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:

selenak

the wife requesting an ambassador seems a lot less unusual to me than the wife putting her ex on the throne of a satellite state.

Same here. Especially since at this point when H-W - if it's not a forgery - is making that speculation, it's not her ex, it's her current. I just can't see him assuming Peter would okay that, so yes, the implicit assumption is that there is no Peter around to make the decisions anymore. To say nothing of...

don't think anyone referred to Fritz as Peter's lieutenant! (I think the Brits actually said Prussia now extended all the way east to Siberia, something to that effect.) So all of this presupposes that Peter's out of the picture and Catherine decides to ally with Fritz. Not things I think could easily have been foreseen.

I mean, H-W leaves Russia in 1757. Which has some of Fritz' major succcesses. It also had his first big defeat, true, but it's still impossible to predict how the war will go, and Russia has just entered on the Austria-France-Sweden side. Granted, everybody knew that if and when Elizaveta died, Peter would ally with Fritz instead, and both in Fritz' letters and in Mitchell's early letters, there's the expectation she's going to kick the bucket any minute now both in 1756 and 1757, which I assume has to come from H-W as the British main source of informmation in Russia. What I can believe is him expecting Elizaveta isn't too long for this world, and as soon as she dies, Russia will stop being a part of the anti Prussia alliance and will ally with Prussia instead, since Peter never made a secret out of how he feels about Fritz. It's also not implausible to speculate that a Russia-England-Prussia alliance will win or at least achieve a standstill against France-Austria-Sweden, and that therefore both Russia and Prussia will have a major say so in who rules Pologne next. But none of this means CATHERINE will be the one to decide, unless H-W either thinks she will be able to dominate her husband so completely as Maria Luisa will Carlos IV in Spain, OR that said husband won't be a factor for long and that Catherine will then rule either as regent for her son or in her own right. Either way, it would point towards Catherine and H-W having talked about such a future years before it happens, which in turn points to Catherine having made long term plans already.

What year was this?

Neither the quote nor the footnote says (though the footnote says it's from the English translated published correspondence between them, p. 239. However, since H-W was hating on Fritz till presented with the Treaty of Westminster as a fait accompli, it can't have been before 1756.

That reminds me, did Seydlitz keep his faculties to the end, do we know?

I don't think the military Seydlitz biography you included in the library ever said, and I don't think any of the Fritz biopraphies I've read mentions it, either.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Russia will stop being a part of the anti Prussia alliance and will ally with Prussia instead, since Peter never made a secret out of how he feels about Fritz.

Yes, I also assume this could have been predicted (Fritz was certainly predicting it), but Peter as Fritz's lieutenant is far from Fritz as Catherine's lieutenant!

This is so far from being prophesiable that I think that either you're right and it's a forgery, or else Catherine and H-W had hashed out the overthrow in some detail years in advance!

unless H-W either thinks she will be able to dominate her husband so completely as Maria Luisa will Carlos IV in Spain

And given that Peter is basically not sleeping with her and I think in love with his mistress already (or was that later?), and wasn't he talking about divorcing her once he came to power? and given that she *didn't* dominate him when he came to power (which was why he had to be overthrown and killed), it seems unlikely that Catherine's confidant in 1757 would assume she would be dominating him. ("Confidant" meaning I could see someone who knows the two of them less well assuming Catherine would dominate, but H-W should know by now that Peter's not too enamored of Catherine and she's worried about it.)

From:

selenak

He should. Certainly he should be aware of the precedent of Peter the Great when it came to Russian monarchs getting rid of an unloved wife in favour of a loved one once they had unlimited power. Now, I'm prepared to making allowances for wishful thinking because H-W is in deterioating health, and we don't know how this affected his mental facilities before it got to the portrait kissing and lunatically raving stage he was in in Hamburg. But the thought that he and Catherine might have at the very least indulged in a "what if?" kind of mental game several years ahead of time is certainly intriguing.

Now, OBVIOUSLY envoys of foreign powers shouldn't do that. But La Chetardie certainly fancied himself an Empress maker with Elizaveta, and I could see H-W concluding that hey, if the French pulled it off... especially since Peter's Fritz-fanboying was bound to irritate him on a personal as well as on a political level before he had to reverse course because the boys back at home wanted it. In fact, that might be the reason why Catherine, who was bound to immediately notice how H-W felt about Fritz, exaggareted her own hostility, to win him as an ally regardless of how much her husband turned him off.

Irony: this is exactly the kind of thing FW THOUGHT Guy Dickens was doing with Fritz against him.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

But the thought that he and Catherine might have at the very least indulged in a "what if?" kind of mental game several years ahead of time is certainly intriguing.

Very!

In fact, that might be the reason why Catherine, who was bound to immediately notice how H-W felt about Fritz, exaggareted her own hostility, to win him as an ally regardless of how much her husband turned him off.

Entirely plausible!

Irony: this is exactly the kind of thing FW THOUGHT Guy Dickens was doing with Fritz against him.

And for an ironical cherry on top, the kind of thing Rottembourg apparently *was* doing with Fritz a few years earlier, but FW, Mister "I can totally read minds!", never seems to have picked up on. (I've never actually seen a primary source on this, but Lavisse relies pretty heavily on the French archives and cites them a lot, so I'm willing to provisionally trust him.)