Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

Thanks, however, to the vigilance of Colonel von Rochow, his keeper, and to the panic of his page, Frederick did not even mount the horse that was to have borne him out of Germany. His abortive attempt inaugurated one of the strangest tragedies in history. From the very fact that he was the guest of other princes Frederick William could not act in haste. The scheme was betrayed to him at Mannheim on August 6th, and he ordered von Rochow to deliver his son to him at his own town of Wesel, alive or dead. In this mood they continued the tour of pleasure, sailing down the Rhine and visiting the potentates upon its shores. At last, on the evening of the 12th, they reached Wesel. Frederick William at once interrogated his son, who lied and protested his submission. The King replied by despatching him to Spandau under the care of a general, who was enjoined to frustrate any attempt at rescue by killing his prisoner.

Spandau is the fortress near Berlin where to-day the Prussian sentries guard some millions of the treasure wrung from France. It was not deemed safe enough to keep the Prince of Prussia. “He is very cunning,” wrote the King, “and will have a hundred inventions for making his escape.” A stronger gaol was sought for. In a sombre plain east of the capital lies Cüstrin, whose grim fortress marks the spot where the sluggish Wartha gliding down from Poland silently joins the Oder. There, on September 4th, Frederick was imprisoned. On the way he had faced a tribunal of soldiers and lawyers with a jaunty confidence which showed that though he might cower before the King he had not forgotten that he was still Crown Prince of Prussia. It was rumoured that he had poked fun at Grumbkow, his father’s most trusted counsellor. For himself he asked no favours, but avowed his responsibility for all that Katte had done amiss.

A fortnight later, on September 16th, the commission examined him again. In the meantime he had begun to understand the nature of a gaol. His father, who lived in such a state of frenzy that he ordered that the tongue which spoke of this affair should be cut out, had not scrupled to condemn him to solitary confinement, a penalty often destructive of health and not seldom of reason. He was clad in brown prison dress, fed on the humblest fare, and deprived of light at seven o’clock in the evening. Thus prepared, he was subjected to a merciless inquisition. After more than one hundred and eighty questions of fact, came two which the King had commanded the interrogators to add. “Do you wish that your life should be granted to you or not?” “I submit to the King’s mercy,” answered Frederick, adding in pencil, when the report was laid before him, “and to his will.” “Since by violating your honour,” ran the last question of all, “you have made yourself incapable of succeeding to the throne, will you renounce the succession by an abdication that shall be confirmed by the whole Roman Empire—to save your life?” “My life is not over-dear to me,” replied the Prince, “but Your Majesty would surely not be so ungracious to me”—and he added a prayer for pardon. The King tore up the petition and applied his genius for detail to a code of rules for the torment of his heir. No one was to speak to the prisoner. Three times a day the door of his room might be opened, but within four minutes it must be made fast again. Mute attendants were to set before Frederick food which they had cut in pieces, since the royal command deprived him of knife and fork. For Katte Frederick William had ordered the rack, but on the representations of Grumbkow the order was cancelled. For his son he discovered a torture which Grumbkow himself was to apply. “He must be told,” decreed the King, “that no one thinks of him any more; that my wife will not hear his name; that his sister Wilhelmina has fallen under my displeasure, that she is shut up in Berlin, and will very soon be sent into the country.”

The problem before Frederick William, whose wrath increased as he experienced the difficulty of laying to his son’s account any definite crime, was to crush his heir without imperilling Prussia. On October 11th Frederick declared to the commission that he was ready to renounce the succession. On October 16th the King avowed in writing his desire to make his second son his heir. But to do this while Frederick lived was dangerous, and on what charge could he be put to death? Assassination, though it might rectify the succession to Philip of Spain or Peter of Russia, was to a Hohenzollern simply impossible. And Frederick William was not entirely sovereign over his son. It was true that a Prussian subject had no longer any right of appeal from the decrees of the Prussian King. But the Prussian King was also Elector of Brandenburg, and therefore a vassal of the Emperor. The heir to the Electorate of Brandenburg was equally a prince of the Empire and as such could appeal unto Cæsar. Moreover, no proof could be found that Frederick was a traitor. He had neither acted nor tried to act in collusion with any foreign Power. His father suspected that England was at the bottom of the plot, but no evidence of this could be found. By no severity could his son be brought to confess more than a design to run away. Foreign sovereigns protested against violence which degraded the royal caste.

It is difficult to see with what hope the baffled King insisted on a quibble which might make out his son to be technically a criminal. Frederick, by no choice of his own, was a colonel in the Prussian army. On October 25th a military court met at the King’s bidding to try him and his accomplices for desertion.

The court consisted of fifteen officers, three from each of five grades. The members of each grade, after deliberating apart, handed their votes to a president, the aged Lieutenant-Colonel von Schulenburg, who summed up their verdicts and added a sixth vote of his own. With regard to the Crown Prince, all were unanimous. Declaring themselves incompetent to pronounce upon affairs of state and of the royal family, they commended the exalted penitent to His Majesty’s supreme and paternal mercy. Katte was condemned by three grades to death, by two to lifelong imprisonment. Von Schulenburg voted for the latter, which by military law carried the day, since it was less severe. The King denounced their criminal leniency and clamoured for “justice,” but von Schulenburg stood firm, appealing to a Higher Power. Thereupon Frederick William decreed “that Katte, although in conformity with the laws he has deserved to be torn with red-hot pincers and hanged for the crime of high-treason which he has committed, be removed from life to eternity by the sword, out of consideration for his family. In informing Katte of this sentence, the Council will tell him that it grieves His Majesty, but that it is better that he should die than that justice should entirely leave the world.”

Under a sentence which no consensus of civilised opinion, no high-placed appeal, no murmur of disaffection could reduce, the doomed man journeyed slowly to Cüstrin. Frederick, who believed that all would go well with himself and his friend, was cheerful still. At five o’clock on the morning of November 6th he was awakened by two officers who told him that Katte was that morning to be put to death and that he must witness it. “What are these ill tidings that you bring me?” he is said to have exclaimed. “Lord Jesus! rather take my life.” Before his judges he had steadfastly declared that Katte’s guilt lay at his door. Now for two terrible hours he wailed, wrung his hands, burst into tears, sent to his friend to beg forgiveness, prayed for a respite while a courier should lay at the King’s feet whatever he might desire from his son—renunciation of the succession, consent to lifelong imprisonment, nay, his own life if Katte’s might be spared. His honourable clamour moves the heart of posterity, but it could vary no line upon the parchment on which the King had set down even the numbers of the soldiers who were to attend the execution. Seven o’clock struck, and the dismal procession filed into the courtyard which stretched from the fortress-wall to the Oder. As the King had commanded, Frederick was led to the window of his cell. He saw his friend, who had received the communion, standing calm and brave amid the soldiers and awaiting with bared head the recital of the sentence of death. The prince kissed his hand to him and cried aloud for his forgiveness. Katte laid his finger upon his lips, bowed respectfully, and answered that there was nothing to forgive. He then bade his comrades farewell, knelt to receive the chaplain’s blessing, and with prayer upon his lips submitted to the fatal stroke.

FREDERICK THE SECOND.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY CUNNINGHAM.