Lehndorff TOTALLY proposed to his 11-year-old cousin Catherine du Rosey in 1749.
Me: Oh nooooo!
she was the heir to a fortune! And Lehndorff with his dead-end job is a fortune-hunter!
Me: ...I guess this makes sense. But still!
they could get married, once she reached the legal age of consent, which was 14.
Keep in mind Lehndorff is 24.
Me: This is not great... but at least it seems like Lehndorff was a mostly reasonable husband, all things considered, so even though this is argh, I guess it could be worse...
Keep in mind, Ludolf is in his 40s.
Me: WELL I GUESS I WAS RIGHT, IT COULD BE WORSE
"I don't have an inclination toward either of them, or any person; I'm too young to be married! But I especially don't have an inclination toward Major von Katte."
This kid is very sensible :( (Seriously, I don't know if I would have been as sensible if I'd been groomed since I was 11!)
So this, I believe, is why Catherine du Rosey ends up not marrying Ludolf until 1755, when she's 17.
*blinks* So, wait, it's sounding like she got disinherited when her grandmother died? And why does Ludolf want to marry her, if she's no longer inheriting anything? ...ugh, maybe he just wants to marry a 17-year-old, ick. UGH.
The best thing I can say for Lehndorff here:
Her family was all for the match while mine nearly had to force me into it.
Which could maybe mean that 1751!Lehndorff -- or at the very least, 1787!Lehndorff -- did have some inkling that maybe this whole marrying an 11-year-old thing was ICK, right? (Not that it stopped him at all, so still ESH (except for the poor kid).)
It's like when we learned about lesbian Isabella of Parma being married to a man she couldn't love, then dying of smallpox + childbirth almost immediately thereafter; and then we learned that she dodged a bullet, because she was almost married to her extremely mentally ill, much older uncle instead!
This kid is very sensible :( (Seriously, I don't know if I would have been as sensible if I'd been groomed since I was 11!)
Right? I kept thinking "Grooming!" the whole time.
*blinks* So, wait, it's sounding like she got disinherited when her grandmother died? And why does Ludolf want to marry her, if she's no longer inheriting anything? ...ugh, maybe he just wants to marry a 17-year-old, ick. UGH.
No, I think she only got disinherited from Grandma's fortune, not what I assume is her other parent's fortune. And since Marschall von Bieberstein died, it's not clear to me that Grandma even managed to disinherit her.
Which could maybe mean that 1751!Lehndorff -- or at the very least, 1787!Lehndorff -- did have some inkling that maybe this whole marrying an 11-year-old thing was ICK, right? (Not that it stopped him at all, so still ESH (except for the poor kid).)
Pardon me for being cynical and thinking this is 1787 Lehndorff, i.e. Lehndorff who's been married twice, having discovered that he had feelings for his actual wives and would rather not give up being married to them. One of whom was 17 when he married her (he was 32); the other was 18 (he was 42). When he wrote the "woe is me" entries, he hadn't yet been married.
Well, he still sounds a bit whistful or at least complimentary about Frau von Katte even after getting married, as in this entry:
I travel with my wife to Wolmirstedt where we've been invited by Obermarschall Wallenrodt. There is a great celebration apropos the wedding of one old General Katt with a Fräulein v. Möllendorf. I mention the age of the newly wedded because his wife the day after the wedding told him: "You haven't heard me come up last night, you were too soundly asleep." All in all, we were thirty. The provincial splendour in their precious old cloths, and the bowings wouldn't end. My sole consolation were one Mrs. General Katt, born v. Truchseß, and my amiable cousin Frau v. Katt, born v. Rosey, who gave us a concert after dinner. We remained dining until 7 pm, then came the concert and the ball. Young Podewils, whom I've brought along, enjoyed himself so thoroughly with Frau v. Angern that he stayed the night. At 2 am, we were happily back home.
I have to say, Lehndorff, bringing up the age factor of the newly wedded here is rich given your own marital plans and history. Though the age gap between both of his actual wives and him were way more standard for the times, i.e. the bride below or only slightly above twenty, the man between thirty and forty.
But to be fair, he does sound fond of both of his wives, and let's not forget, says no to an offer from Heinrich to come with him on his second Russian journey because he wants to stay with wife 2 and children instead, which is no small thing. And with wife 1, when Fritz has finally given him permission to travel abroad he goes to a (German) spa with her instead because she's so sick. And he was a fond father as well. So there were worse husbands than Lehndorff to be had among th Prussian nobility, but good lord, that doesn't make the bargaining and pressuring for little Catherine du Rosey less crass.
Well, he still sounds a bit whistful or at least complimentary about Frau von Katte even after getting married, as in this entry:
Oh, sure, he still likes her as a person. But I think the more time goes on after he's married, the more reconciled he is to how his life turned out, and the more he starts rewriting history in his head.
I have to say, Lehndorff, bringing up the age factor of the newly wedded here is rich given your own marital plans and history. Though the age gap between both of his actual wives and him were way more standard for the times, i.e. the bride below or only slightly above twenty, the man between thirty and forty.
Yeah, I was drafting a reply to cahn about normal age gaps for the period: the man being in his 30s or 40s and the woman being below or only slightly above 20 is standard. Lehndorff never comments on that. He pretty consistently comments on it when a *really* old man, like in his 60s or 70s, gets married to a much younger woman. And if I'm remembering correctly, he wasn't the only one of his time to think that the age gap between a 17-yo Catherine du Rosey and a 40-something Ludolf was normal, but that a 60-year-old man marrying a teenager, especially a younger one, was squicky.
good lord, that doesn't make the bargaining and pressuring for little Catherine du Rosey less crass.
Right, or less damaging to little Catherine, which is the most important thing in my book.
No, I think she only got disinherited from Grandma's fortune, not what I assume is her other parent's fortune. And since Marschall von Bieberstein died, it's not clear to me that Grandma even managed to disinherit her.
Did a little detective work:
Melchior Friedrich Philipp du Rosey (1699-1744) married Marie Katharina von Schlieben (1698-1738), and their daughter was Catherine du Rosey (1738-1813).
Marie Katherina was a widow, and her son from her first marriage was the Marschall von Bieberstein, half-brother of Catherine du Rosey, who died too soon to name Lehndorff in his will.
Marie Katherina was the daughter of Johann Friedrich von Schlieben (1630-1696) and Katharina von Dönhoff (1669-1752). Katharina von Dönhoff is Grandma, and after her husband died, she married Dietrich von Tettau (d. 1730).
Stepmom is Amalie Juliane von Dönhoff (1714-1760). So Grandma and Stepmom are somehow related. Also, Schlieben's first wife is *also* a von Dönhoff, Juliane.
But a little digging isn't showing me how the three von Dönhoff women are related, so I'm going to say distantly. (It would have been interesting and perhaps telling if Grandma and Stepmom had independent family history!)
In conclusion, Grandma is a von Dönhoff, mother of Catherine du Rosey's mother, and Catherine's father is a du Rosey, so Ludolf definitely gets the du Rosey inheritance, and maybe the von Dönhoff inheritance.
Lehndorff is related to the von Dönhoff line, through his father.
Every time we really get into 18th century nobility history, it feels so eerie, because so many of these names show up in the 20th century again. Marion Countess Dönhoff was one of the most famous German women in the 20th century - as a young woman, she was pals with many of the July 20th 1944 conspirators, and later, she became Editor of "Die Zeit", the first female manager of a major newspaper - basically, like Katherine Graham with the Washington Post.
BTW, isn't Lehndorff also related to von Schlieben line - I think one of his sisters married a von Schlieben, something like this, because he later has a Schlieben niece?
BTW, isn't Lehndorff also related to von Schlieben line - I think one of his sisters married a von Schlieben, something like this, because he later has a Schlieben niece?
Good memory! Looks like his sister Marie Eleanore married Karl Leopold von Schlieben in 1747.
Btw, looking at the dates, Grandma von Tettau was 80 the year of the first proposal, and 82/3 when she died, so pretty elderly for her time! No wonder she didn't expect to live two or three more years in 1749.
It's like when we learned about lesbian Isabella of Parma being married to a man she couldn't love, then dying of smallpox + childbirth almost immediately thereafter; and then we learned that she dodged a bullet, because she was almost married to her extremely mentally ill, much older uncle instead!
Yes! It's very very much like that! :(
(Also, this reminds me that as far as I know there was no Isabella of Parma fic for Yuletide this year? Maybe they will request it again next year...)
(Comment composed last night, before selenak weighed in on age gaps.)
...ugh, maybe he just wants to marry a 17-year-old, ick. UGH.
Keep in mind, marrying a 17-yo in this period, for nobility (much less royalty), would not have raised eyebrows. Lehndorff did it twice, as noted above; Katte's father married a 16- or 17-year old (all we know is she gave birth at 17) when he was about 32; Seydlitz was 39 when he married a 16- or 17-year old, Countess Bentinck (since she's on my mind lately) was married at 17 to a 28-year-old; Wilhelmine's daughter was 16 and her husband 20 (her husband started talking about marrying her when she was 12 and he was 16); Émilie was 18 and her husband was 30; Oriane's mother was no more than 15 (15 when she gave birth to her first child) and married to a 39-year-old...and that's not even counting royalty.
There was very little social (as opposed to psychological) reason for a noblewoman *not* to be married at 17, if she had good prospects:
* She wasn't going to university. * She wasn't going to get a job. * She needed financial support, and her parents weren't going to want to support her forever. (Remember FW saying girls should be drowned like kittens, and pessimistically predicting that his daughters wouldn't all find husbands.) * She was of childbearing age. * She was probably going to marry someone her parents picked out anyway, it's not like she needed to wait until she had met The One.
In contrast, women of the lower classes tended to marry at a significantly older age, since neither they nor their husbands could afford to get married until they had worked for a while and saved up. ("Women don't work" has always been a class-based notion; a way for the man to show off that he doesn't need his wife to work, and a way to keep women out of *good* jobs; not an actual constraint on women working.)
And given that noblewomen married young, and tended to die in childbirth, a 40-year-old man looking around for a wife was likely to find women his age were one or more of a) married, b) dead, c) past childbearing age. So an unmarried 16-21-yo was an eminently marriagable candidate. And an older man was more likely to have financial stability, so her parents weren't likely to turn him down, all else being equal (possibly a reason Ludolf got chosen over Lehndorff).
So while men have been icky throughout the ages, and probably many of them found it very convenient that their wives were young and impressionable, you didn't have to be specifically looking to take advantage of someone to look around the marriage market and realize the unmarried women were either at the start of their childbearing years, or widowed, likely with kids, possibly approaching menopause, and to pick the former.
Once your society oppresses women by restricting their alternatives to marriage, the age of marriage drops significantly. As I recall from my classics days, men in Athens were usually around 30 when they married, women about 14-17. This was also the norm in many other historical periods. A 27-year-old woman who wasn't married was an old maid; women by and large tried to avoid that!
The sketchy part in the 18th century would have been the 11-year-old, not the 17-year-old. (If a 17-year-old married a *much* older man, like a 60-year-old, that did raise eyebrows. But it happened; Lehndorff likes to comment on it when it does.)
In conclusion, there are huge *systemic* problems that led to 17-year-old women marrying much older men; if you see an *individual* significantly older man marrying a 17-year-old, he didn't necessarily specifically want a 17-year-old, but may have been responding to social conventions and the pressures of the marriage market. You can't tell.
If you're wondering about Peter and Fredersdorf: both married women in their early 20s, but with a significant age gap. Oriane was 21, Peter 31, when they married, probably subtract a year for the engagement; Caroline Marie Daum was 22, Fredersdorf 44, when they got engaged. Lehndorff never feels the need to comment on this age gap, because it's normal.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 01:04 am (UTC)Me: Oh nooooo!
she was the heir to a fortune! And Lehndorff with his dead-end job is a fortune-hunter!
Me: ...I guess this makes sense. But still!
they could get married, once she reached the legal age of consent, which was 14.
Keep in mind Lehndorff is 24.
Me: This is not great... but at least it seems like Lehndorff was a mostly reasonable husband, all things considered, so even though this is argh, I guess it could be worse...
Keep in mind, Ludolf is in his 40s.
Me: WELL I GUESS I WAS RIGHT, IT COULD BE WORSE
"I don't have an inclination toward either of them, or any person; I'm too young to be married! But I especially don't have an inclination toward Major von Katte."
This kid is very sensible :( (Seriously, I don't know if I would have been as sensible if I'd been groomed since I was 11!)
So this, I believe, is why Catherine du Rosey ends up not marrying Ludolf until 1755, when she's 17.
*blinks* So, wait, it's sounding like she got disinherited when her grandmother died? And why does Ludolf want to marry her, if she's no longer inheriting anything? ...ugh, maybe he just wants to marry a 17-year-old, ick. UGH.
The best thing I can say for Lehndorff here:
Her family was all for the match while mine nearly had to force me into it.
Which could maybe mean that 1751!Lehndorff -- or at the very least, 1787!Lehndorff -- did have some inkling that maybe this whole marrying an 11-year-old thing was ICK, right? (Not that it stopped him at all, so still ESH (except for the poor kid).)
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 01:35 am (UTC)It's like when we learned about lesbian Isabella of Parma being married to a man she couldn't love, then dying of smallpox + childbirth almost immediately thereafter; and then we learned that she dodged a bullet, because she was almost married to her extremely mentally ill, much older uncle instead!
This kid is very sensible :( (Seriously, I don't know if I would have been as sensible if I'd been groomed since I was 11!)
Right? I kept thinking "Grooming!" the whole time.
*blinks* So, wait, it's sounding like she got disinherited when her grandmother died? And why does Ludolf want to marry her, if she's no longer inheriting anything? ...ugh, maybe he just wants to marry a 17-year-old, ick. UGH.
No, I think she only got disinherited from Grandma's fortune, not what I assume is her other parent's fortune. And since Marschall von Bieberstein died, it's not clear to me that Grandma even managed to disinherit her.
Which could maybe mean that 1751!Lehndorff -- or at the very least, 1787!Lehndorff -- did have some inkling that maybe this whole marrying an 11-year-old thing was ICK, right? (Not that it stopped him at all, so still ESH (except for the poor kid).)
Pardon me for being cynical and thinking this is 1787 Lehndorff, i.e. Lehndorff who's been married twice, having discovered that he had feelings for his actual wives and would rather not give up being married to them. One of whom was 17 when he married her (he was 32); the other was 18 (he was 42). When he wrote the "woe is me" entries, he hadn't yet been married.
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 12:58 pm (UTC)I travel with my wife to Wolmirstedt where we've been invited by Obermarschall Wallenrodt. There is a great celebration apropos the wedding of one old General Katt with a Fräulein v. Möllendorf. I mention the age of the newly wedded because his wife the day after the wedding told him: "You haven't heard me come up last night, you were too soundly asleep." All in all, we were thirty. The provincial splendour in their precious old cloths, and the bowings wouldn't end. My sole consolation were one Mrs. General Katt, born v. Truchseß, and my amiable cousin Frau v. Katt, born v. Rosey, who gave us a concert after dinner. We remained dining until 7 pm, then came the concert and the ball. Young Podewils, whom I've brought along, enjoyed himself so thoroughly with Frau v. Angern that he stayed the night. At 2 am, we were happily back home.
I have to say, Lehndorff, bringing up the age factor of the newly wedded here is rich given your own marital plans and history. Though the age gap between both of his actual wives and him were way more standard for the times, i.e. the bride below or only slightly above twenty, the man between thirty and forty.
But to be fair, he does sound fond of both of his wives, and let's not forget, says no to an offer from Heinrich to come with him on his second Russian journey because he wants to stay with wife 2 and children instead, which is no small thing. And with wife 1, when Fritz has finally given him permission to travel abroad he goes to a (German) spa with her instead because she's so sick. And he was a fond father as well. So there were worse husbands than Lehndorff to be had among th Prussian nobility, but good lord, that doesn't make the bargaining and pressuring for little Catherine du Rosey less crass.
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 01:10 pm (UTC)Oh, sure, he still likes her as a person. But I think the more time goes on after he's married, the more reconciled he is to how his life turned out, and the more he starts rewriting history in his head.
I have to say, Lehndorff, bringing up the age factor of the newly wedded here is rich given your own marital plans and history. Though the age gap between both of his actual wives and him were way more standard for the times, i.e. the bride below or only slightly above twenty, the man between thirty and forty.
Yeah, I was drafting a reply to
good lord, that doesn't make the bargaining and pressuring for little Catherine du Rosey less crass.
Right, or less damaging to little Catherine, which is the most important thing in my book.
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 01:48 pm (UTC)Did a little detective work:
Melchior Friedrich Philipp du Rosey (1699-1744) married Marie Katharina von Schlieben (1698-1738), and their daughter was Catherine du Rosey (1738-1813).
Marie Katherina was a widow, and her son from her first marriage was the Marschall von Bieberstein, half-brother of Catherine du Rosey, who died too soon to name Lehndorff in his will.
Marie Katherina was the daughter of Johann Friedrich von Schlieben (1630-1696) and Katharina von Dönhoff (1669-1752). Katharina von Dönhoff is Grandma, and after her husband died, she married Dietrich von Tettau (d. 1730).
Stepmom is Amalie Juliane von Dönhoff (1714-1760). So Grandma and Stepmom are somehow related. Also, Schlieben's first wife is *also* a von Dönhoff, Juliane.
But a little digging isn't showing me how the three von Dönhoff women are related, so I'm going to say distantly. (It would have been interesting and perhaps telling if Grandma and Stepmom had independent family history!)
In conclusion, Grandma is a von Dönhoff, mother of Catherine du Rosey's mother, and Catherine's father is a du Rosey, so Ludolf definitely gets the du Rosey inheritance, and maybe the von Dönhoff inheritance.
Lehndorff is related to the von Dönhoff line, through his father.
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 02:24 pm (UTC)BTW, isn't Lehndorff also related to von Schlieben line - I think one of his sisters married a von Schlieben, something like this, because he later has a Schlieben niece?
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 05:19 pm (UTC)BTW, isn't Lehndorff also related to von Schlieben line - I think one of his sisters married a von Schlieben, something like this, because he later has a Schlieben niece?
Good memory! Looks like his sister Marie Eleanore married Karl Leopold von Schlieben in 1747.
Btw, looking at the dates, Grandma von Tettau was 80 the year of the first proposal, and 82/3 when she died, so pretty elderly for her time! No wonder she didn't expect to live two or three more years in 1749.
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-15 05:14 am (UTC)Yes! It's very very much like that! :(
(Also, this reminds me that as far as I know there was no Isabella of Parma fic for Yuletide this year? Maybe they will request it again next year...)
Re: Lehndorff's one who got away
Date: 2025-01-12 01:31 pm (UTC)...ugh, maybe he just wants to marry a 17-year-old, ick. UGH.
Keep in mind, marrying a 17-yo in this period, for nobility (much less royalty), would not have raised eyebrows. Lehndorff did it twice, as noted above; Katte's father married a 16- or 17-year old (all we know is she gave birth at 17) when he was about 32; Seydlitz was 39 when he married a 16- or 17-year old, Countess Bentinck (since she's on my mind lately) was married at 17 to a 28-year-old; Wilhelmine's daughter was 16 and her husband 20 (her husband started talking about marrying her when she was 12 and he was 16); Émilie was 18 and her husband was 30; Oriane's mother was no more than 15 (15 when she gave birth to her first child) and married to a 39-year-old...and that's not even counting royalty.
There was very little social (as opposed to psychological) reason for a noblewoman *not* to be married at 17, if she had good prospects:
* She wasn't going to university.
* She wasn't going to get a job.
* She needed financial support, and her parents weren't going to want to support her forever. (Remember FW saying girls should be drowned like kittens, and pessimistically predicting that his daughters wouldn't all find husbands.)
* She was of childbearing age.
* She was probably going to marry someone her parents picked out anyway, it's not like she needed to wait until she had met The One.
In contrast, women of the lower classes tended to marry at a significantly older age, since neither they nor their husbands could afford to get married until they had worked for a while and saved up. ("Women don't work" has always been a class-based notion; a way for the man to show off that he doesn't need his wife to work, and a way to keep women out of *good* jobs; not an actual constraint on women working.)
And given that noblewomen married young, and tended to die in childbirth, a 40-year-old man looking around for a wife was likely to find women his age were one or more of a) married, b) dead, c) past childbearing age. So an unmarried 16-21-yo was an eminently marriagable candidate. And an older man was more likely to have financial stability, so her parents weren't likely to turn him down, all else being equal (possibly a reason Ludolf got chosen over Lehndorff).
So while men have been icky throughout the ages, and probably many of them found it very convenient that their wives were young and impressionable, you didn't have to be specifically looking to take advantage of someone to look around the marriage market and realize the unmarried women were either at the start of their childbearing years, or widowed, likely with kids, possibly approaching menopause, and to pick the former.
Once your society oppresses women by restricting their alternatives to marriage, the age of marriage drops significantly. As I recall from my classics days, men in Athens were usually around 30 when they married, women about 14-17. This was also the norm in many other historical periods. A 27-year-old woman who wasn't married was an old maid; women by and large tried to avoid that!
The sketchy part in the 18th century would have been the 11-year-old, not the 17-year-old. (If a 17-year-old married a *much* older man, like a 60-year-old, that did raise eyebrows. But it happened; Lehndorff likes to comment on it when it does.)
In conclusion, there are huge *systemic* problems that led to 17-year-old women marrying much older men; if you see an *individual* significantly older man marrying a 17-year-old, he didn't necessarily specifically want a 17-year-old, but may have been responding to social conventions and the pressures of the marriage market. You can't tell.
If you're wondering about Peter and Fredersdorf: both married women in their early 20s, but with a significant age gap. Oriane was 21, Peter 31, when they married, probably subtract a year for the engagement; Caroline Marie Daum was 22, Fredersdorf 44, when they got engaged. Lehndorff never feels the need to comment on this age gap, because it's normal.