Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 45

[cahn]

Unfortunately, there was then at Berlin a King who pursued one policy only, who deceived his enemies, but not his servants, and who lied without scruple, but never without necessity.

(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )

Comments

Re: Heinz Duchhardt on Protestant Prince X for Emperor Campaigns, or: Fritz for HRE?

[cahn]

D lists Henry VIII of England (who did put himself as a candidate) as a "wavering, but in the end Protestant prince". Not when going up against young Charles (and Francis I. of France) for HRE, Henry wasn't.

Hee hee, Henry VIII is "in the end Protestant prince, as long as he can't get anything better." Fixed that for you, D! :)

What really cracks me up is that the "Crown Prince of Prussia" is named as a candidate, because is of course young FW.

! Well!

(Obviously in the HRE case, because while there is technically no clause saying a Protestant prince can't become Emperor, the now Catholic again supermajority would still have expected him to convert first. FW would never!)

Ha. That's almost endearing (but not really).


Duchardt, however, thinks Fritz never wanted to, despite his answering enigmatically to Voltaire at the time. A decade later, in the Political Testaments of 1750s onwards, he's crystal clear on the subject in that he doesn't exclude the possibility of a Hohenzollern Emperor forever, but thinks conquering provinces and establishing fame must come first, and then his successors if they want to can gratify their vanity and try for HRE.

Lol, this is hilarious. But makes sense.

Now Renate Zedinger made it sound as if Duchhardt thinks Fritz seriously considered it in her footnoting this book, but the actual passage reads more like the opposite:

Meaning that if Wilhelmine told Cobenzl this, she made it up, since Fritz was most definitely not sharing confidences with her just then.

Heh. Right. Thank you for reading and reporting back! :D It's always interesting how the sources differ from the people who cited them... :P

Re: Heinz Duchhardt on Protestant Prince X for Emperor Campaigns, or: Fritz for HRE?

[selenak]

Hee hee, Henry VIII is "in the end Protestant prince, as long as he can't get anything better." Fixed that for you, D! :)

LOL. Incidentally, one of many great things about the Shardlake mystery series is that Henry's constant wavering between Catholicism in everything except the Pope and (some) Protestantism ever since he couldn't get his divorce meant that whenever the Catholic faction in his council seemed to have the upper hand, there were rumors about him returning to Rome. And in his last years of life, there was even a Papal Legate secretly in London. But old Henry had gotten too much used to being spiritual boss as well as secular boss and was in no way prepared to make some repentant gesture a la Canossa, so in his very last year, he went Team Protestantism in a big way by the way he favoured the Protestant council lords.

Basically, it's not that I think Henry was so committed to reform, but he was definitely committed to being Top Dog Of Religious Matters as well as temporal ones. Now a few centuries earlier, as you might know from the History of the Germans podcast, actually the HRE Emperors weren't just investing bishops and abbots but were seen as THE spiritual authority because this was the century of the Pornocracy in Rome. Depending on how sincere one judges Henry's religious feelings per se, he simply was born in the wrong century and in the wrong realm. :)