The triumph of his diplomacy was enhanced by the fact that he would have been completely foiled if Austria had consented to join Russia in dismembering the Turk. As it was, he was permitted to enjoy the spectacle of the Queen struggling with her conscience and upbraiding herself, her Chancellor, and her son. She complained that they had aimed at two incompatible objects at once, “to act in the Prussian fashion and at the same time to preserve the semblance of honesty.” The prospective additions to her domains were to her odious, since they were “bought at the price of honour, at the price of the glory of the monarchy, at the price of the good faith and religion, which are our peculiar possession.” “She is always weeping, but always annexing,” sneered the triumphant King.
On August 5, 1772, Austria signed the Treaty of Partition. By agreeing upon their demands the three Powers had accomplished the hardest part of their enterprise. The strength of Poland had been wasted by the anarchy which Russia and Prussia had studiously conserved. Since 1768, Romanists and Dissidents had been engaged in a bloody and desolating war in which Russia, the protector of the Greek Church, played the decisive part. No party among the Poles still retained sufficient energy to oppose in arms the claims to Polish provinces which, in order to save appearances, were formulated by the Powers. Frederick even put forward a double title to Pomerellen, alleging that it had been wrongfully alienated by the Margrave of Brandenburg in 1311, and that if he as suzerain consented to overlook this irregularity, he would still be entitled to the province as heir, since 1637, to the elder branch of the House of Pomerania. He claimed Great Poland as heir of the Emperor Sigismund, who had pawned it to the Teutonic Order, from which the Poles had wrested it by force. The remainder of his share was due to him as compensation for the loss of the revenues of these two provinces for so many centuries.
The Polish statesmen had no difficulty in refuting such nonsense as this. But King Stanislaus was convinced that true patriotism dictated obedience in order to save what remained. France and England were too intent on their own affairs to interfere by force. Hence a mixture of persuasion, bribery, and the presence of 30,000 soldiers was sufficient to procure the unanimous acquiescence of the Diet after six months’ negotiation (September 30, 1773). The Austrian ambassador was astonished at the trifling sums for which the nobles sold their votes. His Saxon colleague lamented that they shamelessly laid upon the gaming-tables the foreign gold with which they had just been bribed.
Frederick’s share of the spoil amounted to more than sixteen thousand square miles, and in 1774 he was able quietly to filch two hundred additional villages from Poland. Long before the Diet consented to the cession he had inaugurated Prussian rule. In June, 1772, he made a triumphal entry into his new province. He gave out to all and sundry that no one could envy his good fortune, for as he came he had seen nothing but sand, pines, heath, and Jews. “It is a very good and very profitable acquisition,” he wrote to Prince Henry, “both for the political situation of the State and for its finances.” Men said that without Danzig, which along with Thorn remained Polish, West-Preussen was but a trunk without a head, but the King was full of schemes for partitioning the trade of Danzig among his own ports. Voltaire, finding him deaf to his exhortations to free the Greeks, lamented that the harbour of Danzig lay nearer his heart than the Piræus.
Soon the poverty-stricken land echoed to the untiring march of Hohenzollern progress. The contempt which the King openly expressed for “this perfectly imbecile set with names ending in ki” was apparent in all his dealings with the privileged classes. His treatment of private estates as well as of provinces seemed to warrant the Poles who added the word Rapuit to the Suum Cuique which they saw inscribed beneath the Prussian eagle. The local officials were simply dismissed from office, and their lands appropriated at the cost of a trifling compensation. Though Frederick bound himself to respect the existing rights and property of the Roman Catholics, the bishops and abbots likewise lost their lands, but in their case an allowance amounting to nearly half of their previous incomes was conceded. Upon the nobles a tax of one-quarter of their net revenues was imposed, but Protestants were entitled to a discount of twenty per cent. In the hope of cleansing West-Preussen of its Polish inhabitants, the King went so far as to favour the purchase of noble lands by German peasants. Strict watch was kept on the frontier for Polish immigrants who might try to enter the country.
The common people, however, could not but gain from the introduction of that policy of developing all the resources of the land which formed the Hohenzollern ideal of domestic government. Slavery was abolished and serfdom regulated. New waterways were dug. Colonists were brought in by thousands. Prussian soldiers scoured the country in search of gipsies, tramps, and begging Jews. Toleration, justice, and education were established where all three had been far to seek. The peasants and townsmen were subjected to the Prussian system of taxation, which laid upon their shoulders a burden heavy indeed, but steady and not beyond their strength. Soon the royal revenue from West-Preussen amounted to more than two million thalers a year.
But for a timely revival of energy in her royal House, it is not impossible that Sweden, like Poland, would have been the poorer for the Russo-Prussian alliance. In 1769 Catherine and Frederick had pledged themselves to maintain anarchy in Stockholm as well as in Warsaw. Should the existing constitution be modified, Russia would take up arms and Frederick’s contribution to the war was to be the invasion of Swedish Pomerania. It is easy to imagine that with Russia and Prussia in cordial agreement and France and England embroiled or apathetic, a war with Sweden might have resulted in the annexation of Finland and the remainder of Pomerania by the allies. In 1772, however, young Gustavus III., the son of Frederick’s sister Ulrica, delivered Sweden from the trammels of her constitution by an unlooked-for coup d’état. Russia, which was still hampered by the Turkish war, was unable to wage war against the revolution, and Frederick, who for once was taken by surprise, grudgingly accepted the apologies of his nephew.
The remainder of Frederick’s life was dedicated to the defence of the position that he had already attained. He was determined to do nothing that could prejudice his cause in a future struggle with Austria. He therefore looked on while Russia and Austria despoiled the Turk in 1774, while England and her Colonies fell to blows in the next year, and while France joined in the fray in 1778. His private opinion, indeed, was that the country which could commit its destinies to a Bute could hardly fail to be in the wrong. He blamed the English both for political and military folly—for beginning a terrible civil war with no settled plans or adequate preparations, for underestimating the enemy’s force, for dividing her own and for trampling upon the rights of neutrals. But he avoided with the most scrupulous care any action that could give offence to either combatant, and declared to his ministers that he intended to await the issue quietly and to throw in his lot with the side which fortune favoured.
In the very year in which France allied herself with the Colonies against England (1778) Frederick’s long-expected struggle with Austria came to pass. Joseph II., whose restless desire to imitate the achievements of the King of Prussia was not satisfied by his gains from Poland and the Turk, thought that the moment had arrived for acquiring a portion of Bavaria, the great geographical obstacle to the consolidation of the Hapsburg lands. At the close of the year 1777 the Elector of Bavaria died, and his lands passed by right to the aged and childless Elector Palatine. Austria, however, furbished up a claim to a considerable portion of eastern Bavaria, and on January 14, 1778, the Elector was half bribed, half frightened into acquiescence. Two days later 10,000 Austrian troops occupied the ceded districts. Joseph’s triumph seemed to be assured.
Frederick, however, had still to be reckoned with. Though his health was indifferent and his desire was all for peace, he took up the challenge without an hour’s delay. Determined, as he said, “once for all to humble Austrian ambition,” he assumed his ancient pose as champion of the German princes against an Emperor who was trampling upon their constitutional rights. “I know very well,” he owned to Prince Henry, “that it is only our own interest which makes it our duty to act at this moment, but we must be very careful not to say so.” Few volunteers, however, declared themselves on his side. The Elector’s cousin and heir, Duke Charles of Zweibrücken, became a pawn in Frederick’s hands, and the Elector of Saxony, who had claims on the estate of the dead prince, promised 21,000 men. But his only other ally was Bavarian public opinion, which was shocked at the idea of partition. The Bavarians, according to the current jest, left off their pious invocation of “Jesu, Mary, Joseph,” and cried to “Jesu, Mary, Frederick” to deliver them.