FREDERICK AS CROWN PRINCE, 1712–1740
What manner of man was the first-born son of Frederick William,
known to history as Frederick the Great, and what were the causes
that made him such as he was? To answer either question is a task of
uncommon difficulty. Even to those who were regarded as his intimates
Frederick remained an enigma all his life. In his early trials he
acquired, as Carlyle happily expresses it, “the art of wearing among
his fellow-creatures a polite cloak-of-darkness,” and became what he
in great measure still remains, “a man politely impregnable to the
intrusion of human curiosity.” And if it passes our wit adequately
to describe his personality, how shall we determine and distinguish
the factors which created it? No adding together of influences
will suffice. Such enquiries lead us far beyond the bounds of mere
arithmetic. Of Frederick’s nature, as of every man’s, a greater share
was built up in ages which have left no record than in the generations
whose history we can trace. If therefore we next endeavour to indicate
the influences of his parentage and his surroundings, let us avoid the
delusion that these alone made him what he was. In Frederick’s case,
too, it is perhaps equally needful to beware of the converse error. His
personality, like his policy, was not untouched by ordinary influences.
Parents, tutors, friends, nation, home, even religion—each bestowed
something upon one who might on a too hasty scrutiny be pronounced a
freak of nature—the ugly duckling of the Hohenzollern brood.
Frederick’s birth, on January 24, 1712, remedied the anxieties of a
line which had gained too much from the extinction of allied lines not
to be keenly sensitive to its own lack of heirs. His father, Frederick
William, gave vent to rude transports of joy at the arrival of a male
heir. Frederick I., the royal grandfather, who had himself a third time
plunged into wedlock in the hope of safeguarding the succession to
the new Prussian crown, seized the opportunity to astonish Berlin by
the pomp of the infant’s christening. The Prussian nation, living in
tranquillity under the Hohenzollerns, shared in their rejoicing.
The infant prince represented many noble lines, and, it might almost
be said, two separate civilisations. Frederick William was a kind of
Prussian Squire Western. His wife, Sophia Dorothea, was a princess of
the rising House of Hanover, a lady soon to be nicknamed Olympia from
her majestic bearing as queen. Through her and through his grandmother,
a clever daughter of Sophia of Hanover, a thin strain of Stuart blood
flowed in Frederick’s veins. His great-grandmother, the wife of the
Great Elector, was a daughter of the House of Orange, born at the
moment of its triumph over Spain. A generation farther back the
Hohenzollerns had married into the House of the Palatinate, which in
1618 threw for the Bohemian crown and lost. But the virtues of every
Protestant House in Europe could not compensate for the infirm health
which had assailed both the father and the son of the Great Elector,
and which there seemed reason to fear had descended to the offspring of
his grandson Frederick William. Two older sons had died in infancy, a
daughter, Wilhelmina, though she grew up and married, was never robust,
and Frederick himself seems in his childhood to have been often ailing.
The home circle of this delicate prince was surely the strangest in the
world. The royal family of Prussia in the reign of Frederick William
I. was hardly a family and hardly royal. The monarch seemed to regard
his sceptre chiefly as a superior kind of cudgel. As Prussian King, and
therefore _ex officio_ the father of his people, he could treat them
as children, could order them to be anything or to build anything or
to pay anything, with even less risk of resistance than an Elector of
Brandenburg might have had to fear. He was, it is true, on a footing
of equality with foreign kings in negotiating for a treaty or a
province or a bride. But apart from his acceptance of the perquisites
of royalty, his life was one long protest against all that the world
associated with the name of king. Intolerant of state and ceremony, he
agonised his chamberlains by his behaviour. His recreations were such
as befitted a bargeman on the Havel or an overgrown loafer kidnapped to
serve in the King of Prussia’s giant grenadiers. In that snuff-taking
age, a king whose hobby was to smoke pipes in a kind of glorified
tavern-circle known as the Tobacco Parliament earned the reputation
that would fall in our own day to a king who should chew and spit.
Frederick William drank himself to death before he was fifty-two.
Though an artist, if not a scholar, he drove Wolf, the philosopher,
from his dominions and made Gundling President of the Academy of
Letters because he amused the Tobacco Parliament when in his cups. As a
sportsman he slew wild swine by the thousand and forced his subjects to
buy their carcasses at a fixed price. He ordered his officials to spend
only six thousand thalers on the entertainment of Peter the Great, but
to give out that it cost him thirty or forty thousand. His mixture of
fervent piety and immorality suggests that he was hardly sane, and his
foreign policy does not discountenance the suggestion. In some of his
officials he placed complete confidence, even when proofs that they
were bribing his envoys abroad to send home false news were in his
hands. He rushed upon others with his cudgel, first breaking their
heads and then cashiering them. What he was to his children may be
inferred from the fact that his daughter became his bitter satirist and
his son his bitter foe.
Such was the father who directed Frederick’s education. His talent for
detail was always at the service of the state. It could be devoted to
no worthier object than the training of the future king. At the age of
nine years, therefore, Frederick found every hour of the day assigned
to some part of the scheme of education by which the crowned Podsnap
designed to make him such another as himself.
For all its minuteness, the scheme failed in its main object. It
failed because Frederick William was not the sole factor in moulding
and inspiring his son. In the royal household were two trembling
conspirators against the tyrant—his wife and his daughter. Sophia
Dorothea and Wilhelmina formed with Frederick a trio who sighed after
the genteel. Loathing the pipe-clayed Teutonism in which their lord
delighted, they longed for newer fashions and society more polite, for
the wit and gallantry of the French court, and for the splendour of
their own opulent kinsfolk at Saint James’s. Their lines had fallen in
far less pleasant places. In Berlin, a quiet country town with dull
surroundings and a trying climate, they had at least palaces, parties,
and scandal. In Wusterhausen, to this day a lonely village, they were
in exile; and Wusterhausen was the favourite residence of the King. The
Europe in which they lived, it must be remembered, was a Europe which
believed with all its heart that whatever Louis XIV. might have been
in politics, he was beyond doubt the Apollo of culture. German princes
prided themselves on speaking French, on dressing _à la française_,
on building palaces that might be named in the same breath with
Versailles. Frederick’s mother spoke French so well that a Huguenot
refugee paid her the supreme compliment of enquiring whether she
understood German. His sister’s memoirs, like his own, are French in
language and in inspiration. What sympathy, we may wonder, could there
be between these ladies and a boor who hated everything French, whether
language, literature, art, cookery, or dress, and whose ideal of life
was to sleep on straw in a barn, wash at daybreak in a tub, don a plain
uniform, inspect farms, account-books, and soldiers, gorge himself with
rude German dishes in the middle of the day, snore under a tree in the
afternoon, and devote the evening to tobacco, buffoonery, and strong
drink?
It is not surprising that, when the King’s scheme of discipline
outraged his son instead of moulding him, mother and sister were
at hand with ready sympathy. The wayward boy never forgot their
kindness, nor the indulgence of the tutors who connived at a more
humane education than Frederick William had commanded them to inflict.
Cordially as the King detested French culture, he did not venture to
exclude it from a leading part in the education of his son. A French
lady, Madame de Roucoulle, was entrusted with the oversight of his
earliest years. Madame de Camas, whom he called Mamma, was the wife of
a Frenchman. His tutor, Duhan, was a Huguenot. French was at that time
the universal language of the polite and learned world. Frederick, who
never learned English and was forbidden to learn Latin, therefore drew
all his mental supplies from French originals or French translations.
German he never spoke or wrote with ease. To him it stood for whatever
was dull in his education,—for windy sermons every Sunday, lessons
of nearly two hours a day in the Christian religion, books full of
dismal pedantry, the speech of boors and of his father. Thus he early
acquired from France ideas which he proclaimed throughout his life.
That literary creation is the highest achievement of man, and that next
to creation stand patronage and culture; that religion is superstition;
that the enlightened man is he who views with calm not only the rubs of
fortune but also the frailties of mankind—such were the abiding traces
of Frederick’s education. The King, as may readily be believed, did not
fail to remark something of this and to loathe it. He leaped to the
conclusion that a boy who preferred French to German, and flute-playing
to parades, was a monster who would ruin Prussia. It never occurred to
him that his own scheme could be imperfect, and life became one long
collision between father and son.
Yet Frederick’s most irritating delinquencies—his delight in soft
living and secret dissipation, his distaste for the uniform and duty
of a soldier, his contempt for Germans and their tongue—may fairly
be ascribed in great part to mere youthful squeamishness and to the
tyranny of the King. Had Frederick William been wise enough to trust
to the future and to the past, to reflect that in the long line of
Hohenzollerns none had been traitor to his House, that a lad who could
think for himself would be more easily influenced than coerced, that
at the worst he himself was not twenty-four years older than his son
and might train the state to survive Frederick II. as after the Great
Elector it had survived Frederick I.—had he in short been either a
sympathetic father or a man of real penetration, then history might
have heard nothing of either the new Junius Brutus or the Ogre of
Potsdam, and the million victims of Frederick’s wars might have been
spared.
Unhappily for his son and for the world, Frederick William was neither
sensible nor sympathetic. His aversion to an heir who refused to
resemble himself was doubled when the heir became the advocate of a
matrimonial policy which he came to regard with loathing. From the hour
of Frederick’s birth the dearest wish of the Hanoverian House, and of
Sophia Dorothea most of all, had been to unite more closely the royal
lines of England and Prussia. At length a double marriage was proposed.
The Prince of Wales was to marry Wilhelmina, and Frederick his cousin
Amelia, daughter of George II. In 1730, however, England and Prussia
were estranged, yet Frederick William knew that his household had not
given up their darling project. Flouted as a father and as a statesman,
he treated his son so ill as to lend colour to the suspicion that he
wished him dead. Not content with impounding his books, forbidding him
the flute, compelling him to see his mother only by stealth, the tyrant
actually rained blows upon him in public, even in the camp of the
Saxon King. “Had I been so treated by my father,” he is said to have
exclaimed, “I would have blown my brains out, but this fellow has no
honour.”
Unfortunately for Frederick William, the youth whom he thus outraged
was Crown Prince of Prussia, and as such by no means lacked friends.
To England, to Austria, and to his father’s ministers he was an
important pawn in the game of politics. Some of the younger officers
lent him countenance in the hope of favours to come. But the dearest
friend of his life, Lieutenant von Katte, loved him for himself rather
than for what he might be able to bestow. To Katte the prince confided
his fixed purpose to flee from a tyranny that was past endurance.
Together they planned to make use of the opportunity of escape which
might arise when Frederick should approach the French frontier in the
course of a forthcoming tour with his father among the German courts.
[Illustration: PRINCESS SOPHIA DOROTHEA, DAUGHTER OF KING GEORGE THE
FIRST.
AFTER THE PAINTING BY HIRSEMAN.]
On August 4, 1730, the attempt was made. The confederates tried to
steal from the royal camp at dawn and to ride into France. Such a
flight was not without precedent in Hohenzollern history. Frederick’s
grandfather, sharing the general belief that his stepmother had
poisoned his brother and meant to poison himself, had first sought
shelter at Cassel with his aunt and at a later date had quitted the
Great Elector’s court altogether. But for the heir to a crown to flee
beyond the bounds of Germany was a still graver step. The youth of
eighteen had hardly calculated the probable consequences of success.
Where was Frederick William’s heir to find a safe asylum? Louis XV. was
not likely to be to him what Louis XIV. had been to the Old Pretender.
George of England would hardly expose Hanover to the vengeance of
the King of Prussia. His envoy had in fact refused to countenance
the scheme. Nor would the Emperor care to sacrifice the Prussian
alliance to mere sentiment. Even if Frederick should succeed in finding
a refuge for himself, he would none the less have left two dear
hostages at the mercy of the King. “Your mother would have got into the
greatest misery,” declared Frederick William a year later. “Your sister
I would have cast for life into a place where she would never have seen
sun and moon again.”
Thanks, however, to the vigilance of Colonel von Rochow, his keeper,
and to the panic of his page, Frederick did not even mount the horse
that was to have borne him out of Germany. His abortive attempt
inaugurated one of the strangest tragedies in history. From the very
fact that he was the guest of other princes Frederick William could not
act in haste. The scheme was betrayed to him at Mannheim on August 6th,
and he ordered von Rochow to deliver his son to him at his own town of
Wesel, alive or dead. In this mood they continued the tour of pleasure,
sailing down the Rhine and visiting the potentates upon its shores. At
last, on the evening of the 12th, they reached Wesel. Frederick William
at once interrogated his son, who lied and protested his submission.
The King replied by despatching him to Spandau under the care of a
general, who was enjoined to frustrate any attempt at rescue by killing
his prisoner.
Spandau is the fortress near Berlin where to-day the Prussian sentries
guard some millions of the treasure wrung from France. It was not
deemed safe enough to keep the Prince of Prussia. “He is very cunning,”
wrote the King, “and will have a hundred inventions for making his
escape.” A stronger gaol was sought for. In a sombre plain east of
the capital lies Cüstrin, whose grim fortress marks the spot where
the sluggish Wartha gliding down from Poland silently joins the Oder.
There, on September 4th, Frederick was imprisoned. On the way he had
faced a tribunal of soldiers and lawyers with a jaunty confidence which
showed that though he might cower before the King he had not forgotten
that he was still Crown Prince of Prussia. It was rumoured that he
had poked fun at Grumbkow, his father’s most trusted counsellor. For
himself he asked no favours, but avowed his responsibility for all that
Katte had done amiss.
A fortnight later, on September 16th, the commission examined him
again. In the meantime he had begun to understand the nature of a
gaol. His father, who lived in such a state of frenzy that he ordered
that the tongue which spoke of this affair should be cut out, had
not scrupled to condemn him to solitary confinement, a penalty often
destructive of health and not seldom of reason. He was clad in brown
prison dress, fed on the humblest fare, and deprived of light at seven
o’clock in the evening. Thus prepared, he was subjected to a merciless
inquisition. After more than one hundred and eighty questions of fact,
came two which the King had commanded the interrogators to add. “Do
you wish that your life should be granted to you or not?” “I submit
to the King’s mercy,” answered Frederick, adding in pencil, when the
report was laid before him, “and to his will.” “Since by violating
your honour,” ran the last question of all, “you have made yourself
incapable of succeeding to the throne, will you renounce the succession
by an abdication that shall be confirmed by the whole Roman Empire—to
save your life?” “My life is not over-dear to me,” replied the Prince,
“but Your Majesty would surely not be so ungracious to me”—and he added
a prayer for pardon. The King tore up the petition and applied his
genius for detail to a code of rules for the torment of his heir. No
one was to speak to the prisoner. Three times a day the door of his
room might be opened, but within four minutes it must be made fast
again. Mute attendants were to set before Frederick food which they
had cut in pieces, since the royal command deprived him of knife and
fork. For Katte Frederick William had ordered the rack, but on the
representations of Grumbkow the order was cancelled. For his son he
discovered a torture which Grumbkow himself was to apply. “He must be
told,” decreed the King, “that no one thinks of him any more; that my
wife will not hear his name; that his sister Wilhelmina has fallen
under my displeasure, that she is shut up in Berlin, and will very soon
be sent into the country.”
The problem before Frederick William, whose wrath increased as he
experienced the difficulty of laying to his son’s account any definite
crime, was to crush his heir without imperilling Prussia. On October
11th Frederick declared to the commission that he was ready to renounce
the succession. On October 16th the King avowed in writing his desire
to make his second son his heir. But to do this while Frederick
lived was dangerous, and on what charge could he be put to death?
Assassination, though it might rectify the succession to Philip of
Spain or Peter of Russia, was to a Hohenzollern simply impossible. And
Frederick William was not entirely sovereign over his son. It was true
that a Prussian subject had no longer any right of appeal from the
decrees of the Prussian King. But the Prussian King was also Elector
of Brandenburg, and therefore a vassal of the Emperor. The heir to
the Electorate of Brandenburg was equally a prince of the Empire and
as such could appeal unto Cæsar. Moreover, no proof could be found
that Frederick was a traitor. He had neither acted nor tried to act in
collusion with any foreign Power. His father suspected that England was
at the bottom of the plot, but no evidence of this could be found. By
no severity could his son be brought to confess more than a design to
run away. Foreign sovereigns protested against violence which degraded
the royal caste.
It is difficult to see with what hope the baffled King insisted on a
quibble which might make out his son to be technically a criminal.
Frederick, by no choice of his own, was a colonel in the Prussian army.
On October 25th a military court met at the King’s bidding to try him
and his accomplices for desertion.
The court consisted of fifteen officers, three from each of five
grades. The members of each grade, after deliberating apart,
handed their votes to a president, the aged Lieutenant-Colonel von
Schulenburg, who summed up their verdicts and added a sixth vote of
his own. With regard to the Crown Prince, all were unanimous. Declaring
themselves incompetent to pronounce upon affairs of state and of the
royal family, they commended the exalted penitent to His Majesty’s
supreme and paternal mercy. Katte was condemned by three grades to
death, by two to lifelong imprisonment. Von Schulenburg voted for
the latter, which by military law carried the day, since it was less
severe. The King denounced their criminal leniency and clamoured for
“justice,” but von Schulenburg stood firm, appealing to a Higher Power.
Thereupon Frederick William decreed “that Katte, although in conformity
with the laws he has deserved to be torn with red-hot pincers and
hanged for the crime of high-treason which he has committed, be removed
from life to eternity by the sword, out of consideration for his
family. In informing Katte of this sentence, the Council will tell him
that it grieves His Majesty, but that it is better that he should die
than that justice should entirely leave the world.”
Under a sentence which no consensus of civilised opinion, no
high-placed appeal, no murmur of disaffection could reduce, the doomed
man journeyed slowly to Cüstrin. Frederick, who believed that all
would go well with himself and his friend, was cheerful still. At five
o’clock on the morning of November 6th he was awakened by two officers
who told him that Katte was that morning to be put to death and that
he must witness it. “What are these ill tidings that you bring me?”
he is said to have exclaimed. “Lord Jesus! rather take my life.”
Before his judges he had steadfastly declared that Katte’s guilt lay
at his door. Now for two terrible hours he wailed, wrung his hands,
burst into tears, sent to his friend to beg forgiveness, prayed for a
respite while a courier should lay at the King’s feet whatever he might
desire from his son—renunciation of the succession, consent to lifelong
imprisonment, nay, his own life if Katte’s might be spared. His
honourable clamour moves the heart of posterity, but it could vary no
line upon the parchment on which the King had set down even the numbers
of the soldiers who were to attend the execution. Seven o’clock struck,
and the dismal procession filed into the courtyard which stretched from
the fortress-wall to the Oder. As the King had commanded, Frederick was
led to the window of his cell. He saw his friend, who had received the
communion, standing calm and brave amid the soldiers and awaiting with
bared head the recital of the sentence of death. The prince kissed his
hand to him and cried aloud for his forgiveness. Katte laid his finger
upon his lips, bowed respectfully, and answered that there was nothing
to forgive. He then bade his comrades farewell, knelt to receive the
chaplain’s blessing, and with prayer upon his lips submitted to the
fatal stroke.
[Illustration: FREDERICK THE SECOND.
AFTER THE PAINTING BY CUNNINGHAM.]
Frederick had fainted. It was the duty of the chaplain to pass straight
from the dead offender to the living, and to exhort him to repent.
But nature made this royal order of none effect. The prince, when he
came to, could only stare dumbly at the gloomy pall which draped
the body of his friend. At two o’clock some citizens brought a coffin
and bore away the corpse, but Frederick could not withdraw his gaze
from the place of execution. All that day he took no food. At night he
passed from delirium into a second swoon—then fell to raving anew. When
morning broke he declared that Katte was standing before him. But the
very violence of his emotion made the reaction swift. On the same day
he told the doctor that he was well and asked him for a certain powder.
Next day, after much talk with the chaplain on matters of religion, he
learned from him that Katte’s fate was not to be his own. Nine days
later he made peace with Grumbkow, who came at the head of yet another
Commission to exact an oath of strict obedience to the King, and to
open the prison doors a little wider. Before Christmas he was reported
to be “as merry as a lark.”
The conduct of father and son during this crisis is peculiarly worthy
of attention because each was his own counsellor, and because Frederick
never again lay under a scrutiny so searching. In the summer of 1730
the King reaped all that he had sown during his son’s boyhood. He found
in his heir a youth whom he distrusted and despised but could not get
rid of. He therefore began the task anew and inaugurated a second
education sterner than the first. He had slain his son’s friend, not,
as he professed, “that justice should not entirely leave the world,”
but that he might, in spite of past failures, fashion an heir after
his own heart. The loyal father of the dead man found consolation in
viewing his loss as a sacrifice to this design. That this, which he
believed to be indispensable to the welfare of Prussia, was the leading
motive of the King’s policy, grew clearer as his outbursts of wrath
against his son became less frequent and less fierce. It inspired
Frederick also with a leading motive—to beguile his father into
believing that he had his way.
His first education made him a rebel; his second, a hypocrite. Katte’s
death had taught him once and for all that life would be tolerable only
if he gained his father’s confidence. To this end he applied every art
which a fertile brain could devise and an unscrupulous actor could
practise. He exhausted the language of contrition for the past. He
promised full amendment for the future. He sent letters, as many as his
father would consent to receive, and the burden of all was that he was
indeed a new man, a second Frederick William, adoring the things that
he had burned and burning those that he had adored. The new Frederick
is interested in tall soldiers, his father’s hobby, and longs to put
on the uniform which he had been wont to call his winding-sheet. He
relishes theology and after argument abandons what his father calls
“the damned heresy” of predestination. He professes to find pleasure
in the work of the estates committee and informs his father with
ecstasy that the rent of some royal domains can be raised. He tries to
propitiate the King of Prussia as Philip of Spain tried to propitiate
the English people, by pretending to a taste for beer. Even his opinion
of his own family has swiftly changed. He now pretends to realise that
his mother is a mischievous intriguer; to be content that his sister
shall abjure the throne of England and marry an obscure Hohenzollern
of Baireuth; to desire that his father may live to see his children’s
children grow up around him. Finally he receives at the hands of
Frederick William a regiment and a wife and withdraws into the marshy
solitudes of Brandenburg to make the best of both.
It is the duty of Frederick’s biographer to mark from Frederick’s
point of view the stages of this second education. The first period
lasted rather more than two and a half years, from November, 1730,
to June, 1733, and therefore roughly corresponds with the period of
residence at an English university which is usually enjoyed at the age
at which the Crown Prince had then arrived. This course began and ended
with a crime. Katte was done to death for a military offence which a
tribunal representing the most sternly disciplined army in the world
had declared not to be death-worthy—though their commander-in-chief
and king demanded another verdict. A fortnight later, that is, on
November 20, 1730, Frederick was admitted as a humble participant in
the proceedings of the local Chamber of War and Domains—to assist in
duties which he privately styled the work of brigands. He was to study
agriculture under the Director, Hille, and in general to survey the
foundations of the Prussian State.
He was still a close prisoner living at Cüstrin under the heavy cloud
of the King’s displeasure. At Christmas he fell ill and his father
wrote on the margin of a report which told him of it: “If there were
any good in him he would die, but I am certain that he will not die,
for weeds never disappear.” He was forbidden all books save bible,
hymn-book, and Arndt’s _True Christianity_, a work of devotion dear
to humble believers in many lands. Geometry and fortifications were
classed as “amusement” and forbidden, along with cards, music, dancing,
summer-clothing, and meals outside the house. Again, as in the early
days of August, Frederick William entrusted him to the care of three
nobles. These were to refuse to converse with him on any subject
save “the Word of God, the constitution of the land, manufactures,
police, agriculture, accounts, leases, and lawsuits.” Such a scheme
of education, aimed at compounding a king out of a recluse and an
attorney, it is hardly necessary to discuss. We hardly know whether
to think the King a simpleton for imagining that he would be obeyed,
or a fool for continuing to issue minute directions if he knew that
he would not. What is certain is that Frederick’s household revelled
in forbidden gifts, diverted itself as best it could, and pressed
unceasingly for further freedom. One pleasure, as Frederick William
knew in his heart, sweetened his son’s captivity,—in exile he was at
least safe from the sight of his father.
The first dawn of forgiveness took place on August 15, 1731, the King’s
forty-third birthday. Then Frederick received his father in his shabby
lodging, kissed his feet, listened to his reproaches, confessed once
more that it was he who had led Katte astray, and finally received
the royal embrace before all the people. Soon came permission to
engage in the practical study of agriculture, attended by an increase
of liberty and even of amusement. The King still imposed restrictions
upon Frederick’s reading and ordered him to sing hymns. He was never
to be alone or to speak privately to anybody, especially to any girl
or woman. Within a fortnight of his father’s visit he had begun his
courtship of the young wife of Colonel von Wreech.
The remaining months of the year 1731 brought Frederick great pleasure
and a heavy blow. He grew in favour with his father, who in November
summoned him to appear for a short time at Berlin and at last promised
to restore to him his rank in the army. But at the same time he lost
his sister. Wilhelmina was forced by her father into an unhappy
marriage with the Margrave of Baireuth, a humble cousin whose title to
the favour of his bride was that by accepting him she propitiated her
father and freed herself from a still less bearable suitor. Elated by
the progress of his own fortunes, Frederick seems for the moment to
have been insensible to her trouble and to his own loss. By the King’s
order he paid his sister a visit. But he treated her coldly when they
met, broke off the conversation abruptly, and walked into the room
to which her husband had courteously withdrawn. “He scanned him for
some time from head to foot,” writes Wilhelmina, “and after addressing
to him a few words of cold politeness he withdrew.... I could not
recognise that dear brother who had cost me so many tears and for whom
I had sacrificed myself.” Frederick’s standard of behaviour towards his
social inferiors was however revealed by other incidents at this time.
His tutor, Hille, was a man of the middle classes. In his official
position he received reports from a Landrat, or Sheriff, who was of
noble birth. A reference by Hille to these reports drew from the Crown
Prince the remark that it was singular that a nobleman should render
account to a man of the middle class. Next year he wrote to Grumbkow
that his daughter was “without charms and without ancestors.”
[Illustration: ELIZABETH CHRISTINA OF BRUNSWICK.
FROM AN OLD PRINT.]
In 1732 Frederick experienced another pleasure and a far severer
blow. He was allowed to leave Cüstrin, but he left it under sentence
of marriage. This had been decreed in consequence of a curious chain
of events. Frederick’s preceptors had remarked that he scorned
administrative detail but displayed a taste for high politics. This was
evident in his suggestions for the disposal of his hand. Now he would
marry, if he must marry at all, Anne of Russia; now the Archduchess
Maria Theresa, renouncing his succession in Prussia. This suggestion
was reported by Grumbkow to the Emperor’s great minister, Eugene.
The old diplomat scented danger in such large ideas and urged that
the Crown Prince of Prussia should be bound to the car of Austria.
He might be encouraged to borrow money from the Emperor, and married
to Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, a niece of the Empress. Frederick
William, still hot against England, with whose Court his queen
continued to intrigue, cheerfully assented to the match.
In a honeyed letter of February 4, 1732, the King broke the news to
his son. “She is a creature who fears God,” he wrote, “and that is
everything.” The bridegroom elect thought otherwise. He wrote to
Grumbkow that he hated severe virtue, and rather than marry a fanatic,
always grimacing and looking shocked, he would prefer the worst
character in Berlin. “When all is said and done he cried, there will be
one more unhappy princess in the world.” “I shall put her away as soon
as I am master,” he twice declared. “Am I of the wood out of which they
carve good husbands?” “I love the fair sex, my love is very inconstant;
I am for enjoyment, afterwards I despise it. I will keep my word, I
will marry, but that is enough; _Bonjour, Madame, et bon chemin_.”
Frederick’s marriage, by which he brought to an end the sternest period
of his second education, was a crime, but the bridegroom was not
guiltless. All his outcry was made in secret. To the King, in whose
hands his fate lay, he showed himself all submission. Frederick William
had in his own young days received the names of three princesses from
whom his father desired him to choose a bride. He protested with
success against such compulsion and his marriage with Sophia Dorothea
was something of a love-match. Here was an argument to which he could
hardly shut his ears. His son preferred to purchase greater liberty
for himself by condemning to a life of misery an innocent creature who
had never harmed him. At the same time, by making a happy home-life
impossible, he shut out what was perhaps the last chance that he might
become in any sense of the words a good man.
For the moment, however, his submission brought him freedom. On March
10, 1732, he went through the formal ceremony of betrothal. Some of
the guests remarked that his eyes were filled with tears and that he
turned abruptly from his betrothed to a lady who was supposed to be
the mistress of his heart. But a year’s respite was granted him. While
Austrian statesmen schemed to turn the timid, ignorant Elizabeth of
Brunswick-Bevern into a woman of the world, who might make her husband
a Hapsburg partisan, Frederick was learning his work as colonel not far
from the field of Fehrbellin. It was drudgery, but it was not Cüstrin.
After a year of it he wrote: “I have just drilled, I drill, I shall
drill. That is all the news. But it is delightful to indulge in a few
moments’ breathing-space, and I would rather drill here from dawn to
dusk than live as a rich man at Berlin.”
June 12, 1733, was Frederick’s wedding-day. The Austrian diplomats, who
had made the match, went far towards flinging away their advantage. At
the last moment they dared to suggest that Frederick William should
accommodate the Emperor by entering into a new combination which
assigned an English bride to his son. The King was furious at the
slight, and the marriage was only another step towards the alienation
of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns.
After his marriage Frederick’s father still dictated his movements and
kept him short of money. But the period of dragooning was over, and
it becomes important to enquire what Frederick William had achieved
by this stage of the second education begun with crime and carried on
with cruelty. One answer to this question must be mentioned because it
is supported by the authority of Carlyle. He holds that the execution
of Katte was just, that the imprisonment of Frederick was salutary,
that the King was a father yearning to reconcile his son with God and
with himself, and that he was not only just and affectionate but also
successful. An opinion more widely held is that the execution and
imprisonment were unjust but politic, that reasons of state excused
them, that their righteousness was proved by their success, and that by
them Prussia gained a hero who made her great among the nations of the
earth as none but he was able.
On reflection we may think it strange that results so great should
have been achieved by a scheme of education so stupid. The King owed
the best features of his plan to suggestions from outside. He had
condemned his son to tedious, nay, dangerous idleness: it was Wolden
who obtained for him a grudging permission to work. He had set him to
learn agriculture by attending board meetings: it was Hille who urged
that he should be allowed to see how farming was carried on. The united
efforts of Hille and Wolden could not convince him that the heir to the
throne needed any books save books of devotion. These faults, though
significant, were errors of detail. But the King’s whole plan is open
to graver objections. It is in fact based on three of the commonest
yet most fatal errors with regard to education. That boys are dough or
putty to be placed in a mould and beaten till they take the exact shape
of it, that a youth who is destined for a given career will succeed
best by trying to make himself a facsimile of some one else who has
been successful in it, and that it is good to limit training to the
acquisition of professional aptitude—these are errors which Frederick
William held in common with pedants and doctrinaires of every era.
From Frederick’s birth onwards he had laboured to give him his own
characteristics, even his own vices, in the hope that as his son’s
conduct grew like his own, so also would his policy. This was still
the aim of all his measures. But the second education is distinguished
from the first by the ghastly object-lesson with which it opens and
by its appearance of success. The death of Katte affords the measure
of Frederick William’s powers as a teacher. It imperilled the health,
even the reason of his pupil, but assuredly it was not forgotten. Are
we then to infer that the King’s system atoned for its faults by its
triumph? That Frederick was bullied into love for his father seems
incredible. It is true that in public he spoke little ill of him,
either before his death, when it would have been dangerous to himself,
or after it, when it would have been detrimental to the office which
he had inherited. But neither his motto nor his conduct after 1730
betokened love. “Far from love, far from the thunderbolt,” are not
words of affection, nor is it filial piety to cozen, to flatter, and
to shun. He addressed the King as “most all-gracious Father,” while
he secretly petitioned the foes of Prussia for funds wherewith to play
upon his weakness for tall recruits. It was like a foretaste of death,
he said, when a hussar appeared to command his presence at Berlin.
It may at once be granted that in conduct Frederick was transformed.
Before his disgrace he had been a trifler, after it he worked hard till
the day of his death. What is doubtful is that this result could not
have been obtained at a less cost. There is no evidence that the King
had ever tried the normal method of giving his son a fitting task and
a reasonable independence in performing it. Frederick, moreover, was
nearing the age at which many triflers develop a new spirit. During his
year of exile his health improved. He became stouter in body and firmer
in gait, so that at first even Wilhelmina did not recognise him. This
change at least was not designed by the father who wished him dead, yet
to this may be ascribed much of his novel energy.
It is still less certain that his character had gained from the second
education. Many of the striking traits of old reappear. Frederick is
still before all else brilliant—a gay and versatile young man with
elastic spirits and a passion for music, society, and intellectual
conversation. Despite his father’s hatred of all things French,
Frederick still looked on Paris as the Mecca of civilisation. His
literary ambitions were more pronounced than ever. At Cüstrin he had
gone back to verses—verses always Gallic, copious, and bad. A Prussian
patriot lamented that while he knew not whether his ancestors had won
Magdeburg at cards or in some other way, he had Aristotle’s rules of
composition by heart. Yet, for all his perseverance, Lord Mahon speaks
with justice of “his two kinds of prose, the rhymed and unrhymed.”
In the darkest hours of his struggle against all Europe, he sat down
to rhyme in French. “He does not really know the Germans at all,”
complained his tutors. Though sometimes brutal, he prided himself on
his ceremonious politeness—a German version of Louis XIV. All through
his career he was wont at times to put on the great monarch. “Hush,
gentlemen,” once exclaimed Voltaire when his royal host thus suddenly
stiffened, “the King of Prussia has just come in.” His morals were no
better after confronting death than before. “The flesh is weak,” he
writes to his mother, “but I do not believe that Cato was Cato when he
was young.” It was said that the motive of his amours was vainglory
rather than the satisfaction of vicious desires. No one, wrote harsh
critics, could rely upon his word, and few if any could tell of a
disinterested act that he had done.
Yet in some respects Frederick had gained. His talent for diplomacy
grew with the need for it. His father’s schooling had this effect—that
he learned to outwit his father. The closing years of Frederick
William’s life were cheered by the mirage of a good son and a
good husband, which of all Frederick’s fabrications was perhaps
the cleverest. Progress in diplomacy was attended by increase of
self-control. Frederick learned in a hard school to disguise his true
emotions and to feign what he did not feel. Hence arises a difficulty
which Carlyle constantly encounters as he strives to approach his hero
with paternal sympathy and to penetrate into his inner man. He is
forced to speak of Frederick’s “polished panoply,” and to describe him
as “outwardly a radiant but metallic object to mankind.”
The King’s handiwork may be discerned in the increasing poverty of
affection that his son displayed. Frederick William had killed his
friend, proscribed his associates, banished his sister, placed his
mother under a cloud, and forced upon him a wife whom he despised.
It is not surprising that Frederick’s heart, never of the tenderest,
grew harder year by year. He turned to the friendship of men, always
difficult for kings to win, and doubly difficult for an autocrat who
was not prone to self-sacrifice. It was remarked of him in later
life that he softened only in illness, and that the sure sign of his
recovery was renewed harshness towards those about him. His intimates
were chiefly devotees of art and letters, among whom Voltaire was
chief. But the very name of Voltaire, whom Frederick first adored and
then expelled, hints at the transient nature of these ties. As his
sister, his mother, and Madame de Camas were one by one removed by
death, he became bankrupt of affection, and his old age was consoled
only by the fidelity of his servants and of his dogs.
Such was Frederick at his marriage, but his very defects contributed
for a time to his social success. An accomplished man, with great
flashing eyes and flexible, resonant voice, “musical even in cursing,”
he had a genuine relish for the circle of which he was the centre. His
schooling had given him skill in seeming what he pleased, and whatever
affection he possessed was given to his friends. At Rheinsberg, where
he built himself a house and lived from 1736 till 1740, he was gay,
hospitable, and refined, living in apparent amity with his wife and
fitting himself by study and by administration to fill the throne in
his turn.
The year after Frederick’s marriage, the year 1734, was of high
importance in his career. The war of the Polish Succession had
broken out between France and the Empire, and Prussia fulfilled her
obligations by sending an auxiliary force of ten thousand men to serve
on the Rhine under Eugene. In this campaign, which proved inglorious,
Frederick played the part of an eager novice, dogging the footsteps
of the aged hero and copying even his curt manner. There he laid to
heart several fruitful facts—that the great commander never accepted
praise to his face, that the enemy feared him more than they feared
his army, and that other German troops cut a sorry figure beside the
men of Prussia. And—though his father had ordered him to keep out of
harm’s way—he proved by his calm while cannon-balls were splintering
trees around him that the traditional courage of the Hohenzollerns had
descended to him.
Next year (1735) he begged to go to the war again, but the King,
who had been near death from dropsy, put him off with a journey to
Ost-Preussen. This was the first of those official tours of inspection
which later became one of the chief occupations of Frederick’s years
of peace. In 1736 he began a far more agreeable pursuit. It was then
that he established himself at Rheinsberg, and, that, to quote his own
testimony, he began to live.
To live, in Frederick’s vocabulary, meant to read. He plunged into
books, comparing, annotating, analysing, and learned by four days’
trial the lesson of the zealous freshman—that man needs more than two
hours’ sleep a day. To the remonstrances of the doctors he replied that
he would rather suffer in body than in mind. Books were supplemented
by conversation, the society of ladies, music, theatricals, literary
effort of every kind. His _Anti-Machiavel_, a treatise on the duty of
princes, attracted the attention of Europe, and men of liberal mind
awaited with impatience the moment at which he would be able to put his
virtuous maxims into practice. Meanwhile he revelled in intercourse
with philosophers and learned men. Frederick styled his house “the
temple of friendship,” and his guests rejoiced to find that the palace
of a Crown Prince could be Liberty Hall.
Yet the hand of Frederick William was not entirely invisible. Thrice
every Sunday must the master of the house tear himself from philosophy
to go to church, and he was also compelled to read the sermons which
his father’s favourite chaplains had composed. His own select preacher
was Voltaire, with whom and with his intimates he “reasoned high Of
providence, fore-knowledge, will and fate, Passion and apathy and
glory and shame.” From history he learned much for every department of
life; from philosophy chiefly contempt for religion and a deep-rooted
fatalism which sustained him at many moments of disaster. He speaks of
“this Necessity, which orders all things, directs our
intercourse and determines our fate.” “I know too well that we
cannot escape from the inexorable laws of fate ... and that it
would be folly to desire to oppose what is Necessity and was so
arranged from all eternity. I admit that consolation drawn from
the impossibility of avoiding an evil is not very well fitted
to make the evil lighter, but still there is something calming
in the thought that the bitter which we must taste is not the
result of our fault, but pertains to the design and arrangement
of Providence.”
In such discussions passed many hours of the halcyon period, 1736–1740.
Of perhaps higher value was the insight into the possibilities of human
providence which Frederick gained during his visits to Ost-Preussen.
There he saw how the hand of his father had turned a wilderness into
the most blooming of his provinces, so that a land which the King had
found swept bare of men by the plague now contained half a million
prosperous inhabitants. When at last (May 31, 1740) he took the place
of the father whose last hours his presence had consoled, it was with
a conviction that if his foreign policy had been contemptible, he had
shown himself heroic at home.
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE.
FROM THE STATUE BY HOUDON AT THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAIS.]
The time had come when the domestic organisation of Prussia was to
acquire a new significance in Europe. At Rheinsberg, while protesting
that he desired nothing more in life than to be left in peace with
his books and his friends, Frederick had been steadily pursuing the
study of politics. In 1738 he had set down on paper “Considerations”
which pointed to the need of a new champion to defend the liberties
of Europe against the stealthy and menacing expansion of France. It
remained to be seen whether Prussian foreign policy would in future be
influenced by her singular constitution. To appreciate the meaning and
the value of Frederick’s innovations in both systems we must portray
the situation that he found on his accession. This demands in the first
place a brief scrutiny of Europe as it was at Frederick William’s death.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]