The literature of the day shed tears over the royal bereavement, celebrated the “virtues” of this susceptible monarch, and contrasted with the withering scepticism of Voltaire and the criminal frivolity of the French the tender abandon with which Frederick William gave himself up to “nature’s sweetest inclination.” “Women-haters,” wrote Baron de Trenck, “have been the scourges of humanity. The King of Prussia has a great soul, full of sensibility; in love he is capable of a tender attachment: he knows the value of his mistress. Supposing he gives her a million, the money is divided among the members of the household who are citizens. He will not rob an honest man of the spouse who constitutes his happiness, he will not sacrifice Rome for Cleopatra. He wants to please all by himself. For twenty months he courted Mademoiselle de Voss, he married her, he was faithful to her, he wept over her ashes. Every citizen wise enough to know human weaknesses must wish that if he made a fresh choice it would fall on an object as worthy of his heart. So let him enjoy a happiness which belongs to the simple peasant as it does to kings.” This hypocritical twaddle, this licentious casuistry, was “very good style” in Germany then, and was highly appreciated.
IX.
The distraction which Trenck desired for the afflicted soul of the King was not long in presenting itself. In 1790, on the anniversary of the Countess of Ingenheim’s death, Mademoiselle Dœnhof was presented at Court. Everyone there was busy consoling Frederick William. A claimant had even been put forward in the person of a young lady called Viereck, a friend of Mademoiselle de Voss, who had taken the latter’s place with Princess Frederica. Unhappily for Mademoiselle Viereck’s friends, she was dark and in no way recalled the dear departed. Mademoiselle Dœnhof, on the other hand, was, according to the French Minister, “so perfectly fair that, while pretty in artificial light, in daylight she was as yellow as a lemon.” With the same charms as Mademoiselle de Voss, she had the same jumble of pietism and virtue. It was once more a case of marrying. The King saw no difficulty in the way. “I am separated from the Queen,” he wrote to Mademoiselle Dœnhof; “Madame d’Ingenheim has left me a widower; I offer you my heart and hand.” He made no concealment of it, openly declaring that he had grounds for repudiating the Queen, but he refrained from taking action upon them in order to maintain the dignity of the throne.
The Consistory did not require to deliberate a second time; precedents had been established, and they were followed. The marriage took place on April 10, 1790, and it was the Court preacher, Zœllner, who consecrated it, as he had consecrated that with Mademoiselle de Voss. The Queen gave the bride girandoles of diamonds. The Queen-Dowager received her, and everyone at Court made a fuss of her. All the same, she was no more successful than Mademoiselle de Voss in getting rid of Madame Rietz. This favourite, who had been given 70,000 crowns to take her departure, remained, took an officer as her lover, and even got the King to promote him.
X.
And so, in 1790, the King of Prussia, Mademoiselle de Voss’s widower, had three wives living: the Princess of Brunswick, who was repudiated; the Princess of Darmstadt, who, although divorced, still kept the rank of Queen; and Mademoiselle Dœnhof, morganatic wife. This third wife, wrote one diplomat, will not be the last, for “those the King longs for will also want to be married.” The Prince in any case was always ready. Polygamy, in his eyes, was a prerogative of royalty. As the result of a Court intrigue in 1792 he had himself separated from Mademoiselle Dœnhof, crowning by this divorce the strange series of his conjugal evolutions. Then he offered his heart and hand to a lady called Bethmann, a banker’s daughter whom he had known at Frankfurt, and found very much to his liking. This young person, in the words of Lord Malmesbury, was “all sentiment and all fire”; but she had principles and discretion. She had misgivings about the character of the marriage and the constancy of the bridegroom. She refused, thus sparing the Berlin casuists the trouble of a deliberation still more ticklish than before. I know not whether these accommodating theologians, reared in the school of Voltaire and Frederick, took these simultaneous marriages very seriously or not; abroad they afforded subject for ridicule, and Catherine the Great, who herself did not feel bound to observe so many formalities, was highly amused at them; “that big lout of a Gu”—such was her name for Frederick William in her letters to Grimm—“that big lout has just married a third wife; the libertine never has enough legitimate wives; for a conscientious libertine, commend me to him.”
XI.
Frederick William loved women. Women, however, did not govern him. But if he escaped the influence of mistresses, he fell under the influence of favourites, and the people were none the better off. Badly brought up, kept apart from State affairs by his uncle, distrusting others because he was very distrustful of himself, he knew nothing of the art of government, and dallied with vague reform projects. The Ministers whom Frederick left behind, although very second-rate, made him ill at ease. He was afraid of being considered under their thumb; besides, these Ministers represented ideas and a system which he affected to condemn. “The King will be led just because he is afraid of being so,” wrote Mirabeau. The fear of being governed by his Ministers delivered him into the hands of underlings, who promptly gained a mastery over him by humbling themselves before him, reassuring his suspicious pride, flattering his passions—above all, exploiting the shortcomings of his mind. Frederick William desired the good of the State; he had a hazy but quite keen idea of the necessity of counteracting the excesses of Frederick’s Government; but his intentions rambled, and his reform fancies, more mystical then political, proceeded not so much from the idea of the interests of the State as from the influence of a secret doctrine with which he was imbued. The statesman in him was but an adept in magic; for Ministers he took mere charlatans. Skilled conjurers replaced at Potsdam Frederick’s “judicious Ministers.”
XII.
Of all these mystical adventurers, the one whose influence was perhaps the most baneful for the Prussian State was Wœllner, a pure intriguer. Son of a country pastor, he worked his way into the household of General d’Itzenplitz; after wheedling the mother, he ended by marrying the daughter. Frederick, who was anything but indulgent to mis-alliances, had him clapped into prison in Berlin. The hatred of Wœllner for the Philosopher-King dated from that day. At that time he was a rationalist and a disciple of Wolf; he became a Freemason. But already in high society in Germany the wind no longer set in the direction of pure Deism. Wœllner, always a perfect sceptic, changed his convictions. Considering himself as fitted as any other for the apparition business and the mystery industry, he decided to turn “honest broker” between the powers of this world and those of the next, basing his credit with the former on that which he claimed with the latter. He joined the Rosicrucians, and soon became one of the leading lights of the Order.