Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

The jealousy of the rival states in Germany and the wrath of the despot who swayed the policy of Russia would count for much in the coming war. Weightier still was the struggle between France and England for the primacy in three continents and on the seas. This great national duel had been begun by William III. and brilliantly continued by Marlborough. During the pacific rule of Walpole, when the two countries were nominally in alliance, England was gaining strength and taking up a position in America and India which her rival could not witness unmoved. The close league formed by France with Spain, the monopolist of the New World, rendered lasting peace with England impossible and even Walpole was forced into war. This war, known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, began with an attack on the Spaniards in 1739, and developed into a world-wide struggle with the French in which Dettingen and Fontenoy were incidents. The settlement at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which put an end to it, was obviously a mere breathing-space. In the early fifties hostilities broke out anew between the English and French in India and North America, and it could hardly be doubted that Europe would soon catch fire.

In 1756, therefore, war between France and England had already begun, and war between Frederick and his two Imperial neighbours was imminent. The custom of Europe and the precedent of the former struggle made it in the highest degree unlikely that these wars would be kept apart. What would be the connexion between them? The answer was determined by three accidents. The King of England happened to be Elector of Hanover, the ruling spirit at Vienna happened to be Kaunitz, and the mistress of Louis XV. happened to be Madame de Pompadour.

Hanover, argued George II., will certainly be attacked by the French. It must be defended at all costs. The only possible defenders are Austria, Russia, and Prussia. Austria, the old patron of Hanover, would be preferable. But the Queen has grievances against England and is bent on attacking Prussia. Alliance with her would therefore expose Hanover to the Prussians as well as to the French, and must therefore be regarded as out of the question. Russia and Prussia remained to be considered. Russia actually made a convention to hire out troops for the defence of Hanover. But Russia, the King found, also desired to attack Prussia, and was therefore as ineligible an ally as Austria. Only the Prussian alliance remained possible. In January, 1756, by the Convention of Westminster, it was secured.

The Convention of Westminster, by which Frederick bound himself to defend Hanover against attack, helped on the far more difficult task of Kaunitz. This was no less than to reverse the secular policy of France and Austria and to bring Bourbon and Hapsburg into alliance. Kaunitz based his calculations on the assumption that France might help Austria to recover Silesia, but that England never would. This view of the political situation was urged for seven years with great ability by a statesman in whom the Queen reposed a confidence greater than that with which our own Elizabeth honoured Burleigh, and who treated her in return with a haughtiness such as Essex would never have dared to show. Kaunitz, whose life was spent in the endeavour to exalt the power of his mistress, forced her to shut her windows to humour his prejudice against fresh air, and stalked out of her Council when she interrupted him with a question. At another meeting, it is said, she remonstrated with him on his riotous living. He replied that he had come there to discuss her affairs, not his own.

But the great, it is said, are known to the great, and Maria Theresa’s confidence in Kaunitz seemed to be justified when his visionary scheme proved feasible. It was easy to form a league to despoil Prussia. Kaunitz tempted Russia with parts of Poland, Poland with an indemnity in Ost-Preussen, Saxony with Magdeburg, Sweden with Prussian Pomerania, the princes of the Empire with the favours which the Emperor alone could bestow. But it required great powers of imagination to conceive that France might quit the beaten track of history, which was at the same time plainly the path of self-interest, in order to assist her hereditary foe in a great land-war at a time when she needed all her strength to meet England upon the seas.

Kaunitz had not only the strength to see this vision, but also the fortune to realise it in fact. The circumstance that favoured him the most was that the Pompadour was now at the height of her influence in France. The mistress of Louis XV. furthered the plan of Kaunitz for selfish reasons, but in the expectation that its result would be the exact reverse of what it was. She desired to keep the peace in Europe in order that she might continue to live quietly at Versailles. The Minister of Marine, moreover, was her friend; the minister who might profit by a land-war was her enemy. She therefore favoured a covenant of neutrality with Austria in the hope that the two wars would thus be kept apart.

The Convention of Westminster, however, made it impossible that the affair should rest here. The fact that Prussia had bound herself to resist a French invasion of Hanover frustrated all Frederick’s efforts to propitiate the Pompadour and to throw dust in the eyes of the French.

“If the ministry of France will consider it well,” wrote Frederick on January 24th, “... it should find nothing to say in reason if I undertake such a convention, by which, moreover, I flatter myself that I render an essential service to France, seeing that I shall certainly arrest 50,000 Russians by it, and shall hold in check another 50,000 Austrians at least, who but for that would all have acted against France.”

He further endeavoured to discount his alliance with George II. by turning a sympathetic ear to the French plans for assisting the Young Pretender, and by advising her to strike in Ireland and on the south coast of England at the same time. It was beyond his art, however, to disguise what he had done, and Kaunitz knew how to profit by it.

The labours of the diplomatists were immense, but at last they were successful. On May 1, 1756, by the Treaty of Versailles, both France and Austria undertook for the future to defend the European possessions of the other with 24,000 men. In the war with England, Austria was to remain neutral, but if in the course of it any province of France in Europe were to be attacked by any ally or auxiliary of England, Austria promised by a secret article to provide the stipulated assistance and France offered a similar guarantee. This might be interpreted as binding Austria to join in the war if the French were masters of Hanover and the Prussians marched against them. It thus deprived the Convention of Westminster of half its value, and at the same time threatened to connect the war against England, which France had begun brilliantly at Minorca, with the war against Prussia, for which Elizabeth was clamouring. Negotiations for a still closer union between Austria and France were pressed on, and Kaunitz hoped that in 1757 all would be ready.