Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

Though it would be rash to assume that any single part of the Mark may be regarded as typical of the whole, there seems to be no reason to call in question the dictum of Frederick the Great, that his ancestors needed a century to repair the damage of the Thirty Years’ War. This great task was confided to a youth of twenty years, an only son, yet no favourite of his father, the Elector George William, whom he succeeded in 1640. Frederick William, known to history as the Great Elector, was the great-grandfather of Frederick the Great. By common consent he is reputed the founder of the glory of the House of Hohenzollern in modern times. He found Brandenburg prostrate and threatened with dissolution. It is from the low-water mark of these earliest years, when he with reason bewailed difficulties greater than those of David or Solomon, that the progress of his State is to be measured and his own achievement thereby understood.

He found his exchequer empty, his palace half-ruined, the court seeking safety and even sustenance at far-off Königsberg, the Austrian papist, Schwarzenburg, supreme in the state, the Mark trampled underfoot by alien hosts. How should an open country like his, the highroad between Sweden and Austria, be delivered from the endless war? Even if, by miracle, a peace could be devised, which Calvinists and Lutherans could both accept, what prospect, nay what possibility existed that territories so ill-compacted as his could be welded into a single, solid state? All the needful bonds of union seemed to be lacking. What common tie of blood, of faith, of speech was there strong enough to bind together Cleves and Brandenburg and Ost-Preussen, units gathered by the chance of recent history into one hand but dissevered by hundreds of miles of alien soil and by chasms of sentiment still harder to bridge over? The constituent parts of Frederick William’s domain were in 1640 dissimilar in race, in history, and in interest. They had no desire for closer relations; they had not even a uniform calendar; their only common political aim seemed to be to flout the Elector, who was the bugbear of them all.

Even were he to make himself master of the centre, dangers clustered thick on either wing, while behind the Polish problems of the East and the Netherlandish problems of the West a seer might have discerned the double peril that encompasses modern Germany. Peter the Great and his Russia lay yet in the womb of time, but Richelieu and his France were in the full flood of successful ambition. Thus the organiser of a North German power must work while his horizon was already darkening. In grasping the lands which formed his birthright the Great Elector was defying, though as yet he knew it not, two of the greatest forces of modern times. Hohenzollern rule on the Niemen was to become a challenge to Russia and to the Slavic advance, while the Hohenzollern lord of Cleves must ultimately reckon with the belief of Frenchmen that the Rhine is the boundary designed by nature for their state.

FREDERICK THE GREAT.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY CHRISTIAN WOLFFGANG.

During the first critical years of his rule, however, the plans of the Great Elector were of the humblest. Striving for existence rather than for empire, he was not too proud to beg for help in every likely quarter. Among our own State-papers are to be seen his letters suing for petty favours which Charles I., so long as diplomacy would serve, was very willing to grant. The King of England marked the small esteem in which he held the untried and obscure Elector by pressing upon him the hand of his niece, a princess of the fugitive and bankrupt House of the Palatinate. Frederick William’s relations with Poland, the suzerain of whom he held Ost-Preussen, show yet more clearly how slight was his power at his accession. When the Lutherans of Königsberg threatened riot because a Calvinist was chosen to preach the funeral sermon of George William, the Elector did not blush to solicit the Papist King, Wladislaus IV., to admonish these unruly Protestants. To this end he bade his minister at Warsaw “make humble request to His Majesty that His Majesty would in friendly—cousinly fashion let it please him to send a letter to our chief Councillors (but as if His Majesty had been informed of this from other quarters and not from us) and thereby to order them to reprove and repress this folly of the unquiet theologians.... It will perhaps be best if you solicit this work only after the departure of the Diet.” The request was made and granted, and the minister instructs the Elector how he may palm off the document as a mandate approved by the Diet behind whose backs it had been obtained.

Where charity was to be looked for, Frederick William was not too proud to beg. But of all powers the least likely to be charitable was Sweden, whose armies had for nearly ten years been fighting solely for material compensation. To Sweden therefore the Elector offered money and was allowed to purchase that deliverance from the war which was essential to all his plans (1641). He could now begin the task of his life—to reduce all his provinces into dependence upon himself and to render Brandenburg, augmented and centralised, a formidable military power.

During forty-eight years (1640–1688) he pursued the old Hohenzollern policy of family aggrandisement. His success has earned him the title of the Great Elector, and the place of the first hero of the Prussian state. Yet he is remarkable chiefly for his commercial instinct, imbibed perhaps during his education among the Dutch, the neighbours to whom he always looked for example and alliance. On occasion he could display the soldierly instinct of his race, but in time of peace he was hardly a heroic figure. With domestic virtues specially to be praised in a monarch of that time he combined a weakness for strong drink which damaged his health and temper. He took pride in being abreast of the times, reverenced London and Amsterdam, and was ready to haggle with foreigners for preferential rates. He wrote a good commercial hand, planted cabbages in his garden, and hammered out verses which with a little doctoring might have graced the poet’s corner of a provincial newspaper. He was a thrifty householder, save when he deemed it necessary to keep up his position by building a massive palace or giving a pompous feast. A convinced Protestant, he welcomed serviceable Huguenots to his capital with more good-will than serviceable papists. It is not impossible to believe that as a German patriot he took favours from the Emperor with more inward pleasure than from Louis XIV. In what Dr. Prothero terms “the ocean of recognised mendacity which we call diplomacy” he floundered without either repugnance or great success. He spent his life in unifying his dominions and made a will which if carried into effect would have dismembered them at his death. That a man of this stamp is designated Great suggests that he was not only diligent but that he was also fortunate in the conditions under which he lived and worked.

In his early years he owed much to the weakness and insignificance which have already been described. What rival state was thrown into the shade if Brandenburg was allowed to grow? Thus, at the close of the Thirty Years’ War, the Hohenzollern line received indulgent treatment. Their claim to Pomerania was admitted for the eastern half of the duchy. The western half was indispensable to Sweden, but the rights of the Elector were bought up at the price of more valuable ecclesiastical lands scattered between the Mark and his possessions in the West. The bishoprics of Halberstadt and Minden and the reversion of the rich archbishopric of Magdeburg were given to Brandenburg, whose part in the war had been contemptible, by the great Peace of Westphalia, the fundamental pact of modern Europe. Yet its sacredness was so little appreciated by the Elector that a few years later he would have renewed the war, had not outraged Germany held him in.