First of all, one of the Frederick Faithful has sketched a lovely tribute to our fallen monarch, Peter the Great. It's entirely wonderful, so take a gander!

Poor, poor Katte. Hans Hermann von Katte was Frederick the Great's great friend as a young lad, and speculation has it that they were lovers as well, though I don't believe there's any definitive evidence on that as of yet. What we do know is that he was privy to Frederick's plan to escape to Britain to avoid the marriage his father planned for him, and that, as a soldier, his complicity in the plot cost him his life in what was perhaps THE defining moment of Frederick's adolescence. Frederick was arrested by his father, and made to stand at a window overlooking von Katte's execution while the deed was done. He was 18 years old, von Katte 26. The experience broke something inside of Frederick, and he became understandably more outwardly dutiful afterwards, though the heady days of his Augsburg period still lay ahead of him. To erase von Katte from history, then, is to change Frederick rather significantly.

- Count Dolby von Luckner