this moment another blow not less {222}terrible than that of Kolin fell
upon him. The French under Marshal D’Estrées had invaded Germany. The
Duke of Cumberland had given them battle at Hastembeek, and had been
defeated. In order to save the Electorate of Hanover from entire
subjugation, he had made, at Closter Seven, an arrangement with the
French Generals, which left them at liberty to turn their arms against
the Prussian dominions.
That nothing might be wanting to Frederic’s distress, he lost his mother
just at this time; and he appears to have felt the loss more than was to
be expected from the hardness and severity of his character. In truth,
his misfortunes had now cut to the quick. The mocker, the tyrant, the
most rigorous, the most imperious, the most cynical of men, was very
unhappy. His face was so haggard and his form so thin, that when on his
return from Bohemia he passed through Leipsic, the people hardly knew
him again. His sleep was broken; the tears, in spite of himself, often
started into his eyes; and the grave began to present itself to
his agitated mind as the best refuge from misery and dishonour. His
resolution was fixed never to be taken alive, and never to make peace
on condition of descending from his place among the powers of Europe.
He saw nothing left for him except to die; and he deliberately chose his
mode of death. He always carried about with him a sure and speedy poison
in a small glass case; and to the few in whom he placed confidence, he
made no mystery of his resolution.
But we should very imperfectly describe the state of Frederic’s mind,
if we left out of view the laughable peculiarities which contrasted so
singularly with the gravity, energy, and harshness of his character. It
is difficult to say whether the tragic or the comic {223}predominated in
the strange scene which was then acting. In the midst of all the great
King’s calamities, his passion for writing indifferent poetry grew
stronger and stronger. Enemies all round him, despair in his heart,
pills of corrosive sublimate hidden in his clothes, he poured forth
hundreds upon hundreds of lines, hateful to gods and men, the insipid
dregs of Voltaire’s Hippocrene, the faint echo of the lyre of Chaulieu.
It is amusing to compare what he did during the last months of 1757,
with what he wrote during the same time. It may be doubted whether any
equal portion of the life of Hannibal, of Cæsar, or of Napoleon, will
bear a comparison with that short period, the most brilliant in the
history of Prussia and of Frederic. Yet at this very time the scanty
leisure of the illustrious warrior was employed in producing odes
and epistles, a little better than Cibber’s, and a little worse than
Hay-ley’s. Here and there a manly sentiment which deserves to be in
prose makes its appearance in company with Prometheus and Orpheus,
Elysium and Acheron, the plaintive Philomel, the poppies of Morpheus,
and all the other frippery which, like a robe tossed by a proud beauty
to her waiting-woman, has long been contemptuously abandoned by genius
to mediocrity. We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness
of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this
haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates
and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of
poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
Frederic had some time before made advances towards a reconciliation
with Voltaire; and some civil letters had passed between them. After the
battle of Kolin {224}their epistolary intercourse became, at least in
seeming, friendly and confidential. We do not know any collection of
Letters which throws so much light on the darkest and most intricate
parts of human nature, as the correspondence of these strange beings
after they had exchanged forgiveness. Both felt that the quarrel had
lowered them in the public estimation. They admired each other. They
stood in need of each other. The great King wished to be handed down to
posterity by the great writer. The great writer felt himself exalted by
the homage of the great King. Yet the wounds which they had inflicted
on each other were too deep to be effaced, or even perfectly healed.
Not only did the scars remain; the sore places often festered and bled
afresh. The letters consisted for the most part of compliments, thanks,
offers of service, assurances of attachment. But if any thing brought
back to Frederic’s recollection the cunning and mischievous pranks
by which Voltaire had provoked him, some expression of contempt and
displeasure broke forth in the midst of eulogy. It was much worse when
any thing recalled to the mind of Voltaire the outrages which he and his
kinswoman had suffered at Frankfort. All at once his flowing panegyric
was turned into invective, “Remember how you behaved to me. For your
sake I have lost the favour of my native king. For your sake 1 am an
exile from my country. 1 loved you. I trusted myself to you. I had
no wish but to end my life in your service. And what was my reward?
Stripped of all that you had bestowed on me, the key, the order, the
pension, I was forced to fly from your territories. I was hunted as if
I had been a deserter from your grenadiers. I was arrested, insulted,
plundered. My niece was dragged through the mud of Frankfort by
{225}your soldiers, as if she had been some wretched follower of your
camp. You have great talents. You have good qualities. But you have one
odious vice. You delight in the abasement of your fellow-creatures. You
have brought disgrace on the name of philosopher. You have given some
colour to the slanders of the bigots, who say that no confidence can
be placed in the justice or humanity of those who reject the Christian
faith.” Then the King answers, with less heat but equal severity--“You
know that you behaved shamefully in Prussia. It was well for you that
you had to deal with a man so indulgent to the infirmities of genius as
I am. You richly deserved to see the inside of a dungeon. Your talents
are not more widely known than your faithlessness and your malevolence.
The grave itself is no asylum from your spite. Maupertuis is dead; but
you still go on calumniating and deriding him, as if you had not made
him miserable enough while he was living. Let us have no more of this.
And, above all, let me hear no more of your niece. I am sick to death of
her name. I can bear with your faults for the sake of your merits; but
she has not written Mahomet or Merope.”
An explosion of this kind, it might be supposed, would necessarily put
an end to all amicable communication. But it was not so. After every
outbreak of ill humour this extraordinary pair became more loving than
before, and exchanged compliments and assurances of mutual regard with a
wonderful air of sincerity.
It may well be supposed that men who wrote thus to each other, were not
very guarded in what they said of each other. The English ambassador,
Mitchell, who knew that the King of Prussia was constantly writing to
Voltaire with the greatest freedom on the most important {226}subjects,
was amazed to hear his Majesty designate this highly favoured
correspondent as a bad-hearted fellow, the greatest rascal on the face
of the earth. And the language which the poet held about the King was
not much more respectful.
It would probably have puzzled Voltaire himself to say what was his
real feeling towards Frederic. It was compounded of all sentiments, from
enmity to friendship, and from scorn to admiration; and the proportions
in which these elements were mixed, changed every moment. The old
patriarch resembled the spoiled child who screams, stamps, cuffs,
laughs, kisses, and cuddles within one quarter of an hour. His
resentment was not extinguished; yet he was not without sympathy for
his old friend. As a Frenchman, he wished success to the arms of his
country. As a philosopher, he was anxious for the stability of a
throne on which a philosopher sat. He longed both to save and to humble
Frederic. There was one way, and only one, in which all his conflicting
feelings could at once be gratified. If Frederic were preserved by the
interference of France, if it were known that for that interference
he was indebted to the mediation of Voltaire, this would indeed be
delicious revenge; this would indeed be to heap coals of fire on that
haughty head. Nor did the vain and restless poet think it impossible
that he might, from his hermitage near the Alps, dictate peace to
Europe. D’Estrdes had quitted Hanover, and the command of the French
army had been intrusted to the Duke of Richelieu, a man whose chief
distinction was derived from his success in gallantry. Richelieu was
in truth the most eminent of that race of seducers by profession, who
furnished Cordbillon the younger and La Clos with models for {227}their
heroes. In his earlier days the royal house itself had not been
secure from his presumptuous love. He was believed to have carried his
conquests into the family of Orleans; and some suspected that he was not
unconcerned in the mysterious remorse which embittered the last hours of
the charming mother of Lewis the Fifteenth. But the Duke was now sixty
years old. With a heart deeply corrupted by vice, a head long accustomed
to think only on trifles, an impaired constitution, an impaired
fortune, and, worst of all, a very red nose, he was entering on a
dull, frivolous, and unrespected old age. Without one qualification for
military command, except that personal courage which was common between
him and the whole nobility of France, he had been placed at the head of
the army of Hanover; and in that situation he did his best to repair, by
extortion and corruption, the injury which he had done to his property
by a life of dissolute profusion.
The Duke of Richelieu to the end of his life hated the philosophers as
a sect, not for those parts of their system which a good and wise man
would have condemned, but for their virtues, for their spirit of free
inquiry, and for their hatred of those social abuses of which he was
himself the personification. But he, like many of those who thought
with him, excepted Voltaire from the list of proscribed writers. He
frequently sent flattering letters to Ferney. He did the patriarch
the honour to borrow money of him, and even carried this condescending
friendship so far as to forget to pay the interest. Voltaire thought
that it might be in his power to bring the Duke and the King of Prussia
into communication with each other. He wrote earnestly to both; and
he so far succeeded that a correspondence between them was commenced.
{228}But it was to very different means that Frederic was to owe is
deliverance. At the beginning of November the net seemed to have closed
completely round him. The Russians were in the field, and were spreading
devastation through his eastern provinces. Silesia was overrun by the
Austrians. A great French army was advancing from the west under the
command of Marshal Soubise, a prince of the great Armorican house of
Rohan. Berlin itself had been taken and plundered by the Croatians. Such
was the situation from which Frederic extricated himself, with dazzling
glory, in the short space of thirty days.
He marched first against Soubise. On the fifth of November the
armies met at Rosbaeh. The French were two to one; but they were ill
disciplined, and their general was a dunce. The tactics of Frederic, and
the well-regulated valour of the Prussian troops, obtained a complete
victory. Seven thousand of the invaders were made prisoners. Their guns,
their colours, their baggage, fell into the hands of the conquerors.
Those who escaped fled as confusedly as a mob scattered by cavalry.
Victorious in the West, the King turned his arms towards Silesia. In
that quarter every thing seemed to be lost. Breslau had fallen; and
Charles of Loraine, with a mighty power, held the whole province! On
the fifth of December, exactly one month after the battle of Rosbaeh,
Frederic, with forty thousand men, and Prince Charles, at the head of
not less than sixty thousand, met at Leuthen, hard by Breslau. The King,
who was, in general, perhaps too much inclined to consider the common
soldier as a mere machine, resorted, on this great day, to means
resembling those which Bonaparte afterwards employed with such signal
success for the purpose of stimulating military enthusiasm. {229}The
principal officers were convoked. Frederic addressed them with great
force and pathos; and directed them to speak to their men as he had
spoken to them. When the armies were set in battle array, the Prussian
troops were in a state of fierce excitement; but their excitement showed
itself after the fashion of a grave people. The columns advanced to the
attack chanting, to the sound of drums and fifes, the rude hymns of the
old Saxon Sternholds. They had never fought so well: nor had the genius
of their chief ever been so conspicuous. “That battle,” said Napoleon,
“was a masterpiece. Of itself it is sufficient to entitle Frederic to
a place in the first rank among generals.” The victory was complete.
Twenty-seven thousand Austrians were killed, wounded, or taken; fifty
stand of colours, a hundred guns, four thousand waggons, fell into
the hands of the Prussians. Breslau opened its gates; Silesia was
reconquered; Charles of Loraine retired to hide his shame and sorrow at
Brussels; and Frederic allowed his troops to take some repose in winter
quarters, after a campaign, to the vicissitudes of which it will be
difficult to find any parallel in ancient or modern history.
The King’s fame filled all the world. He had, during the last year,
maintained a contest, on terms of advantage, against three powers, the
weakest of which had more than three times his resources. He had fought
four great pitched battles against superior forces. Three of these
battles he had gained; and the defeat of Kolin, repaired as it had been,
rather raised than lowered his military renown. The victory of Leuthen
is, to this day, the proudest on the roll of Prussian fame. Leipsic
indeed, and Waterloo, produced consequences more important to mankind.
But {230}the glory of Leipsic must be shared by the Prussians with the
Austrians and Russians; and at Waterloo the British Infantry bore the
burden and heat of the day. The victory of Rosbach was, in a military
point of view, less honourable than that of Leuthen; for it was gained
over an incapable general and a disorganized army; but the moral effect
which it produced was immense. All the preceding triumphs of Frederic
had been triumphs over Germans, and could excite no emotions of national
pride among the German people. It was impossible that a Hessian or
a Hanoverian could feel any patriotic exultation at hearing that
Pomeranians had slaughtered Moravians, or that Saxon banners had been
hung in the churches of Berlin. Indeed, though the military character of
the Germans justly stood high throughout the world, they could boast of
no great day which belonged to them as a people; of no Agincourt, of no
Bannockburn. Most of their victories had been gained over each other;
and their most splendid exploits against foreigners had been achieved
under the command of Eugene, who was himself a foreigner. The news of
the battle of Ros-bach stirred the blood of the whole of the mighty
population from the Alps to the Baltic, and from the borders of Courland
to those of Loraine. Westphalia and Lower Saxony had been deluged by
a great host of strangers, whose speech was unintelligible, and whose
petulant and licentious manners had excited the strongest feelings of
disgust and hatred. That great host had been put to flight by a small
band of German warriors, led by a prince of German blood on the side
of father and mother, and marked by the fair hair and clear blue eye of
Germany. Never since the dissolution of the empire of Charlemagne, had
the Teutonic race won {231}such a field against the French. The tidings
called forth a general burst of delight and pride from the whole of the
great family which spoke the varions dialects of the ancient language
of Arminius. The fame of Frederic began to supply, in some degree,
the place of a common government and of a common capital. It became a
rallying point for all true Germans, a subject of mutual congratulation
to the Bavarian and the Westphalian, to the citizen of Frankfort and the
citizen of Nuremburg. Then first it was manifest that the Germans were
truly a nation. Then first was discernible that patriotic spirit which,
in 1813, achieved the great deliverance of central Europe, and which
still guards, and long will guard, against foreign ambition the old
freedom of the Rhine.
Nor were the effects produced by that celebrated day merely political.
The greatest masters of German poetry and eloquence have admitted that,
though the great King neither valued nor understood his native language,
though he looked on France as the only seat of taste and philosophy,
yet, in his own despite, he did much to emancipate the genius of his
countrymen from the foreign yoke; and that, in the act of vanquishing
Soubise, he was, unintentionally, rousing the spirit which soon began to
question the literary precedence of Boileau and Voltaire. So strangely
do events confound all the plans of man. A prince who read only French,
who wrote only French, who aspired to rank as a French classic, became,
quite unconsciously, the means of liberating half the Continent from the
dominion of that French criticism of which he was himself, to the end
of his life, a slave. Yet even the enthusiasm of Germany in favour
of Frederic hardly equalled the enthusiasm of England. The birth-day
{232}of our ally was celebrated with as much enthusiasm as that of our
own sovereign: and at night the streets of London were in a blaze with
illuminations. Portraits of the hero of Rosbach, with his cocked hat and
long pigtail, were in every house. An attentive observer will, at this
day, find in the parlours of old-fashioned inns, and in the portfolios
of print-sellers, twenty portraits of Frederic for one of George the
Second. The sign painters were everywhere employed in touching up
Admiral Vernon into the King of Prussia. This enthusiasm was strong
among religions people, and especially among the Methodists, who knew
that the French and Austrians were Papists, and supposed Frederic to be
the Joshua or Gideon of the Reformed Faith. One of Whitfield’s hearers,
on the day on which thanks for the battle of Leuthen were returned at
the Tabernacle, made the following exquisitely ludicrous entry in a
diary, part of which has come down to us: “The Lord stirred up the King
of Prussia and his soldiers to pray. They kept three fast days, and
spent about an hour praying and singing psalms before they engaged the
enemy. O! how good it is to pray and fight!” Some young Englishmen
of rank proposed to visit Germany as volunteers, for the purpose of
learning the art of war under the greatest, of commanders. This last
proof of British attachment and admiration, Frederic politely but
firmly declined. His camp was no place for amateur students of military
science. The Prussian discipline was rigorous even to cruelty.
The officers, while in the field, were expected to practise an
abstemiousness and self-denial, such as was hardly surpassed by the most
rigid monastic orders. However noble their birth, however high their
rank in the service, they were not permitted to eat from any thing
better than {233}pewter. It was a high crime even in a count and
field-marshal to have a single silver spoon among his baggage. Gay
young Englishmen of twenty thousand a year, accustomed to liberty and
to luxury, would not easily submit to these Spartan restraints. The King
could not venture to keep them in order as he kept his own subjects in
order. Situated as he was with respect to England, he could not well
imprison or shoot refractory Howards and Cavendishes. On the other hand,
the example of a few fine gentlemen, attended by chariots and livery
servants, eating in plate, and drinking Champagne and Tokay, was enough
to corrupt his whole army. He thought it best to make a stand at first,
and civilly refused to admit such dangerous companions among his troops.
The help of England was bestowed in a manner far more useful and more
acceptable. An annual subsidy of near seven hundred thousand pounds
enabled the King to add probably more than fifty thousand men to his
army. Pitt, now at the height of power and popularity, undertook the
task of defending Western Germany against France, and asked Frederic
only the loan of a general. The general selected was Prince Ferdinand of
Brunswick, who had attained high distinction in the Prussian service.
He was put at the head of an army, partly English, partly Hanoverian,
partly composed of mercenaries hired from the petty princes of the
empire. He soon vindicated the choice of the two allied courts, and
proved himself the second general of the age.
Frederic passed the winter at Breslau, in reading, writing, and
preparing for the next campaign. The havoc which the war had made among
his troops was rapidly repaired; and in the spring of 1758 he was again
{234}ready for the conflict. Prince Ferdinand kept the French in check.
The King in the mean time, after attempting against the Austrians some
operations which led to no very important results, marched to encounter
the Russians, who, slaying, burning, and wasting wherever they turned,
had penetrated into the heart of his realm. He gave them battle at
Zorndorf, near Frank fort on the Oder. The fight was long and bloody.
Quarter was neither given nor taken; for the Germans and Scythians
regarded each other with bitter aversion, and the sight of the ravages
committed by the halfsavage invaders had incensed the King and his army.
The Russians were overthrown with great slaughter: and for a few months
no further danger was to be apprehended from the east.
A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed by the King, and was celebrated
with pride and delight by his people. The rejoicings in England were not
less enthusiastic or less sincere. This may be selected as the point of
time at which the military glory of Frederic reached the zenith. In the
short space of three quarters of a year he had won three great battles
over the armies of three mighty and warlike monarchies, France, Austria
and Russia.
But it was decreed that the temper of that strong mind should be tried
by both extremes of fortune in rapid succession. Close upon this series
of triumphs came a series of disasters, such as would have blighted the
fame and broken the heart of almost any other commander. Yet Frederic,
in the midst of his calamities, was still an object of admiration to his
subjects, his allies, and his enemies. Overwhelmed by adversity, sick of
life, he still maintained the contest, greater in defeat, in flight,
and in what seemed hopeless ruin, than on the fields of his proudest
victories. {235}Having vanquished the Russians, he hastened into Saxony
to oppose the troops of the Empress Queen, commanded by Daun, the
most cautious, and Landohn, the most inventive and enterprising of her
generals. These two celebrated commanders agreed on a scheme, in which
the prudence of the one and the vigour of the other seemed to have been
happily combined. At dead of night they surprised the King in his camp
at Hochkirchen.
His presence of mind saved his troops from destruction; but nothing
could save them from defeat and severe loss. Marshal Keith was among the
slain. The first roar of the guns roused the noble exile from his rest,
and he was instantly in the front of the battle. He received a dangerous
wound, but refused to quit the field, and was in the act of rallying
his broken troops, when an Austrian bullet terminated his chequered and
eventual life.