A story cited by Carlyle illuminates Frederick’s views upon the relations between Church and State. He was questioning the monks of Cleve, to whom the old dukes had assigned an income from the royal forest-dues for masses to be said on their behalf. “‘You still say those masses then?’ ‘Certainly, your Majesty.’ ‘And what good does anybody get out of them?’ ‘Your Majesty, those old sovereigns are to obtain heavenly mercy by them, to be delivered out of purgatory by them.’ ‘Purgatory? It is a sore thing for the Forests, all this while! And they are not yet out, those poor souls, after so many hundred years of praying?’ Monks have a fatal apprehension, No. ‘When will they be out, and the thing complete?’ Monks cannot say. ‘Send me a courier whenever it is complete!’ sneers the King,” and leaves them to finish the Te Deum which they had begun to greet his arrival.
Lastly, the forms with which Frederick took up the kingship showed that the fears of his father and the hopes of enlightened men were alike without foundation. It became clear that the philosopher-king, though he relieved famine and tempted learned foreigners to Berlin, would not revert to the ill-timed pageantry of his grandfather. Nor—though he freed the press and restricted to a few cases the use of torture—would he anticipate the glory of some Hohenzollern who is still unborn by fostering a spirit of individual liberty among his people. Impatient of coronation, which he classed among the “useless and frivolous ceremonies which ignorance and superstition have established,” he received the homage of his subjects by proxy everywhere save in Ost-Preussen, Brandenburg, and Cleve. At Königsberg he paid homage to the memory of liberties which his ancestors had crushed, and which he had no intention of animating anew. The ceremony at Berlin was made memorable by one of his rare displays of feeling. When he appeared on the balcony of the Castle and looked down upon the surging crowd in the square below, he was so affected that he remained standing many minutes, silent and buried in thought. Then, recovering himself, he bowed to the multitude, and rode off to attend a military review.
EUROPE 1740
G. P. Putnam’s Sons. London, & New York.
It is, however, on his journey to Wesel, his Rhenish capital, that he reveals most clearly how the Crown Prince has changed into the King. Wilhelmina had found him of late so careless, even so uncivil, a correspondent that the news of his coming to Baireuth prostrated her with joy. He seemed to her so altered in countenance and developed in form that, just as after his imprisonment at Cüstrin, she hardly recognised him. But a less welcome change was only too perceptible. Wilhelmina found her brother’s caresses forced, his conversation trivial, their sister, the Margravine of Ansbach, more favoured than herself. The remainder of the journey proved that Frederick at least remained true to the French. At Frankfort he disguised himself for a flying visit to Strasburg. There his little party put up at an inn, sent the landlord to invite officers to their table, and visited the theatre. The mask was penetrated by a runaway Prussian whose tall brother had been kidnapped for the army and who recognised the son of his former King. The greatest pleasure of all came last. At Wesel, besides dealing with the affair of Herstal, which will be described in the next chapter, Frederick for the first time paid homage in person to Voltaire.
At the end of October Wilhelmina visited Berlin, but her brother welcomed her coldly. She found abundant proofs that he had become inscrutable. She describes in her Memoirs how the Queen Mother had shut herself up, equally astonished and mortified at her complete exclusion from affairs of State. “Some complained of the little care he had to reward those who had been attached to him as prince royal; others, of his avarice, which they said surpassed that of the late King; others of his passions; others again of his suspicions, of his mistrust, of his pride, and of his dissimulation.” This criticism from an unwonted quarter may possibly be explained away. It has been suggested that the King’s treatment of his sister at Baireuth was due to the same policy of repelling every possible claimant to influence his policy, which may be held to excuse the snubs inflicted upon Dessau and Schulenburg and the dignified exile of Frederick’s mother and wife. His conduct at Rheinsberg, whither Wilhelmina followed him, does not admit of the same excuse.
“The little spare time that he had,” she complains, “was spent in the company of wits or men of letters. Such were Voltaire, Maupertuis, Algarotti, and Jordan. I saw the King but seldom. I had no ground for being satisfied with our interviews. The greater part of them was spent either in embarrassed words of politeness or in outrageous witticisms on the bad state of the Margrave’s finances; indeed he often ridiculed him and the princes of the empire, which I felt very much.”
