Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

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.

Comments

Re: Swedish politics

[mildred_of_midgard]

Lol, I've read a bit further and continue to be entertained. You see, I'm used to bribery getting a passing mention in my foreign policy reading, e.g. Rottembourg's diplomatic instructions include a note to try to find out if Grumbkow can be bribed, Fritz is always wanting to bribe Pompadour, etc...but I'm not used to it being such a big deal that half a chapter is dedicated to the economics and financing of the bribes. And I'm only a third of the way in so far!

So it turns out that we were not kidding about "Goodricke had been bitten by Swedish politics, and looked forward with pleasurable anticipation to the day when he should be able to play the part of party manager, vote-manipulator, and distributor of judiciously placed bribes," for lo:

Goodrick's figures for corruption were anything but reassuring. Sinclair's figure, it appeared, was £20,000; Lowenhielm's, £40,000, "to be quite sure"; Osterman believed that £30,000 would be the minimum.

There's a whooole lot of haggling with Russia over how to split the bill and whether Russia is interested in splitting the bill at all (Goodricke is being sneaky and convincing both GB and Russia that the other will do what they want, in the hopes of getting them to meet in the middle before they figure out he's been playing them both), and then there's this amazing section where the finagling gets out of hand because letters keep missing each other. Goodricke is trying to tell his boss* not to use a certain firm in Stockholm because the owner is tied by marriage to many prominent Hat families, but the treasury doesn't get his letter in time, so now the Hats know exactly how much the English have for bribery money, so Goodricke has to do some more juggling of the books with different firms, and in conclusion, lol. For a country like Sweden, bribery isn't casual, it gets a lot of page time!

I can only imagine that when I get around to Poland, things will be equally entertaining. (I have a juicy-looking footnote with a ton of interesting references on Polish politics in English, German, and French, and so once my French is slightly better, it's on my list of things to dig into. Blame the Danes for the fact that my French isn't as good as it was intended to be by mid March.)

* The Earl of Sandwich. Yes, the one who allegedly invented the sandwich.