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

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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:

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!

From:

selenak

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

Check out her English and her German wiki entry (another case where the two have different texts and while the information isn't very different, the German article goes into more details). She became the only female peer(ess) put on trial for bigamy and found guilty to this day. (Her second husband's nephew wanted the heritage.) Oh, and she met Fritz while travelling abroad in 1765.

But I say he still had it coming!

Oh, same. He was a trial to be the mistress of (poor Henrietta Howard, especially!), and lots of work to be the wife of. BTW, Lucy Worsley brought in another aspect re: the marital relationship. As I said elsewhere, while it's very clear how G2 felt about Caroline, it's hard to say what she felt about him, the person (as opposed the opportunity to be Queen of England), given how much work he was. Worsley thinks that Caroline enjoyed sex, and that what she minded about G2's affairs wasn't the cheating - this was standard for the day, and her emotional priority in his life was usually clear - but that in the later years of their marriage he had less and less sex with her, and she couldn't, wouldn't have it with anyone else. (Worsley backs this up with the conversation between Caroline and Robert Walpole where she's worried about the King not finding her sexually alluring anymore, and then Walpole says well, at her age it's normal to hold him with the power of her mind, not her body. She - Lucy Worsley - then points out Caroline lived just before the idea of female sexuality changed radically in England - in the 19th century, of course, it was legless angels and only men wanting sex all the time, but up to and including the first half of the 18th century, women wanting sex was normal and orgasms were a good condition to produce children with, so she could have that kind of conversations.)

We hates him, precious, we hates him forever!

Thank God Lehndorff's descendant wasn't as radical and left it at the attempt to change a few lui's into elle's, before giving up....

(And thank God Schmidt-Lötzen published all those additional volumes, the originals of which now are partly loss, despite his shock as expressed in the original preface to the original volume that the Frederician age wasn't one of manly chastity and sexual affairs at court did not just start with FW3's reign...)