Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

FREDERICK WILLIAM THE FIRST.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY F. W. WEIDEMAN.

Just as the traditional enemy of the Bourbon was the Hapsburg, so the traditional enemy of the Hohenzollern was the Vasa. This gifted House had ruled in Sweden since 1520 and had chosen for their country a path which it was not strong enough to follow to the end. They had striven to turn the Baltic into a Swedish lake by conquering all its coasts. Success seemed nearest when in 1630 Gustavus landed in Germany, and at the point of the sword compelled his kinsman of Brandenburg to favour his adventure. The result of these bold steps was for Sweden a swift blaze of glory; for Brandenburg a decade of misery inflicted in great part by Swedish hands. In 1648 the great treaty compensated the Swedes for their work by driving the Great Elector from the mouth of the Oder. Their ambition to be masters of the Baltic shores, however, remained, and the Great Elector suffered much at their hands before the Peace of Oliva (1660) confirmed his sovereignty over Ost-Preussen. What happened at Fehrbellin and after it has been already told. The meteoric career of Charles XII. (1697–1718), who began by humbling Prussia, but ended by losing Stettin to her, is no part of our story, except in so far as it interested and influenced young Frederick. It suffices that in 1740 Sweden was factious and impotent, and that her aged King still held that part of Pomerania which Prussia did not possess. To acquire Western Pomerania was therefore a possible object for Frederick’s ambition.

The central mass of the Hohenzollern dominions touched along almost the whole of its eastern frontier a Power whose decline was even more visible than that of Sweden. The Polish Republic, which almost encircled Ost-Preussen, formed perhaps the strangest spectacle that Europe has ever seen. A vaster country than any of the Western Powers, Poland remained in the Middle Ages. Her constitution, indeed, seemed to have no other end than to make progress impossible. There were only two classes, nobles and serfs, the free and the unfree. But where every freeman was noble, many nobles were poor. These served for hire, and were distinguished, it is said, from men of lower birth by the privilege of being flogged upon a Turkey carpet. The direction of this vast country rested with a few thousand feudal chiefs who elected a nominal King from within their own body or outside it. They made the laws themselves, but a single dissentient voice could wreck the work of a whole Diet, as the annual session of Parliament was termed, and of late years this right had commonly been exercised. What trade there was, was left to the despised class of German burghers. The fighting force grew every year more feeble. While Austria could boast a Eugene and Russia a Peter, while the parade-ground at Potsdam was trodden by ever-growing masses of men who handled modern weapons with the precision given by daily practice, the Poles were blindly trusting in feudal levies generalled by a puppet King.

At Frederick’s accession, however, Poland still possessed two elements of strength besides her vast bulk and the knightly courage of her sons. These were the Saxon connexion and the port of Danzig. Two years earlier, at the price of war with France (1733–1738) and loss of lands in Italy, Charles VI. had secured the Polish crown for the son of the late King, Augustus III., the Elector of Saxony. The Emperor made this sacrifice to win support for the Pragmatic Sanction and to propitiate Russia, who looked upon Poland as her own if the French candidate were expelled. And, as the road from Dresden to Warsaw passed through the Hapsburg province of Silesia, Augustus had good reason to be faithful to the daughter of Charles VI.

Poland none the less promised much to a king of Prussia who could wait. Her artificial connexion with Saxony, established by foreign Powers against the will of a majority of the Poles, could only weaken the frail bonds which bound the State together. Poland, all the world had long known, would one day fall in pieces, and who should hinder Prussia from gathering some of them? For the moment, however, Augustus could defend his new dominions. A king of Prussia in a fever to act at once could not assail Poland without laying bare his flank to Saxony and to her Imperial ally.

But could Prussia in 1740 afford to wait? If Augustus’s dream were to be fulfilled would not she be in jeopardy? The Elector hoped that the Emperor would cede to him a part of Lower Silesia, so that Prussia might be for ever divided and hemmed in by a Saxon-Polish State. Had we no other guide than the map, we might be tempted to guess that it was to avert this peril that Frederick seized Silesia. If it were true it were a grievous fault. Augustus, who was no statesman, might dream of a hereditary crown, but a firm Saxony-Poland was in fact impossible. Dresden and Warsaw were centuries apart. Out of two such halves no strong whole could be compounded. The one was German, the other Slav; the one industrial, the other primitive; the one Lutheran, the other partly Romanist and partly Orthodox. Compounds so discordant could have found no abiding unity in a monarchy based on the treason of their common head against the constitution of each. Nor could such a State have barred for a decade the path of the Muscovite Colossus which Peter had already roused and which Catherine and Alexander were soon to reinspire.

In weighing Frederick’s wisdom we must not forget that the share of Poland which he might expect that Prussia was destined to acquire, and which did, in fact, fall to her during his own lifetime, would change Ost-Preussen from an isolated province into a strong limb of a well-knit State. It gave her the lower waters of a third great arterial river—the Vistula. But it came to her in 1774 shorn of its chief glory, the old portal of the Vistula and strong tower of Poland, the matchless town of Danzig. Frederick had seen that fair city, a hearth of German culture among the Slavs, with its giant Marienkirche towering over a mass of battlements and gates and churches of stately civic halls and mansions hardly less stately, the whole forming a Venice of the North beside which his capital was but a market town. He must have taken note of the foundation of all this grandeur, great warehouses on busy wharves, canals crowded with masts and hulls from many lands. And he cannot have been blind to the fact that within a few miles of this prize lay Ost-Preussen, and that, since Augustus had surrendered Curland, within a few miles of Ost-Preussen lay Russia. Seldom has a king had clearer warning to look before he leaped.

Thus, without departing from the policy of the men who had made Prussia what she was, the young King had his choice between adventure on the Rhine or across the Peene and a policy of expectant watchfulness on the Vistula. But if he were capable of building upon the foundations of his forefathers the loftiest structure that they would bear, then a still more glorious conquest might be his. Lord of Stettin and of the ports of Ost-Preussen, he might claim a share in what all the nations coveted, the empire of the sea.

It is one of the most grotesque facts in history that the Emperor William II., when he cried, “Our future lies upon the water,” should have been uttering as prophecy what ought to have been commonplace for a century and a half. Even in 1740 the truth that the New World offered a fairer career than the Old was not hidden from statesmen less astute than Frederick. Since the Armada foundered in 1588, the nations of Europe had been realising it one by one. Spain and Portugal, the first in the field, still held a vast heritage across the ocean, but their monopoly was not as unchallenged as of old. First the Dutch, who as subjects of Spain had monopolised that carrying-trade which seemed to be beneath the dignity of an Iberian gentleman, enriched themselves so rapidly that they were able to throw off the yoke of Philip II. and to establish a colonial and commercial empire of their own. Then England, tardily comprehending the changing conditions of life, grappled with their little republic in a long and doubtful struggle. Finally weight told, and after the Revolution of 1688 England under her Dutch King led the way and Holland followed in a campaign against a rival dangerous to both. For France had been guided by Colbert into the path of greatness beyond the seas, and it was by grasping at Spain and the Indies that Louis XIV. aroused the keenest apprehensions that he might become dictator of the world. Only at the cost of two mighty wars had the danger from France been averted for a generation. By the Peace of Utrecht (1713) the Sea Powers gained security for themselves and for their commerce, but the prize of North America still remained to be fought for between France and England.