Produced by Cathy Maxam, Charlie Howard, and the Online
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Transcriber’s Notes

Illustrations at the beginning and end of chapters are decorative
headpieces and tailpieces.

Other Notes will be found at the end of this eBook.

Heroes of the Nations

  A Series of Biographical Studies presenting the lives and work of
      certain representative historical characters, about whom have
      gathered the traditions of the nations to which they belong,
      and who have, in the majority of instances, been accepted as
      types of the several national ideals.

  12°, Illustrated, cloth, each          $1.50
  Half Leather, gilt top, each           $1.75
  Nos. 33 and following Nos.         net $1.35
    Each                      (By mail, $1.50)
  Half Leather, gilt top             net $1.60
                              (By mail, $1.75)

FOR FULL LIST SEE END OF THIS VOLUME

  Heroes of the Nations

  EDITED BY
  H. W. Carless Davis
  FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD

  FACTA DUCIS VIVENT OPEROSAQUE
  GLORIA RERUM.—OVID, IN LIVIAM, 266.

  THE HERO’S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
  FAME SHALL LIVE.

FREDERICK THE GREAT

[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY CARLO VANLOO.]

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  AND THE RISE OF PRUSSIA

  BY
  W. F. REDDAWAY, M.A.

  FELLOW AND LECTURER OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; LECTURER IN HISTORY
  TO NON-COLLEGIATE STUDENTS; AUTHOR OF “THE MONROE
  DOCTRINE” (CAMB. UNIV. PRESS)

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
  NEW YORK    27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
  LONDON    24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND

  The Knickerbocker Press
  1904

  COPYRIGHT, 1904
  BY
  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Published, April, 1904

  The Knickerbocker Press, New York

  TO THE
  NON-COLLEGIATE STUDENTS
  OF THE
  UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PREFACE

In attempting to sketch the career of Frederick the Great and to
define its relation to the rise of Prussia, I have made free use of
many printed works, especially of Frederick’s own _Œuvres_ and of
the elaborate _Politische Correspondenz_ of his reign. With these
great “primary” authorities may perhaps be ranked the face and voice
of modern Germany, rich in evidence of Frederick’s work, which have
doubtless influenced my opinions more than I am aware of. Among
“secondary” authorities I owe most to the opulent treasure-house of
Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_ and to the more systematic narrative
of Professor Koser. His _Friedrich der Grosse als Kronprinz_, which
largely inspired the work of Lavisse translated under the title _The
Youth of Frederick the Great_, forms my chief source for much of
Frederick’s early life, as does the last volume of the _König Friedrich
der Grosse_ (1903), for the domestic labours after 1763. Mr. Herbert
Tuttle’s judicious _History of Prussia_ gave me much assistance down to
the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, and I have often referred to Mr.
Lodge’s _Modern Europe_ and Mr. Henderson’s _Short History of Germany_.

At critical points in the record of the years 1712 to 1786 I was
influenced successively by the _Mémoires de la Margravine de Baireuth_,
the trenchant _Frédéric II et Marie-Thérèse_ of the Duc de Broglie,
the _Politische Staatsschriften_, Schäfer’s _Der Siebenjährige Krieg_,
von Arneth’s _Oesterreichische Geschichte_, and Sorel’s _The Eastern
Question in the Eighteenth Century_. Many of the battles in Saxony,
Brandenburg, Bohemia, and Silesia form the subject of monographs which
it was interesting to study on the field, sometimes with the aid of
collections of maps and plans preserved in the neighbourhood.

It would be impossible without a false pretence of erudition to name
more than a small portion of the books to which some reference must be
made in writing of the rise of Prussia. Students will recognise the
debt that I owe to such well-known works as those of Ranke, Droysen,
Philippson, Förster, Seeley, Isaacsohn, Oncken, Vitzthum, Archenholtz,
and many more, as well as to the _Essays_ of Macaulay and Lord Mahon.
My account of the early history of Brandenburg is in part based on my
paper of April, 1901, in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Historical
Society.

I offer my grateful thanks to Mr. G. H. Putnam and to Mr. H. W. C.
Davis for their counsel, to Mr. G. H. M. Gray for minute scrutiny
of the proof-sheets, and to Messrs. Ernest and Harold Temperley, my
indulgent comrades in Silesia. To the latter this book owes much at
every stage.

            W. F. R.

  KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
      Jan. 9th, 1904.

CONTENTS

                                                                    PAGE
  INTRODUCTION                                                         1

  CHAPTER I
       THE RISE OF PRUSSIA                                             3

  CHAPTER II
       FREDERICK AS CROWN PRINCE, 1712–1740                           24

       THE PROBLEM OF 1740                                            56

  CHAPTER IV
       THE SILESIAN ADVENTURE, 1740–1742                              83

  CHAPTER V
       THE SECOND STRUGGLE FOR SILESIA, 1742–1745                    128

  CHAPTER VI
       THE TEN YEARS’ PEACE, 1746–1756                               155

  CHAPTER VII
       THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR TO THE BATTLE OF LEUTHEN                 189

  CHAPTER VIII
       THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR (CONTINUED). LEUTHEN TO MAXEN
           (DECEMBER, 1757, TO DECEMBER, 1759)                       251

  CHAPTER IX
       THE END OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, 1760–1763                    281

  CHAPTER X
       FREDERICK AND PRUSSIA AFTER THE WAR                           301

  CHAPTER XI
       FREDERICK AND EUROPE, 1763–1786                               322

  CHAPTER XII
       FREDERICK’S DEATH AND GREATNESS                               344

  Index                                                              361

ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                                    PAGE
      FREDERICK THE GREAT                                 _Frontispiece_
           After the painting by Carlo Vanloo.

      FREDERICK THE GREAT                                             10
          After the painting by Christian Wolffgang.

      MAP OF PRUSSIA AFTER THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA, 1715               22

      PRINCESS SOPHIA DOROTHEA, DAUGHTER OF KING GEORGE THE FIRST     32
          After the painting by Hirseman.

      FREDERICK THE SECOND                                            38
          After the painting by Cunningham.

      ELIZABETH CHRISTINA OF BRUNSWICK                                44
          From an old print.

      VOLTAIRE                                                        54
          From the statue by Houdon at the Comédie Français.

      FREDERICK WILLIAM THE FIRST                                     64

          After the painting by F. W. Weideman.

      VIEW OF GLATZ IN THE 18TH CENTURY                               78
          From an old print.

      MAP OF EUROPE IN 1740                                           80

      THE RATHHAUS IN BRESLAU                                         90
          From a steel engraving.

      THE BOARD OF FINANCES AT NEISSE                                104
          From a steel engraving.

      PLAN OF MOLWITZ, APRIL 10, 1741                                114

      THE PARADE GROUND AT POTSDAM                                   128

      FREDERICK THE SECOND, KING OF PRUSSIA                          140

      After the painting by F. Bock.

      SANS-SOUCI. CARYTID FRONT                                      160

      THE EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARIA THERESA IN THE VIENNA HOFFBURG  190
          Reproduced by permission of A. F. Czihaks Nachflg, Vienna.

      LEOPOLD, COUNT VON DAUN                                        214
          From a copper print.

      PLAN OF PRAGUE, MAY 6, 1757                                    216

      PLAN OF KOLIN, JUNE 18, 1757                                   222

      FREDERICK VIEWING THE BURNING BRIDGE AT WEISSENFELS            234
          From a relief on his statue at Weissenfels.

      PLAN OF ROSSBACH, NOVEMBER 5, 1757                             236

      PLAN OF LEUTHEN, DECEMBER 5, 1757                              246

      THE CHARGE OF THE WALLOON DRAGOONS AT KOLIN                    248
          From a relief on the monument of Victory near Křečhoř,
            unveiled 1898.

      MAP FOR THE SILESIAN AND SEVEN YEARS’ WARS                     254

      PLAN OF ZORNDORF, AUGUST 25, 1758                              260

      BATTLE OF HOCHKIRCH, OCTOBER 14, 1758                          264

      BATTLE OF KUNERSDORF, AUGUST 12, 1759                          270

      BATTLE OF LIEGNITZ, AUGUST 15, 1760                            286

      BATTLE OF TORGAU, NOVEMBER 3, 1760                             292

      THE NEW PALACE AT POTSDAM                                      308

      JOSEPH THE SECOND                                              322
          After the painting by Listard.

      WENZEL ANTON, PRINCE VON KAUNITZ                               326
          After the painting by Steiner.

      UNTER DEN LINDEN IN 1780                                       340
          From an etching by Rosentag.

      DEATH-MASK OF FREDERICK THE GREAT                              344
          From the original in the Hohenzollern Museum, Berlin.

      COFFINS OF FREDERICK THE GREAT (RIGHT) AND  FREDERICK
        WILLIAM I. (LEFT) IN THE GARRISON CHURCH AT POTSDAM          348

      FREDERICK THE SECOND, KING OF PRUSSIA                          356
          After the painting by Chodowiecki.

FREDERICK THE GREAT

INTRODUCTION

In the Austrian and Prussian capitals to-day the traveller may mark the
contrast between two great statues, in each of which the meaning of a
reign is set forth with happy instinct. In the heart of imperial Vienna
is seated the colossal figure of Maria Theresa, the Victoria of an age
when a Pompadour could sway the fate of nations. Her effigy presents
her as the mother of her people, displaying rather than obscuring the
scholars, statesmen, and warriors who cluster round her feet, sharing
harmoniously the glory which neither Queen nor people could have won
without the other’s aid.

In Berlin the superb monument of the Great Frederick is instinct with
a different spirit. Raised high above the throng, the King seems to
gaze with his inscrutable mask-face at the astounding works of his
successors. At the base of his lofty pedestal are stationed generals
and civilians of renown, numerous enough almost to confute the Cassius
who should infer of Frederick’s Prussia that there was in it but
one only man. The statue none the less suggests the truth. Between
monarch and people there was ever a great gulf fixed. Through all
his life—in his counsels, in his despair, in his triumph, and in his
death—Frederick, almost beyond parallel in the record of human history,
was alone.

CHAPTER I

THE RISE OF PRUSSIA

The first task of the student of Frederick’s life-story is to rid
himself of the idea that the solitary King was either wholly original
or wholly free. To seize Silesia, to quarter Poland, to rival Austria,
to humble France, each was no doubt a feat which no Prussian ruler
before him had dared to attempt. Yet in each of these, as will
presently be shown, the hand of the living was at once nerved and
guided by the dead. From his House Frederick inherited his might,
to his House he turned for inspiration in the use of it, and to it
he dedicated his conquests. He who would appreciate Frederick must
first survey the road trodden for three centuries before him by the
Hohenzollerns from whom he sprang.

“Why should I serve the Hohenzollerns?” Bismarck is said to have
exclaimed. “My family is as good as theirs.” It was the complaint
of the yeoman against his fellow who has saved money and bought the
lordship of the manor.

The early history of the state now called Prussia is chiefly the record
of a thrifty family—the Hohenzollerns. Since the year 1415, when
the overlordship of the sandy tract lying between the middle Elbe
and lower Oder and stretching across their banks was conferred upon
him by the Emperor for cash down, Frederick of Hohenzollern and his
descendants had remained lords of Brandenburg. From Nuremberg, where
Frederick had been Burggrave, they had brought with them the vital
energy and business ability of successful townsmen. So poor was their
new estate that for many generations relaxation would have meant ruin.
There was therefore no temptation to depart from that policy of adding
field to field which is the natural law of the industrious countryman.
Whether from native superiority or from greater need, the Hohenzollerns
were usually a little wiser than their neighbours. With the aid of a
family statute of 1473, which made primogeniture the rule of succession
for Brandenburg, they avoided the consequences of that custom of equal
inheritance which has been the bane of Germany. By careful watching of
opportunities, by windfalls, by purchase, and by covenants for mutual
succession on failure of heirs made with neighbours whose lines died
out, the domain of the rulers of Brandenburg was in two centuries
increased fourfold. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out and the modern
history of Prussia began, the head of the Hohenzollern family, who had
long since become one of the seven Electors of the Empire, held sway
over an area almost as great as that of Ireland.

Of the territories by which the original Mark of Brandenburg had been
augmented, two were of special importance. In 1525 East Prussia had
been acquired. This province, which throughout this book will be
called by its German name of Ost-Preussen, was richer by far than the
Mark, the kernel of the Hohenzollern possessions. It had an important
city, Königsberg, for its capital and a coast-line on the Baltic. It
constituted the domain of the old Order of Teutonic Knights, permanent
crusaders whose task had been to spread the faith and civilisation of
their fatherland among the heathen Slavs. But the Baltic lands had
all submitted to the Cross, and the Knights became in their turn the
objects of a religious mission. Early in the sixteenth century, the
doctrines of the Reformation penetrated the minds of their High Master,
Albert of Hohenzollern. He turned for counsel to Luther himself. In a
celibate Order which had no more heathen to convert, the husband of the
nun Catherine Bora could see only a standing defiance of the laws of
nature and of God. By his advice Ost-Preussen was “secularised,” that
is, taken from the service of religion to form a Hohenzollern estate,
and in time (1618), though still submissive to the suzerainty of
Poland, it was added to the main body of the Electoral dominions. The
Hohenzollerns thus became distinguished from the mass of German princes
by ruling territories to which the Empire had never possessed any
claim. Ost-Preussen was to them on a small scale what England became in
1688 to the House of Orange, or in 1714 to the House of Hanover. Their
policy acquired a new breadth and a new weight. Hitherto provincial, it
became more and more cosmopolitan, and commerce with the Baltic lands
and England began to hint to the lord of Pillau and Memel that his
future lay upon the water.

A makeweight to Ost-Preussen, which would prevent the centre of gravity
of the Hohenzollern lands from shifting eastwards, was found in 1609,
when the family inherited Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg in Western
Germany. This acquisition, made on the very eve of the Thirty Years’
War, was accompanied in 1613 by the conversion of the Elector, John
Sigismund, from the Lutheranism which his grandfather, Joachim II.,
had established in 1539 to the sterner and more militant creed of
Calvin. This meant that at the very moment when all Germany was taking
up arms for the greatest religious war of modern times, the court and
people of Brandenburg were hopelessly at variance with one another. A
Calvinist prince ruled a Lutheran people, and the new Elector, George
William (1619–1640), “of Christ-mild memory” but the weakest of his
line, proved to be a puppet in the hands of Schwarzenburg, his Romanist
prime-minister. Under such guidance did Brandenburg, ill-knit and
ill-armed, become the battle-ground between Swede and Hapsburg in their
struggle for faith and empire.

What Brandenburg suffered in the terrible decade 1630–1640, between
the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany and the accession of the
Great Elector, can never be fully calculated. The State was rudderless,
defenceless, and poor; the combatants on both sides brigands, whom
years of license had habituated to every kind of cruelty. What passed
could be described by no more patently truthful eye-witness than
Andreas Rittner, the cheery burgomaster of Tangermünde, a little town
on the Elbe with a royal history of its own. In his pages may be traced
the swift descent of the afflicted people through every depth of
misery down to despair or even annihilation. The invaders—it mattered
little whether Swedes or Imperialists—exacted in endless sequence
contributions, lodging, forage, and loot, drove off the cattle, broke
up the coffins of the dead, laid waste the land, and hunted down the
inhabitants. The mischief was only increased by the feeble efforts of
the home government to call out and support a militia. The maddened
peasants turned guerilla. Food failed, for who could sow or reap?
Men fed on carrion, even, it was whispered, on human flesh, and soon
pestilence seized on persecutors and persecuted alike.

Anarchy and degradation brought forth torture. The name of the Swedish
Drink attests the cruelty of the degenerate deliverers of Germany.
“They laid men awhile upon the fire,” writes Rittner,

    “baked them in ovens, flung them into wells, hung them up by
    the feet, fastened thumb-screws upon them, drove sharp spikes
    under their nails, bound round their heads so tight that
    their eyes started out, gagged them and sealed their mouths.
    Matrons and virgins were oft-times put to shame. Husbands must
    often leave their wives and wives their husbands, parents
    their children and children their parents, even on the bed of
    sickness, for they were powerless to save them from abuse, and
    sometimes when they came back they found nought of them save
    some few bones, for all else had the dogs mangled and eaten up.”

Not less graphic is the story told in stone in some of the tormented
cities. Round the giant church, spared by the Swedes to uphold the
Lutheran faith of which it was then the temple and by the Imperialists
for the sake of the Roman faith which they hoped to establish anew
within its walls, there may be seen the tombs of many generations
of citizens. Those of the sixteenth century are covered with quaint
adornment and graven with artistic skill. Then, as war sweeps over
the land, the series is broken, to be resumed after many decades
with a rude clumsiness which shows that wealth and art had fled from
Brandenburg together.

Though it would be rash to assume that any single part of the Mark may
be regarded as typical of the whole, there seems to be no reason to
call in question the dictum of Frederick the Great, that his ancestors
needed a century to repair the damage of the Thirty Years’ War. This
great task was confided to a youth of twenty years, an only son, yet no
favourite of his father, the Elector George William, whom he succeeded
in 1640. Frederick William, known to history as the Great Elector,
was the great-grandfather of Frederick the Great. By common consent
he is reputed the founder of the glory of the House of Hohenzollern
in modern times. He found Brandenburg prostrate and threatened with
dissolution. It is from the low-water mark of these earliest years,
when he with reason bewailed difficulties greater than those of David
or Solomon, that the progress of his State is to be measured and his
own achievement thereby understood.

He found his exchequer empty, his palace half-ruined, the court seeking
safety and even sustenance at far-off Königsberg, the Austrian papist,
Schwarzenburg, supreme in the state, the Mark trampled underfoot by
alien hosts. How should an open country like his, the highroad between
Sweden and Austria, be delivered from the endless war? Even if, by
miracle, a peace could be devised, which Calvinists and Lutherans
could both accept, what prospect, nay what possibility existed that
territories so ill-compacted as his could be welded into a single,
solid state? All the needful bonds of union seemed to be lacking. What
common tie of blood, of faith, of speech was there strong enough to
bind together Cleves and Brandenburg and Ost-Preussen, units gathered
by the chance of recent history into one hand but dissevered by
hundreds of miles of alien soil and by chasms of sentiment still harder
to bridge over? The constituent parts of Frederick William’s domain
were in 1640 dissimilar in race, in history, and in interest. They had
no desire for closer relations; they had not even a uniform calendar;
their only common political aim seemed to be to flout the Elector, who
was the bugbear of them all.

Even were he to make himself master of the centre, dangers clustered
thick on either wing, while behind the Polish problems of the East and
the Netherlandish problems of the West a seer might have discerned the
double peril that encompasses modern Germany. Peter the Great and his
Russia lay yet in the womb of time, but Richelieu and his France were
in the full flood of successful ambition. Thus the organiser of a
North German power must work while his horizon was already darkening.
In grasping the lands which formed his birthright the Great Elector was
defying, though as yet he knew it not, two of the greatest forces of
modern times. Hohenzollern rule on the Niemen was to become a challenge
to Russia and to the Slavic advance, while the Hohenzollern lord of
Cleves must ultimately reckon with the belief of Frenchmen that the
Rhine is the boundary designed by nature for their state.

[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY CHRISTIAN WOLFFGANG.]

During the first critical years of his rule, however, the plans of
the Great Elector were of the humblest. Striving for existence rather
than for empire, he was not too proud to beg for help in every likely
quarter. Among our own State-papers are to be seen his letters suing
for petty favours which Charles I., so long as diplomacy would serve,
was very willing to grant. The King of England marked the small esteem
in which he held the untried and obscure Elector by pressing upon him
the hand of his niece, a princess of the fugitive and bankrupt House of
the Palatinate. Frederick William’s relations with Poland, the suzerain
of whom he held Ost-Preussen, show yet more clearly how slight was his
power at his accession. When the Lutherans of Königsberg threatened
riot because a Calvinist was chosen to preach the funeral sermon of
George William, the Elector did not blush to solicit the Papist King,
Wladislaus IV., to admonish these unruly Protestants. To this end he
bade his minister at Warsaw “make humble request to His Majesty
that His Majesty would in friendly—cousinly fashion let it please
him to send a letter to our chief Councillors (but as if His Majesty
had been informed of this from other quarters and not from us) and
thereby to order them to reprove and repress this folly of the unquiet
theologians.... It will perhaps be best if you solicit this work only
after the departure of the Diet.” The request was made and granted, and
the minister instructs the Elector how he may palm off the document as
a mandate approved by the Diet behind whose backs it had been obtained.

Where charity was to be looked for, Frederick William was not too proud
to beg. But of all powers the least likely to be charitable was Sweden,
whose armies had for nearly ten years been fighting solely for material
compensation. To Sweden therefore the Elector offered money and was
allowed to purchase that deliverance from the war which was essential
to all his plans (1641). He could now begin the task of his life—to
reduce all his provinces into dependence upon himself and to render
Brandenburg, augmented and centralised, a formidable military power.

During forty-eight years (1640–1688) he pursued the old Hohenzollern
policy of family aggrandisement. His success has earned him the title
of the Great Elector, and the place of the first hero of the Prussian
state. Yet he is remarkable chiefly for his commercial instinct,
imbibed perhaps during his education among the Dutch, the neighbours to
whom he always looked for example and alliance. On occasion he could
display the soldierly instinct of his race, but in time of peace he was
hardly a heroic figure. With domestic virtues specially to be praised
in a monarch of that time he combined a weakness for strong drink which
damaged his health and temper. He took pride in being abreast of the
times, reverenced London and Amsterdam, and was ready to haggle with
foreigners for preferential rates. He wrote a good commercial hand,
planted cabbages in his garden, and hammered out verses which with a
little doctoring might have graced the poet’s corner of a provincial
newspaper. He was a thrifty householder, save when he deemed it
necessary to keep up his position by building a massive palace or
giving a pompous feast. A convinced Protestant, he welcomed serviceable
Huguenots to his capital with more good-will than serviceable papists.
It is not impossible to believe that as a German patriot he took
favours from the Emperor with more inward pleasure than from Louis XIV.
In what Dr. Prothero terms “the ocean of recognised mendacity which
we call diplomacy” he floundered without either repugnance or great
success. He spent his life in unifying his dominions and made a will
which if carried into effect would have dismembered them at his death.
That a man of this stamp is designated Great suggests that he was not
only diligent but that he was also fortunate in the conditions under
which he lived and worked.

In his early years he owed much to the weakness and insignificance
which have already been described. What rival state was thrown into the
shade if Brandenburg was allowed to grow? Thus, at the close of the
Thirty Years’ War, the Hohenzollern line received indulgent treatment.
Their claim to Pomerania was admitted for the eastern half of the
duchy. The western half was indispensable to Sweden, but the rights of
the Elector were bought up at the price of more valuable ecclesiastical
lands scattered between the Mark and his possessions in the West. The
bishoprics of Halberstadt and Minden and the reversion of the rich
archbishopric of Magdeburg were given to Brandenburg, whose part in
the war had been contemptible, by the great Peace of Westphalia, the
fundamental pact of modern Europe. Yet its sacredness was so little
appreciated by the Elector that a few years later he would have renewed
the war, had not outraged Germany held him in.

The Peace of Westphalia had bestowed upon Brandenburg and other
German states a gift of more value than many bishoprics—the gift of
independence. In outward show Frederick William was still a vassal of
the Emperor. He continued to be one of the seven Electors who chose
the head of the Holy Roman Empire and honoured him with lowly homage.
In virtue of his hereditary office of Grand Chamberlain it was the
duty of the Elector of Brandenburg, prescribed by the Golden Bull of
1356, to appear at solemn courts “on horseback, having in his hands a
silver basin with water, and a beautiful towel, and descending from his
horse, to present the water to the Emperor or King of the Romans to
wash his hands.” As a German prince, moreover, he had still to look
to the Emperor for investiture, leadership, and advice. But his right
to determine the creed of his subjects, which the Peace of Westphalia
confirmed, and the right to choose allies outside the Empire, which it
expressly granted, were inconsistent with real vassalage. The gift of
these admitted Brandenburg to a place in the commonwealth of nations.
The Elector had become undisputed master in his own house. Soon his
horizon expanded far beyond the bounds of Germany. Europe, nay more,
as his colonial ventures were to prove, the wide world lay open to the
Hohenzollern. Both at home and abroad he could strike with a freer
hand. But his power, though irresistible in Brandenburg, was made
respectable in Europe only by years of toil. Hence the home policy of
the Great Elector was as straightforward as his foreign policy was
tortuous. To beat down all competing authority, to establish an armed
autocracy, to develop to the utmost all the resources of the State—such
was the plan which the Great Elector designed, which his son and
grandson perfected, and the fruits of which Frederick the Great enjoyed.

By steady pressure, by force, and at times by fraud, the Great Elector
guarded the future of the Hohenzollern power against the danger
of obstructive provincial parliaments. To make the men of Cleves,
Brandenburg, and Ost-Preussen feel themselves brethren was indeed
beyond his power. But he ruthlessly suppressed the institutions which
symbolised their mutual independence of each other and of himself.
Carlyle, the great panegyrist of _coups d’état_, thus describes one
example of

    “his measures, soft but strong, and ever stronger to the
    needful pitch, with mutinous spirits. One Bürgermeister of
    Königsberg, after much stroking on the back, was at length
    seized in open Hall, by Electoral writ,—soldiers having first
    gently barricaded the principal streets, and brought cannon to
    bear upon them. This Bürgermeister, seized in such brief way,
    lay prisoner for life; refusing to ask his liberty, though it
    was thought he might have had it on asking.”

The Great Elector’s chief legacy was, however, the Prussian army. The
ruler of mere patches of the great northern plain, “a country by nature
the least defensible of all countries,” he girdled it laboriously with
a wall of men. In an age when France alone possessed a large standing
army, this obscure German prince raised his force from a few garrisons
to a host some twenty-seven thousand strong, well drilled and well
appointed.

The lord of Brandenburg now became a _condottiere_ of ever-increasing
reputation. His regiments brought security to his dominions and gold
to his exchequer. In every European struggle their aid was welcome.
On the frozen lagoons by the Baltic and on the shores of Torbay,
on the torrid plain of Warsaw, and in the vine-clad valley of the
Rhine—everywhere the men of the Mark approved themselves good soldiers
and punctual allies. In 1660 the Great Elector netted his profit from
the Northern war by receiving Ost-Preussen free from Polish suzerainty.
The heroic moment of the whole reign came, however, in 1675, when all
the threads of the Elector’s policy—ambition, vengeance against the
Swedes, military creation, domestic organisation—guided him to the
stricken field of Fehrbellin. While playing his part in the West as a
member of the coalition against France, he learned that the Swedes,
his hated neighbours in Pomerania, had been hurled upon his domains by
their patron Louis XIV. He straightway turned his back upon the Rhine
and stalked silently across Germany to rescue his helpless people. His
troops had been beaten by Turenne and exhausted by the long struggle
with rain and mud. Yet he dared to overrule his generals and to strike
straight at superior forces trained in the school of Gustavus and
posted with a river in their rear.

The bold move succeeded. In a hand-to-hand struggle, amid bogs and
dunes, Brandenburg was saved by its chief. At the crisis of the fight
he put himself at the head of a wavering squadron, and with one wild
charge shattered the Swedes and their prestige together. The result of
Fehrbellin was that Brandenburg took rank as the first military power
of Northern Europe and that the land had rest for many years.

Fehrbellin forms a conspicuous landmark on the road to Hohenzollern
greatness, but it is separated by no great interval of time from
a double demonstration of the insignificance of Brandenburg when
confronted with states of the first order. The Emperor flatly refused
to admit the claim of the Elector to portions of Silesia. The King of
France dashed from his lips the cup of triumph over the Swedes. In
an age when rivers were of even greater value than at present, the
great waterway of Brandenburg was the Oder. Ere she could draw full
profit from the Oder, Stettin, with its splendid harbourage and strong
strategic position, must be wrested from alien hands. At Fehrbellin
hope sprang up that the time was come. With all the tenacity of his
nature the Great Elector clung to the task. In 1677 Stettin fell, after
enduring one of the most desolating bombardments in history. Before the
close of 1678 the Swedes were driven from all Western Pomerania. They
descended upon Ost-Preussen, but Frederick William set at naught the
winter cold and his own infirmity, hurried from Cleves to the Vistula,
put his troops on sledges, and dashed at the enemy across the frozen
sea (January, 1679). The triumph of the Elector was complete, but at
the Peace of S. Germain (1679) he was compelled to surrender all his
conquests at the behest of Louis XIV.

In spite of some failures, however, Frederick William by dogged
perseverance accomplished enough to justify his reputation as the
founder of the Prussian State. He is still a force in Germany.
Frederick the Great and all the later Hohenzollerns of renown have paid
homage to his memory. William II. embittered the downfall of Bismarck
by applauding a drama which represented the Great Elector deposing
Schwarzenburg, the hated counsellor of his father. Throughout Prussia
the imperious features of the little hero of Fehrbellin are as familiar
to the people as his deeds.

With the death of the Great Elector in 1688 the age of iron gave way
to the age of tinsel. Frederick, who ruled in his father’s place for a
quarter of a century (1688–1713), was a prince who prized culture above
character and strove to imitate in his provincial court the splendours
of Versailles. From time to time, though less often than in other royal
lines, the business instinct of the Hohenzollerns fails, and of such a
lapse Frederick is an example. Despising the domestic labours of the
Great Elector, he was captivated by those ceremonious shadows which
the German nation is always wont to pursue. Frail, even maimed, since
childhood, he developed a passion for pageants, robes, and titles. He
could not endure the promotion of his equals to rank higher than his
own. If the Dutch Statthalter rose to be William III. of England and
the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg to be Elector George of Hanover, might
not he himself, as master of the best troops in Germany, also claim
to rise? When in 1696 he was about to visit William of Orange at the
Hague he declared that he could not consent to sit upon an ordinary
seat while an armchair was placed for the King. The interview therefore
was accomplished standing, and when William returned the visit he found
armchairs of equal dignity set for the Elector and for himself.

Seldom has a ruler’s weakness done better service to his State.
Brandenburg was shielded by its poverty from the ordinary fate of
German states whose rulers tried to copy the profusion of the kings of
France. Frederick, moreover, had not the force of will to break with
all the traditions of the Great Elector. He continued to take part
in every struggle as an auxiliary, but in none as a principal. His
country thus enjoyed the glories of war without its penalties. It was
under the command of Prince Eugene, Austria’s greatest general, that
Brandenburgers helped to overthrow the French before Turin (1706). And
since a large army is the most splendid trapping of monarchy, Frederick
made his army very large. He inherited 27,000 men, he bequeathed nearly
50,000 to his son.

The climax of his reign was reached in 1701, when he prevailed upon
the Emperor to make him King of Prussia. In a double sense it may be
said with truth that he owed his crown to his weakness. It is generally
believed that the chief motive which prompted him to sue for it was
vanity. For months he could think and speak of nothing else. When at
last the imperial license came, the enraptured Elector quitted Berlin
in midwinter and spent twelve days in moving with a pompous train to
Königsberg. There, with every detail of ceremony that his imagination
could suggest, he placed the crown upon his head. It is doubtful
whether a more sober ruler would have prized a throne as he did, and
doubtful too whether the Emperor would have consented to the elevation
of a prince less obviously feeble. But Frederick had carried on without
reserve the old Hohenzollern tradition of standing well with the head
of the German world. He had even given back to Austria the territory
of Schwiebus, which the Emperor had assigned to the Great Elector in
settlement of whatever claim the Hohenzollerns possessed to portions
of Silesia. Now he was prepared to uphold the Hapsburg cause in the War
of the Spanish Succession. What harm could there be, the Emperor may
well have asked himself, in promoting a vassal so devoted as this?

Forty years later, Austria had bitter cause to rue the error of her
chief. From the very first the crown aggrandised the Hohenzollern
dynasty. It consecrated their ambition, enlarged their horizon, and
gave them, as the Lord’s anointed, a new claim upon the devotion of
their subjects. The Order of the Black Eagle, which for two centuries
has been the coveted prize of service to their state, signalised the
coronation of Frederick I.

The Great Elector and the first king of Prussia have this in
common—that whatever may be thought of their achievements it is
difficult to mistake the men themselves. Of the second king, Frederick
William I. (1713–1740), the father of Frederick the Great, the exact
opposite is true. His life-work, the establishment of the royal power
“like a rock of bronze,” is patent to all. He himself, on the other
hand, was a mystery to his own children. His most gifted admirer,
Carlyle, sets out to paint a prophet and ends by portraying something
very like a madman. His theory of his own sovereign office was as
mystical as his practice of ruling was simple. He regarded himself,
it has been said, as the servant of an imaginary master—the King of
Prussia—under whose eye he lived and worked. Baser princes looked on
their royalty as a privilege to be enjoyed. To Frederick William
it was a duty calling for endless toil. He struggled to check every
detail of government with his own hand, as though Prussia were a single
manor and he the squire. A French critic (Lavisse) thus portrays him
wrestling with his ever-multiplying tasks:

    “Have we not too many officials,” the King enquires. “Could
    not several places be merged into one? We must see if some of
    the officials cannot be put down. Why is not the beer so good
    everywhere as at Potsdam? In order to have wool we must have
    sheep. Now in Prussia there are nearly as many wolves as sheep.
    Quick, let me have a minute upon the destruction of wolves.
    How comes it that the salt tax has brought in less money this
    year than last from the district of Halberstadt? The number of
    officials has not diminished, has it? They must have eaten as
    much salt as last year. There must therefore be fraud or waste
    somewhere. The Superintendent of the Salt Department must be
    warned to manage matters better than he has done of late. Can
    it be that my subjects buy salt in Hanover or Poland? Every
    importer of salt must be hanged.”

His violence was and still is notorious. He flung plates at his
children, caned his son in public, cudgelled the inhabitants of his
capital, and flung the judges down-stairs. He forced his queen, the
sister of the English King, to drink to the downfall of England. He
vilified everything French, and insulted the British Ambassador so
seriously that he conceived himself bound to leave Berlin. Yet he kept
Prussia at peace steadily enough to earn for himself the reputation of
a mere bully whom the Emperor could lead by the nose.

In spite of the contradictions of his character, however, the broad
principles of his reign are clear. Having stripped the state of the
veneer of luxury with which Frederick I. had disguised its poverty,
he took up and developed further the ideals of the Great Elector. He
made the royal power absolute in the state, and increased the army
till a population of about two and a half million souls supported
the unheard-of number of 83,000 men under arms. These were drilled
to such a pitch of perfection that Macaulay could say that, placed
beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and St. James’s
would have appeared an awkward squad. Yet this mighty force was used
for little save to secure the frontiers of Prussia and the rights of
all German Protestants. In territory the “Sergeant King” gained only
from the wreck of Sweden part of the prize which the Great Elector
had grudgingly relinquished at the behest of Louis XIV.—the mouth of
the Oder and with it the islands of Usedom and Wollin, and Western
Pomerania as far as the river Peene (1720).

[Illustration: PRUSSIA

After the Congress of Vienna, 1815]

In the home department, on the other hand, Frederick William I. made
a conspicuous advance from the point reached by his grandfather. He
showed the same military zeal, the same practical insight, the same
determination to set to rights with his own hand whatever in his
dominion was governed amiss, the same contempt for higher education,
the same benevolence towards the persecuted of other lands who might be
made useful to Prussia. But he showed also a power of grasping and of
simplifying the whole system of administration such as few rulers
have ever possessed. His great Edict of 1723 removed friction from the
working of the Prussian state. Thanks to this, his son Frederick found
the organisation described in the sixth chapter of this book—a machine
of government answering to every touch of the royal hand. He found at
the same time a firm tradition in favour of thrift, diligence, and
activity in the steersman of the state. We have traced the growth of
Prussia to 1740; let us now turn to the story of the prince who in that
year linked her fortunes with his own.

CHAPTER II

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.

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