[The following extracts from the private correspondence of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams will further illustrate the remark in the text, and show the unfavourable view taken by him of the Prussian Court and Frederick the Great.]
Extract of a Letter from Charles Hanbury Williams, from Berlin, 1750.
.... ’Tis incredible what care this Pater Patriæ takes of his people. He is so good as to meddle in their family affairs, in their marriages, in the education of their children, and in the disposition of their estates. He hates that anybody should marry, especially an officer, let him be of what degree soever, and from the moment they take a wife, they are sure of never being preferred. All children are registered as soon as born, and the parents are obliged to produce either certificates of their deaths, or the male children themselves, at the age of fourteen, in order to be enrolled, and to take the oath of a soldier to the King; and if this is not done, or the children have escaped, the parents are answerable for the escape, and are sent to prison.
No man can sell land throughout all the Prussian dominions without a special licence from the King: and as he does no more give licences, nobody can now dispose of or alienate his possessions. If they could, and were to find fools to purchase them, I believe he would not have ten of his present subjects left in a year’s time. They have really no liberty left but that of thinking. There is a general constraint that runs through all sorts of people, and diffidence is painted in every face. All their ambition and desire is to be permitted to go to their Country Seats, where they need not be obliged to converse with any but their own family. But this leave is not easily obtained, because the father of his country insists upon their living at Berlin, and making his Capital flourish. He is never here but from the beginning of December to the end of January, and during that time, Prussians, Silesians, and all his most distant subjects, are obliged to come and make a figure here, and spend all they have been saving for the other ten months. He hates that any subject of his should be rich or easy; and if he lives a few years longer, he will have accomplished his generous design. There are actually but four persons in this great town that live upon their own means, and they are people that can’t last long in their present condition.
He (always meaning Pater Patriæ) gives very small salaries to all employments, and this is the cause that he can get no gentleman to serve him in a Foreign Legation. His Ministers at every Court are the scum of the earth, and have nothing but the insolence of their master to support them; and, indeed, the Prussian method of treating with every Court is such, as I wonder how Sovereign Princes can bear. Of this, if I had time, I could give you many provoking instances. His Prussian Majesty’s Ministers at Berlin—I mean those for Foreign Affairs—make the oddest figure of any in Europe. They seldom or never see any dispatches that are sent to the Prussian Ministers at Foreign Courts; and all letters that come to Berlin from Foreign Courts go directly to the King; so that Mr. Podewils and Count Finkenstein know no more of what passes in Europe than what they are informed of by the Gazettes. When any of us go to them on any business, the surprise they are in easily betrays their ignorance, and the only answer you ever get is, that they will lay what you say before their master, and give you an answer as soon as he shall have signified his pleasure to them. When you return to their houses for this answer, they tell you the exact words which the king has directed, and never one word more; nor are you permitted to argue any point. In short, they act the part of Ministers without being really so, as much as ever Cibber did that of Wolsey upon the stage, only not half so well.
The first of them is reputed to be an honest man, but he is nothing less. He loses that appearance of credit he once had, daily; for verily I believe he never had real weight enough with his master to have made an Ensign in his Army, or a Postillion in one of his Posthouses. His face is the picture of Dullness when she smiles, and his figure is a mixture of a clown and a petit-maître. He is a little genteeler than Mons. Adrié, who you may remember to have seen make so great a figure in England.
The other, Count Finkenstein, whom everybody calls Count Fink, is very like the late Lord Hervey, and yet his face is the ugliest I ever saw. But when he speaks, his affectation, the motion of his eyes and shoulders, all his different gestures and grimaces, bring Lord Hervey very strongly into my mind; and, like that Lord, he is the Queen’s favourite (I mean the Queen Mother’s); and her Majesty, whether seriously or otherwise I can’t tell, calls him “Mon beau Comte Fink.” He has parts, and is what, at Berlin, is called sçavant, which is to say, that he has read all the modern French story books, from Les Egaremens down to the history of Prince Cocquetron.
The person who has certainly the greatest share of the King of Prussia’s confidence is one Heichel. He is his Private Secretary, and writes all that the King himself dictates. But this man I never saw, and people that have lived here seven years have never seen him. He is kept like a State Prisoner, is in constant waiting, and never has half an hour to himself in the whole year.