cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 45

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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) )

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From:

cahn

(The exception was the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's last favourite, who was very much popular with the masses, which went to his head and contributed to him losing it.)

Gosh but you have a way with words :P :) <3

James was a peace loving gay nerd

Aw! (Gosh, I can see why Alan Cummings had a field day with him.)

but what became appearant was the way for an English newbie to catch the King's eye and be appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber was.... by being good-looking and sexy.

...whoops.
(Now I'm imagining the AU in which Heinrich is king and Prussia has Gentlemen of the Bedchamber...)

As it happened, James was furious, and he remained so, but that wasn't the reason why he didn't back Frederick, it was not wanting a bloody religious war engulfing the European continent and then swapping over to Britain and Ireland!

Oh wait... can I have a couple more sentences unpacking this? :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

You can have three paragraphs copied from

selenak's review of Nancy Goldstone's Daughters of the Winter Queen:

First, meet Elizabeth, sole daughter of James the VI and I (of Scotland and England respectively, son of Mary Queen of Scots; played by Alan Cummings on Doctor Who, which I just have to mention). She spends her childhood and teenage years being a princess praised for beauty and cleverness, a golden girl like her brother Henry is a golden boy, and little brother Charles the sickly afterthought. However, James rather surprisingly sells her under marriage market value by accepting a marriage proposal not from European royalty (and definitely not from a British noble - James was justifiably paranoid, and the Gunpowder Plotters apparently had a scheme of making little Elizabeth Queen after offing her male relations), but from one Friedrich, Prince Elector of the Palatine. This made him one of the more powerful princes within the HRE, but still, in no way was he Elizabeth's social equal. Otoh he was her age (they were born just ten days apart), handsome, and had, drumroll, a rather intriguing prospect on the horizon if a whole chain of events would happen, relating to the Crown of Bohemia. Whether James when marrying his daughter to Friedrich was actively encouraging German Protestants to consider his new son-in-law as a candidate for the Bohemian Crown (what the Bohemians thoughts, what many a German Protestant thought, and definitely what Elizabeth thought) or whether he had no such thing in mind (what James said he thought and how he acted subsequently) became a matter of hot debate. Not least because just before the marriage could happen, James' older son Henry died, which make Charles (whose health had been poor all through his youth) the sole surviving male heir, which in turn meant Elizabeth suddenly was next in line for the English and Scottish heritage as well.

Elizabeth marries Friedrich, has a few early good years with him at Heidelberg producing babies, and then the Defenestration of Prague happens, Bohemians vote the Catholic Habsburg Emperor out and Friedrich in re: the Bohemian Crown (with the expectation that hey, father-in-law James, who also accepted the title of head of the German Protestant Defense League surely would have never done that and made the guy his son -in-law if he wasn't willing to spend some money and troops there) - and Thirty Years of the bloodiest, most devastating conflict on European soil until the 20th century have just started. BTW, Goldstone is unabashedly partisan and harsh on James, who at time wanted to marry Charles to a Spanish Infanta (as in, a Habsburg, Catholic one), not only didn't do anything to help Elizabeth and her husband but explicitly forbade her and any of her children to return to England once the war turned against them (which it quickly did), but you can of course make the case that this way, he kept Britain out of the hell that was this particular war. (Otoh whether or not this war would have happened when it did and the way it did if he'd made it clear earlier that he would act this way is also up to debate.)

The reason why Elizabeth and her husband are called "The Winter Queen and the Winter King" is that they didn't last much longer before a crushing defeat happened that ousted them from Prague. Worse was to come, because Friedrich's own principality, the Palatinate, was next. Which meant Elizabeth was on the run with no money, no backup, one toddler (Rupert, btw), her highly pregnant again, and her three older children with her mother-in-law. At which point she becomes interesting as she shows she's one of the Stuarts who are best in adversity. Courtesy of the Prince Elector of Brandenburg having married Friedrich's sister, they end up at first in, drumroll, Küstrin, which is mostly famous because that's where Elizabeth's great-grandson would lock up his son, her great great grandson, future Frederick the Great, and force him to watch his friend's and probable lover's execution, so naturally I paid attention at the naming of this particular location. However, their brother-in-law of Brandenburg doesn't want any trouble with the Emperor, so this was only temporary, and they ended up in the Netherlands, sponsored by the Prince of Orange. Elizabeth's ever increasing number of children reads like a list of the people she hoped would help her in her stubborn lobbying campain for allies and to get at least the Palatinate back. (Notably, there's not a single "James" among them, but a Gustavus Adolphus, after the most famous Protestant ruler of the 30 Years War.)

The 30 Years' War engulfed most of the countries of Europe (although mostly fought on German territory), and James, by refusing to get involved despite all the pressure, at least kept his kingdoms out of it.

From:

selenak

(Now I'm imagining the AU in which Heinrich is king and Prussia has Gentlemen of the Bedchamber...)

I don't renember anymore at which point in his life Lehndorff did his history of the Stuarts reading (complete with commenting in his diary that they were a weird family ~~so unlike our own dear Hohenzollern~~), but if it was later rather than earlier, I bet he mentally cast Kaphengst as Buckingham.

Also, given that apparantly being good looking didn't hurt your prospects for serving as Fritz' chamber hussar, either, there's no AU necessary, just a Glasow story. (Because the others didn't get important jobs other than guarding Fritz, but Glasow at least temporarily did.