Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

The Peace of Westphalia had bestowed upon Brandenburg and other German states a gift of more value than many bishoprics—the gift of independence. In outward show Frederick William was still a vassal of the Emperor. He continued to be one of the seven Electors who chose the head of the Holy Roman Empire and honoured him with lowly homage. In virtue of his hereditary office of Grand Chamberlain it was the duty of the Elector of Brandenburg, prescribed by the Golden Bull of 1356, to appear at solemn courts “on horseback, having in his hands a silver basin with water, and a beautiful towel, and descending from his horse, to present the water to the Emperor or King of the Romans to wash his hands.” As a German prince, moreover, he had still to look to the Emperor for investiture, leadership, and advice. But his right to determine the creed of his subjects, which the Peace of Westphalia confirmed, and the right to choose allies outside the Empire, which it expressly granted, were inconsistent with real vassalage. The gift of these admitted Brandenburg to a place in the commonwealth of nations. The Elector had become undisputed master in his own house. Soon his horizon expanded far beyond the bounds of Germany. Europe, nay more, as his colonial ventures were to prove, the wide world lay open to the Hohenzollern. Both at home and abroad he could strike with a freer hand. But his power, though irresistible in Brandenburg, was made respectable in Europe only by years of toil. Hence the home policy of the Great Elector was as straightforward as his foreign policy was tortuous. To beat down all competing authority, to establish an armed autocracy, to develop to the utmost all the resources of the State—such was the plan which the Great Elector designed, which his son and grandson perfected, and the fruits of which Frederick the Great enjoyed.

By steady pressure, by force, and at times by fraud, the Great Elector guarded the future of the Hohenzollern power against the danger of obstructive provincial parliaments. To make the men of Cleves, Brandenburg, and Ost-Preussen feel themselves brethren was indeed beyond his power. But he ruthlessly suppressed the institutions which symbolised their mutual independence of each other and of himself. Carlyle, the great panegyrist of coups d’état, thus describes one example of

“his measures, soft but strong, and ever stronger to the needful pitch, with mutinous spirits. One Bürgermeister of Königsberg, after much stroking on the back, was at length seized in open Hall, by Electoral writ,—soldiers having first gently barricaded the principal streets, and brought cannon to bear upon them. This Bürgermeister, seized in such brief way, lay prisoner for life; refusing to ask his liberty, though it was thought he might have had it on asking.”

The Great Elector’s chief legacy was, however, the Prussian army. The ruler of mere patches of the great northern plain, “a country by nature the least defensible of all countries,” he girdled it laboriously with a wall of men. In an age when France alone possessed a large standing army, this obscure German prince raised his force from a few garrisons to a host some twenty-seven thousand strong, well drilled and well appointed.

The lord of Brandenburg now became a condottiere of ever-increasing reputation. His regiments brought security to his dominions and gold to his exchequer. In every European struggle their aid was welcome. On the frozen lagoons by the Baltic and on the shores of Torbay, on the torrid plain of Warsaw, and in the vine-clad valley of the Rhine—everywhere the men of the Mark approved themselves good soldiers and punctual allies. In 1660 the Great Elector netted his profit from the Northern war by receiving Ost-Preussen free from Polish suzerainty. The heroic moment of the whole reign came, however, in 1675, when all the threads of the Elector’s policy—ambition, vengeance against the Swedes, military creation, domestic organisation—guided him to the stricken field of Fehrbellin. While playing his part in the West as a member of the coalition against France, he learned that the Swedes, his hated neighbours in Pomerania, had been hurled upon his domains by their patron Louis XIV. He straightway turned his back upon the Rhine and stalked silently across Germany to rescue his helpless people. His troops had been beaten by Turenne and exhausted by the long struggle with rain and mud. Yet he dared to overrule his generals and to strike straight at superior forces trained in the school of Gustavus and posted with a river in their rear.

The bold move succeeded. In a hand-to-hand struggle, amid bogs and dunes, Brandenburg was saved by its chief. At the crisis of the fight he put himself at the head of a wavering squadron, and with one wild charge shattered the Swedes and their prestige together. The result of Fehrbellin was that Brandenburg took rank as the first military power of Northern Europe and that the land had rest for many years.

Fehrbellin forms a conspicuous landmark on the road to Hohenzollern greatness, but it is separated by no great interval of time from a double demonstration of the insignificance of Brandenburg when confronted with states of the first order. The Emperor flatly refused to admit the claim of the Elector to portions of Silesia. The King of France dashed from his lips the cup of triumph over the Swedes. In an age when rivers were of even greater value than at present, the great waterway of Brandenburg was the Oder. Ere she could draw full profit from the Oder, Stettin, with its splendid harbourage and strong strategic position, must be wrested from alien hands. At Fehrbellin hope sprang up that the time was come. With all the tenacity of his nature the Great Elector clung to the task. In 1677 Stettin fell, after enduring one of the most desolating bombardments in history. Before the close of 1678 the Swedes were driven from all Western Pomerania. They descended upon Ost-Preussen, but Frederick William set at naught the winter cold and his own infirmity, hurried from Cleves to the Vistula, put his troops on sledges, and dashed at the enemy across the frozen sea (January, 1679). The triumph of the Elector was complete, but at the Peace of S. Germain (1679) he was compelled to surrender all his conquests at the behest of Louis XIV.

In spite of some failures, however, Frederick William by dogged perseverance accomplished enough to justify his reputation as the founder of the Prussian State. He is still a force in Germany. Frederick the Great and all the later Hohenzollerns of renown have paid homage to his memory. William II. embittered the downfall of Bismarck by applauding a drama which represented the Great Elector deposing Schwarzenburg, the hated counsellor of his father. Throughout Prussia the imperious features of the little hero of Fehrbellin are as familiar to the people as his deeds.

With the death of the Great Elector in 1688 the age of iron gave way to the age of tinsel. Frederick, who ruled in his father’s place for a quarter of a century (1688–1713), was a prince who prized culture above character and strove to imitate in his provincial court the splendours of Versailles. From time to time, though less often than in other royal lines, the business instinct of the Hohenzollerns fails, and of such a lapse Frederick is an example. Despising the domestic labours of the Great Elector, he was captivated by those ceremonious shadows which the German nation is always wont to pursue. Frail, even maimed, since childhood, he developed a passion for pageants, robes, and titles. He could not endure the promotion of his equals to rank higher than his own. If the Dutch Statthalter rose to be William III. of England and the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg to be Elector George of Hanover, might not he himself, as master of the best troops in Germany, also claim to rise? When in 1696 he was about to visit William of Orange at the Hague he declared that he could not consent to sit upon an ordinary seat while an armchair was placed for the King. The interview therefore was accomplished standing, and when William returned the visit he found armchairs of equal dignity set for the Elector and for himself.

Seldom has a ruler’s weakness done better service to his State. Brandenburg was shielded by its poverty from the ordinary fate of German states whose rulers tried to copy the profusion of the kings of France. Frederick, moreover, had not the force of will to break with all the traditions of the Great Elector. He continued to take part in every struggle as an auxiliary, but in none as a principal. His country thus enjoyed the glories of war without its penalties. It was under the command of Prince Eugene, Austria’s greatest general, that Brandenburgers helped to overthrow the French before Turin (1706). And since a large army is the most splendid trapping of monarchy, Frederick made his army very large. He inherited 27,000 men, he bequeathed nearly 50,000 to his son.