to Molly with a hint it's better for Augustus' career that they're not archived with the Navy. Molly is concerned for her boy but also, just more tactfully, pleads Byng's case. Henry Fox isn't hating on Byng but cooly pragmatic. A gigantic international war has just broken out, someone has to be guilty for the fact the glorious British navy has just lost to the French, and it certainly won't be Henry and his colleagues in government. As late as 2007, the Byng family still sought a postumous pardon and the Ministry of Defense still refused.

Fritz: See? See?!! Supposedly constitutional monarchies did it, too, and in the same war. Why is everyone on my ass then?
Heinrich: Don't even start.

Anyway, the fate of Byng is by far the most serious subject of the entire book. Otherwise, it's mostly light hearted. In the previous peace time, Augustus is the proverbial sailor with a girl (or several) in every harbour, and Erskine calls him the English Casanova, only better, because his stories are totally true while Casanova "has been unmasked as a liar" (this is news to me, though I don't doubt that Casanova, writing in his Bohemian library as an old man, got things wrong; I also note that the 1950s publication date is decades before the memoirs were re translated and re published from the entire manuscript). One thing that can se said is that as opposed to Casanova, who used pseudonyms for all the ladies, with some able to be identified only because he first used their real names in the manuscript, then scratched it out and wrote the alias over it, Augustus generally goes for real names, as with the Duchess who kidnaps him to have her way with him (in which he delightedly complies). Mind you, he's also a major case of the usual double standard, because in one of the few references to Elizabeth Chudley left by the Victorian descendant in the manuscript, he complains she's not been "a Vestal" in his absence and that's a major reason why he wants to split. Otoh, one of Augustus' sympathetic traits is that when his oldest brother, George - like I said, career Courtier Lord Hervey naming his sons George, Augustus and Frederick, respectively, is so typical - makes noises about wanting to take custody of their younger sisters away from Molly because of her Jacobitism, Augustus immediately goes "I love Mom, and no way!" (Unsurprisingly, he's her favourite among her children.) (If Molly disliked being with children, you won't find any references to it in this book. Of course, it might just be small children she did not get along with, and adults are another matter.)

Augustus is also a good tourist who in peace time takes a lot of shore leave to go sight seeing, which is why we get a description of post Medici, pre Leopold Florence from him. He is under the impression Cosimo was the last of the Medici, though. (Pure Gian Gastone, forgotten already.)

In terms of the previous generation, he mentions his father only in context with his mother - i.e. "my father and mother" knew such and such -; because of how things go with Admiral Byng, he thinks Henry Fox is scum (Newcastle, too, but Hervey the memoirist wasn't friends with Newcastle), but, in a surprising turn of events, likes Fritz of Wales! Fritz of Wales is very nice to him, too, so if the Hervey/Fritz of Wales breakup left bad blood on both sides, apparantly FoW doesn't extend it to Hervey's kids.

(Hervey's ghost: NOT THE LOVE RAT! Augustus, no!!!!!)

Otoh, Augustus isn't impressed with Cumberland the Butcher at all, and this before Cumberland screws up in the 7 Years War.

Now, on to the quotes. First, from the introduction about the squabbling Hervey clan. Reminder: still headed, when the story starts, by Lord Bristol. Lord Hervey the memoirist was his second son and his favourite; as his first son died childless Lord Hervey would have become the Earl of Bristol after him but died before his father, which means Gramps has to essentially co-raise Hervey's kids with Molly. (Luckily, they got on very well.) Augustus is fond of his grandfather and mourns him when the old man dies. Because nobles use each other's title like that, this also means his own oldest brother, George, goes from being referred to as "my brother Hervey" to "my brother Bristol". Incidentally, all three of Hervey the memoirist's sons would become the Earl of Bristol, because George dies without kids as well, Augustus dies without legitimate kids (though he enlists "Little Augustus", his illegitimate son, as a midshipman with the Navy at age 4 in order to finance him), and then it's Frederick's turn. Augustus and George had their ups and downs, but generally got along. Augustus and Frederick, otoh, became mortal enemies. (This I knew from the book "Courtiers" already, but there assumed the wrong reasons, more about this in a moment.) Writes Erskine:

The Honourable Augustus Hervey, third Earl of Bristol and Vice-Admiral of the Blue, died of 'gout in the stomach' at 6 St. James SQuare on the 22nd December 1779, aged fifty-five. He was succeeded in the title an dentailed estatese by his brother Frederick, Bishop of Derry, from whom by his will he alienated all he could, even, it is said, the deer in the park of the family seat at Ickworth.

Because Frederick became an (Anglican) bishop and because of the way Lucy Worsley divides the family between the fun ones (Augustus, Molly, Hervey the memoirist) and the dull moralists (George, Frederick, their sister Lepell and the Victorian scissors wielding guy, most likely Frederick's son, also called Frederick), I thought the Augustus/Frederick feud was for moral reasons. Not so, and Frederick, bishop or not, was far from dull. Or a moralist in the Victorian sense. Erskine's introduction first alerted me to this fact:

The younger brother Frederick features prominently in the latter half of the century, when as "Earl-Bishop" he lived mostly on the continent, travelling about, and leaving there as his permanent memorial a string of Hotels Bristol. What the origin of the implacable feud betwen him and Augustus was, we do not know; as the years went by all hope of ending it vanished, for they took opposing sides in politics, the Bishop supporting Catholic emancipation in Ireland and independence in America, while the Admiral voted against the repeal of the Stamp Act and was a member of Lord North's administration.

An Anglican globetrotting Bishop who supports equal rights for Catholics and American Independence is very much not the norm in the 18th century, so I checked Frederick's wiki entry, and lo, it gets even better. Frederick wasn't just any old Bishop, he became Bishop of Derry. In Ireland, just so there's no doubt. And STILL was pro equal rights for Catholics.

As Bishop of Derry, Hervey quickly developed a reputation for being "the most worldly, most eccentric, most talked-about priest in the Church of Ireland".
Hervey was Derry's most generous philanthropist, although some of the clergy in his diocese came to regard him as cheerfully sadistic, for such instances as when he instructed any portly priests coveting plum promotions to compete in midnight runs through bogs and marshland.

Frederick married and continued the family line, but he also (presumably when in Italy) fell in love with, drum roll, none other than Wilhelmine Encke, Countess of Lichtenau, chief mistress of FW2.

Lucy Worsley, I don't know what you're on about. No way this guy sounds dull and moralistic.

Anyway, in the era covered by this book, Augustus and Frederick are still on talking terms, but Augustus makes very suspicious noises about brother Frederick now and then.

Mind you: the previous generation of Herveys was just as wild. I knew Hervey the memoirist's mother Elizabeth had 17 children, but I never wondered what became of them. Well, Erskine informs me thusly about Lord Hervey's most notorious younger brothers:

The wildest and wickedest were Tom and Harry. Tom must befor ever memorable for eloping with this godfather's young wife and subsequently carrying on a debate in pamphlet form with the injured husband, in the course of which he described the lady as "our wife - for, in heaven, whose wife shall she be?" Harry's youthful scrapes and extravagances had cost his father dearly, until he followed the advice and practice of "the good old Lord", married an heiress and changed his name to ASton. Formerely a cornet of Dragoons he ended his days in Holy Orders; even the Duke of Newcastle (...) must have lefted an eyebrow when Harry's petition for the see of Chester came to his hands. However Tom and Harry have some claim to the gratitude of posterity, for it was they who protected young Samuel Johnson when he first came to London, friendless a nd in need; he at least was grateful to them, saying that though they were both vicious men, Tom was one of the genteelest that ever lived, and that Harry was "very kind to me; if you call a dog Hervey I shall love him."
Help for the distressed is their redeeming feature; Augustus Hervey benefitted from it when an impecunious Lieutenant, but in later life this kindness was forgotten. In 1766 Tom wrote in a raving pamphlet that the hatred he bore his nephews George and Augustus was "utterly inexpressable", which provoked Augustus to reply that Uncle Tom was "the most detestable and daring monster that ever ventured to insult mankind so openly." (...)

Uncle William is the most important of the brothers in the history of Augustus Hervey, for it was with him that the author of these memoirs was sent to sea to learn the naval officer's trade. Unfortunately , William was the most barbaric of them all. (...) In May 1735, Augustus Hervey, then aged eleven, joined William Hervey's ship the Pembroke and was rated "Captain's servant", which description conceiles the true nature of his position in the ship, which was to all intents and purposes that of cadet. From a professional point of view, Uncle William was a suitable patron for a budding officer, for he is spoken of as a fine seaman and competent commander. But his brutality overshadowed these qualities. John Charnock, the century's most rewarding naval biographer, passes this severe judgment upon him:

"This Gentleman, htough so nobly descended and honourably educated, appears to have been very ill-qualified for a nval command; austere in his disposition, even to a degree of cruelty, he became at once an object both of terror and hatred to his people."

In 1742 this sea-monster was cashiered by court-martial for his brutality; his nephew, then a lieutenant of two years's seniority, had to seek out another patron. Augustus always retained an affectionate regard for his uncle; he does not seem to have been a brutal officer himself, but he was sufficiently indififferent to his uncle's vices to be able to describe that officer's fate as 'his misfortune of being dismissed from the service'. It was a brutal age, and the Royal Navy was one of the most brutal features of it.

Okay, two thoughts:

1) How brutal did you have to be to be cashiered for brutality from the freaking British Navy in the 18th century?
2.) Note that when Augustus joins his uncle at age 11, in 1735, both of his parents were alive, well, and having no problems with that. Hervey is busy helping Caroline feud with her son, Algarotti is in his future, Molly has discovered her heart for the Jacobite cause. If either of them worried about what eleven years old Augustus might see, hear and learn at sea, we don't hear about it. This is standard for time, but it does say something about the time.

FW: If I had become King of England instead of stupid cousin G2, I would have made my kids join the Royal Navy, too.

Edited Date: 2023-03-21 05:43 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

As you know, I hop around from book to book, so I've collected a few tidbits here and there I wanted to share, some just because they amused me.

So I read what was available of the Poniatowski and Anglophilia book on Google books preview, and it pointed me to what it said was the most accessible and comprehensive English-language treatment of 18th century Poland-Lithuania, Liberty's Folly, and that I was able to get a hold of. I'm not up for summarizing 18th century Poland-Lithuania (though I have plans for how I might someday become up to it), but the descriptions of various characters was entertaining.

Stanislaw Leszczynski, first appointed king by Karl XII:

Possessor of a great magnate name and immense personal wealth, he lacked his dead father’s determination or personal following. With no strength of character and little sense of self-respect, but dazzled by the Swedish king, he fitted the bill exactly.

Brühl:

Heinrich Brühl, a man whose reputation for financial corruption in Poland was exceeded only by his reputation for the same in Saxony.

Fritz:

That thinking man's thug.

(I laughed.)

Augustus III:

One of the factors in his favour was his apparent stupidity. Augustus III had been taught Polish, but was reluctant to use it. His poor grasp of Latin did not facilitate communication with his new subjects. His conversion to Catholicism in 1717 was less cynical than his father’s. The energy which Augustus II had put into sex and drink his son put into piety and gluttony.

The author of this book: maybe this is a stereotype, we're not sure. He patronized J.S. Bach, he must have had *some* good qualities! Anyway,

By the end of the reign the initial bitter hostility which Augustus III had met had given way to a widespread affection. Clad in his ceremonial robes his corpulent body exuded a kind of majesty. He had long abandoned any effort to tamper with Golden Liberty. He had become what the szlachta [Polish nobles] wanted in a king.

Fun times with the author of this book. I look forward to his descriptions of characters later in the 18th century.

Also, he finally explained something that had been bugging me for a long time now. I know I've mentioned more than once that FW wanted to partition Poland already, but the time was not deemed right by other European powers. But I had *no* details, just like a single sentence in a footnote. I finally have details, and they make sense!

Turns out, *August the Strong* wanted to partition Poland. Now, wasn't August the king of Poland, you ask? Why would he want to partition his own country? And yes, he was, but he was an elective monarch. And we've discussed why his neighbors wanted to keep the Polish monarchy elective, for the same reason they later wanted to keep the Swedish monarchy elective and the Swedish constitution of 1720 in effect.

What August wanted was to break off pieces of Poland to give to his neighbors, in return for making Poland a hereditary monarchy in the Wettin family.

FW was all for it. I assume he wanted Royal Prussia, the part of Poland that Fritz would later get as a result of Heinrich's machinations.

But around the time of 1720, during and after the Great Northern War, when August is making these plans, Peter the Great deems it in Russia's best interests to have a sprawling, weak Poland on his border, not a smaller and stronger Poland. So Peter consistently vetoes the Poland partitionining project. So August's plans for a hereditary monarchy come to naught.

Re partitioning plans, the book also tells me Fritz told his successors (in the political testaments, I assume?) that Poland must be eaten like an artichoke, leaf by leaf. I couldn't not share this analogy!

Also in this book is the factoid that 39% of East Prussia's population died of the plague between 1707 and 1711, 270,000 deaths out of a population of 692,000. I knew it was a lot, and that FW had to repopulate East Prussia by soliciting immigrants, but I don't think I knew it was 39%. In the 18th century! And in other parts of Poland, it was this bad or worse.

This book also tells me that August the Strong made a number of unsuccessful (and unspecified by the author) attempts on Stanislaw Leszczynski's life, between his ousting of Stanislaw during the Great Northern War and the start of the War of the Polish Succession. We haven't seen a ton of assassination attempts in the 18th century, so this surprised me. Though from my reading in various places, August had a reputation for duplicity as bad as or worse than Fritz's, so if there's anyone I would believe it of, it would be him (or maybe Victor Amadeus). I'm still holding out for evidence, though. (No footnotes, 90% of all bibliographic sources in Polish, as noted.)

In a completely different book, the Struensee bio that I continue to chip away at, were some interesting passages.

One of the Danish royal ladies-in-waiting, Frau von Plessen, was a devotee of the very old-fashioned etiquette, and admired Richardson's Pamela, "a sensitive epistolary novel that was so popular in the mid-eighteenth century as a didactic 'marriage mirror' that it was considered by ladies as a criminal omission not to know the book."

Based on the Pamela school of thought, Frau von Plessen told Caroline Mathilde that if she wanted Christian to stop neglecting her and sleeping around, she had to

"force her vicious husband "through coy abstinence" into the role of a sighing lover who, kneeling, must express his joy and gratitude for the slightest favor and, for fear of losing it, must have no other will than hers. As reigning queen who is to give the dynasty the heirs, she is such a high and holy person that even the king must not approach her without deference."

The punchline: As a result of this advice, Christian completely neglected his wife. When her childbirth was approaching, he was hanging out with the prostitute Boot Catherine, who, as we've seen, indulged his masochistic desires. (I did mention that? Frederik was apparently a sexual sadist (at least judging by one memoirist's report of gossip in the city); his son Christian a masochist, with somewat more evidence.) Winkle also agrees with Barz that the fact that Christian liked the very masculine Catherine was because he had repressed homosexual tendencies, though Winkle, unlike Barz, doesn't pathologize this.

I mean, it's entirely possible he just liked strong, dominant women, there is some diversity amongst heterosexual men's tastes, but yeah, he could also have been repressed gay/bi in this society. People need to stop drawing such firm conclusions.

Anyway! I was entertained by the punchline. Comedy is tragedy plus time. Also by the mention of Pamela, which brings back memories of a fanwork by that name. ;)

Voltaire: I'm usually as straight as they come, but something about Fritz irresistibly compels me to draw analogies with Alcina, Pamela, and the like.

Btw, Frau von Plessen ended up getting banned, and when Christian was in England, one of the English royals, I forget who, tried interceding to get her readmitted to court. CHristian said that was not impossible, but then he would have to leave court himself, because he had taken an oath never to be in the same place as her. Christian was known for having his moments of wit: there was also a time, when he was supposed to be putting his signature on a document to approve a bunch of title grants (Danish society was obsessed with titles), he commented, "Didn't Caligula make his horse a senator?" I've seen this quoted at least 3 places, it's one of everyone's favorite stories about him.

Continuing with fun anecdotes in this book, when Christian was in England, he really enjoyed the theater, and especially David Garrick. Now, Garrick was known for being the best mimic ever, like really just set a new standard for theater (which was admittedly quite stilted in those days). Every facial expression, every muscle perfect. According to a footnote, there was a time when he was watching aother professional pretend to be drunk, and he called, "Your feet are too sober!"

Finally, I learned how to say "evil stepmother" in Danish from Hans Christian Andersen: "ond stedmoder." Or, as it appears in "The Wild Swans": "den onde stedmoder", the evil stepmother. :D If I manage to persevere, we may get more 18th century Danish history in the next year.

ETA: Also, I meant to mention that the 2023 season of the History of the Germans is apparently going back to the beginning (Charlemagne) and talking about events in the north and east. While I was very much looking forward to the Black Death, Avignon Papacy, and Golden Bull, I am delighted that we're getting more Brandenburg and surrounding regions! It was something I was disappointed he didn't cover more of. But now that I see he was focusing on the south and west to tell a coherent tale, and he's going back to cover events elsewhere in more detail, I approve of the decision and am delighted. Though I'm still impatient to learn about the 14th century!

Edited Date: 2023-03-21 10:28 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

They are going to help with the Leining to Fredersdorf correspondence! \o/

In return, they have a question for salon, related to the undergrad thesis they're writing:

I vaguely recall a quote from a letter from Fritz to Wilhelmine around the time of FW's death where he says something about not really knowing how to feel about the approaching end of his life...?

It rings a bell, but I haven't read the Fritz/Wilhelmine correspondence. Help?

Edited Date: 2023-03-25 12:28 am (UTC)

From:

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-04-08 02:17 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

This is the long promised report by Charles Hanbury-Williams on what it says on the title. Now, H-W was anything but a Jacobite himself; he'd been among the panicked gentry who formed local militia when it looked like BPC would actually come further south. But, possibly foreshadowing how the English would go from reviling the Scottish uprising and hating on the Highlanders (see young Boswell witnessing a London theatre crowd shouting "no Scots! no Scots!" to some Highlander soldiers who had fought FOR England in the Americas) to finding it all frightfully romantic and noble fifty years down the line (see G4 dressing up in kilts), H-W was very touched and impressed by how two of these guys died, and wrote about it to Lord Ilchester, aka Stephen Fox, Hervey's ex boyfriend, and his hagiographic biography renders the letter nearly in full.

My dear Lord,

Yesterday I went to see the terriblest sight I ever saw. I saw the two Lords beheaded. Lord Kilmarnock, who was certainly the genteelest man I ever saw, came first, dresssed in black, in his own fair hair without powder, and walked (instead of going in the mourning coach which followed him, as did his horse) quite from the Tower across Tower Hill to the Transport Office, next door to which I was, so that they came within a yard of our door. The Sheriffs walked before him, and he came supported on one side by Foster, the dissenting teacher, and one Mr. Hume, a clergyman, on the other. He then walked into the Transport Office, where there were two rooms prepared for the two Lords; but Lord Balmerino desired to speak to Lord Kilmarnock, which was granted, and he came into his room, and asked whether ever he had heard that there were orders issued before the Battle of Culloden to put all the English prisoners to death; for that there was such a lie raised against Prince Charles. To which the Lord Kilmarnock replied, that he knew of no such orders at the time, for he was not in the secrets, but that since, he had heard so from such undoubted authority that he believed upon his honour it was very true. To which Balmerino answsered that he believed no such thing, and went out of the room.
After Lord Kilmarnock had stayed about an hour and an half in that place, he came forth supported in the same manner, and walked to the scaffold, which was erected about ten yards from the door. When he was upon it, he delivered his speech to the Sheriffs without saying a word; and then stood and payed with Foster, who was very devout and embraced him often, which comforted him much. After staying thus about 20 mnutes, he began to undress, and forgave Jack Ketch, who asked him forgiveness. He declared to the few people upon the scaffold that his repentance was very sincere, that with his last breath who would bless and pray for King George, and that he heartily wished that all the people that ever engaged in such wicked treasons as he might meet with the same ignominous fate. He then pulled off his coat, and tucked his hair under a night cap; then he knelt down before the block, which is a thing about 28 inches high, about a yard wide, and a foot and half thick, with two hollows, one for the breast to rest upon, and another to receive the chin, so the neck lies upon a rise. They kneel upon a cushion. And here I perceived first Lord Kilmarnock's great uneasiness. He rose from the block several times, pulled off his waistcoat, and showed much anxiety. At last he knelt down for good and all, and told Jack Ketch the sign should be dropping a hankerchief, which about 2 minutes prayer he did, and Jack Kech struck off his head at one blow, all but a bit of skin. The head was received into a piece of scarlet cloth, which 4 men held on the other side the block. And thus ended his life. Aged 42.
Very different was the behaviour of Lord Balmerinno, who died with greater indifference than I go to dinner. When he came out of the Tower, Lord Kilmarnock and he met upon the stairs. He embraced Lord Kilmarnock, and told (him) he wished he could die for them both. When the Lieut. of the Tower told him the Sheiffs were there to demand, he said he was ready: "But before I go, Mr. Lieutenant, here is K. James' helath in a bumper to you." When he appeared walking upon Tower Hill towards the Transport Office, I declare I could not imagine which was the hprisoner, for when I saw him at the Bar of the House of Lords he was a shabby-looking old fellow, in an old black suit of clothes and a bad bob wigg, but here he was dressed in the Pretender's regimentals, blue turned up with red, a good tied wigg, and a well cocked hat. He walked with great firmness, supported by nobody. Two clergymen walked behind him, and he looked much more like an officer upon guard than a prisoner. After Lord Kilmarnock was beheaded and the stage new covered with sawdust to hide the blood, and the block new covered with black cloth, Balmerino came forth looking round at the spectators, which at a moderate cumputation could not be less than a hundred thousand. He then mounted the scaffold, and seeing his coffin lie there, he said: "I must look at it, to see whether they have put my title right." When he had done reading, he throew his hat down upon it, pulled out his spectacles, and read his speech to the people upon the scaffold; for the soldiers, horse and foot, surrounded the scaffold, so that none of the mob were within 50 yards of it. The speech was very treasonable, and I believe he was seven minutes at reading it; after that he up to the block, and said: "If I had a thousand lives, I would lay them all down for the same glorious cause that I engaged in. How could I or any body refuse joining with such a sweet Prince as Prince Charles?"
The executioner then came and asked his pardon. He forgave him, and asked how many blows he gave Lord Kilmarnock, to which he answered one. "Oh!" said he, "that will do well for me," and then gave three guineas, and said he had no more. He then went to the other side of the stage to look at his horse, where seeing the warder that attended him in the Tower, he himself called him up and made him a present of his peruke which he pulled off, and put on a cap made of Scotch plaid, and then he pulled off his cloths and embraced two friends very cheerfully. I could hear the smack of his kisses up to where I was.
He then turned to the two clergymen that came with him, and to whom he had not yet spoke a word. He told them that he thanked them for attending him; that they had done all that could be done for him, but he hoped they found him well prepared. From thence he went to the block, and knelt on the wrong side of it, which being told of, he rose nimbly up nad went immediately on the other side, where he told Jack Ketch his sign should be when he lifted upo his right arm; and he then perceived Jack Katch went from him, which he did to fetch the ax, that was in a box at the other end of the stage (and which is exactly a carpenter's ax), he followed him wiht his eyes, and seeing him take up the ax, he called to him and took it from him and managed it in his own hands. He returned it then to Jack Ketch and, putting down his head upon the block, in a quarter of a minute he tossed his right arm up with the greatest (calmness), and his head was cut off at three blows, but the first did the business. I saw his face when he laid it down, and indeed he never changed colour, nor did I see in him all that dreadful time the least shadow of fear.

From:

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-04-17 12:51 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

luzula

I have told you before about the Oglethorpe sisters, who were Jacobite spies and agents, and sisters to James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia. At that time, I mostly told you about Anne and Fanny, but now I’ve read some more about their sister Eleanor in the essay ‘Queen Oglethorpe’ by Andrew Lang from 1904 (but the foreword notes that a Miss Alice Shield did most of the research).

None of the sisters had much money, but Eleanor was apparently very beautiful and married the Marquis de Mézières, a much older French aristocrat. Two of their daughters also made brilliant marriages, of which more later. Fanny apparently took part in a money-making scheme in Paris in the late 1710’s, something called the Mississippi Scheme, where they bought cheap stock and sold it when the market was high. In that way, she managed to get a large dowry and could marry the Marquis des Marches. The essay notes that this was also around the time when the Keith brothers fled to Paris from Scotland after the ’19, but that they didn't buy any shares in this scheme. So the Oglethorpe sisters did pretty well, for penniless exiles.

So, the eldest daughter of Eleanor (Eléonore Eugénie) married Charles de Rohan, Prince de Montauban, younger brother of the Duc de Montbazon, whose wife was the daughter of the Duc de Bouillon and Princess Caroline Sobieska, and so first cousin to the sons of James III. Another of Eleanor's daughters died tragically: ‘She had recently become a canoness of Povesay, a very noble foundation, indeed, in Lorraine, where the sisters wore little black ribbons on their heads which they called ‘husbands’. She was 25, very pretty, and most irreligiously devoted to shooting and hunting. Though these chapters of noble canonesses are not by any means strict after the use of ordinary convents, there were serious expostulations made when the novice insisted upon constantly carrying a gun and shooting. She fell one day when out with her gun as usual. It went off and killed her on the spot.’

Eleanor's son (the Chevalier de Mézières) was all set to embark with Saxe to England in ’44, and was later wounded at Fontenoy. Eleanor herself was deeply involved in Jacobite plotting, urged BPC to convert to Anglicanism though she was a Catholic, and was secretly in England around the time of the Elibank plot. Another of her daughters, now Princesse de Ligne, was involved in the 1759 Jacobite attempt.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Fanny apparently took part in a money-making scheme in Paris in the late 1710’s, something called the Mississippi Scheme, where they bought cheap stock and sold it when the market was high.

Okay, so, some context about the Mississippi Scheme!

When Louis XIV died in 1715, the War of the Spanish Succession, on top of all his other wars, had economically ruined the country. His de facto successor, Philippe d'Orleans, regent for young Louis XV, was something of an Anglophile and had noticed the English were doing quite well with their Bank of England. So he worked with some finance ministers, the most famous of whom was the Scot John Law, to introduce paper money and a stock market into France. The Mississippi Company got a royal monopoly in 1717, and people believed it had access to vast wealth in the Louisiana territory. By combining with the stock market, John Law was able to drive speculation of shares in the Mississippi Company very high, starting in 1719, which he wanted to use to restore French finances.

Much like with the contemporary South Sea Bubble in England (which *also* developed out of the War of the Spanish Succession, but differently), it had a good run for a few years (almost the identical same few years), then the bubble burst, there was a stock market crash, and a few people made off well from the speculation, but most were impoverished.

The French attempt to adopt the English financial model was abandoned, paper money got a bad name, and the French economy remained wobbly throughout the mid-eighteenth century. They still hadn't figured out a solution when the economy *really* bad after the Seven Years' War and the financing of the American Revolution. Though Louis XVI and his ministers tried desperately to solve that problem, they failed, and then all it took was a few bad 1780s harvests to result in the famines that would kick off the French Revolution.

Across the Channel, they had the South Sea Bubble. A little history: one of the things Britain had gone to war over in the War of the Spanish Succession was to keep France from getting all the economic benefits of the Spanish empire. In particular, Britain wanted the "asiento", the contract to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies. Britain won this and was granted the asiento as part of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Much like with Louisiana and the Mississippi Company, the whole idea of a vast overseas empire made people think "$$$!!!!" all out of proportion to reality, and they invested like crazy. The bubble burst in 1720.

But unlike the French, the more modern English economy was able to weather it. England got into a positive feedback loop in which the economy supported the military, which supported imperialism, which supported the economy, and the French got into a negative feedback loop where the military sucked up money from the economy, which became inadequate to fund an army that would win the military victories needed to support the economy...and thus you have the 18th century, and the English ability to weather a defeat in the American Revolution and the French inability to weather a victory, and eventually the French Revolution (as mentioned) and the British empire on which the sun never set.

Though these chapters of noble canonesses are not by any means strict after the use of ordinary convents

Yeah, that was definitely how it went! Marguerite Louise d'Orleans could tell you a thing or two about that.

Fontenoy

cahn, this was a victory of Maurice de Saxe (illegitimate son of August the Strong and Aurora von Königsmarck) over future "Butcher" Cumberland in the War of the Austrian Succession. Voltaire, as Louis XV's court historian, got a commission to write a poem glorifying the victory. Louis himself had been present but not especially responsible for the victory.

Re: 1710s economic bubbles

From:

luzula - Date: 2023-04-01 05:21 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: 1710s economic bubbles

From:

selenak - Date: 2023-04-02 04:46 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: 1710s economic bubbles

From:

cahn - Date: 2023-04-17 12:14 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Gossip about Oglethorpe sisters, de Rohans, and a tiny bit about the Keith brothers

From:

cahn - Date: 2023-04-17 12:14 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

selenak

The "Rothschild" in the title made me a bit wary because invoking the Rothschilds was such a popular antisemitic slander (these days, it's more George Soros who gets drafted for the same type of insinuation), but whatever else this book is, it's not antisemitic. In fact, even when the 7 Years War Fritzian war crimes complete with coin clipping are invoked, the author doesn't, as opposed to, say, Poniatowski in his memoirs, connects this with some antijudaistic slurs. Which doesn't mean the author doesn't have other axes to grind, because boy, does he ever. (More in a second.) But as this book is a passionate Brühl defense, "Rothschild" was - like Medici and Richelieu - meant as a compliment, signifying rich patron of the arts (in addition to master politician etc.).

Now, about those axes. Here's my experience reading the preface (as is my wont, and how we've discovered many an interesting thing, including Henri de Catt, RPF writer.)

AvB: WWI and the catastrophe of 1918 have caused many a historical study being written by many people. Same here. See, as a result of WWI France is dominant in Europe again by smashing Austria-Hungary, as was their cunning plan for centuries.

Self: Are you....?

AvB: MT. the great Empress, prevented this back in the day by first defeating France in battle and then taming her French opponents via diplomacy. MT's cause was Germany's cause!

Fritz fan reader before me in old German handwriting via pencil: NO!

AvB: The great Empress could have saved Germany for all time from French machinations, if Germany had united behind her as she fought the Erbfeind. You know who prevented this, thereby setting Germany on a course the result of which we've seen in WWI? Fritz!

Self: That's one way of putting it that I haven't seen. I mean, I'm familiar with the Fritz->Wilhelm II->Hitler theory, but you're writing in 1930, so Hitler isn't part of your agument yet, and even with this theory I'm familiar with, the argument isn't that an MT victory could have prevented this.

AvB: One man, a genius statesman and the coolest guy of his era, did his best to help in this noble cause and worked for a future where Austria and Saxony, side by side, would have created a wonderful future, and got smeared and slandered by Fritz in his demonic hate for his troubles: Brühl! Readers, I was familiar with his image, so imagine my surprise when I went to the archives and found nothing to support it. You know what Brühl's true guilt in Fritz' eyes was? That Saxony didn't help him destroying the HRE!

Fritzian fanboy reader before me in old fashioned German handwriting: RUBBISH!

AvB: Look, I'm an Hungarian, so I don't have any loyalties to any of the current political factions of today's Germany. But as an Hungarian, I'm closer to MT's pov than to that of bloody Fritz, and Brühl, too, was (mostly) on MT's side. We will understand him better, if we look at events from his pov.

Fritz fanboy reader before me: underlines "Hungarian" and "closer to MT's standpoint than that of bloody Fritz" but this time without a comment.

Self: OMG. You are a 20th century Hungarian Habsburg loyalist! I mean, I knew you guys existed even after WWI, but I haven't come across one of you before! The closest I read of was Joseph Roth addressing Otto von Habsburg as "my Emperor" in the 1930s, and Roth was from Galicia. Truly, AvB, you are a novelty in my readings.

After this introduction, it won't surprise you who the villain of this biography is. It's passionately defensive of Brühl, as mentioned, and blames most though not all of his bad reputation of Fritzian slanders which because of the Fritz cult and Prussian dominance in Germany later were adopted wholesale by historians, even though Austrian hstorians like Arneth exposed much of the most blatant propaganda. Arneth is quoted frequently, but AvB also did a lot of original work by using the Dresden archives, and he's good with the footnotes. This doesn't mean he's above manipulative presentation. For example, he goes from describing Saxon-Russian negotiations via Suhm (there's a lot of what Suhm did when not writing letters to Fritz, i.e. his actual job as envoy, which by itself I think will make Mildred glad I read this book) in the late 1730s back to Manteuffel bribing gentlemen from Fritz' social circle and the prostitute, which took place in 1733/34 before he had his in. Now, AvB does actually name the dates, but by mixing the two separate narratives and presenting them in reverse order, he creates the impression of a connection of actions because his main narrative has Brühl identifying Fritz early on as a threat to Saxony and doing everything he can to secure Saxony via alliances and spying from the inevitable demon rising.

This said, the 1730s section was the most interesting one to me, because the 7 Years Wars stuff - i.e. Fritz the war criminal bleeding Saxony dry and then in his propaganda blaming Brühl's supposed corruption as having Saxony ruined already - was already familiar to me via Hahn and Poniatowski. (AvB presents a great many numbers from the archives supporting his claim that it was the 70 Million Fritz extorted out of Saxony that ruined the country while Brühl had left it in good shape as of 1756. ) Whereas most of the 1730s stuff was new and had not shown up in previous books, at least not that I recall. There's lots from the Suhm/Brühl correspondence, and also Manteuffel/Brühl (this was a bit more familiar, though the perspective certainly is new), and also Lynar/Brühl.

Before I get into details, I also have to share this general attitude, because it comes up repeatedly:

AvB: Not content with bashing my guy Brühl, Fritz was awful about the Poles in his memoirs.

Self: True enough.

AVB: I will say that I agree on one point with him...

Self: Now I'm curious.

AvB: ...the Polish Elective Monarchy system sucked and was ruinous to the country, and so was the Veto. But it's not like the Poles were bad as Fritz claims, they were like big children, who didn't understand what was good for them. Now my guy Brühl in working towards making the Saxony/Poland union permanent, one solidly ruled monarchy, could have prevented all the future Polisih tragedies! He would have been your saviour, Poles! No partitioned Poland under Saxon rule! And no bloody Prussian dominance in Germany with a Saxon/Poland superstate = > no Hohenzollern Emperors => no WWI.

Self: Good lord.

Okay, on to details. Defensive AvB says the slanders already start at claiming Brühl was an upstart from lower nobility, when his noble descend and family were solid. Also, despite him being the youngest brother, none of his older brothers begrudged him turning into the family head by virtue of his success. They were supportive of and affectionate towards him in letters not just to him but among themselves.

Zeithain as the first time young Heinrich Brühl starts to get noticed outside of August the Strong's inner circle: AvB says he must have witnessed the scenes between FW and Fritz as everyone did, and that FW gave him the Black Eagle order, but does not speculate whether this impacted the future Fritzian attitude towards Brühl and/or Saxony. What he does note is that Brühl, who was responsible for this part of the Zeithain preparations, was responsible for the first use of Meissen porcelain as part of a diplomatic event, i.e. Meissen porcelain table wear was used big time on all the meals. (Given how much Meissen porceillain Fritz ~~stole~~ appropriated during the 7 Years War, I dare say that part at least amidst all the FW caused misery must have left an impression. Zeithain will turn up much later in the book in a most surprising fashion, stay tuned.

Immediate aftermath of August the Strong's death:

AvB: Here Fritzian slander, subsequently taken as gospel, has spread the tale that my guy Brühl hastened back from Warsaw to Dresden, slimed himself into future A3's good graces by giving him the news of his father's death, fooled future A3's buddy Sulkowski into sharing power with him and subsequently ruled as a duo with Sulkowski until he could get rid of Sulkowksi to remain sole fave. Fritz claims he did this because Sulkoswki wanted to turn against Austria and Brühl provided Austria with the poof, thereby getting cash from them and engineering Sulkowski's downfall. Well, I say bollocks to that! Firstly, here's a letter from Kurprinz future A3 TO Brühl, co-written with Sulkowski, asking for his friendship, when August the Strong was still alive. I.e. Brühl didn't need to ingratiate hmself with future A3, future A3, evidently on Sulkowki's advice, approached him first. Secondly, sure, we could write off all the friendly letters between Sulkowski and Brühl as mutual expediency and political hypocrisy, but the thing is, these letters go on AFTER Sulkowski's downfall, when Sulkowski went from Hero to Zero in terms of having influence at court. Also, when Sulkowski's wife died, Brühl took Sulkowski's kids into his household and helped out and furthered the careers of the older ones, and here's Sulkowski's letter thanking him for this! As for Sulkowski planning to go anti Austria and being brought down for this, as Fritz claims, fact is MT gave him honors after his downfall. Why would she bother if he'd been planning to turn against her country?

Brühl's marriage:

AvB: A love match, not something he did to solidify his position because he was a Protestant and she was a Catholic. Look at the touching love letters years after the marriage where he call sher his Maruschl! Incidentally, no matter what the sensational novel which the tv show "Sachsens Glanz und Preußens Gloria" is based on claims, of her first names Maria Anna Franziska she used Maria Anna or Marianne, not Franziska. Hence "Maruschl".

Self: Having read an article on the Bruhls' marriage from only a decade or so ago which also quotes from their letters, I agree it was a very affectionate and solid marriage, and not the hate union from the novel/tv show, but that doesn't preclude it also having been a political match to start with.

Mistresses: AvB doesn't mention any, just says that pre marriage (but not after), Brühl lived like other noblemen at this court. Hanbury-Willliams claims otherwise, but Hanbury-Williams, like any potential or actual mistresses, is not mentioned in this biography at all. Incidentally, this discretion goes both ways - you won't find any insinuations about Fritz' sex life or any STD's, either. (Other than the mention of the woman Manteuffel bribed, who is called "a certain young lady", not, as in the Manteuffel political biography published years before this Brühl biography, a prostitute.) There are no sex stories about anyone.

From:

luzula

I'm not sure I'll read all the details in the following comments, but wow, that author is really cocksure about what actions in the 18th century would have prevented WWI!