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

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.)