Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

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.

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.”