Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

The climax of his reign was reached in 1701, when he prevailed upon the Emperor to make him King of Prussia. In a double sense it may be said with truth that he owed his crown to his weakness. It is generally believed that the chief motive which prompted him to sue for it was vanity. For months he could think and speak of nothing else. When at last the imperial license came, the enraptured Elector quitted Berlin in midwinter and spent twelve days in moving with a pompous train to Königsberg. There, with every detail of ceremony that his imagination could suggest, he placed the crown upon his head. It is doubtful whether a more sober ruler would have prized a throne as he did, and doubtful too whether the Emperor would have consented to the elevation of a prince less obviously feeble. But Frederick had carried on without reserve the old Hohenzollern tradition of standing well with the head of the German world. He had even given back to Austria the territory of Schwiebus, which the Emperor had assigned to the Great Elector in settlement of whatever claim the Hohenzollerns possessed to portions of Silesia. Now he was prepared to uphold the Hapsburg cause in the War of the Spanish Succession. What harm could there be, the Emperor may well have asked himself, in promoting a vassal so devoted as this?

Forty years later, Austria had bitter cause to rue the error of her chief. From the very first the crown aggrandised the Hohenzollern dynasty. It consecrated their ambition, enlarged their horizon, and gave them, as the Lord’s anointed, a new claim upon the devotion of their subjects. The Order of the Black Eagle, which for two centuries has been the coveted prize of service to their state, signalised the coronation of Frederick I.

The Great Elector and the first king of Prussia have this in common—that whatever may be thought of their achievements it is difficult to mistake the men themselves. Of the second king, Frederick William I. (1713–1740), the father of Frederick the Great, the exact opposite is true. His life-work, the establishment of the royal power “like a rock of bronze,” is patent to all. He himself, on the other hand, was a mystery to his own children. His most gifted admirer, Carlyle, sets out to paint a prophet and ends by portraying something very like a madman. His theory of his own sovereign office was as mystical as his practice of ruling was simple. He regarded himself, it has been said, as the servant of an imaginary master—the King of Prussia—under whose eye he lived and worked. Baser princes looked on their royalty as a privilege to be enjoyed. To Frederick William it was a duty calling for endless toil. He struggled to check every detail of government with his own hand, as though Prussia were a single manor and he the squire. A French critic (Lavisse) thus portrays him wrestling with his ever-multiplying tasks:

“Have we not too many officials,” the King enquires. “Could not several places be merged into one? We must see if some of the officials cannot be put down. Why is not the beer so good everywhere as at Potsdam? In order to have wool we must have sheep. Now in Prussia there are nearly as many wolves as sheep. Quick, let me have a minute upon the destruction of wolves. How comes it that the salt tax has brought in less money this year than last from the district of Halberstadt? The number of officials has not diminished, has it? They must have eaten as much salt as last year. There must therefore be fraud or waste somewhere. The Superintendent of the Salt Department must be warned to manage matters better than he has done of late. Can it be that my subjects buy salt in Hanover or Poland? Every importer of salt must be hanged.”

His violence was and still is notorious. He flung plates at his children, caned his son in public, cudgelled the inhabitants of his capital, and flung the judges down-stairs. He forced his queen, the sister of the English King, to drink to the downfall of England. He vilified everything French, and insulted the British Ambassador so seriously that he conceived himself bound to leave Berlin. Yet he kept Prussia at peace steadily enough to earn for himself the reputation of a mere bully whom the Emperor could lead by the nose.

In spite of the contradictions of his character, however, the broad principles of his reign are clear. Having stripped the state of the veneer of luxury with which Frederick I. had disguised its poverty, he took up and developed further the ideals of the Great Elector. He made the royal power absolute in the state, and increased the army till a population of about two and a half million souls supported the unheard-of number of 83,000 men under arms. These were drilled to such a pitch of perfection that Macaulay could say that, placed beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and St. James’s would have appeared an awkward squad. Yet this mighty force was used for little save to secure the frontiers of Prussia and the rights of all German Protestants. In territory the “Sergeant King” gained only from the wreck of Sweden part of the prize which the Great Elector had grudgingly relinquished at the behest of Louis XIV.—the mouth of the Oder and with it the islands of Usedom and Wollin, and Western Pomerania as far as the river Peene (1720).

PRUSSIA

After the Congress of Vienna,
1815

In the home department, on the other hand, Frederick William I. made a conspicuous advance from the point reached by his grandfather. He showed the same military zeal, the same practical insight, the same determination to set to rights with his own hand whatever in his dominion was governed amiss, the same contempt for higher education, the same benevolence towards the persecuted of other lands who might be made useful to Prussia. But he showed also a power of grasping and of simplifying the whole system of administration such as few rulers have ever possessed. His great Edict of 1723 removed friction from the working of the Prussian state. Thanks to this, his son Frederick found the organisation described in the sixth chapter of this book—a machine of government answering to every touch of the royal hand. He found at the same time a firm tradition in favour of thrift, diligence, and activity in the steersman of the state. We have traced the growth of Prussia to 1740; let us now turn to the story of the prince who in that year linked her fortunes with his own.