Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

In 1732 Frederick experienced another pleasure and a far severer blow. He was allowed to leave Cüstrin, but he left it under sentence of marriage. This had been decreed in consequence of a curious chain of events. Frederick’s preceptors had remarked that he scorned administrative detail but displayed a taste for high politics. This was evident in his suggestions for the disposal of his hand. Now he would marry, if he must marry at all, Anne of Russia; now the Archduchess Maria Theresa, renouncing his succession in Prussia. This suggestion was reported by Grumbkow to the Emperor’s great minister, Eugene. The old diplomat scented danger in such large ideas and urged that the Crown Prince of Prussia should be bound to the car of Austria. He might be encouraged to borrow money from the Emperor, and married to Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, a niece of the Empress. Frederick William, still hot against England, with whose Court his queen continued to intrigue, cheerfully assented to the match.

In a honeyed letter of February 4, 1732, the King broke the news to his son. “She is a creature who fears God,” he wrote, “and that is everything.” The bridegroom elect thought otherwise. He wrote to Grumbkow that he hated severe virtue, and rather than marry a fanatic, always grimacing and looking shocked, he would prefer the worst character in Berlin. “When all is said and done he cried, there will be one more unhappy princess in the world.” “I shall put her away as soon as I am master,” he twice declared. “Am I of the wood out of which they carve good husbands?” “I love the fair sex, my love is very inconstant; I am for enjoyment, afterwards I despise it. I will keep my word, I will marry, but that is enough; Bonjour, Madame, et bon chemin.”

Frederick’s marriage, by which he brought to an end the sternest period of his second education, was a crime, but the bridegroom was not guiltless. All his outcry was made in secret. To the King, in whose hands his fate lay, he showed himself all submission. Frederick William had in his own young days received the names of three princesses from whom his father desired him to choose a bride. He protested with success against such compulsion and his marriage with Sophia Dorothea was something of a love-match. Here was an argument to which he could hardly shut his ears. His son preferred to purchase greater liberty for himself by condemning to a life of misery an innocent creature who had never harmed him. At the same time, by making a happy home-life impossible, he shut out what was perhaps the last chance that he might become in any sense of the words a good man.

For the moment, however, his submission brought him freedom. On March 10, 1732, he went through the formal ceremony of betrothal. Some of the guests remarked that his eyes were filled with tears and that he turned abruptly from his betrothed to a lady who was supposed to be the mistress of his heart. But a year’s respite was granted him. While Austrian statesmen schemed to turn the timid, ignorant Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern into a woman of the world, who might make her husband a Hapsburg partisan, Frederick was learning his work as colonel not far from the field of Fehrbellin. It was drudgery, but it was not Cüstrin. After a year of it he wrote: “I have just drilled, I drill, I shall drill. That is all the news. But it is delightful to indulge in a few moments’ breathing-space, and I would rather drill here from dawn to dusk than live as a rich man at Berlin.”

June 12, 1733, was Frederick’s wedding-day. The Austrian diplomats, who had made the match, went far towards flinging away their advantage. At the last moment they dared to suggest that Frederick William should accommodate the Emperor by entering into a new combination which assigned an English bride to his son. The King was furious at the slight, and the marriage was only another step towards the alienation of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns.

After his marriage Frederick’s father still dictated his movements and kept him short of money. But the period of dragooning was over, and it becomes important to enquire what Frederick William had achieved by this stage of the second education begun with crime and carried on with cruelty. One answer to this question must be mentioned because it is supported by the authority of Carlyle. He holds that the execution of Katte was just, that the imprisonment of Frederick was salutary, that the King was a father yearning to reconcile his son with God and with himself, and that he was not only just and affectionate but also successful. An opinion more widely held is that the execution and imprisonment were unjust but politic, that reasons of state excused them, that their righteousness was proved by their success, and that by them Prussia gained a hero who made her great among the nations of the earth as none but he was able.

On reflection we may think it strange that results so great should have been achieved by a scheme of education so stupid. The King owed the best features of his plan to suggestions from outside. He had condemned his son to tedious, nay, dangerous idleness: it was Wolden who obtained for him a grudging permission to work. He had set him to learn agriculture by attending board meetings: it was Hille who urged that he should be allowed to see how farming was carried on. The united efforts of Hille and Wolden could not convince him that the heir to the throne needed any books save books of devotion. These faults, though significant, were errors of detail. But the King’s whole plan is open to graver objections. It is in fact based on three of the commonest yet most fatal errors with regard to education. That boys are dough or putty to be placed in a mould and beaten till they take the exact shape of it, that a youth who is destined for a given career will succeed best by trying to make himself a facsimile of some one else who has been successful in it, and that it is good to limit training to the acquisition of professional aptitude—these are errors which Frederick William held in common with pedants and doctrinaires of every era.

From Frederick’s birth onwards he had laboured to give him his own characteristics, even his own vices, in the hope that as his son’s conduct grew like his own, so also would his policy. This was still the aim of all his measures. But the second education is distinguished from the first by the ghastly object-lesson with which it opens and by its appearance of success. The death of Katte affords the measure of Frederick William’s powers as a teacher. It imperilled the health, even the reason of his pupil, but assuredly it was not forgotten. Are we then to infer that the King’s system atoned for its faults by its triumph? That Frederick was bullied into love for his father seems incredible. It is true that in public he spoke little ill of him, either before his death, when it would have been dangerous to himself, or after it, when it would have been detrimental to the office which he had inherited. But neither his motto nor his conduct after 1730 betokened love. “Far from love, far from the thunderbolt,” are not words of affection, nor is it filial piety to cozen, to flatter, and to shun. He addressed the King as “most all-gracious Father,” while he secretly petitioned the foes of Prussia for funds wherewith to play upon his weakness for tall recruits. It was like a foretaste of death, he said, when a hussar appeared to command his presence at Berlin.

It may at once be granted that in conduct Frederick was transformed. Before his disgrace he had been a trifler, after it he worked hard till the day of his death. What is doubtful is that this result could not have been obtained at a less cost. There is no evidence that the King had ever tried the normal method of giving his son a fitting task and a reasonable independence in performing it. Frederick, moreover, was nearing the age at which many triflers develop a new spirit. During his year of exile his health improved. He became stouter in body and firmer in gait, so that at first even Wilhelmina did not recognise him. This change at least was not designed by the father who wished him dead, yet to this may be ascribed much of his novel energy.

It is still less certain that his character had gained from the second education. Many of the striking traits of old reappear. Frederick is still before all else brilliant—a gay and versatile young man with elastic spirits and a passion for music, society, and intellectual conversation. Despite his father’s hatred of all things French, Frederick still looked on Paris as the Mecca of civilisation. His literary ambitions were more pronounced than ever. At Cüstrin he had gone back to verses—verses always Gallic, copious, and bad. A Prussian patriot lamented that while he knew not whether his ancestors had won Magdeburg at cards or in some other way, he had Aristotle’s rules of composition by heart. Yet, for all his perseverance, Lord Mahon speaks with justice of “his two kinds of prose, the rhymed and unrhymed.” In the darkest hours of his struggle against all Europe, he sat down to rhyme in French. “He does not really know the Germans at all,” complained his tutors. Though sometimes brutal, he prided himself on his ceremonious politeness—a German version of Louis XIV. All through his career he was wont at times to put on the great monarch. “Hush, gentlemen,” once exclaimed Voltaire when his royal host thus suddenly stiffened, “the King of Prussia has just come in.” His morals were no better after confronting death than before. “The flesh is weak,” he writes to his mother, “but I do not believe that Cato was Cato when he was young.” It was said that the motive of his amours was vainglory rather than the satisfaction of vicious desires. No one, wrote harsh critics, could rely upon his word, and few if any could tell of a disinterested act that he had done.