Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

Frederick had treated the defensive alliance between the two Empresses as a conspiracy against himself. Early in February it became such; save that what he might once have termed a conspiracy now wore the aspect of a crusade. All the North was summoned to unite with Austria in curbing Prussia for ever, and Russia bound herself to keep 80,000 men in the field until the lost provinces had been regained. Frederick had even performed what Kaunitz and the Pompadour could not completely accomplish. France now gave in her whole-hearted adhesion to the league for the recovery of Silesia and Glatz. She pledged herself to pay Austria a heavy annual subsidy, to place 105,000 French troops in the field, and to enlist 10,000 Germans. The history of the negotiations, which were prolonged till May 1, 1757, shows how real were the difficulties to be overcome before Bourbon and Hapsburg could unite.

In May, 1757, when the new campaign began, Frederick thus stood face to face with what it is hardly an exaggeration to term a world in arms. He, and no other, had brought Prussia to this pass. A coalition unprecedented in history was the result of the aggressions of 1740 and 1756. All the world believed that the hour of reckoning had struck and that the Third Silesian War would bring the punishment from which chance had delivered the King who made the First.

To the biographer of Frederick, 1757 is welcome, for Frederick now begins to be a hero. Had a chance bullet at Lobositz struck him down, the world would have known only a king who promised to bring in a new era of government, but who owed to his father’s work and methods the chief part of whatever success he achieved. For creative power he would have taken rank below the Great Elector and Frederick William, for military renown below the Old Dessauer and Schwerin; for the aggrandisement of his House, who knows? for who can calculate what havoc the Coalition of 1757 would have wrought with his dominions? The Frederick who had bequeathed to Prussia several volumes of prose and verse in French and the memory of sixteen years’ tenure of Silesia would hardly be known to fame as Frederick the Great.

In 1757, however, he takes his stand for the existence of Prussia. At the moment that the military balance turns against him the moral balance turns in his favour. Courage, energy, resource, determination, all displayed through a score of lifetimes, if sensations rather than moments make up life,—Frederick is the embodiment of these things during the next six years. At first it is his daring that seems to eclipse all else. If Frederick feared not God, neither did he regard man. Far from being dazzled by the array of sceptres marshalled against him, he determined to strike before his foes could form.

With the first breath of spring he despatched three royal princes and the Duke of Bevern against four several points in Bohemia. “If those false attacks have so far succeeded as to cover the King of Prussia’s real intention,” writes Mitchell on April 18th, “I may venture to say that His Prussian Majesty is upon the point of executing one of the boldest and one of the greatest designs that ever was attempted by man.” Just at this juncture a plot against his life was discovered. “I think upon the whole His Prussian Majesty has had a very narrow escape, which however seems to have made no impression at all upon him, nor to have created in him the least diffidence whatever of anybody.” Such is his Scotch friend’s account of the King at the outset of the chequered campaign to which he owes the immensity of his fame.

Frederick’s courage was not foolhardiness, for the very reason that he was one, and his enemies were many. Every coalition must encounter the difficulty of concerting a plan of campaign acceptable to all and the still greater difficulty of securing honest and punctual co-operation. The coalition against Frederick had the advantage that several of its members could serve the common cause by following the course most profitable to themselves. The Russians might be expected to overrun Ost-Preussen and the Swedes to attack Prussian Pomerania with the best will in the world, while the Austrians had every incentive to be vigorous in the conquest of Silesia. But France consented to help to make Silesia and Glatz Austrian chiefly in order that she might secure Austrian help nearer to her own borders. The motley forces of the Empire had little interest in the quarrel, and the activity of Russia depended upon a czarina whose health was bad. Speed and secrecy were alike unattainable by a machine which could be set in motion only after debate between the Board of War at Vienna, the corrupt and factious Court at St. Petersburg, and the inharmonious ministers of France. Once set in motion, however, the gigantic machine seemed irresistible. Kaunitz could launch battalions against Prussia from every point of the compass. Although a new English minister, William Pitt, seemed disposed to stand by Frederick, it might well be thought incredible that Prussia could escape destruction at the hands of such a multitude.

Frederick’s plain course was to make use of the speed and secrecy for which the Prussian movements were famous. The Queen was massing troops in Bohemia. She had determined to raise 150,000 men, but with sisterly partiality she halved their effectiveness by appointing Prince Charles to the command. This appointment favoured the plan which Mitchell admired so highly. Frederick was devising a new form of the manœuvre by which he decoyed the Austrians to Hohenfriedberg. He was so successful that everyone on the Austrian side believed that his one object was to maintain himself in Saxony. To them the four sham-invasions of Bohemia seemed to be designed to conceal the King’s defensive operations and to paralyse their own attack. The illusion was strengthened because at the same time they learned that Torgau and Dresden were being fortified in all haste and that barricades were rising on the roads from Bohemia into Saxony. The last thing that they could suspect was that Frederick was on the eve of attacking.

LEOPOLD, COUNT VON DAUN.

FROM A COPPER PRINT.