Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 46

[cahn]

Background: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.

Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*

Comments

Re: Løvenørn letters: August 1, 1730

[mildred_of_midgard]

Lövenörn/Rottembourg: would this be our first envoy/envoy ship? (As opposed to envoy/royal family member or someone else?) Nifty discovery, in any case.

I think so! However, I initially hesitated before putting "(French)" in "(French) Count Rottembourg", then remembered Prussian Count Rothenburg would have been in Berlin, so Løvenørn wouldn't have any reason to write to him or miss him. But! This morning I remembered that Prussian Count Rothenburg went with his cousin French Count Rothenburg to Spain around this time, and ended up fighting in Africa. So I looked more closely at his dates, and at least if the ADB can be trusted, Prussian Count Rothenburg left Berlin with his cousin in 1727 and was serving in a French regiment. In 1731, he would go with him to Spain. He would not be recalled to Prussia until after Fritz became king, at which point Løvenørn (d. Feb 1740) would be dead.

So this could be Prussian Count Rothenburg, and I'm no longer sure it's an envoy/envoy ship! I will keep an eye out for more evidence.

I dimly recall the ultra nationalist German historian who analyzed the English marriage negotions debacle and entirely blamed perfidious Albion in general and Charles Hotham in particular saying something about the big showdown involving Hotham presenting a Grumbkow letter to the Prussian resident to FW (complete with being SHOCKED that the holy secrecy of diplomatic letters would be comopromised, which of course Prussian monarchs would NEVER)? With it backfiring.

Yes, I was assuming those were the same letters, which was why I guessed 'resident' for something that looked like it ended in 'ent'. Reminder to cahn, FW threw the letters down on the ground in front of Hotham, insulted him, and stormed out. Hotham, offended, abandoned the mission to Prussia, thus driving Fritz to further desperation (this was less than a month before the escape attempt, so about 3 weeks before Løvenørn's letter to Rottembourg).

Re: Løvenørn letters: August 1, 1730

[mildred_of_midgard]

The result of a bit more deciphering in a second pass at this letter:

Løvenørn is sending Rottembourg a packet with extracts from some of his recent reports.

He begs Rottembourg, in the name of all the love that Rottembourg has always had for him, not to show them to anyone or make any use of this packet except to read it himself without communicating the contents to anyone.

At the first opportunity, Løvenørn's going to send to Rottembourg copies of the letters that Grumbkow wrote to the resident of the King of Prussia in London, which are full of lies.

Also, now that I've looked at the dates, French Rottembourg and Løvenørn are about the same age, 44 and 46 respectively, and Prussian Rothenburg is only 20, meaning 17 when Løvenørn would have last seen him. If this were a romance, I would totally suspect Løvenørn of going for the hot young thing, but if he's sending extracts of his envoy reports and copies of incriminating Grumbkow letters, I sincerely hope we can take this as evidence that this is business-related and thus that the recipient is the envoy French Count Rottembourg.

And so I'm tentatively concluding this is indeed our first candidate for an envoy/envoy ship! (Though it could totally be two 18th century colleagues who got along well and wrote flowery prose to each other.)

ETA: I should also remind everyone that Whitworth and Rottembourg used to show each other secret papers when they were stationed in Berlin in the 1720s. So whatever may or may not be going on at a personal level between Løvenørn and Rottembourg, at a political level we clearly have a pro-English marriage cabal among the envoys. (And I should remind everyone of what we've learned since learning about this: that Danish politics was pro-English at this stage, since England saved Denmark's butt helped Denmark out against Karl XII during the Great Northern War, and the other major option, France, was allied with Sweden, Denmark's main enemy.)

Re: Løvenørn letters: August 1, 1730

[selenak]

Not to mention that England and Denmark have centuries of alliance tradition complete with marriages: legendary Queen Margaret (mentioned by Dirk in the Hanse series), She Who Ruled Denmark, Sweden AND Norway), married her adopted son to Henry IV's daughter, then there's the James VI and I/ Anne of Denmark marriage, of course, and alas for her finally Caroline Matilda/ Christian the Mentally Unstable in the 18th century.

(Mind you, if you go back even longer, you have a lot of Vikings raiding England and colonizing it for a while, and King Canute ruling both England and Denmark at some point...)

Re: Pro-English Marriage cabal among the envoys: well, not the Imperial and Brunswick ones for obvious reasons. :)

Re: Løvenørn letters: August 1, 1730

[mildred_of_midgard]

Re: Pro-English Marriage cabal among the envoys: well, not the Imperial and Brunswick ones for obvious reasons. :)

Right, sorry, I wasn't clear. What I meant was that withi the set of envoys, these three (Løvenørn, Rottembourg, Whitworth) are clearly in a cabal, sharing secret documents with each other and so forth.

You know, it occurred to me James Frederick Chance's book on the alliance of Hanover would have more details on Rottembourg and Løvenørn, but I've never been able to make it through that book. Even for yours truly, 800 pages on 2 years of foreign policy (1725-1727) is just *too much*. I might do what I did before, though, and search for their names and see if anything interesting comes up that I didn't have the context to appreciate a couple years ago. (If you'd told me then that I was going to be deciphering their unpublished correspondence, I would not have believed you!)