Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

Though Frederick regarded his great antagonist as bigoted and hypocritical, he mourned her sincerely, for her death removed the most potent check upon her son. Joseph seemed to have inherited his mother’s energy, without her reverence for existing institutions. He now plunged into a medley of hasty and sweeping reforms, treating the inhabitants of his miscellaneous provinces as cavalierly as though he were a Frederick and they submissive Prussians. The King could afford to look on while Joseph and Kaunitz embroiled themselves with the landowners, the Hungarians, and the Church. It was not long, however, before their foreign policy compelled him to active interference.

Since 1780 the Russian alliance had failed him. He valued it as a means of preserving peace, but the policy which now prevailed at St. Petersburg looked towards war. Frederick, who was strangely blind to this, declared in response to the blandishments of the Czarina that the time was not ripe to seize more of Poland (1779). He proposed the admission of the Turk into the league at the moment when Catherine was dreaming of a new crusade. In Joseph, on the other hand, the Czarina found a willing partner in a policy of adventure. From the time when he visited her in the summer of 1780, the alliance between Russia and Prussia was practically dead. Frederick sacrificed to it in May, 1781, by joining the Armed Neutrality which Russia had organised in order to check the high-handed treatment of neutral vessels by Great Britain. But in the same month Catherine and Joseph made a defensive alliance for eight years. Frederick rightly divined that the ambitious Czarina had won the Emperor’s countenance to the scheme of a revival by Russia of the old Eastern Empire. Her eldest grandson was destined to be Czar of all the Russias. Her second was named after the founder of Constantinople and suckled by six Greek nurses. The third, sneered the King, when another was expected, would presumably become Great Mogul.

But though Frederick regarded Catherine as pretentious, saying that if she were corresponding with God the Father she would claim at least equal rank, none knew better than he the value of her alliance. In 1762 Russia had turned the scale, and had she been favourable to the plan, Joseph’s bold throw for Bavaria might have been successful. It was no light matter for Frederick that in his old age his State was threatened by an Emperor whose thoughts were still running on Silesia and who had succeeded in seducing his sole ally. France and England were beyond the range of his overtures, and when the Russian armies moved in 1783 Europe believed that the Turk was about to be finally expelled. Frederick, it seemed, was doomed to perilous isolation.

UNTER DEN LINDEN IN 1780.

FROM AN ETCHING BY ROSENTAG.

One force indeed remained—a force difficult to marshal, but as Charles V. had found, formidable when marshalled—which Frederick might hope to rally to his side. The tilted balance of Europe might still be redressed in Germany. By his conduct in the affair of the Bavarian Succession Frederick had proved that it was not impossible for Germans to trust him, and since that time Austria by fresh aggressions had alienated from herself the general body of Romanist opinion among them. It appeared that the Empire which was a corporation for the preservation of rights had acquired in Joseph a head who set at naught all rights save those of Austria. The inevitable result was that the princes began to think of uniting in self-defence.

From the beginning of the year 1784, Frederick devoted himself to the task of organising a confederacy of German States to defend the existing constitution. This was a far more arduous undertaking than any negotiation with a single Great Power. It was always difficult to induce a number of naturally jealous neighbours to combine. In 1784 the difficulty was increased threefold. The danger from Austria was general and prospective, rather than specific and imminent. It might be averted, indeed, by maintaining an equality of strength between Prussia and Austria, but the princes would beware of embarking upon a course which might make Prussia the stronger of the two. Frederick, moreover, was compelled to entrust a great share in the negotiations to his ministers. His chief agent, Hertzberg, had dared to form political ideas of his own. In the hope that a rapprochement with Austria would lead to further gains in Poland, he quietly obstructed the measures of the aged King.

The inactivity of the Prussian ministers might have delayed the confederation indefinitely had not all Germany been shocked by the sudden revival of the Emperor’s designs upon Bavaria. Again, just as seven years earlier, Austria corrupted the Elector Palatine without the privity of his heir and again her acquisition of the Electorate was paraded before the world as an accomplished fact. In the first days of January, 1785, Rumianzow, the Russian agent at the German Diet, suddenly presented to the Duke of Zweibrücken a joint demand of Austria and Russia for his acceptance of a bargain to which the Elector Palatine had already consented. The substance of this was that Bavaria was assigned to the Emperor in return for the Austrian Netherlands, the title of King, and handsome rewards in money.

“I, who am already more than half beyond this world,” complained Frederick to his brother, “am forced to double my wisdom and activity, and continually keep in my head the detestable plans that this curséd Joseph begets afresh with every fresh day. I am condemned to enjoy no rest before my bones are covered with a little earth.” His energy, none the less, was as great as the crisis demanded. Austria was always hampered in time of war because the distant Netherlands were hers as much as because the adjacent Bavaria was not. The exchange was therefore most alluring, but the opposition of Prussia to the scheme was so stout as to evoke disclaimers from all the parties to it. Catherine protested that she would countenance no violation of the Peace of Teschen. Louis XVI., whom Frederick believed to have been bribed by the offer of Luxemburg, stated in answer to his protests that the Emperor renounced the scheme. Before the end of February, 1785, the danger was past.