cahn

Pfff, this reminds me of my Aged Parent originally refusing to believe Fritz would do a couple of things he did because he said it was ooc for Fritz until I waved excerpts from Henckel von Donnersmark's wartime diary at him, and even then he had trouble. And there's always the "glorious" example of not only a bunch of 19th but even 20th century historians declaring it would have been ooc for such a pious Christian as FW to insist on Gundling's being buried in a barrel and to organize the entire burial the way he did and to write essay after essay of how this was an anti Prussian legend surely and ooc and what not when Stratemann's diplomatic dispatches had been published in the late 19th century already (including the one where he, who is an FW friendly source and can't possibly accused of anti FW bias, describes the entire affair in detail (plus the letters from the pastors which the Gundling biographer found).

Of course envoys are biased, we've often found them so. But historians and biographers can be equally biased and tempted to declare "this doesn't fit with my image of person X, therefore the contemporary source who says they absolutely did this must have made it up!"