Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

Too much was, however, in the wind for Frederick’s keen scent to be entirely baffled. Austria, indeed, sincerely desired peace for the present. The published articles of the Treaty of Versailles were innocent. The English ministry disingenuously tried to lull the protector of Hanover into false security by assurances that they could answer for Russia. But the King of Prussia had his own sources of information as well as the most perfect faith in the malevolence of his fellow-men. For three years and a half one Menzel, a clerk in the Saxon Foreign Office, had been furnishing him with copies of the secret state-papers of Augustus. The whole truth about the negotiations against Prussia was not known at Dresden, but enough reached Frederick from this source to impress upon him the desirability of anticipating his foes. So early as June 23, 1756, he sent to General Lehwaldt, in Königsberg, three sets of instructions, military, economic, and secret, for dealing with the anticipated Russian invasion, and even for negotiations with a view to peace.

“You know already,” wrote the King, “how I have allied myself with England, and that thereupon the Austrian court, from hatred of my successful convention with England, took the course of allying itself with France. It is true that Russia has concluded a subsidy-treaty with England, but I have every reason to believe that it will be broken by Russia and that she has joined the Austrian party and concerted with her a threatening plan. But all this would not have caused me to move if it had not been brought to my notice through many channels and also by the march of Russian and Austrian troops that this concert is directed against myself.”

Frederick probably told the truth to his commander-in-chief in Ost-Preussen. On the same day Sir Andrew Mitchell, the shrewd and honest Scotchman who then represented England at the court of Prussia, had an audience with the King. He reported that, notwithstanding the great number of enemies, the King seemed in no wise disconcerted, and had already given orders everywhere. “In a fortnight’s time he will be ready to act. His troops, as I am informed, are complete, and the artillery in excellent order.”

On the eve of war, then, Frederick’s sword was as sharp as of old and his courage as high. He soon showed that his pen had not lost its cunning. At the end of June he indicted his enemy before the judgment-seat of England. Austria regarded her new connexions, so stated his clever memoir, as the triumvirate of Augustus, Antony, and Lepidus. The three courts, like the three Romans of old, had sacrificed their friends to each other.

“The Empress abandoned England and Holland to the resentment of France, and the court of Versailles sacrificed Prussia to the ambition of the Empress. The latter proposes to imitate the conduct of Augustus, who used the power of his colleagues to aggrandise himself and then overthrew them one by one. The court of Vienna has three designs towards which her present steps are tending—to establish her despotism in the Empire, to ruin the Protestant cause, and to reconquer Silesia. She regards the King of Prussia as the great obstacle to her vast designs.”

Thus Frederick claimed to be the champion of the balance of power and of Protestantism, and proposed to solicit not only Denmark and Holland, but even the Turk and the Empire for aid. His appeal to England concluded with the assurance that Prussia was not cast down. “Three things can restore the equilibrium of Europe—a close and intimate connexion between our two courts, earnest efforts to form new alliances and to foil the schemes of the enemy, and boldness to face the greatest dangers.”

A paper of this kind, brilliant, concise, astute, and even eloquent, is worth many thousand lines of the rhymed platitudes by which the author set greater store. We might expect to hear that it was followed at once by a spring at the throat of the enemy. It is true that Kaunitz, who was not yet ready for war, and who wished that if war must come Frederick should be the aggressor, held the Russians back. But he was pressing forward warlike preparations in Bohemia and Moravia, and Frederick was not likely to ignore the advantage of striking swiftly and of waging war outside his own borders. The military men, when they saw the evidence in the King’s hands, were all for action. “Schwerin,” says Carlyle, “much a Cincinnatus since we last saw him, has laid down his plough again, a fervid ‘little Marlborough’ of seventy-two.” He urged the immediate seizure of Saxony, as a base of operations against Bohemia.

Cooler heads, indeed, counselled Frederick to have patience. On behalf of England, a Power always singularly dispassionate when the interests of a German ally were at stake, Mitchell urged that many chances of war and politics might swiftly change the face of affairs, and that to attack Austria would give unnecessary provocation to France. The faithful Podewils ventured to spend a summer afternoon at Potsdam in labouring to turn the King from his purpose. In his letter of July 22, 1756, to Eichel, he speaks of the “respectful freedom” with which he begged the King not to drive France and Russia to do what they had no desire to do that year if Austria were not attacked. Let him rather use the ten months’ grace before the next campaign in securing allies within and without the Empire, in trying to reconcile France and England, and in preparing an imposing defence.

“But all this,” says the poor man, “was completely rejected as arising from far too great timidity, and at last I was dismissed coldly enough with the words, ‘Adieu, Monsieur de la timide politique.’” His concluding phrases, however, have in them so much of prophecy that they may be cited here.

“That it was not doubtful that progress and success might at first be brilliant, but that the complication of enemies, at a time when the King was isolated and deprived of all foreign help, which had never happened to him yet, at least in regard to the diversions which had been made in his favour in the two preceding wars, would, perhaps, make him remember one day what I took the respectful liberty of representing to him for the last time.”