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Heroes of the Nations
A Series of Biographical Studies presenting the lives and work of
certain representative historical characters, about whom have
gathered the traditions of the nations to which they belong,
and who have, in the majority of instances, been accepted as
types of the several national ideals.
12°, Illustrated, cloth, each $1.50
Half Leather, gilt top, each $1.75
Nos. 33 and following Nos. net $1.35
Each (By mail, $1.50)
Half Leather, gilt top net $1.60
(By mail, $1.75)
FOR FULL LIST SEE END OF THIS VOLUME
Heroes of the Nations
EDITED BY
H. W. Carless Davis
FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD
FACTA DUCIS VIVENT OPEROSAQUE
GLORIA RERUM.—OVID, IN LIVIAM, 266.
THE HERO’S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
FAME SHALL LIVE.
FREDERICK THE GREAT
[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT.
AFTER THE PAINTING BY CARLO VANLOO.]
FREDERICK THE GREAT
AND THE RISE OF PRUSSIA
BY
W. F. REDDAWAY, M.A.
FELLOW AND LECTURER OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; LECTURER IN HISTORY
TO NON-COLLEGIATE STUDENTS; AUTHOR OF “THE MONROE
DOCTRINE” (CAMB. UNIV. PRESS)
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
LONDON 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
The Knickerbocker Press
1904
COPYRIGHT, 1904
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Published, April, 1904
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
TO THE
NON-COLLEGIATE STUDENTS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
[Illustration]
PREFACE
In attempting to sketch the career of Frederick the Great and to
define its relation to the rise of Prussia, I have made free use of
many printed works, especially of Frederick’s own _Œuvres_ and of
the elaborate _Politische Correspondenz_ of his reign. With these
great “primary” authorities may perhaps be ranked the face and voice
of modern Germany, rich in evidence of Frederick’s work, which have
doubtless influenced my opinions more than I am aware of. Among
“secondary” authorities I owe most to the opulent treasure-house of
Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_ and to the more systematic narrative
of Professor Koser. His _Friedrich der Grosse als Kronprinz_, which
largely inspired the work of Lavisse translated under the title _The
Youth of Frederick the Great_, forms my chief source for much of
Frederick’s early life, as does the last volume of the _König Friedrich
der Grosse_ (1903), for the domestic labours after 1763. Mr. Herbert
Tuttle’s judicious _History of Prussia_ gave me much assistance down to
the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, and I have often referred to Mr.
Lodge’s _Modern Europe_ and Mr. Henderson’s _Short History of Germany_.
At critical points in the record of the years 1712 to 1786 I was
influenced successively by the _Mémoires de la Margravine de Baireuth_,
the trenchant _Frédéric II et Marie-Thérèse_ of the Duc de Broglie,
the _Politische Staatsschriften_, Schäfer’s _Der Siebenjährige Krieg_,
von Arneth’s _Oesterreichische Geschichte_, and Sorel’s _The Eastern
Question in the Eighteenth Century_. Many of the battles in Saxony,
Brandenburg, Bohemia, and Silesia form the subject of monographs which
it was interesting to study on the field, sometimes with the aid of
collections of maps and plans preserved in the neighbourhood.
It would be impossible without a false pretence of erudition to name
more than a small portion of the books to which some reference must be
made in writing of the rise of Prussia. Students will recognise the
debt that I owe to such well-known works as those of Ranke, Droysen,
Philippson, Förster, Seeley, Isaacsohn, Oncken, Vitzthum, Archenholtz,
and many more, as well as to the _Essays_ of Macaulay and Lord Mahon.
My account of the early history of Brandenburg is in part based on my
paper of April, 1901, in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Historical
Society.
I offer my grateful thanks to Mr. G. H. Putnam and to Mr. H. W. C.
Davis for their counsel, to Mr. G. H. M. Gray for minute scrutiny
of the proof-sheets, and to Messrs. Ernest and Harold Temperley, my
indulgent comrades in Silesia. To the latter this book owes much at
every stage.
W. F. R.
KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
Jan. 9th, 1904.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 3
CHAPTER II
FREDERICK AS CROWN PRINCE, 1712–1740 24
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF 1740 56
CHAPTER IV
THE SILESIAN ADVENTURE, 1740–1742 83
CHAPTER V
THE SECOND STRUGGLE FOR SILESIA, 1742–1745 128
CHAPTER VI
THE TEN YEARS’ PEACE, 1746–1756 155
CHAPTER VII
THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR TO THE BATTLE OF LEUTHEN 189
CHAPTER VIII
THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR (CONTINUED). LEUTHEN TO MAXEN
(DECEMBER, 1757, TO DECEMBER, 1759) 251
CHAPTER IX
THE END OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, 1760–1763 281
CHAPTER X
FREDERICK AND PRUSSIA AFTER THE WAR 301
CHAPTER XI
FREDERICK AND EUROPE, 1763–1786 322
CHAPTER XII
FREDERICK’S DEATH AND GREATNESS 344
Index 361
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
FREDERICK THE GREAT _Frontispiece_
After the painting by Carlo Vanloo.
FREDERICK THE GREAT 10
After the painting by Christian Wolffgang.
MAP OF PRUSSIA AFTER THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA, 1715 22
PRINCESS SOPHIA DOROTHEA, DAUGHTER OF KING GEORGE THE FIRST 32
After the painting by Hirseman.
FREDERICK THE SECOND 38
After the painting by Cunningham.
ELIZABETH CHRISTINA OF BRUNSWICK 44
From an old print.
VOLTAIRE 54
From the statue by Houdon at the Comédie Français.
FREDERICK WILLIAM THE FIRST 64
After the painting by F. W. Weideman.
VIEW OF GLATZ IN THE 18TH CENTURY 78
From an old print.
MAP OF EUROPE IN 1740 80
THE RATHHAUS IN BRESLAU 90
From a steel engraving.
THE BOARD OF FINANCES AT NEISSE 104
From a steel engraving.
PLAN OF MOLWITZ, APRIL 10, 1741 114
THE PARADE GROUND AT POTSDAM 128
FREDERICK THE SECOND, KING OF PRUSSIA 140
After the painting by F. Bock.
SANS-SOUCI. CARYTID FRONT 160
THE EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARIA THERESA IN THE VIENNA HOFFBURG 190
Reproduced by permission of A. F. Czihaks Nachflg, Vienna.
LEOPOLD, COUNT VON DAUN 214
From a copper print.
PLAN OF PRAGUE, MAY 6, 1757 216
PLAN OF KOLIN, JUNE 18, 1757 222
FREDERICK VIEWING THE BURNING BRIDGE AT WEISSENFELS 234
From a relief on his statue at Weissenfels.
PLAN OF ROSSBACH, NOVEMBER 5, 1757 236
PLAN OF LEUTHEN, DECEMBER 5, 1757 246
THE CHARGE OF THE WALLOON DRAGOONS AT KOLIN 248
From a relief on the monument of Victory near Křečhoř,
unveiled 1898.
MAP FOR THE SILESIAN AND SEVEN YEARS’ WARS 254
PLAN OF ZORNDORF, AUGUST 25, 1758 260
BATTLE OF HOCHKIRCH, OCTOBER 14, 1758 264
BATTLE OF KUNERSDORF, AUGUST 12, 1759 270
BATTLE OF LIEGNITZ, AUGUST 15, 1760 286
BATTLE OF TORGAU, NOVEMBER 3, 1760 292
THE NEW PALACE AT POTSDAM 308
JOSEPH THE SECOND 322
After the painting by Listard.
WENZEL ANTON, PRINCE VON KAUNITZ 326
After the painting by Steiner.
UNTER DEN LINDEN IN 1780 340
From an etching by Rosentag.
DEATH-MASK OF FREDERICK THE GREAT 344
From the original in the Hohenzollern Museum, Berlin.
COFFINS OF FREDERICK THE GREAT (RIGHT) AND FREDERICK
WILLIAM I. (LEFT) IN THE GARRISON CHURCH AT POTSDAM 348
FREDERICK THE SECOND, KING OF PRUSSIA 356
After the painting by Chodowiecki.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
FREDERICK THE GREAT
INTRODUCTION
In the Austrian and Prussian capitals to-day the traveller may mark the
contrast between two great statues, in each of which the meaning of a
reign is set forth with happy instinct. In the heart of imperial Vienna
is seated the colossal figure of Maria Theresa, the Victoria of an age
when a Pompadour could sway the fate of nations. Her effigy presents
her as the mother of her people, displaying rather than obscuring the
scholars, statesmen, and warriors who cluster round her feet, sharing
harmoniously the glory which neither Queen nor people could have won
without the other’s aid.
In Berlin the superb monument of the Great Frederick is instinct with
a different spirit. Raised high above the throng, the King seems to
gaze with his inscrutable mask-face at the astounding works of his
successors. At the base of his lofty pedestal are stationed generals
and civilians of renown, numerous enough almost to confute the Cassius
who should infer of Frederick’s Prussia that there was in it but
one only man. The statue none the less suggests the truth. Between
monarch and people there was ever a great gulf fixed. Through all
his life—in his counsels, in his despair, in his triumph, and in his
death—Frederick, almost beyond parallel in the record of human history,
was alone.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA
The first task of the student of Frederick’s life-story is to rid
himself of the idea that the solitary King was either wholly original
or wholly free. To seize Silesia, to quarter Poland, to rival Austria,
to humble France, each was no doubt a feat which no Prussian ruler
before him had dared to attempt. Yet in each of these, as will
presently be shown, the hand of the living was at once nerved and
guided by the dead. From his House Frederick inherited his might,
to his House he turned for inspiration in the use of it, and to it
he dedicated his conquests. He who would appreciate Frederick must
first survey the road trodden for three centuries before him by the
Hohenzollerns from whom he sprang.
“Why should I serve the Hohenzollerns?” Bismarck is said to have
exclaimed. “My family is as good as theirs.” It was the complaint
of the yeoman against his fellow who has saved money and bought the
lordship of the manor.
The early history of the state now called Prussia is chiefly the record
of a thrifty family—the Hohenzollerns. Since the year 1415, when
the overlordship of the sandy tract lying between the middle Elbe
and lower Oder and stretching across their banks was conferred upon
him by the Emperor for cash down, Frederick of Hohenzollern and his
descendants had remained lords of Brandenburg. From Nuremberg, where
Frederick had been Burggrave, they had brought with them the vital
energy and business ability of successful townsmen. So poor was their
new estate that for many generations relaxation would have meant ruin.
There was therefore no temptation to depart from that policy of adding
field to field which is the natural law of the industrious countryman.
Whether from native superiority or from greater need, the Hohenzollerns
were usually a little wiser than their neighbours. With the aid of a
family statute of 1473, which made primogeniture the rule of succession
for Brandenburg, they avoided the consequences of that custom of equal
inheritance which has been the bane of Germany. By careful watching of
opportunities, by windfalls, by purchase, and by covenants for mutual
succession on failure of heirs made with neighbours whose lines died
out, the domain of the rulers of Brandenburg was in two centuries
increased fourfold. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out and the modern
history of Prussia began, the head of the Hohenzollern family, who had
long since become one of the seven Electors of the Empire, held sway
over an area almost as great as that of Ireland.
Of the territories by which the original Mark of Brandenburg had been
augmented, two were of special importance. In 1525 East Prussia had
been acquired. This province, which throughout this book will be
called by its German name of Ost-Preussen, was richer by far than the
Mark, the kernel of the Hohenzollern possessions. It had an important
city, Königsberg, for its capital and a coast-line on the Baltic. It
constituted the domain of the old Order of Teutonic Knights, permanent
crusaders whose task had been to spread the faith and civilisation of
their fatherland among the heathen Slavs. But the Baltic lands had
all submitted to the Cross, and the Knights became in their turn the
objects of a religious mission. Early in the sixteenth century, the
doctrines of the Reformation penetrated the minds of their High Master,
Albert of Hohenzollern. He turned for counsel to Luther himself. In a
celibate Order which had no more heathen to convert, the husband of the
nun Catherine Bora could see only a standing defiance of the laws of
nature and of God. By his advice Ost-Preussen was “secularised,” that
is, taken from the service of religion to form a Hohenzollern estate,
and in time (1618), though still submissive to the suzerainty of
Poland, it was added to the main body of the Electoral dominions. The
Hohenzollerns thus became distinguished from the mass of German princes
by ruling territories to which the Empire had never possessed any
claim. Ost-Preussen was to them on a small scale what England became in
1688 to the House of Orange, or in 1714 to the House of Hanover. Their
policy acquired a new breadth and a new weight. Hitherto provincial, it
became more and more cosmopolitan, and commerce with the Baltic lands
and England began to hint to the lord of Pillau and Memel that his
future lay upon the water.
A makeweight to Ost-Preussen, which would prevent the centre of gravity
of the Hohenzollern lands from shifting eastwards, was found in 1609,
when the family inherited Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg in Western
Germany. This acquisition, made on the very eve of the Thirty Years’
War, was accompanied in 1613 by the conversion of the Elector, John
Sigismund, from the Lutheranism which his grandfather, Joachim II.,
had established in 1539 to the sterner and more militant creed of
Calvin. This meant that at the very moment when all Germany was taking
up arms for the greatest religious war of modern times, the court and
people of Brandenburg were hopelessly at variance with one another. A
Calvinist prince ruled a Lutheran people, and the new Elector, George
William (1619–1640), “of Christ-mild memory” but the weakest of his
line, proved to be a puppet in the hands of Schwarzenburg, his Romanist
prime-minister. Under such guidance did Brandenburg, ill-knit and
ill-armed, become the battle-ground between Swede and Hapsburg in their
struggle for faith and empire.
What Brandenburg suffered in the terrible decade 1630–1640, between
the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany and the accession of the
Great Elector, can never be fully calculated. The State was rudderless,
defenceless, and poor; the combatants on both sides brigands, whom
years of license had habituated to every kind of cruelty. What passed
could be described by no more patently truthful eye-witness than
Andreas Rittner, the cheery burgomaster of Tangermünde, a little town
on the Elbe with a royal history of its own. In his pages may be traced
the swift descent of the afflicted people through every depth of
misery down to despair or even annihilation. The invaders—it mattered
little whether Swedes or Imperialists—exacted in endless sequence
contributions, lodging, forage, and loot, drove off the cattle, broke
up the coffins of the dead, laid waste the land, and hunted down the
inhabitants. The mischief was only increased by the feeble efforts of
the home government to call out and support a militia. The maddened
peasants turned guerilla. Food failed, for who could sow or reap?
Men fed on carrion, even, it was whispered, on human flesh, and soon
pestilence seized on persecutors and persecuted alike.
Anarchy and degradation brought forth torture. The name of the Swedish
Drink attests the cruelty of the degenerate deliverers of Germany.
“They laid men awhile upon the fire,” writes Rittner,
“baked them in ovens, flung them into wells, hung them up by
the feet, fastened thumb-screws upon them, drove sharp spikes
under their nails, bound round their heads so tight that
their eyes started out, gagged them and sealed their mouths.
Matrons and virgins were oft-times put to shame. Husbands must
often leave their wives and wives their husbands, parents
their children and children their parents, even on the bed of
sickness, for they were powerless to save them from abuse, and
sometimes when they came back they found nought of them save
some few bones, for all else had the dogs mangled and eaten up.”
Not less graphic is the story told in stone in some of the tormented
cities. Round the giant church, spared by the Swedes to uphold the
Lutheran faith of which it was then the temple and by the Imperialists
for the sake of the Roman faith which they hoped to establish anew
within its walls, there may be seen the tombs of many generations
of citizens. Those of the sixteenth century are covered with quaint
adornment and graven with artistic skill. Then, as war sweeps over
the land, the series is broken, to be resumed after many decades
with a rude clumsiness which shows that wealth and art had fled from
Brandenburg together.
Though it would be rash to assume that any single part of the Mark may
be regarded as typical of the whole, there seems to be no reason to
call in question the dictum of Frederick the Great, that his ancestors
needed a century to repair the damage of the Thirty Years’ War. This
great task was confided to a youth of twenty years, an only son, yet no
favourite of his father, the Elector George William, whom he succeeded
in 1640. Frederick William, known to history as the Great Elector,
was the great-grandfather of Frederick the Great. By common consent
he is reputed the founder of the glory of the House of Hohenzollern
in modern times. He found Brandenburg prostrate and threatened with
dissolution. It is from the low-water mark of these earliest years,
when he with reason bewailed difficulties greater than those of David
or Solomon, that the progress of his State is to be measured and his
own achievement thereby understood.
He found his exchequer empty, his palace half-ruined, the court seeking
safety and even sustenance at far-off Königsberg, the Austrian papist,
Schwarzenburg, supreme in the state, the Mark trampled underfoot by
alien hosts. How should an open country like his, the highroad between
Sweden and Austria, be delivered from the endless war? Even if, by
miracle, a peace could be devised, which Calvinists and Lutherans
could both accept, what prospect, nay what possibility existed that
territories so ill-compacted as his could be welded into a single,
solid state? All the needful bonds of union seemed to be lacking. What
common tie of blood, of faith, of speech was there strong enough to
bind together Cleves and Brandenburg and Ost-Preussen, units gathered
by the chance of recent history into one hand but dissevered by
hundreds of miles of alien soil and by chasms of sentiment still harder
to bridge over? The constituent parts of Frederick William’s domain
were in 1640 dissimilar in race, in history, and in interest. They had
no desire for closer relations; they had not even a uniform calendar;
their only common political aim seemed to be to flout the Elector, who
was the bugbear of them all.
Even were he to make himself master of the centre, dangers clustered
thick on either wing, while behind the Polish problems of the East and
the Netherlandish problems of the West a seer might have discerned the
double peril that encompasses modern Germany. Peter the Great and his
Russia lay yet in the womb of time, but Richelieu and his France were
in the full flood of successful ambition. Thus the organiser of a
North German power must work while his horizon was already darkening.
In grasping the lands which formed his birthright the Great Elector was
defying, though as yet he knew it not, two of the greatest forces of
modern times. Hohenzollern rule on the Niemen was to become a challenge
to Russia and to the Slavic advance, while the Hohenzollern lord of
Cleves must ultimately reckon with the belief of Frenchmen that the
Rhine is the boundary designed by nature for their state.
[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT.
AFTER THE PAINTING BY CHRISTIAN WOLFFGANG.]
During the first critical years of his rule, however, the plans of
the Great Elector were of the humblest. Striving for existence rather
than for empire, he was not too proud to beg for help in every likely
quarter. Among our own State-papers are to be seen his letters suing
for petty favours which Charles I., so long as diplomacy would serve,
was very willing to grant. The King of England marked the small esteem
in which he held the untried and obscure Elector by pressing upon him
the hand of his niece, a princess of the fugitive and bankrupt House of
the Palatinate. Frederick William’s relations with Poland, the suzerain
of whom he held Ost-Preussen, show yet more clearly how slight was his
power at his accession. When the Lutherans of Königsberg threatened
riot because a Calvinist was chosen to preach the funeral sermon of
George William, the Elector did not blush to solicit the Papist King,
Wladislaus IV., to admonish these unruly Protestants. To this end he
bade his minister at Warsaw “make humble request to His Majesty
that His Majesty would in friendly—cousinly fashion let it please
him to send a letter to our chief Councillors (but as if His Majesty
had been informed of this from other quarters and not from us) and
thereby to order them to reprove and repress this folly of the unquiet
theologians.... It will perhaps be best if you solicit this work only
after the departure of the Diet.” The request was made and granted, and
the minister instructs the Elector how he may palm off the document as
a mandate approved by the Diet behind whose backs it had been obtained.
Where charity was to be looked for, Frederick William was not too proud
to beg. But of all powers the least likely to be charitable was Sweden,
whose armies had for nearly ten years been fighting solely for material
compensation. To Sweden therefore the Elector offered money and was
allowed to purchase that deliverance from the war which was essential
to all his plans (1641). He could now begin the task of his life—to
reduce all his provinces into dependence upon himself and to render
Brandenburg, augmented and centralised, a formidable military power.
During forty-eight years (1640–1688) he pursued the old Hohenzollern
policy of family aggrandisement. His success has earned him the title
of the Great Elector, and the place of the first hero of the Prussian
state. Yet he is remarkable chiefly for his commercial instinct,
imbibed perhaps during his education among the Dutch, the neighbours to
whom he always looked for example and alliance. On occasion he could
display the soldierly instinct of his race, but in time of peace he was
hardly a heroic figure. With domestic virtues specially to be praised
in a monarch of that time he combined a weakness for strong drink which
damaged his health and temper. He took pride in being abreast of the
times, reverenced London and Amsterdam, and was ready to haggle with
foreigners for preferential rates. He wrote a good commercial hand,
planted cabbages in his garden, and hammered out verses which with a
little doctoring might have graced the poet’s corner of a provincial
newspaper. He was a thrifty householder, save when he deemed it
necessary to keep up his position by building a massive palace or
giving a pompous feast. A convinced Protestant, he welcomed serviceable
Huguenots to his capital with more good-will than serviceable papists.
It is not impossible to believe that as a German patriot he took
favours from the Emperor with more inward pleasure than from Louis XIV.
In what Dr. Prothero terms “the ocean of recognised mendacity which
we call diplomacy” he floundered without either repugnance or great
success. He spent his life in unifying his dominions and made a will
which if carried into effect would have dismembered them at his death.
That a man of this stamp is designated Great suggests that he was not
only diligent but that he was also fortunate in the conditions under
which he lived and worked.
In his early years he owed much to the weakness and insignificance
which have already been described. What rival state was thrown into the
shade if Brandenburg was allowed to grow? Thus, at the close of the
Thirty Years’ War, the Hohenzollern line received indulgent treatment.
Their claim to Pomerania was admitted for the eastern half of the
duchy. The western half was indispensable to Sweden, but the rights of
the Elector were bought up at the price of more valuable ecclesiastical
lands scattered between the Mark and his possessions in the West. The
bishoprics of Halberstadt and Minden and the reversion of the rich
archbishopric of Magdeburg were given to Brandenburg, whose part in
the war had been contemptible, by the great Peace of Westphalia, the
fundamental pact of modern Europe. Yet its sacredness was so little
appreciated by the Elector that a few years later he would have renewed
the war, had not outraged Germany held him in.
The Peace of Westphalia had bestowed upon Brandenburg and other
German states a gift of more value than many bishoprics—the gift of
independence. In outward show Frederick William was still a vassal of
the Emperor. He continued to be one of the seven Electors who chose
the head of the Holy Roman Empire and honoured him with lowly homage.
In virtue of his hereditary office of Grand Chamberlain it was the
duty of the Elector of Brandenburg, prescribed by the Golden Bull of
1356, to appear at solemn courts “on horseback, having in his hands a
silver basin with water, and a beautiful towel, and descending from his
horse, to present the water to the Emperor or King of the Romans to
wash his hands.” As a German prince, moreover, he had still to look
to the Emperor for investiture, leadership, and advice. But his right
to determine the creed of his subjects, which the Peace of Westphalia
confirmed, and the right to choose allies outside the Empire, which it
expressly granted, were inconsistent with real vassalage. The gift of
these admitted Brandenburg to a place in the commonwealth of nations.
The Elector had become undisputed master in his own house. Soon his
horizon expanded far beyond the bounds of Germany. Europe, nay more,
as his colonial ventures were to prove, the wide world lay open to the
Hohenzollern. Both at home and abroad he could strike with a freer
hand. But his power, though irresistible in Brandenburg, was made
respectable in Europe only by years of toil. Hence the home policy of
the Great Elector was as straightforward as his foreign policy was
tortuous. To beat down all competing authority, to establish an armed
autocracy, to develop to the utmost all the resources of the State—such
was the plan which the Great Elector designed, which his son and
grandson perfected, and the fruits of which Frederick the Great enjoyed.
By steady pressure, by force, and at times by fraud, the Great Elector
guarded the future of the Hohenzollern power against the danger
of obstructive provincial parliaments. To make the men of Cleves,
Brandenburg, and Ost-Preussen feel themselves brethren was indeed
beyond his power. But he ruthlessly suppressed the institutions which
symbolised their mutual independence of each other and of himself.
Carlyle, the great panegyrist of _coups d’état_, thus describes one
example of
“his measures, soft but strong, and ever stronger to the
needful pitch, with mutinous spirits. One Bürgermeister of
Königsberg, after much stroking on the back, was at length
seized in open Hall, by Electoral writ,—soldiers having first
gently barricaded the principal streets, and brought cannon to
bear upon them. This Bürgermeister, seized in such brief way,
lay prisoner for life; refusing to ask his liberty, though it
was thought he might have had it on asking.”
The Great Elector’s chief legacy was, however, the Prussian army. The
ruler of mere patches of the great northern plain, “a country by nature
the least defensible of all countries,” he girdled it laboriously with
a wall of men. In an age when France alone possessed a large standing
army, this obscure German prince raised his force from a few garrisons
to a host some twenty-seven thousand strong, well drilled and well
appointed.
The lord of Brandenburg now became a _condottiere_ of ever-increasing
reputation. His regiments brought security to his dominions and gold
to his exchequer. In every European struggle their aid was welcome.
On the frozen lagoons by the Baltic and on the shores of Torbay,
on the torrid plain of Warsaw, and in the vine-clad valley of the
Rhine—everywhere the men of the Mark approved themselves good soldiers
and punctual allies. In 1660 the Great Elector netted his profit from
the Northern war by receiving Ost-Preussen free from Polish suzerainty.
The heroic moment of the whole reign came, however, in 1675, when all
the threads of the Elector’s policy—ambition, vengeance against the
Swedes, military creation, domestic organisation—guided him to the
stricken field of Fehrbellin. While playing his part in the West as a
member of the coalition against France, he learned that the Swedes,
his hated neighbours in Pomerania, had been hurled upon his domains by
their patron Louis XIV. He straightway turned his back upon the Rhine
and stalked silently across Germany to rescue his helpless people. His
troops had been beaten by Turenne and exhausted by the long struggle
with rain and mud. Yet he dared to overrule his generals and to strike
straight at superior forces trained in the school of Gustavus and
posted with a river in their rear.
The bold move succeeded. In a hand-to-hand struggle, amid bogs and
dunes, Brandenburg was saved by its chief. At the crisis of the fight
he put himself at the head of a wavering squadron, and with one wild
charge shattered the Swedes and their prestige together. The result of
Fehrbellin was that Brandenburg took rank as the first military power
of Northern Europe and that the land had rest for many years.
Fehrbellin forms a conspicuous landmark on the road to Hohenzollern
greatness, but it is separated by no great interval of time from
a double demonstration of the insignificance of Brandenburg when
confronted with states of the first order. The Emperor flatly refused
to admit the claim of the Elector to portions of Silesia. The King of
France dashed from his lips the cup of triumph over the Swedes. In
an age when rivers were of even greater value than at present, the
great waterway of Brandenburg was the Oder. Ere she could draw full
profit from the Oder, Stettin, with its splendid harbourage and strong
strategic position, must be wrested from alien hands. At Fehrbellin
hope sprang up that the time was come. With all the tenacity of his
nature the Great Elector clung to the task. In 1677 Stettin fell, after
enduring one of the most desolating bombardments in history. Before the
close of 1678 the Swedes were driven from all Western Pomerania. They
descended upon Ost-Preussen, but Frederick William set at naught the
winter cold and his own infirmity, hurried from Cleves to the Vistula,
put his troops on sledges, and dashed at the enemy across the frozen
sea (January, 1679). The triumph of the Elector was complete, but at
the Peace of S. Germain (1679) he was compelled to surrender all his
conquests at the behest of Louis XIV.
In spite of some failures, however, Frederick William by dogged
perseverance accomplished enough to justify his reputation as the
founder of the Prussian State. He is still a force in Germany.
Frederick the Great and all the later Hohenzollerns of renown have paid
homage to his memory. William II. embittered the downfall of Bismarck
by applauding a drama which represented the Great Elector deposing
Schwarzenburg, the hated counsellor of his father. Throughout Prussia
the imperious features of the little hero of Fehrbellin are as familiar
to the people as his deeds.
With the death of the Great Elector in 1688 the age of iron gave way
to the age of tinsel. Frederick, who ruled in his father’s place for a
quarter of a century (1688–1713), was a prince who prized culture above
character and strove to imitate in his provincial court the splendours
of Versailles. From time to time, though less often than in other royal
lines, the business instinct of the Hohenzollerns fails, and of such a
lapse Frederick is an example. Despising the domestic labours of the
Great Elector, he was captivated by those ceremonious shadows which
the German nation is always wont to pursue. Frail, even maimed, since
childhood, he developed a passion for pageants, robes, and titles. He
could not endure the promotion of his equals to rank higher than his
own. If the Dutch Statthalter rose to be William III. of England and
the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg to be Elector George of Hanover, might
not he himself, as master of the best troops in Germany, also claim
to rise? When in 1696 he was about to visit William of Orange at the
Hague he declared that he could not consent to sit upon an ordinary
seat while an armchair was placed for the King. The interview therefore
was accomplished standing, and when William returned the visit he found
armchairs of equal dignity set for the Elector and for himself.
Seldom has a ruler’s weakness done better service to his State.
Brandenburg was shielded by its poverty from the ordinary fate of
German states whose rulers tried to copy the profusion of the kings of
France. Frederick, moreover, had not the force of will to break with
all the traditions of the Great Elector. He continued to take part
in every struggle as an auxiliary, but in none as a principal. His
country thus enjoyed the glories of war without its penalties. It was
under the command of Prince Eugene, Austria’s greatest general, that
Brandenburgers helped to overthrow the French before Turin (1706). And
since a large army is the most splendid trapping of monarchy, Frederick
made his army very large. He inherited 27,000 men, he bequeathed nearly
50,000 to his son.
The climax of his reign was reached in 1701, when he prevailed upon
the Emperor to make him King of Prussia. In a double sense it may be
said with truth that he owed his crown to his weakness. It is generally
believed that the chief motive which prompted him to sue for it was
vanity. For months he could think and speak of nothing else. When at
last the imperial license came, the enraptured Elector quitted Berlin
in midwinter and spent twelve days in moving with a pompous train to
Königsberg. There, with every detail of ceremony that his imagination
could suggest, he placed the crown upon his head. It is doubtful
whether a more sober ruler would have prized a throne as he did, and
doubtful too whether the Emperor would have consented to the elevation
of a prince less obviously feeble. But Frederick had carried on without
reserve the old Hohenzollern tradition of standing well with the head
of the German world. He had even given back to Austria the territory
of Schwiebus, which the Emperor had assigned to the Great Elector in
settlement of whatever claim the Hohenzollerns possessed to portions
of Silesia. Now he was prepared to uphold the Hapsburg cause in the War
of the Spanish Succession. What harm could there be, the Emperor may
well have asked himself, in promoting a vassal so devoted as this?
Forty years later, Austria had bitter cause to rue the error of her
chief. From the very first the crown aggrandised the Hohenzollern
dynasty. It consecrated their ambition, enlarged their horizon, and
gave them, as the Lord’s anointed, a new claim upon the devotion of
their subjects. The Order of the Black Eagle, which for two centuries
has been the coveted prize of service to their state, signalised the
coronation of Frederick I.
The Great Elector and the first king of Prussia have this in
common—that whatever may be thought of their achievements it is
difficult to mistake the men themselves. Of the second king, Frederick
William I. (1713–1740), the father of Frederick the Great, the exact
opposite is true. His life-work, the establishment of the royal power
“like a rock of bronze,” is patent to all. He himself, on the other
hand, was a mystery to his own children. His most gifted admirer,
Carlyle, sets out to paint a prophet and ends by portraying something
very like a madman. His theory of his own sovereign office was as
mystical as his practice of ruling was simple. He regarded himself,
it has been said, as the servant of an imaginary master—the King of
Prussia—under whose eye he lived and worked. Baser princes looked on
their royalty as a privilege to be enjoyed. To Frederick William
it was a duty calling for endless toil. He struggled to check every
detail of government with his own hand, as though Prussia were a single
manor and he the squire. A French critic (Lavisse) thus portrays him
wrestling with his ever-multiplying tasks:
“Have we not too many officials,” the King enquires. “Could
not several places be merged into one? We must see if some of
the officials cannot be put down. Why is not the beer so good
everywhere as at Potsdam? In order to have wool we must have
sheep. Now in Prussia there are nearly as many wolves as sheep.
Quick, let me have a minute upon the destruction of wolves.
How comes it that the salt tax has brought in less money this
year than last from the district of Halberstadt? The number of
officials has not diminished, has it? They must have eaten as
much salt as last year. There must therefore be fraud or waste
somewhere. The Superintendent of the Salt Department must be
warned to manage matters better than he has done of late. Can
it be that my subjects buy salt in Hanover or Poland? Every
importer of salt must be hanged.”
His violence was and still is notorious. He flung plates at his
children, caned his son in public, cudgelled the inhabitants of his
capital, and flung the judges down-stairs. He forced his queen, the
sister of the English King, to drink to the downfall of England. He
vilified everything French, and insulted the British Ambassador so
seriously that he conceived himself bound to leave Berlin. Yet he kept
Prussia at peace steadily enough to earn for himself the reputation of
a mere bully whom the Emperor could lead by the nose.
In spite of the contradictions of his character, however, the broad
principles of his reign are clear. Having stripped the state of the
veneer of luxury with which Frederick I. had disguised its poverty,
he took up and developed further the ideals of the Great Elector. He
made the royal power absolute in the state, and increased the army
till a population of about two and a half million souls supported
the unheard-of number of 83,000 men under arms. These were drilled
to such a pitch of perfection that Macaulay could say that, placed
beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and St. James’s
would have appeared an awkward squad. Yet this mighty force was used
for little save to secure the frontiers of Prussia and the rights of
all German Protestants. In territory the “Sergeant King” gained only
from the wreck of Sweden part of the prize which the Great Elector
had grudgingly relinquished at the behest of Louis XIV.—the mouth of
the Oder and with it the islands of Usedom and Wollin, and Western
Pomerania as far as the river Peene (1720).
[Illustration: PRUSSIA
After the Congress of Vienna, 1815]
In the home department, on the other hand, Frederick William I. made
a conspicuous advance from the point reached by his grandfather. He
showed the same military zeal, the same practical insight, the same
determination to set to rights with his own hand whatever in his
dominion was governed amiss, the same contempt for higher education,
the same benevolence towards the persecuted of other lands who might be
made useful to Prussia. But he showed also a power of grasping and of
simplifying the whole system of administration such as few rulers
have ever possessed. His great Edict of 1723 removed friction from the
working of the Prussian state. Thanks to this, his son Frederick found
the organisation described in the sixth chapter of this book—a machine
of government answering to every touch of the royal hand. He found at
the same time a firm tradition in favour of thrift, diligence, and
activity in the steersman of the state. We have traced the growth of
Prussia to 1740; let us now turn to the story of the prince who in that
year linked her fortunes with his own.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]