THE PROBLEM OF 1740
In his instructions for the education of his successor, Frederick
prescribed a thorough course of European history from the time of the
Emperor Charles V. (1519–1556) to his own reign. This had been the
favourite study of his own youth, so that at his accession he realised
to the full that modern Europe owed little of its political contour
to chance, but much to the aspirations and struggles of the several
states during the last two centuries. For modern Europe was no older
than Charles V. Right through the Middle Ages the Christian world
maintained that supreme authority, like truth, ought to be one, and
that every Christian should look up to the Emperor in matters temporal
as he looked up to the Pope in matters spiritual. On the secular side,
however, this theory had crumbled beneath its own weight. Even a
Charlemagne could not really rule the world. As the various races of
mankind who lived in England, France, Spain, and Scandinavia gradually
came under the sway of a few national rulers, the Emperor dwindled
into a dignified president of German princes. His lordship of the
world survived only in distracting claims to rule more widely and more
exclusively than his attenuated power could warrant. Two sharp shocks
heralded modern times. First Columbus bestowed upon his masters, the
Kings of Spain, a new world which had never heard of Pope and Emperor
and which the Emperor at least did not pretend to sway. Then Luther,
wrestling blindly with the papacy, shattered the central pillar of
the mediæval world, and modern history, the biography of a group of
independent states, began.
These states, however, did not enjoy unchallenged independence. Each
had to work out its own religious settlement, and—if it embraced
the Reformation—had to repel, with whatever help it could find, the
rescue-work of the Pope and his allies. To the end of the sixteenth
century, through the careers of Charles V., Elizabeth, William of
Orange, Henry of Navarre, Romanist and Protestant States always
tended to fall apart into two hostile camps. Even in Frederick’s time
religious affinity always counted for something. He had laid history
to heart and, as we shall see, profited in his dealings with England
by the old cry of “Church in danger.” On his lips the cry was a mere
ruse. The day of crusades was over. In the sixteenth century Spain,
Austria, and Italy rejected the Reformation; England established its
own Church; France came to terms with the Huguenots. At the great Peace
of Westphalia Germany established parity between the warring creeds, a
boon tardily won by thirty years of desolation. Thenceforward affairs
of state came first in every land. Louis XIV.’s revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in 1685 proved that religious aggression was to be
feared only as the sequel of undue political preponderance. From the
birth of modern states down to our own time, the bugbear of the nations
has been world-rule and their watchword equilibrium.
The first prince who threatened to restore in fact if not in form the
world-rule which had broken down in the Middle Ages was Charles V.,
the scion and pattern of the House of Hapsburg, whose career is the
narrative of European politics from 1519 to 1556. France, which he
threatened most, took the lead against him, began the long duel between
Bourbon and Hapsburg, and thus guarded the liberties of Europe till the
close of the Thirty Years’ War (1648). Then Louis XIV. threatened to
make France in her turn mistress of the world. The equilibrium which
he, as absolute ruler of the foremost State of Europe, seemed to have
overthrown, was painfully re-established at Utrecht (1713). A new and
greater Thirty Years’ War was thus brought to an end. It left the
States weary and timid, dreading France as a century earlier they had
dreaded Spain, clinging to peace lest the whole fabric of Europe should
collapse and with it the gains which they had made or hoped to make
should vanish. France, conscious of weakness in spite of the glories of
Louis XIV., turned to diplomacy and won Lorraine. England, ridden on a
loose rein by Walpole, followed her natural bent towards the sea. For
Austria and the Hapsburg Charles VI., the great problem was to keep
what had already been heaped together. Only Spain was not afraid to
break the peace, and in the long run she gained parts of Italy by her
boldness.
Most of the territorial profits made by European Powers during the
years 1713–1740 were made at the expense of Charles VI., either as head
of the Hapsburgs or as Emperor. As it became certain that he would
have no son, he grew more and more reckless in sacrificing the welfare
of the Empire to that of his House. The future of his heir was indeed
precarious. For there was not and never had been an Austria in the same
sense in which there was an England, a France, or a Spain; that is, a
well-knit nation, preferring ruin to dismemberment. “Austria” meant
the dominions of the elder branch of the House of Hapsburg just as
“Prussia” under Frederick I. meant the dominions of the elder branch of
the House of Hohenzollern. In the case of the Hapsburg agglomeration,
however, the subjects were too many, too miscellaneous, and too
rich for the work of a Frederick William to be possible. Germans,
Hungarians, and Italians were only the chief among a motley crowd of
races which had come under the sceptre of Charles VI.’s ancestors and
which he strained every nerve to hand down to his daughter undispersed.
The method which Charles selected was to proclaim that his dominions
were one and indivisible, and descended to a female heir if no male
were forthcoming. This he did by the famous Pragmatic Sanction, a
document which for fifteen years, from 1725 to 1740, was the pivot
of European politics. From State after State Charles purchased a
guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction, which amounted to an undertaking
to recognise his daughter, Maria Theresa, as heir to the Hapsburg
dominions. For this he yielded to Spain broad lands in Italy, for
this he sacrificed commercial prospects to the sea-powers England and
Holland, for this he consented that Lorraine should pass from Germany
to France, for this he followed Russia into a Turkish war which cost
him great tracts on either side the Danube. For this, too, he committed
what was perhaps the most dangerous of all his blunders. He played fast
and loose with a time-honoured ally, and estranged the King of Prussia.
Ever since the Peace of Westphalia had given them freedom to make
alliances where they would, the policy of the Hohenzollerns had been to
maintain a good understanding with Austria. It might, indeed, happen,
as after 1679, when Louis XIV. hired them, that some other course
became so advantageous that for the moment they adopted it. In general
however, the Emperor had most to give. To him the German princes still
looked for investiture, for arbitration, and for promotion, and if a
State desired to exercise its troops, who was so likely as the lord
of the long Hapsburg frontiers to be at war? King Frederick William
might reasonably hope that the Power which had given his father the
crown, which had led Prussians to victory before Turin, and which had
permitted him to keep conquests in Swedish Pomerania (1720), would
reward his devoted service by favouring his pretensions to inheritance
on the Rhine.
Though a forceful squire, as a statesman the King lacked imagination.
He was master of the finest soldiers in Europe, yet he dared not
vindicate his claims to Jülich-Berg without the help of the Emperor,
and he could not understand that the Emperor might be reluctant to help
the master of the finest soldiers in Europe. Such was, however, the
truth. The rise of the Hohenzollerns had long been watched at Vienna
with not unnatural jealousy. Even against the Turk Prussians were but
sparingly enlisted. The gift of the crown had been hotly opposed and
bitterly regretted. When Frederick William cried, “The Emperor will
have to spurn me from him with his feet: I am his unto death, faithful
to the last drop of my blood,” it was already a Hapsburg maxim that a
new Vandal kingdom must not arise on the shores of the Baltic.
The statesmen at Vienna valued the Prussian alliance enough to employ
Grumbkow and the Austrian ministers at Berlin to hoodwink Frederick
William. As we have seen, they lavished pocket-money and sacrificed
a bride in the hope of securing ascendancy over his son. But they
blundered greatly when to please England and thereby to further the
Pragmatic Sanction, they bade the King break off a marriage which all
the world knew was fixed for the very next day, and they blundered
still more when to please France and Holland with the same end in view
they withdrew the promise of supporting him in Jülich-Berg. In 1732
Frederick William, for the only time in his life, met Charles VI. face
to face and the truth with regard to the relations between Hapsburg
and Hohenzollern began to dawn upon him. All his life he had been the
vassal of an Emperor whom he had imagined as a German overlord, heir to
the dignity of the Cæsars, who when the time was ripe would look with
paternal complacency upon the Prussian claims. The vision faded and
revealed a rival monarch, pompous, contemptuous, and shifty. The shock
of disillusionment was terrible, but before his death he saw clearly.
Once, it is said, he pointed to Frederick with the words, “There stands
one who will avenge me.” It is certain that with failing breath he
warned his son against the policy of Vienna.
Thus, even supposing that Frederick’s view of politics had been no
wider than his father’s, that he had come to the throne resolved merely
to keep up a great army and to win Jülich-Berg, he would none the less
have possessed remarkable freedom of action. In foreign politics he was
fettered by only one great treaty, that of Berlin (December, 1728), by
which Prussia undertook to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction. But it was
possible to contend that this agreement, which was made in secret to
secure the Emperor’s assistance in Jülich-Berg, became void in 1739,
when Austria entered into conflicting engagements with France.
Circumstances, too, were favourable to Frederick’s liberty. The
very existence of the Pragmatic Sanction, a violent remedy against
dissolution, was a guarantee that Austria would be harmless for years
to come. If Charles VI. and his heir were loath to uphold Prussia on
the Rhine, they would be very unlikely to risk their own existence by
taking up arms against her. In other quarters Prussia had little to
fear. Hanover, the parvenu electorate which lay like a broad barrier
across the direct road from Berlin to the West, had become a dependency
of England in 1714, and therefore was not dangerous. Whatever might be
the wishes of George II., it was certain that Walpole would not spend
blood and treasure to maintain the House of Pfalz-Sulzbach, Prussia’s
rival in Jülich-Berg, at Düsseldorf. The Dutch, it is true, felt
themselves menaced by a Prussian garrison in Cleves, but their course
had by this time become that of a mere cock-boat in the wake of Great
Britain. France alone remained to be considered, and France, with a
frontier fifty leagues from Berg, was guided by a Walpole of her own,
Cardinal Fleury, now nearing the close of his eighty-seventh year. If
then Frederick elected to make Prussia more considerable among the
Powers of the West by pressing his claims to Berg he could fling his
sword into the scales of justice without great fear that a stronger
hand would turn the balance against him.
Adventure in the Rhine countries had much to commend it to the young
King. His House undoubtedly possessed some title to Berg, and it had
been the secular policy of the Hohenzollerns to forego no claim without
arguing to the death. The busy and fertile Rhineland was a gold-mine
in comparison with the sterile Mark. Frederick, as an enthusiast for
the higher civilisation of the West, might well feel drawn towards
a duchy which lay more than half-way along the direct line from his
capital to Paris. And, greatest merit of all in the eyes of a dynasty
of merchants, Berg was eminently salable. The Rhenish duchies were like
good accommodation-lands in the midst of thriving farms. Many rulers
would always be glad of them and their price would therefore be high.
But the arguments against staking all on Berg were also strong. A
statesman trained between the Elbe and the Oder could hardly be unaware
that Prussia’s heritage in the West was a mere windfall and that by
interest as by situation she belonged to the system of the North. Her
natural outlook was towards the Baltic, which formed the only free road
between her centre and her eastern wing. It was by foregoing lands
on the Baltic that she had gained rich bishoprics to the westward in
1648. Baltic Powers, Poland, Russia, and above all Sweden, had steadily
influenced her politics since the advent of the Great Elector. History
and geography alike seemed to beckon young Frederick to the sea. Let us
therefore cast a glance at those among his neighbours whom he had to
take account of, whatever plan he might devise.
[Illustration: FREDERICK WILLIAM THE FIRST.
AFTER THE PAINTING BY F. W. WEIDEMAN.]
Just as the traditional enemy of the Bourbon was the Hapsburg, so the
traditional enemy of the Hohenzollern was the Vasa. This gifted House
had ruled in Sweden since 1520 and had chosen for their country a path
which it was not strong enough to follow to the end. They had striven
to turn the Baltic into a Swedish lake by conquering all its coasts.
Success seemed nearest when in 1630 Gustavus landed in Germany, and at
the point of the sword compelled his kinsman of Brandenburg to favour
his adventure. The result of these bold steps was for Sweden a swift
blaze of glory; for Brandenburg a decade of misery inflicted in great
part by Swedish hands. In 1648 the great treaty compensated the Swedes
for their work by driving the Great Elector from the mouth of the Oder.
Their ambition to be masters of the Baltic shores, however, remained,
and the Great Elector suffered much at their hands before the Peace of
Oliva (1660) confirmed his sovereignty over Ost-Preussen. What happened
at Fehrbellin and after it has been already told. The meteoric career
of Charles XII. (1697–1718), who began by humbling Prussia, but ended
by losing Stettin to her, is no part of our story, except in so far
as it interested and influenced young Frederick. It suffices that in
1740 Sweden was factious and impotent, and that her aged King still
held that part of Pomerania which Prussia did not possess. To acquire
Western Pomerania was therefore a possible object for Frederick’s
ambition.
The central mass of the Hohenzollern dominions touched along almost
the whole of its eastern frontier a Power whose decline was even
more visible than that of Sweden. The Polish Republic, which almost
encircled Ost-Preussen, formed perhaps the strangest spectacle that
Europe has ever seen. A vaster country than any of the Western Powers,
Poland remained in the Middle Ages. Her constitution, indeed, seemed
to have no other end than to make progress impossible. There were
only two classes, nobles and serfs, the free and the unfree. But where
every freeman was noble, many nobles were poor. These served for hire,
and were distinguished, it is said, from men of lower birth by the
privilege of being flogged upon a Turkey carpet. The direction of this
vast country rested with a few thousand feudal chiefs who elected a
nominal King from within their own body or outside it. They made the
laws themselves, but a single dissentient voice could wreck the work
of a whole Diet, as the annual session of Parliament was termed, and
of late years this right had commonly been exercised. What trade there
was, was left to the despised class of German burghers. The fighting
force grew every year more feeble. While Austria could boast a Eugene
and Russia a Peter, while the parade-ground at Potsdam was trodden
by ever-growing masses of men who handled modern weapons with the
precision given by daily practice, the Poles were blindly trusting in
feudal levies generalled by a puppet King.
At Frederick’s accession, however, Poland still possessed two elements
of strength besides her vast bulk and the knightly courage of her
sons. These were the Saxon connexion and the port of Danzig. Two years
earlier, at the price of war with France (1733–1738) and loss of lands
in Italy, Charles VI. had secured the Polish crown for the son of the
late King, Augustus III., the Elector of Saxony. The Emperor made this
sacrifice to win support for the Pragmatic Sanction and to propitiate
Russia, who looked upon Poland as her own if the French candidate were
expelled. And, as the road from Dresden to Warsaw passed through the
Hapsburg province of Silesia, Augustus had good reason to be faithful
to the daughter of Charles VI.
Poland none the less promised much to a king of Prussia who could wait.
Her artificial connexion with Saxony, established by foreign Powers
against the will of a majority of the Poles, could only weaken the
frail bonds which bound the State together. Poland, all the world had
long known, would one day fall in pieces, and who should hinder Prussia
from gathering some of them? For the moment, however, Augustus could
defend his new dominions. A king of Prussia in a fever to act at once
could not assail Poland without laying bare his flank to Saxony and to
her Imperial ally.
But could Prussia in 1740 afford to wait? If Augustus’s dream were to
be fulfilled would not she be in jeopardy? The Elector hoped that the
Emperor would cede to him a part of Lower Silesia, so that Prussia
might be for ever divided and hemmed in by a Saxon-Polish State. Had we
no other guide than the map, we might be tempted to guess that it was
to avert this peril that Frederick seized Silesia. If it were true it
were a grievous fault. Augustus, who was no statesman, might dream of
a hereditary crown, but a firm Saxony-Poland was in fact impossible.
Dresden and Warsaw were centuries apart. Out of two such halves no
strong whole could be compounded. The one was German, the other Slav;
the one industrial, the other primitive; the one Lutheran, the other
partly Romanist and partly Orthodox. Compounds so discordant could
have found no abiding unity in a monarchy based on the treason of their
common head against the constitution of each. Nor could such a State
have barred for a decade the path of the Muscovite Colossus which Peter
had already roused and which Catherine and Alexander were soon to
reinspire.
In weighing Frederick’s wisdom we must not forget that the share of
Poland which he might expect that Prussia was destined to acquire,
and which did, in fact, fall to her during his own lifetime, would
change Ost-Preussen from an isolated province into a strong limb of a
well-knit State. It gave her the lower waters of a third great arterial
river—the Vistula. But it came to her in 1774 shorn of its chief glory,
the old portal of the Vistula and strong tower of Poland, the matchless
town of Danzig. Frederick had seen that fair city, a hearth of German
culture among the Slavs, with its giant Marienkirche towering over
a mass of battlements and gates and churches of stately civic halls
and mansions hardly less stately, the whole forming a Venice of the
North beside which his capital was but a market town. He must have
taken note of the foundation of all this grandeur, great warehouses
on busy wharves, canals crowded with masts and hulls from many lands.
And he cannot have been blind to the fact that within a few miles of
this prize lay Ost-Preussen, and that, since Augustus had surrendered
Curland, within a few miles of Ost-Preussen lay Russia. Seldom has a
king had clearer warning to look before he leaped.
Thus, without departing from the policy of the men who had made Prussia
what she was, the young King had his choice between adventure on the
Rhine or across the Peene and a policy of expectant watchfulness on
the Vistula. But if he were capable of building upon the foundations
of his forefathers the loftiest structure that they would bear, then a
still more glorious conquest might be his. Lord of Stettin and of the
ports of Ost-Preussen, he might claim a share in what all the nations
coveted, the empire of the sea.
It is one of the most grotesque facts in history that the Emperor
William II., when he cried, “Our future lies upon the water,” should
have been uttering as prophecy what ought to have been commonplace for
a century and a half. Even in 1740 the truth that the New World offered
a fairer career than the Old was not hidden from statesmen less astute
than Frederick. Since the Armada foundered in 1588, the nations of
Europe had been realising it one by one. Spain and Portugal, the first
in the field, still held a vast heritage across the ocean, but their
monopoly was not as unchallenged as of old. First the Dutch, who as
subjects of Spain had monopolised that carrying-trade which seemed to
be beneath the dignity of an Iberian gentleman, enriched themselves so
rapidly that they were able to throw off the yoke of Philip II. and to
establish a colonial and commercial empire of their own. Then England,
tardily comprehending the changing conditions of life, grappled with
their little republic in a long and doubtful struggle. Finally weight
told, and after the Revolution of 1688 England under her Dutch
King led the way and Holland followed in a campaign against a rival
dangerous to both. For France had been guided by Colbert into the path
of greatness beyond the seas, and it was by grasping at Spain and the
Indies that Louis XIV. aroused the keenest apprehensions that he might
become dictator of the world. Only at the cost of two mighty wars had
the danger from France been averted for a generation. By the Peace of
Utrecht (1713) the Sea Powers gained security for themselves and for
their commerce, but the prize of North America still remained to be
fought for between France and England.
In the early years of the eighteenth century other competitors put to
sea. Under Peter the Great, the new land Power, Russia, struggled to
become maritime, though her horizon, as yet, hardly extended beyond
European waters. But in 1722 the Emperor Charles VI. made his port
of Ostend the headquarters of a new Imperial East India Company,
and England, France, and Holland joined in an outcry against German
competition. Nine years later they were appeased. The Hapsburg
sacrificed the future of his House to its past. To purchase guarantees
of the Pragmatic Sanction he withdrew his support from the Company,
which none the less was able to maintain itself for more than sixty
years.
If then the tide had set so strongly towards distant continents that
even conservative ill-knit Austria was swept along with it, we may well
ask, what of Prussia? The history of our own time makes the question
more pertinent. North Germany has shown beyond dispute not only that
she can now build ships, a fact which proves little or nothing as to
her powers in the past, but also that she can fill them with brave
and skilful seamen, whose character only many generations of worthy
forefathers could create. These forefathers were the Prussians of
Frederick’s day, poor, fearless, and docile, living on the borders of
the Baltic, speeding and welcoming its fleets at Memel, at Pillau,
at Colberg, and above all at Stettin. Why, it may be wondered, was
Frederick blind to the signs of the times? Why did not he at the very
outset of his reign hasten to employ the power of the Crown, which
Frederick William had raised so high, to equip a Prussian Baltic
Company, a Prussian West Africa Company, even a Prussian East India
Company?
Never was the political situation more favourable to such an enterprise
than when Frederick grasped the reins. No neighbour could enforce a
veto upon Prussian maritime enterprise. Poland was in the last stage of
impotence and decay. Russia, who might form a good customer, was not
yet equipped for conquest. Austria could not afford to offend a German
ally. Sweden had lost her sting and her province of Pomerania was a
hostage at Frederick’s mercy. The Sea Powers would view the enterprise
askance, but they too had given hostages to Prussia. If England played
foul, the master of eighty thousand men could overrun Hanover in a
fortnight and the Dutch would think twice ere they provoked the lord
of Cleves. Of all Powers Denmark, the surly janitor of the Baltic,
was perhaps the best able to injure Prussian commerce with impunity,
but the heir of the Great Elector might be trusted to find a way with
Denmark. Thus Europe seemed to invite Prussia to follow the destiny
which nature prescribed, and which led to wealth. Firmly governed,
armed to the teeth, learned, Protestant, and rich, she might have
pursued her old opportunist policy on the mainland with full confidence
that the future would bring her wider boundaries and yet greater
strength.
In an earlier generation and with smaller means the Great Elector had
perceived that the true path for Prussia lay across the seas. Balked of
Stettin, he strove to make Pillau and Memel his London and Amsterdam.
His little Armada of ten frigates attacked the Spaniards with success.
In a humble way there began to be Brandenburgish West Indies, and in
1683 Fort Great-Fredericksburgh was built upon the Brandenburgish
Gold Coast. But the Great Elector’s son and grandson lacked either
his firm hand or his imagination. While Frederick I. was squabbling
with the Dutch about armchairs, the Dutch were driving his subjects
from West Africa. Frederick William, the apostle of domestic economy,
was impatient of flunkeys, universities, and colonies, the several
extravagances of his father and of his grandfather. Would Frederick II.
prove himself more enlightened?
We see with amazement that he did not. A prince who was accounted
clever, who had spent the first decade of manhood in pondering on high
politics, who revered the memory of the Great Elector, and followed
the fortunes of England with keen interest—how could such an one ignore
what the movement of the times and the course of after events seem
to point out so clearly? Among his first acts was the establishment
of a new department of manufactures. He commanded the head of it to
take measures for improving the condition of existing industries, for
introducing new ones, and for bringing in foreign capital and foreign
hands. Why did he not at the same time establish a department of
marine? Why did he wait till East Frisia fell to Prussia before making
even a half-hearted effort to win profit from the sea?
A partial explanation may lie in the fact that Frederick lacked the
inspiration drawn from travel. The stupid fears of Frederick William
that his son would become too Frenchified in his life or too Austrian
in his politics had closed to Frederick the doors of the best school
of his time. Who knows how much profit the Great Elector brought to
his State from his education in Holland, or Peter the Great from his
journeys in the West? Save at Danzig, Frederick had hardly seen with
his own eyes the dignity which commerce might create. Save for two
stolen days in Strasburg in the first months of his reign, a secret
visit to Holland in 1755, and a meeting with the Emperor in Moravia in
1770, he was fated never to gain fresh knowledge of what would now be
foreign lands except at the head of his army.
Again, Frederick’s political economy was unfavourable to Prussian
commerce. At Cüstrin he learned from Hille that the only trade by which
a country can profit is that which adds to its stock of gold and
silver. His father had carried this idea to its logical conclusion. He
had seized the precious metals and locked them up. Like a timid farmer
who thinks that the bank will break, he had hidden in his cellars
the hoard which represented the economies of a lifetime. Frederick
therefore found a treasure of more than twenty-six million marks, at a
time when the weekly wage of a common soldier hardly exceeded one.
It seems clear that a policy of hoarding could be wise only when war
was in sight. In time of war that Government would be happiest which
had most coined money with which to pay its troops. But in time of
peace not even Frederick William could take a breed from barren metal
by keeping it locked up. Profit could be drawn from it in either of two
ways. The coined metal might be spent to advantage, so that the State
bought something, such as a school, or a farm, or a flock of sheep,
which would in the future be worth more than the sum laid out. Or it
might be lent to citizens who would pay for the use of it and establish
with its aid some business which might be taxed. By locking up the
surplus funds of the country, however, the King stifled commerce at the
birth. Frederick did not detect the fallacy, and Germany waited till
the nineteenth century for her commercial rise.
Though nimble-witted and fond of philosophy, the King was hardly
profound. His lector, the Swiss de Catt, tells a significant story of
his first discussion with a singular stranger on a Dutch vessel, whom
he did not suspect to be the lord of Prussia. Frederick, he says,
“tried to prove that creation was impossible. At this last
point I stood out in opposition. ‘But how can one create
something out of nothing?’ said he. ‘That is not the question,’
answered I, ‘the question is, whether such a Being as God can
or cannot give existence to what has yet none?’ He seemed
embarrassed and added, ‘But the Universe is eternal.’ ‘You are
in a circle,’ said I, ‘how will you get out of it?’ ‘I skip
over it,’ said he, laughing; and then began to speak of other
things.”
He wrote incessantly on history and politics, always with the clearness
and sprightliness that seem inseparable from the French tongue which
he employed, and always with the confidence of a journalist and of a
king. Of his ancestor Joachim I. he says: “He received the surname of
Nestor in the same way as Louis XIII. that of ‘the Just’; that is, for
no reason that any one can discover”—and this is a very fair example of
his style. Sense, lucidity, concise statement, even wit, distinguish
his writings. He made so many confident generalisations on political
affairs that some have almost of necessity proved correct. But of deep
insight, still less of great constructive power, there is little trace.
In freedom from illusions, however, Frederick surpassed some rival
statesmen. This was abundantly illustrated at the very outset of his
reign. He saw, as Charles VI. could not, that the claim of the Emperor
to be lord of the world rested on no firm basis. Early in 1737 he had
written: “If the Emperor dies to-day or to-morrow, what revolutions
will come to pass! Every one will wish to share his estate, and we
shall see as many factions as there are sovereigns.” The discovery,
indeed, was by no means new. More than a century earlier Gustavus
Adolphus had told the Germans that their constitution was rotten.
But Frederick informs the Emperor pointedly that he is only first
among his peers. He was equally clear-sighted in the choice of means
to spread his views. William the Silent had perceived a fact dark to
many statesmen since his time—that the public opinion of Europe is
worth much and that it may be courted through the Press. Frederick had
already composed the earliest of his many pamphlets, which he intended
to publish anonymously as the work of an Englishman, to rouse the Sea
Powers against France.
More significant than all else was the fact that he viewed his own
strength with clearer eyes than his father’s. Frederick William had
never been able to convince himself that Prussia was a strong State:
Frederick wears no blinkers and with his accession the day of half
measures is over. Two years before this he had written to Grumbkow
words which express his real opinion of the old policy of his House.
The affair of Berg, which he as Crown Prince earnestly hoped would
enable him to win fame on the battle-field, had then entered upon a
phase adverse to Prussian expectations. Austria had been prevailed on
to join with France and the Sea Powers in claiming that it should be
referred to the arbitration of a congress, and Frederick William,
though disgusted, had decided to give way. Of this decision Grumbkow
approved, writing, “I am persuaded that a King of Prussia, like a King
of Sardinia, will always have more need of the fox’s hide than of the
lion’s.” Frederick replies (March, 1738):
“I confess that I perceive in the answer a conflict between
greatness and humiliation to which I can never agree. The
answer is like the declaration of a man who has no stomach
for fighting and yet wishes to seem as if he had. There were
only two solutions, either to reply with noble pride, with
no evasions in the shape of petty negotiations whose real
value will soon be recognised, or to bow ourselves under the
degrading yoke that they wish to lay upon us. I am no subtle
politician to couple together a set of contradictory threats
and submissions, I am young, I would perhaps follow the
impetuosity of my nature; under no circumstances would I do
anything by halves.”
Close observers held that a change of king would be followed by a
change of policy and that Frederick was likely to attempt great things.
What these would be no one, with the possible exception of the young
King himself, had the least idea. What in the opinion of the present
writer they should have been is sufficiently indicated above. What they
were, will be shown in the following chapter.
At first, for all his determination to lose no time, the results of
his accession seemed but small. No human being could maintain that he
was swayed by his affections. Though Duhan, Keith, and Katte’s father
received some measure of compensation for their sufferings, Frederick’s
behaviour towards those concerned in his early struggles emboldened
the wits to say that his memory was excellent as far back as 1730.
His Rheinsberg friends expected to share the spoils of office. They
were disappointed in a way that has reminded Macaulay of the treatment
of Falstaff by Henry V. Frederick was as masterful as his father.
The aged Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, who had created the Prussian army,
and the aged General von Schulenburg, who had risked all rather than
condemn Katte to death, were humiliated by royal reprimands. Grumbkow,
with whom he had corresponded for more than eight years in terms of
affectionate intimacy, might have caused him a moment’s embarrassment,
but he had just died—“for me the greatest conceivable gain,” the
King assured his sister. He broke up his father’s useless and costly
regiment of giant grenadiers, a measure which Frederick William had
himself advised, but he increased the effective strength of the army by
nearly ten thousand men. At the same time he sounded, more clearly even
than his ancestor George William, the note of religious toleration for
which Brandenburg had been honourably distinguished in the time of her
greatest peril. “In this country,” he instructed his officials, “every
one shall get to heaven in his own way.”
[Illustration: VIEW OF GLATZ IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
FROM AN OLD PRINT.]
The crowned philosopher always recognised the difference between the
things which were Cæsar’s and the things which were God’s. The scion
of a Calvinist House, he began his reign by authorising the Lutherans
to restore their ritual, which had been arbitrarily simplified by his
father. He was soon to court the favour of Breslau by supplying her
with Protestant preachers, and of Glatz by bestowing vestments upon
a statue of the Virgin. When Romanist Europe expelled the Jesuits,
he seized the opportunity of picking up well-trained teachers cheap.
Some of his papist subjects had a fancy for buying handkerchiefs which
bore the effigies of saints. Frederick, eager to encourage the linen
manufacture, bade his officials find out which saints were the most
popular and adjust the supply to the demand.
A story cited by Carlyle illuminates Frederick’s views upon the
relations between Church and State. He was questioning the monks of
Cleve, to whom the old dukes had assigned an income from the royal
forest-dues for masses to be said on their behalf. “‘You still say
those masses then?’ ‘Certainly, your Majesty.’ ‘And what good does
anybody get out of them?’ ‘Your Majesty, those old sovereigns are to
obtain heavenly mercy by them, to be delivered out of purgatory by
them.’ ‘Purgatory? It is a sore thing for the Forests, all this while!
And they are not yet out, those poor souls, after so many hundred years
of praying?’ Monks have a fatal apprehension, No. ‘When will they be
out, and the thing complete?’ Monks cannot say. ‘Send me a courier
whenever it _is_ complete!’ sneers the King,” and leaves them to
finish the _Te Deum_ which they had begun to greet his arrival.
Lastly, the forms with which Frederick took up the kingship showed that
the fears of his father and the hopes of enlightened men were alike
without foundation. It became clear that the philosopher-king, though
he relieved famine and tempted learned foreigners to Berlin, would not
revert to the ill-timed pageantry of his grandfather. Nor—though he
freed the press and restricted to a few cases the use of torture—would
he anticipate the glory of some Hohenzollern who is still unborn by
fostering a spirit of individual liberty among his people. Impatient
of coronation, which he classed among the “useless and frivolous
ceremonies which ignorance and superstition have established,” he
received the homage of his subjects by proxy everywhere save in
Ost-Preussen, Brandenburg, and Cleve. At Königsberg he paid homage to
the memory of liberties which his ancestors had crushed, and which he
had no intention of animating anew. The ceremony at Berlin was made
memorable by one of his rare displays of feeling. When he appeared on
the balcony of the Castle and looked down upon the surging crowd in
the square below, he was so affected that he remained standing many
minutes, silent and buried in thought. Then, recovering himself, he
bowed to the multitude, and rode off to attend a military review.
[Illustration: EUROPE 1740
_G. P. Putnam’s Sons. London, & New York._]
It is, however, on his journey to Wesel, his Rhenish capital, that
he reveals most clearly how the Crown Prince has changed into the
King. Wilhelmina had found him of late so careless, even so uncivil,
a correspondent that the news of his coming to Baireuth prostrated
her with joy. He seemed to her so altered in countenance and developed
in form that, just as after his imprisonment at Cüstrin, she hardly
recognised him. But a less welcome change was only too perceptible.
Wilhelmina found her brother’s caresses forced, his conversation
trivial, their sister, the Margravine of Ansbach, more favoured than
herself. The remainder of the journey proved that Frederick at least
remained true to the French. At Frankfort he disguised himself for a
flying visit to Strasburg. There his little party put up at an inn,
sent the landlord to invite officers to their table, and visited the
theatre. The mask was penetrated by a runaway Prussian whose tall
brother had been kidnapped for the army and who recognised the son of
his former King. The greatest pleasure of all came last. At Wesel,
besides dealing with the affair of Herstal, which will be described in
the next chapter, Frederick for the first time paid homage in person to
Voltaire.
At the end of October Wilhelmina visited Berlin, but her brother
welcomed her coldly. She found abundant proofs that he had become
inscrutable. She describes in her _Memoirs_ how the Queen Mother had
shut herself up, equally astonished and mortified at her complete
exclusion from affairs of State. “Some complained of the little care
he had to reward those who had been attached to him as prince royal;
others, of his avarice, which they said surpassed that of the late
King; others of his passions; others again of his suspicions, of his
mistrust, of his pride, and of his dissimulation.” This criticism
from an unwonted quarter may possibly be explained away. It has been
suggested that the King’s treatment of his sister at Baireuth was due
to the same policy of repelling every possible claimant to influence
his policy, which may be held to excuse the snubs inflicted upon Dessau
and Schulenburg and the dignified exile of Frederick’s mother and wife.
His conduct at Rheinsberg, whither Wilhelmina followed him, does not
admit of the same excuse.
“The little spare time that he had,” she complains, “was spent
in the company of wits or men of letters. Such were Voltaire,
Maupertuis, Algarotti, and Jordan. I saw the King but seldom.
I had no ground for being satisfied with our interviews. The
greater part of them was spent either in embarrassed words of
politeness or in outrageous witticisms on the bad state of the
Margrave’s finances; indeed he often ridiculed him and the
princes of the empire, which I felt very much.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]