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.