At this time General Borck was ill with an ailment that soon ended in mental derangement. Another general, Krusemarck, replaced him and proceeded to visit Trenck. They had been old friends and brother officers, but the general showed him no compassion; on the contrary, he abused him roundly, promising him even more severe treatment. It was then that the inhuman order was issued to the night guards to waken Trenck every quarter of an hour,—a devilish form of cruelty unsurpassed in prison punishments. Kindly nature, however, came to the rescue, and Trenck learned to answer automatically in his sleep; yet this cruel device was continued for four years and until within a few months of his final release.
The precautions taken effectually debarred the prisoner from any fresh attempt at evasion. A new governor had replaced the madman Borck, Lieutenant-Colonel Reichmann, a humane and mild-mannered officer. About this time, several members Of the royal family, including Princess Amelia, came to reside at Magdeburg and showed a kindly interest in Trenck’s grievous lot; his cell doors were presently opened each day to admit daylight and fresh air. He found employment, too, for his restless energies and was permitted to carve verses and figures upon the pewter cup provided as part of his cell furniture. The first rude attempt was much admired, the cup was impounded, and a new one served out; several, indeed, were provided in succession, so that Trenck became quite expert in this artistic employment and laboured at it continuously until the day of his release. By means of these cups he opened up communication with the outside world. Hitherto all correspondence had been forbidden; no one under pain of death might converse with him or supply him with pen, ink or paper. Strange to say, he was allowed to engrave what he pleased upon the pewter, and the cups were in great demand and passed into many hands. One reached the empress-queen of Austria and stimulated her to plead for Trenck’s pardon through her minister accredited to the court of Frederick. The engraving that touched her feelings was that of a bird in a cage held by a Turk, with the inscription, “The bird sings even in the storm: open his cage and break his fetters, ye friends of virtue, and his songs shall be the delight of your abodes.” The demand for these cups was so keen that Trenck worked at them by candle light for eighteen hours a day, and the reflected lustre from the pewter seriously injured his eyesight. It is a pathetic picture,—that of the active-minded, undefeated captive, labouring incessantly although weighed down by chains and the terrible encumbrance of a huge collar which pressed on the arteries at the back of his neck and occasioned intolerable headache.
Although repeatedly foiled in his assiduous attempts to break prison, the indomitable Trenck never abated his unshaken desire to compass freedom. At length opportunity offered for a larger and more dangerous project: the seizure of the Star Fort and the capture of Magdeburg. At that time the war was in full progress and the garrison of the fortress consisted of only nine hundred discontented men of the militia. Trenck had already won over two majors and two lieutenants to his interest. The guard of the Star Fort was limited to one hundred and fifteen men. The town gate immediately opposite was held by no more than twelve men under a sergeant; just within it was a barrack filled with seven thousand Croat prisoners of war, several of whose officers were willing to join in an uprising. It was arranged that a whole company of Prussians should turn out at a moment’s notice with muskets loaded and bayonets fixed, to head the attack as soon as Trenck had overpowered the two sentinels who stood over him, secured them and locked them into his cell. It was an ambitious plan and was well worth the attempt. Magdeburg was the great national storehouse, holding all the sinews of war, treasure and munitions, and Trenck in possession, backed with sixteen thousand Croats, might have dictated his own terms. The plot failed through the treachery of an agent despatched to Vienna with a letter, seeking cooperation; it was given into the wrong hands and was sent back to Magdeburg, where the governor, then the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, read it and took prompt precautions to secure the fortress. An investigation was ordered, and Trenck was formally arraigned as a traitor to his country, but he sturdily denied the authorship of the incriminating letter, and the charge was not brought home to him. The landgrave was more merciful than former governors and showed great kindness to Trenck, relieved him of his intolerable iron collar, sent his own private physician to attend him in his illness and revoked the cruel order that prescribed his incessant awakening during the night.
A fresh attempt to undermine the wall was soon undertaken by the captive, but he was presently discovered at work and the hole in the floor walled up. The humane landgrave did not punish him further, and in the period of calm that followed, Trenck’s hopes were revived with the prospect of approaching peace, for he was now at liberty to read the newspapers. But when the landgrave succeeded to his throne and left Magdeburg, Trenck in despair turned his thoughts once more to a means of escape, and decided on the same method of driving a tunnel underground. A dreadful accident befell him in this particular attempt. While mining under the foundation, he struck his foot against a loose stone which dropped into the passage and completely closed the opening. Death by suffocation stared him in the face and paralyzed his powers. For eight full hours he could not stir a finger to release himself, but at last he managed to turn his body into a ball and excavate a hole under the stone till it sank and left him sufficient space to crawl over it and get out.
All was in a fair way to final evasion when Trenck had another narrow escape from discovery. It occurred through a pet mouse he had tamed and trained to come at his call, to play round him and eat from his hand. One night Trenck had encouraged it to dance and caper on a plate, and the noise made attracted the attention of the sentries, who gave the alarm. An anxious visitation was made at daybreak; smiths and masons closely scrutinised walls and floors and minutely searched the prisoner. Trenck was asked to explain the disturbance, and whistled to his mouse which came out and jumped upon his shoulder. The alarm forthwith subsided, and yet he found what the searchers had missed,—that his mouse had nibbled away the chewed bread with which he had filled the interstices between the planks of the floor which he had cut to penetrate below.
Trenck’s efforts did not flag till the very last hour of his imprisonment, nor did his gaolers relax their determination to hold him. One of their last devices was to reconstruct and strengthen his prison cell by paving the floor with huge flagstones. His courage was beginning to fail, but the darkest hour was before the dawn. Quite unexpectedly on Christmas Eve, 1763, the governor appeared at his cell door, accompanied by the blacksmith. “Rejoice,” he cried, “the king has been graciously pleased to relieve you of your irons;” and again,—“The king wills that you shall have a better apartment;” and last of all,—“The king wills that you shall go free.”
It has been said that the empress-queen of Austria had been moved to compassion for Trenck by the engraving on the pewter cup that came into her hands. His beloved Princess Amelia had also been active in trying to obtain his release. She employed a clever business man in Vienna, who at her bidding and for a sum of two thousand ducats won over a confidential servant of Maria Theresa, and caused him to intercede for the wretched prisoner at Magdeburg, who after all was still an Austrian officer. The kind-hearted Hapsburg sovereign wrote a personal letter to Frederick, her great antagonist, and the king of Prussia at last pardoned the miserable man who had dwelt for ten years in a living tomb. Like all political prisoners, he was obliged to bind himself by oath to the following conditions, which were not exactly performed by him:—that he would take no revenge on anyone; that he would not cross the Saxon or the Prussian frontiers to re-enter those states; that he would neither speak nor write of what had happened to him; that he would not, so long as the king lived, serve in any army either in a civil or military capacity.
After his liberation, he first lived in Vienna, where he came into personal contact with Maria Theresa and the emperors Francis and Joseph II. Later he settled at Aix-la-Chapelle, where he married the daughter of Burgomaster de Broe, and conducted a flourishing wine business. He undertook long journeys, and published his poems and autobiography, which had an immense success and were translated into almost every European language; he was also the editor of a newspaper and another periodical entitled The Friend of Men, and he amassed a handsome fortune.
After the death of Frederick, Trenck was allowed to return to Berlin and his confiscated goods were restored to him. His first visit was to his liberator and earliest love, the Princess Amelia; the interview was most affecting and heartrending. They were both greatly changed in appearance and more like the ghosts of their former brilliant selves. She inquired for his numerous children, for whom she assured him she would do all in her power, and he parted from her full of gratitude and greatly moved. It is a creditable trait in Trenck’s character that in spite of all his sufferings he did not hate the Prussian king, Frederick the Great.
One would think this aged adventurer would now seek rest, but far from it. He was attracted to Paris by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and he felt the necessity for playing an active part. He finally fell into the hands of Robespierre, and was tried and guillotined at the age of sixty-nine. On the scaffold his great stature, for he was much above the average height, towered over his fellow-sufferers. He looked quietly at the crowd and said, “Why do you stare? This is but a comedy à la Robespierre!”