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Heroes of the Nations

A Series of Biographical Studies presenting the lives and work of certain representative historical characters, about whom have gathered the traditions of the nations to which they belong, and who have, in the majority of instances, been accepted as types of the several national ideals.

FOR FULL LIST SEE [END OF THIS VOLUME]

Heroes of the Nations
EDITED BY
H. W. Carless Davis
FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD

FACTA DUCIS VIVENT OPEROSAQUE
GLORIA RERUM.—OVID, IN LIVIAM, 266.
THE HERO’S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
FAME SHALL LIVE.

Frederick the Great

FREDERICK THE GREAT.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY CARLO VANLOO.

FREDERICK THE GREAT
AND THE RISE OF PRUSSIA

BY
W. F. REDDAWAY, M.A.
FELLOW AND LECTURER OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; LECTURER IN HISTORY
TO NON-COLLEGIATE STUDENTS; AUTHOR OF “THE MONROE
DOCTRINE” (CAMB. UNIV. PRESS)

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
LONDON 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
The Knickerbocker Press
1904

Copyright, 1904
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Published, April, 1904

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

TO THE
NON-COLLEGIATE STUDENTS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PREFACE

In attempting to sketch the career of Frederick the Great and to define its relation to the rise of Prussia, I have made free use of many printed works, especially of Frederick’s own Œuvres and of the elaborate Politische Correspondenz of his reign. With these great “primary” authorities may perhaps be ranked the face and voice of modern Germany, rich in evidence of Frederick’s work, which have doubtless influenced my opinions more than I am aware of. Among “secondary” authorities I owe most to the opulent treasure-house of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great and to the more systematic narrative of Professor Koser. His Friedrich der Grosse als Kronprinz, which largely inspired the work of Lavisse translated under the title The Youth of Frederick the Great, forms my chief source for much of Frederick’s early life, as does the last volume of the König Friedrich der Grosse (1903), for the domestic labours after 1763. Mr. Herbert Tuttle’s judicious History of Prussia gave me much assistance down to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, and I have often referred to Mr. Lodge’s Modern Europe and Mr. Henderson’s Short History of Germany.

At critical points in the record of the years 1712 to 1786 I was influenced successively by the Mémoires de la Margravine de Baireuth, the trenchant Frédéric II et Marie-Thérèse of the Duc de Broglie, the Politische Staatsschriften, Schäfer’s Der Siebenjährige Krieg, von Arneth’s Oesterreichische Geschichte, and Sorel’s The Eastern Question in the Eighteenth Century. Many of the battles in Saxony, Brandenburg, Bohemia, and Silesia form the subject of monographs which it was interesting to study on the field, sometimes with the aid of collections of maps and plans preserved in the neighbourhood.

It would be impossible without a false pretence of erudition to name more than a small portion of the books to which some reference must be made in writing of the rise of Prussia. Students will recognise the debt that I owe to such well-known works as those of Ranke, Droysen, Philippson, Förster, Seeley, Isaacsohn, Oncken, Vitzthum, Archenholtz, and many more, as well as to the Essays of Macaulay and Lord Mahon. My account of the early history of Brandenburg is in part based on my paper of April, 1901, in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

I offer my grateful thanks to Mr. G. H. Putnam and to Mr. H. W. C. Davis for their counsel, to Mr. G. H. M. Gray for minute scrutiny of the proof-sheets, and to Messrs. Ernest and Harold Temperley, my indulgent comrades in Silesia. To the latter this book owes much at every stage.

W. F. R.

King’s College, Cambridge,
Jan. 9th, 1904.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FREDERICK THE GREAT

INTRODUCTION

In the Austrian and Prussian capitals to-day the traveller may mark the contrast between two great statues, in each of which the meaning of a reign is set forth with happy instinct. In the heart of imperial Vienna is seated the colossal figure of Maria Theresa, the Victoria of an age when a Pompadour could sway the fate of nations. Her effigy presents her as the mother of her people, displaying rather than obscuring the scholars, statesmen, and warriors who cluster round her feet, sharing harmoniously the glory which neither Queen nor people could have won without the other’s aid.

In Berlin the superb monument of the Great Frederick is instinct with a different spirit. Raised high above the throng, the King seems to gaze with his inscrutable mask-face at the astounding works of his successors. At the base of his lofty pedestal are stationed generals and civilians of renown, numerous enough almost to confute the Cassius who should infer of Frederick’s Prussia that there was in it but one only man. The statue none the less suggests the truth. Between monarch and people there was ever a great gulf fixed. Through all his life—in his counsels, in his despair, in his triumph, and in his death—Frederick, almost beyond parallel in the record of human history, was alone.

CHAPTER I
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA

The first task of the student of Frederick’s life-story is to rid himself of the idea that the solitary King was either wholly original or wholly free. To seize Silesia, to quarter Poland, to rival Austria, to humble France, each was no doubt a feat which no Prussian ruler before him had dared to attempt. Yet in each of these, as will presently be shown, the hand of the living was at once nerved and guided by the dead. From his House Frederick inherited his might, to his House he turned for inspiration in the use of it, and to it he dedicated his conquests. He who would appreciate Frederick must first survey the road trodden for three centuries before him by the Hohenzollerns from whom he sprang.

“Why should I serve the Hohenzollerns?” Bismarck is said to have exclaimed. “My family is as good as theirs.” It was the complaint of the yeoman against his fellow who has saved money and bought the lordship of the manor.

The early history of the state now called Prussia is chiefly the record of a thrifty family—the Hohenzollerns. Since the year 1415, when the overlordship of the sandy tract lying between the middle Elbe and lower Oder and stretching across their banks was conferred upon him by the Emperor for cash down, Frederick of Hohenzollern and his descendants had remained lords of Brandenburg. From Nuremberg, where Frederick had been Burggrave, they had brought with them the vital energy and business ability of successful townsmen. So poor was their new estate that for many generations relaxation would have meant ruin. There was therefore no temptation to depart from that policy of adding field to field which is the natural law of the industrious countryman. Whether from native superiority or from greater need, the Hohenzollerns were usually a little wiser than their neighbours. With the aid of a family statute of 1473, which made primogeniture the rule of succession for Brandenburg, they avoided the consequences of that custom of equal inheritance which has been the bane of Germany. By careful watching of opportunities, by windfalls, by purchase, and by covenants for mutual succession on failure of heirs made with neighbours whose lines died out, the domain of the rulers of Brandenburg was in two centuries increased fourfold. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out and the modern history of Prussia began, the head of the Hohenzollern family, who had long since become one of the seven Electors of the Empire, held sway over an area almost as great as that of Ireland.

Of the territories by which the original Mark of Brandenburg had been augmented, two were of special importance. In 1525 East Prussia had been acquired. This province, which throughout this book will be called by its German name of Ost-Preussen, was richer by far than the Mark, the kernel of the Hohenzollern possessions. It had an important city, Königsberg, for its capital and a coast-line on the Baltic. It constituted the domain of the old Order of Teutonic Knights, permanent crusaders whose task had been to spread the faith and civilisation of their fatherland among the heathen Slavs. But the Baltic lands had all submitted to the Cross, and the Knights became in their turn the objects of a religious mission. Early in the sixteenth century, the doctrines of the Reformation penetrated the minds of their High Master, Albert of Hohenzollern. He turned for counsel to Luther himself. In a celibate Order which had no more heathen to convert, the husband of the nun Catherine Bora could see only a standing defiance of the laws of nature and of God. By his advice Ost-Preussen was “secularised,” that is, taken from the service of religion to form a Hohenzollern estate, and in time (1618), though still submissive to the suzerainty of Poland, it was added to the main body of the Electoral dominions. The Hohenzollerns thus became distinguished from the mass of German princes by ruling territories to which the Empire had never possessed any claim. Ost-Preussen was to them on a small scale what England became in 1688 to the House of Orange, or in 1714 to the House of Hanover. Their policy acquired a new breadth and a new weight. Hitherto provincial, it became more and more cosmopolitan, and commerce with the Baltic lands and England began to hint to the lord of Pillau and Memel that his future lay upon the water.

A makeweight to Ost-Preussen, which would prevent the centre of gravity of the Hohenzollern lands from shifting eastwards, was found in 1609, when the family inherited Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg in Western Germany. This acquisition, made on the very eve of the Thirty Years’ War, was accompanied in 1613 by the conversion of the Elector, John Sigismund, from the Lutheranism which his grandfather, Joachim II., had established in 1539 to the sterner and more militant creed of Calvin. This meant that at the very moment when all Germany was taking up arms for the greatest religious war of modern times, the court and people of Brandenburg were hopelessly at variance with one another. A Calvinist prince ruled a Lutheran people, and the new Elector, George William (1619–1640), “of Christ-mild memory” but the weakest of his line, proved to be a puppet in the hands of Schwarzenburg, his Romanist prime-minister. Under such guidance did Brandenburg, ill-knit and ill-armed, become the battle-ground between Swede and Hapsburg in their struggle for faith and empire.

What Brandenburg suffered in the terrible decade 1630–1640, between the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany and the accession of the Great Elector, can never be fully calculated. The State was rudderless, defenceless, and poor; the combatants on both sides brigands, whom years of license had habituated to every kind of cruelty. What passed could be described by no more patently truthful eye-witness than Andreas Rittner, the cheery burgomaster of Tangermünde, a little town on the Elbe with a royal history of its own. In his pages may be traced the swift descent of the afflicted people through every depth of misery down to despair or even annihilation. The invaders—it mattered little whether Swedes or Imperialists—exacted in endless sequence contributions, lodging, forage, and loot, drove off the cattle, broke up the coffins of the dead, laid waste the land, and hunted down the inhabitants. The mischief was only increased by the feeble efforts of the home government to call out and support a militia. The maddened peasants turned guerilla. Food failed, for who could sow or reap? Men fed on carrion, even, it was whispered, on human flesh, and soon pestilence seized on persecutors and persecuted alike.

Anarchy and degradation brought forth torture. The name of the Swedish Drink attests the cruelty of the degenerate deliverers of Germany. “They laid men awhile upon the fire,” writes Rittner,

“baked them in ovens, flung them into wells, hung them up by the feet, fastened thumb-screws upon them, drove sharp spikes under their nails, bound round their heads so tight that their eyes started out, gagged them and sealed their mouths. Matrons and virgins were oft-times put to shame. Husbands must often leave their wives and wives their husbands, parents their children and children their parents, even on the bed of sickness, for they were powerless to save them from abuse, and sometimes when they came back they found nought of them save some few bones, for all else had the dogs mangled and eaten up.”

Not less graphic is the story told in stone in some of the tormented cities. Round the giant church, spared by the Swedes to uphold the Lutheran faith of which it was then the temple and by the Imperialists for the sake of the Roman faith which they hoped to establish anew within its walls, there may be seen the tombs of many generations of citizens. Those of the sixteenth century are covered with quaint adornment and graven with artistic skill. Then, as war sweeps over the land, the series is broken, to be resumed after many decades with a rude clumsiness which shows that wealth and art had fled from Brandenburg together.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER II
FREDERICK AS CROWN PRINCE, 1712–1740

What manner of man was the first-born son of Frederick William, known to history as Frederick the Great, and what were the causes that made him such as he was? To answer either question is a task of uncommon difficulty. Even to those who were regarded as his intimates Frederick remained an enigma all his life. In his early trials he acquired, as Carlyle happily expresses it, “the art of wearing among his fellow-creatures a polite cloak-of-darkness,” and became what he in great measure still remains, “a man politely impregnable to the intrusion of human curiosity.” And if it passes our wit adequately to describe his personality, how shall we determine and distinguish the factors which created it? No adding together of influences will suffice. Such enquiries lead us far beyond the bounds of mere arithmetic. Of Frederick’s nature, as of every man’s, a greater share was built up in ages which have left no record than in the generations whose history we can trace. If therefore we next endeavour to indicate the influences of his parentage and his surroundings, let us avoid the delusion that these alone made him what he was. In Frederick’s case, too, it is perhaps equally needful to beware of the converse error. His personality, like his policy, was not untouched by ordinary influences. Parents, tutors, friends, nation, home, even religion—each bestowed something upon one who might on a too hasty scrutiny be pronounced a freak of nature—the ugly duckling of the Hohenzollern brood.

Frederick’s birth, on January 24, 1712, remedied the anxieties of a line which had gained too much from the extinction of allied lines not to be keenly sensitive to its own lack of heirs. His father, Frederick William, gave vent to rude transports of joy at the arrival of a male heir. Frederick I., the royal grandfather, who had himself a third time plunged into wedlock in the hope of safeguarding the succession to the new Prussian crown, seized the opportunity to astonish Berlin by the pomp of the infant’s christening. The Prussian nation, living in tranquillity under the Hohenzollerns, shared in their rejoicing.

The infant prince represented many noble lines, and, it might almost be said, two separate civilisations. Frederick William was a kind of Prussian Squire Western. His wife, Sophia Dorothea, was a princess of the rising House of Hanover, a lady soon to be nicknamed Olympia from her majestic bearing as queen. Through her and through his grandmother, a clever daughter of Sophia of Hanover, a thin strain of Stuart blood flowed in Frederick’s veins. His great-grandmother, the wife of the Great Elector, was a daughter of the House of Orange, born at the moment of its triumph over Spain. A generation farther back the Hohenzollerns had married into the House of the Palatinate, which in 1618 threw for the Bohemian crown and lost. But the virtues of every Protestant House in Europe could not compensate for the infirm health which had assailed both the father and the son of the Great Elector, and which there seemed reason to fear had descended to the offspring of his grandson Frederick William. Two older sons had died in infancy, a daughter, Wilhelmina, though she grew up and married, was never robust, and Frederick himself seems in his childhood to have been often ailing.

The home circle of this delicate prince was surely the strangest in the world. The royal family of Prussia in the reign of Frederick William I. was hardly a family and hardly royal. The monarch seemed to regard his sceptre chiefly as a superior kind of cudgel. As Prussian King, and therefore ex officio the father of his people, he could treat them as children, could order them to be anything or to build anything or to pay anything, with even less risk of resistance than an Elector of Brandenburg might have had to fear. He was, it is true, on a footing of equality with foreign kings in negotiating for a treaty or a province or a bride. But apart from his acceptance of the perquisites of royalty, his life was one long protest against all that the world associated with the name of king. Intolerant of state and ceremony, he agonised his chamberlains by his behaviour. His recreations were such as befitted a bargeman on the Havel or an overgrown loafer kidnapped to serve in the King of Prussia’s giant grenadiers. In that snuff-taking age, a king whose hobby was to smoke pipes in a kind of glorified tavern-circle known as the Tobacco Parliament earned the reputation that would fall in our own day to a king who should chew and spit.

Frederick William drank himself to death before he was fifty-two. Though an artist, if not a scholar, he drove Wolf, the philosopher, from his dominions and made Gundling President of the Academy of Letters because he amused the Tobacco Parliament when in his cups. As a sportsman he slew wild swine by the thousand and forced his subjects to buy their carcasses at a fixed price. He ordered his officials to spend only six thousand thalers on the entertainment of Peter the Great, but to give out that it cost him thirty or forty thousand. His mixture of fervent piety and immorality suggests that he was hardly sane, and his foreign policy does not discountenance the suggestion. In some of his officials he placed complete confidence, even when proofs that they were bribing his envoys abroad to send home false news were in his hands. He rushed upon others with his cudgel, first breaking their heads and then cashiering them. What he was to his children may be inferred from the fact that his daughter became his bitter satirist and his son his bitter foe.

Such was the father who directed Frederick’s education. His talent for detail was always at the service of the state. It could be devoted to no worthier object than the training of the future king. At the age of nine years, therefore, Frederick found every hour of the day assigned to some part of the scheme of education by which the crowned Podsnap designed to make him such another as himself.

For all its minuteness, the scheme failed in its main object. It failed because Frederick William was not the sole factor in moulding and inspiring his son. In the royal household were two trembling conspirators against the tyrant—his wife and his daughter. Sophia Dorothea and Wilhelmina formed with Frederick a trio who sighed after the genteel. Loathing the pipe-clayed Teutonism in which their lord delighted, they longed for newer fashions and society more polite, for the wit and gallantry of the French court, and for the splendour of their own opulent kinsfolk at Saint James’s. Their lines had fallen in far less pleasant places. In Berlin, a quiet country town with dull surroundings and a trying climate, they had at least palaces, parties, and scandal. In Wusterhausen, to this day a lonely village, they were in exile; and Wusterhausen was the favourite residence of the King. The Europe in which they lived, it must be remembered, was a Europe which believed with all its heart that whatever Louis XIV. might have been in politics, he was beyond doubt the Apollo of culture. German princes prided themselves on speaking French, on dressing à la française, on building palaces that might be named in the same breath with Versailles. Frederick’s mother spoke French so well that a Huguenot refugee paid her the supreme compliment of enquiring whether she understood German. His sister’s memoirs, like his own, are French in language and in inspiration. What sympathy, we may wonder, could there be between these ladies and a boor who hated everything French, whether language, literature, art, cookery, or dress, and whose ideal of life was to sleep on straw in a barn, wash at daybreak in a tub, don a plain uniform, inspect farms, account-books, and soldiers, gorge himself with rude German dishes in the middle of the day, snore under a tree in the afternoon, and devote the evening to tobacco, buffoonery, and strong drink?

It is not surprising that, when the King’s scheme of discipline outraged his son instead of moulding him, mother and sister were at hand with ready sympathy. The wayward boy never forgot their kindness, nor the indulgence of the tutors who connived at a more humane education than Frederick William had commanded them to inflict. Cordially as the King detested French culture, he did not venture to exclude it from a leading part in the education of his son. A French lady, Madame de Roucoulle, was entrusted with the oversight of his earliest years. Madame de Camas, whom he called Mamma, was the wife of a Frenchman. His tutor, Duhan, was a Huguenot. French was at that time the universal language of the polite and learned world. Frederick, who never learned English and was forbidden to learn Latin, therefore drew all his mental supplies from French originals or French translations.

German he never spoke or wrote with ease. To him it stood for whatever was dull in his education,—for windy sermons every Sunday, lessons of nearly two hours a day in the Christian religion, books full of dismal pedantry, the speech of boors and of his father. Thus he early acquired from France ideas which he proclaimed throughout his life. That literary creation is the highest achievement of man, and that next to creation stand patronage and culture; that religion is superstition; that the enlightened man is he who views with calm not only the rubs of fortune but also the frailties of mankind—such were the abiding traces of Frederick’s education. The King, as may readily be believed, did not fail to remark something of this and to loathe it. He leaped to the conclusion that a boy who preferred French to German, and flute-playing to parades, was a monster who would ruin Prussia. It never occurred to him that his own scheme could be imperfect, and life became one long collision between father and son.

Yet Frederick’s most irritating delinquencies—his delight in soft living and secret dissipation, his distaste for the uniform and duty of a soldier, his contempt for Germans and their tongue—may fairly be ascribed in great part to mere youthful squeamishness and to the tyranny of the King. Had Frederick William been wise enough to trust to the future and to the past, to reflect that in the long line of Hohenzollerns none had been traitor to his House, that a lad who could think for himself would be more easily influenced than coerced, that at the worst he himself was not twenty-four years older than his son and might train the state to survive Frederick II. as after the Great Elector it had survived Frederick I.—had he in short been either a sympathetic father or a man of real penetration, then history might have heard nothing of either the new Junius Brutus or the Ogre of Potsdam, and the million victims of Frederick’s wars might have been spared.

Unhappily for his son and for the world, Frederick William was neither sensible nor sympathetic. His aversion to an heir who refused to resemble himself was doubled when the heir became the advocate of a matrimonial policy which he came to regard with loathing. From the hour of Frederick’s birth the dearest wish of the Hanoverian House, and of Sophia Dorothea most of all, had been to unite more closely the royal lines of England and Prussia. At length a double marriage was proposed. The Prince of Wales was to marry Wilhelmina, and Frederick his cousin Amelia, daughter of George II. In 1730, however, England and Prussia were estranged, yet Frederick William knew that his household had not given up their darling project. Flouted as a father and as a statesman, he treated his son so ill as to lend colour to the suspicion that he wished him dead. Not content with impounding his books, forbidding him the flute, compelling him to see his mother only by stealth, the tyrant actually rained blows upon him in public, even in the camp of the Saxon King. “Had I been so treated by my father,” he is said to have exclaimed, “I would have blown my brains out, but this fellow has no honour.”

Unfortunately for Frederick William, the youth whom he thus outraged was Crown Prince of Prussia, and as such by no means lacked friends. To England, to Austria, and to his father’s ministers he was an important pawn in the game of politics. Some of the younger officers lent him countenance in the hope of favours to come. But the dearest friend of his life, Lieutenant von Katte, loved him for himself rather than for what he might be able to bestow. To Katte the prince confided his fixed purpose to flee from a tyranny that was past endurance. Together they planned to make use of the opportunity of escape which might arise when Frederick should approach the French frontier in the course of a forthcoming tour with his father among the German courts.

PRINCESS SOPHIA DOROTHEA, DAUGHTER OF KING GEORGE THE FIRST.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY HIRSEMAN.

On August 4, 1730, the attempt was made. The confederates tried to steal from the royal camp at dawn and to ride into France. Such a flight was not without precedent in Hohenzollern history. Frederick’s grandfather, sharing the general belief that his stepmother had poisoned his brother and meant to poison himself, had first sought shelter at Cassel with his aunt and at a later date had quitted the Great Elector’s court altogether. But for the heir to a crown to flee beyond the bounds of Germany was a still graver step. The youth of eighteen had hardly calculated the probable consequences of success. Where was Frederick William’s heir to find a safe asylum? Louis XV. was not likely to be to him what Louis XIV. had been to the Old Pretender. George of England would hardly expose Hanover to the vengeance of the King of Prussia. His envoy had in fact refused to countenance the scheme. Nor would the Emperor care to sacrifice the Prussian alliance to mere sentiment. Even if Frederick should succeed in finding a refuge for himself, he would none the less have left two dear hostages at the mercy of the King. “Your mother would have got into the greatest misery,” declared Frederick William a year later. “Your sister I would have cast for life into a place where she would never have seen sun and moon again.”

Thanks, however, to the vigilance of Colonel von Rochow, his keeper, and to the panic of his page, Frederick did not even mount the horse that was to have borne him out of Germany. His abortive attempt inaugurated one of the strangest tragedies in history. From the very fact that he was the guest of other princes Frederick William could not act in haste. The scheme was betrayed to him at Mannheim on August 6th, and he ordered von Rochow to deliver his son to him at his own town of Wesel, alive or dead. In this mood they continued the tour of pleasure, sailing down the Rhine and visiting the potentates upon its shores. At last, on the evening of the 12th, they reached Wesel. Frederick William at once interrogated his son, who lied and protested his submission. The King replied by despatching him to Spandau under the care of a general, who was enjoined to frustrate any attempt at rescue by killing his prisoner.

Spandau is the fortress near Berlin where to-day the Prussian sentries guard some millions of the treasure wrung from France. It was not deemed safe enough to keep the Prince of Prussia. “He is very cunning,” wrote the King, “and will have a hundred inventions for making his escape.” A stronger gaol was sought for. In a sombre plain east of the capital lies Cüstrin, whose grim fortress marks the spot where the sluggish Wartha gliding down from Poland silently joins the Oder. There, on September 4th, Frederick was imprisoned. On the way he had faced a tribunal of soldiers and lawyers with a jaunty confidence which showed that though he might cower before the King he had not forgotten that he was still Crown Prince of Prussia. It was rumoured that he had poked fun at Grumbkow, his father’s most trusted counsellor. For himself he asked no favours, but avowed his responsibility for all that Katte had done amiss.

A fortnight later, on September 16th, the commission examined him again. In the meantime he had begun to understand the nature of a gaol. His father, who lived in such a state of frenzy that he ordered that the tongue which spoke of this affair should be cut out, had not scrupled to condemn him to solitary confinement, a penalty often destructive of health and not seldom of reason. He was clad in brown prison dress, fed on the humblest fare, and deprived of light at seven o’clock in the evening. Thus prepared, he was subjected to a merciless inquisition. After more than one hundred and eighty questions of fact, came two which the King had commanded the interrogators to add. “Do you wish that your life should be granted to you or not?” “I submit to the King’s mercy,” answered Frederick, adding in pencil, when the report was laid before him, “and to his will.” “Since by violating your honour,” ran the last question of all, “you have made yourself incapable of succeeding to the throne, will you renounce the succession by an abdication that shall be confirmed by the whole Roman Empire—to save your life?” “My life is not over-dear to me,” replied the Prince, “but Your Majesty would surely not be so ungracious to me”—and he added a prayer for pardon. The King tore up the petition and applied his genius for detail to a code of rules for the torment of his heir. No one was to speak to the prisoner. Three times a day the door of his room might be opened, but within four minutes it must be made fast again. Mute attendants were to set before Frederick food which they had cut in pieces, since the royal command deprived him of knife and fork. For Katte Frederick William had ordered the rack, but on the representations of Grumbkow the order was cancelled. For his son he discovered a torture which Grumbkow himself was to apply. “He must be told,” decreed the King, “that no one thinks of him any more; that my wife will not hear his name; that his sister Wilhelmina has fallen under my displeasure, that she is shut up in Berlin, and will very soon be sent into the country.”

The problem before Frederick William, whose wrath increased as he experienced the difficulty of laying to his son’s account any definite crime, was to crush his heir without imperilling Prussia. On October 11th Frederick declared to the commission that he was ready to renounce the succession. On October 16th the King avowed in writing his desire to make his second son his heir. But to do this while Frederick lived was dangerous, and on what charge could he be put to death? Assassination, though it might rectify the succession to Philip of Spain or Peter of Russia, was to a Hohenzollern simply impossible. And Frederick William was not entirely sovereign over his son. It was true that a Prussian subject had no longer any right of appeal from the decrees of the Prussian King. But the Prussian King was also Elector of Brandenburg, and therefore a vassal of the Emperor. The heir to the Electorate of Brandenburg was equally a prince of the Empire and as such could appeal unto Cæsar. Moreover, no proof could be found that Frederick was a traitor. He had neither acted nor tried to act in collusion with any foreign Power. His father suspected that England was at the bottom of the plot, but no evidence of this could be found. By no severity could his son be brought to confess more than a design to run away. Foreign sovereigns protested against violence which degraded the royal caste.

It is difficult to see with what hope the baffled King insisted on a quibble which might make out his son to be technically a criminal. Frederick, by no choice of his own, was a colonel in the Prussian army. On October 25th a military court met at the King’s bidding to try him and his accomplices for desertion.

The court consisted of fifteen officers, three from each of five grades. The members of each grade, after deliberating apart, handed their votes to a president, the aged Lieutenant-Colonel von Schulenburg, who summed up their verdicts and added a sixth vote of his own. With regard to the Crown Prince, all were unanimous. Declaring themselves incompetent to pronounce upon affairs of state and of the royal family, they commended the exalted penitent to His Majesty’s supreme and paternal mercy. Katte was condemned by three grades to death, by two to lifelong imprisonment. Von Schulenburg voted for the latter, which by military law carried the day, since it was less severe. The King denounced their criminal leniency and clamoured for “justice,” but von Schulenburg stood firm, appealing to a Higher Power. Thereupon Frederick William decreed “that Katte, although in conformity with the laws he has deserved to be torn with red-hot pincers and hanged for the crime of high-treason which he has committed, be removed from life to eternity by the sword, out of consideration for his family. In informing Katte of this sentence, the Council will tell him that it grieves His Majesty, but that it is better that he should die than that justice should entirely leave the world.”

Under a sentence which no consensus of civilised opinion, no high-placed appeal, no murmur of disaffection could reduce, the doomed man journeyed slowly to Cüstrin. Frederick, who believed that all would go well with himself and his friend, was cheerful still. At five o’clock on the morning of November 6th he was awakened by two officers who told him that Katte was that morning to be put to death and that he must witness it. “What are these ill tidings that you bring me?” he is said to have exclaimed. “Lord Jesus! rather take my life.” Before his judges he had steadfastly declared that Katte’s guilt lay at his door. Now for two terrible hours he wailed, wrung his hands, burst into tears, sent to his friend to beg forgiveness, prayed for a respite while a courier should lay at the King’s feet whatever he might desire from his son—renunciation of the succession, consent to lifelong imprisonment, nay, his own life if Katte’s might be spared. His honourable clamour moves the heart of posterity, but it could vary no line upon the parchment on which the King had set down even the numbers of the soldiers who were to attend the execution. Seven o’clock struck, and the dismal procession filed into the courtyard which stretched from the fortress-wall to the Oder. As the King had commanded, Frederick was led to the window of his cell. He saw his friend, who had received the communion, standing calm and brave amid the soldiers and awaiting with bared head the recital of the sentence of death. The prince kissed his hand to him and cried aloud for his forgiveness. Katte laid his finger upon his lips, bowed respectfully, and answered that there was nothing to forgive. He then bade his comrades farewell, knelt to receive the chaplain’s blessing, and with prayer upon his lips submitted to the fatal stroke.

FREDERICK THE SECOND.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY CUNNINGHAM.

Frederick had fainted. It was the duty of the chaplain to pass straight from the dead offender to the living, and to exhort him to repent. But nature made this royal order of none effect. The prince, when he came to, could only stare dumbly at the gloomy pall which draped the body of his friend. At two o’clock some citizens brought a coffin and bore away the corpse, but Frederick could not withdraw his gaze from the place of execution. All that day he took no food. At night he passed from delirium into a second swoon—then fell to raving anew. When morning broke he declared that Katte was standing before him. But the very violence of his emotion made the reaction swift. On the same day he told the doctor that he was well and asked him for a certain powder. Next day, after much talk with the chaplain on matters of religion, he learned from him that Katte’s fate was not to be his own. Nine days later he made peace with Grumbkow, who came at the head of yet another Commission to exact an oath of strict obedience to the King, and to open the prison doors a little wider. Before Christmas he was reported to be “as merry as a lark.”

The conduct of father and son during this crisis is peculiarly worthy of attention because each was his own counsellor, and because Frederick never again lay under a scrutiny so searching. In the summer of 1730 the King reaped all that he had sown during his son’s boyhood. He found in his heir a youth whom he distrusted and despised but could not get rid of. He therefore began the task anew and inaugurated a second education sterner than the first. He had slain his son’s friend, not, as he professed, “that justice should not entirely leave the world,” but that he might, in spite of past failures, fashion an heir after his own heart. The loyal father of the dead man found consolation in viewing his loss as a sacrifice to this design. That this, which he believed to be indispensable to the welfare of Prussia, was the leading motive of the King’s policy, grew clearer as his outbursts of wrath against his son became less frequent and less fierce. It inspired Frederick also with a leading motive—to beguile his father into believing that he had his way.

His first education made him a rebel; his second, a hypocrite. Katte’s death had taught him once and for all that life would be tolerable only if he gained his father’s confidence. To this end he applied every art which a fertile brain could devise and an unscrupulous actor could practise. He exhausted the language of contrition for the past. He promised full amendment for the future. He sent letters, as many as his father would consent to receive, and the burden of all was that he was indeed a new man, a second Frederick William, adoring the things that he had burned and burning those that he had adored. The new Frederick is interested in tall soldiers, his father’s hobby, and longs to put on the uniform which he had been wont to call his winding-sheet. He relishes theology and after argument abandons what his father calls “the damned heresy” of predestination. He professes to find pleasure in the work of the estates committee and informs his father with ecstasy that the rent of some royal domains can be raised. He tries to propitiate the King of Prussia as Philip of Spain tried to propitiate the English people, by pretending to a taste for beer. Even his opinion of his own family has swiftly changed. He now pretends to realise that his mother is a mischievous intriguer; to be content that his sister shall abjure the throne of England and marry an obscure Hohenzollern of Baireuth; to desire that his father may live to see his children’s children grow up around him. Finally he receives at the hands of Frederick William a regiment and a wife and withdraws into the marshy solitudes of Brandenburg to make the best of both.

It is the duty of Frederick’s biographer to mark from Frederick’s point of view the stages of this second education. The first period lasted rather more than two and a half years, from November, 1730, to June, 1733, and therefore roughly corresponds with the period of residence at an English university which is usually enjoyed at the age at which the Crown Prince had then arrived. This course began and ended with a crime. Katte was done to death for a military offence which a tribunal representing the most sternly disciplined army in the world had declared not to be death-worthy—though their commander-in-chief and king demanded another verdict. A fortnight later, that is, on November 20, 1730, Frederick was admitted as a humble participant in the proceedings of the local Chamber of War and Domains—to assist in duties which he privately styled the work of brigands. He was to study agriculture under the Director, Hille, and in general to survey the foundations of the Prussian State.

He was still a close prisoner living at Cüstrin under the heavy cloud of the King’s displeasure. At Christmas he fell ill and his father wrote on the margin of a report which told him of it: “If there were any good in him he would die, but I am certain that he will not die, for weeds never disappear.” He was forbidden all books save bible, hymn-book, and Arndt’s True Christianity, a work of devotion dear to humble believers in many lands. Geometry and fortifications were classed as “amusement” and forbidden, along with cards, music, dancing, summer-clothing, and meals outside the house. Again, as in the early days of August, Frederick William entrusted him to the care of three nobles. These were to refuse to converse with him on any subject save “the Word of God, the constitution of the land, manufactures, police, agriculture, accounts, leases, and lawsuits.” Such a scheme of education, aimed at compounding a king out of a recluse and an attorney, it is hardly necessary to discuss. We hardly know whether to think the King a simpleton for imagining that he would be obeyed, or a fool for continuing to issue minute directions if he knew that he would not. What is certain is that Frederick’s household revelled in forbidden gifts, diverted itself as best it could, and pressed unceasingly for further freedom. One pleasure, as Frederick William knew in his heart, sweetened his son’s captivity,—in exile he was at least safe from the sight of his father.

The first dawn of forgiveness took place on August 15, 1731, the King’s forty-third birthday. Then Frederick received his father in his shabby lodging, kissed his feet, listened to his reproaches, confessed once more that it was he who had led Katte astray, and finally received the royal embrace before all the people. Soon came permission to engage in the practical study of agriculture, attended by an increase of liberty and even of amusement. The King still imposed restrictions upon Frederick’s reading and ordered him to sing hymns. He was never to be alone or to speak privately to anybody, especially to any girl or woman. Within a fortnight of his father’s visit he had begun his courtship of the young wife of Colonel von Wreech.

The remaining months of the year 1731 brought Frederick great pleasure and a heavy blow. He grew in favour with his father, who in November summoned him to appear for a short time at Berlin and at last promised to restore to him his rank in the army. But at the same time he lost his sister. Wilhelmina was forced by her father into an unhappy marriage with the Margrave of Baireuth, a humble cousin whose title to the favour of his bride was that by accepting him she propitiated her father and freed herself from a still less bearable suitor. Elated by the progress of his own fortunes, Frederick seems for the moment to have been insensible to her trouble and to his own loss. By the King’s order he paid his sister a visit. But he treated her coldly when they met, broke off the conversation abruptly, and walked into the room to which her husband had courteously withdrawn. “He scanned him for some time from head to foot,” writes Wilhelmina, “and after addressing to him a few words of cold politeness he withdrew.... I could not recognise that dear brother who had cost me so many tears and for whom I had sacrificed myself.” Frederick’s standard of behaviour towards his social inferiors was however revealed by other incidents at this time. His tutor, Hille, was a man of the middle classes. In his official position he received reports from a Landrat, or Sheriff, who was of noble birth. A reference by Hille to these reports drew from the Crown Prince the remark that it was singular that a nobleman should render account to a man of the middle class. Next year he wrote to Grumbkow that his daughter was “without charms and without ancestors.”

ELIZABETH CHRISTINA OF BRUNSWICK.

FROM AN OLD PRINT.

In 1732 Frederick experienced another pleasure and a far severer blow. He was allowed to leave Cüstrin, but he left it under sentence of marriage. This had been decreed in consequence of a curious chain of events. Frederick’s preceptors had remarked that he scorned administrative detail but displayed a taste for high politics. This was evident in his suggestions for the disposal of his hand. Now he would marry, if he must marry at all, Anne of Russia; now the Archduchess Maria Theresa, renouncing his succession in Prussia. This suggestion was reported by Grumbkow to the Emperor’s great minister, Eugene. The old diplomat scented danger in such large ideas and urged that the Crown Prince of Prussia should be bound to the car of Austria. He might be encouraged to borrow money from the Emperor, and married to Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, a niece of the Empress. Frederick William, still hot against England, with whose Court his queen continued to intrigue, cheerfully assented to the match.

In a honeyed letter of February 4, 1732, the King broke the news to his son. “She is a creature who fears God,” he wrote, “and that is everything.” The bridegroom elect thought otherwise. He wrote to Grumbkow that he hated severe virtue, and rather than marry a fanatic, always grimacing and looking shocked, he would prefer the worst character in Berlin. “When all is said and done he cried, there will be one more unhappy princess in the world.” “I shall put her away as soon as I am master,” he twice declared. “Am I of the wood out of which they carve good husbands?” “I love the fair sex, my love is very inconstant; I am for enjoyment, afterwards I despise it. I will keep my word, I will marry, but that is enough; Bonjour, Madame, et bon chemin.”

Frederick’s marriage, by which he brought to an end the sternest period of his second education, was a crime, but the bridegroom was not guiltless. All his outcry was made in secret. To the King, in whose hands his fate lay, he showed himself all submission. Frederick William had in his own young days received the names of three princesses from whom his father desired him to choose a bride. He protested with success against such compulsion and his marriage with Sophia Dorothea was something of a love-match. Here was an argument to which he could hardly shut his ears. His son preferred to purchase greater liberty for himself by condemning to a life of misery an innocent creature who had never harmed him. At the same time, by making a happy home-life impossible, he shut out what was perhaps the last chance that he might become in any sense of the words a good man.

For the moment, however, his submission brought him freedom. On March 10, 1732, he went through the formal ceremony of betrothal. Some of the guests remarked that his eyes were filled with tears and that he turned abruptly from his betrothed to a lady who was supposed to be the mistress of his heart. But a year’s respite was granted him. While Austrian statesmen schemed to turn the timid, ignorant Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern into a woman of the world, who might make her husband a Hapsburg partisan, Frederick was learning his work as colonel not far from the field of Fehrbellin. It was drudgery, but it was not Cüstrin. After a year of it he wrote: “I have just drilled, I drill, I shall drill. That is all the news. But it is delightful to indulge in a few moments’ breathing-space, and I would rather drill here from dawn to dusk than live as a rich man at Berlin.”

June 12, 1733, was Frederick’s wedding-day. The Austrian diplomats, who had made the match, went far towards flinging away their advantage. At the last moment they dared to suggest that Frederick William should accommodate the Emperor by entering into a new combination which assigned an English bride to his son. The King was furious at the slight, and the marriage was only another step towards the alienation of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns.

After his marriage Frederick’s father still dictated his movements and kept him short of money. But the period of dragooning was over, and it becomes important to enquire what Frederick William had achieved by this stage of the second education begun with crime and carried on with cruelty. One answer to this question must be mentioned because it is supported by the authority of Carlyle. He holds that the execution of Katte was just, that the imprisonment of Frederick was salutary, that the King was a father yearning to reconcile his son with God and with himself, and that he was not only just and affectionate but also successful. An opinion more widely held is that the execution and imprisonment were unjust but politic, that reasons of state excused them, that their righteousness was proved by their success, and that by them Prussia gained a hero who made her great among the nations of the earth as none but he was able.

On reflection we may think it strange that results so great should have been achieved by a scheme of education so stupid. The King owed the best features of his plan to suggestions from outside. He had condemned his son to tedious, nay, dangerous idleness: it was Wolden who obtained for him a grudging permission to work. He had set him to learn agriculture by attending board meetings: it was Hille who urged that he should be allowed to see how farming was carried on. The united efforts of Hille and Wolden could not convince him that the heir to the throne needed any books save books of devotion. These faults, though significant, were errors of detail. But the King’s whole plan is open to graver objections. It is in fact based on three of the commonest yet most fatal errors with regard to education. That boys are dough or putty to be placed in a mould and beaten till they take the exact shape of it, that a youth who is destined for a given career will succeed best by trying to make himself a facsimile of some one else who has been successful in it, and that it is good to limit training to the acquisition of professional aptitude—these are errors which Frederick William held in common with pedants and doctrinaires of every era.

From Frederick’s birth onwards he had laboured to give him his own characteristics, even his own vices, in the hope that as his son’s conduct grew like his own, so also would his policy. This was still the aim of all his measures. But the second education is distinguished from the first by the ghastly object-lesson with which it opens and by its appearance of success. The death of Katte affords the measure of Frederick William’s powers as a teacher. It imperilled the health, even the reason of his pupil, but assuredly it was not forgotten. Are we then to infer that the King’s system atoned for its faults by its triumph? That Frederick was bullied into love for his father seems incredible. It is true that in public he spoke little ill of him, either before his death, when it would have been dangerous to himself, or after it, when it would have been detrimental to the office which he had inherited. But neither his motto nor his conduct after 1730 betokened love. “Far from love, far from the thunderbolt,” are not words of affection, nor is it filial piety to cozen, to flatter, and to shun. He addressed the King as “most all-gracious Father,” while he secretly petitioned the foes of Prussia for funds wherewith to play upon his weakness for tall recruits. It was like a foretaste of death, he said, when a hussar appeared to command his presence at Berlin.

It may at once be granted that in conduct Frederick was transformed. Before his disgrace he had been a trifler, after it he worked hard till the day of his death. What is doubtful is that this result could not have been obtained at a less cost. There is no evidence that the King had ever tried the normal method of giving his son a fitting task and a reasonable independence in performing it. Frederick, moreover, was nearing the age at which many triflers develop a new spirit. During his year of exile his health improved. He became stouter in body and firmer in gait, so that at first even Wilhelmina did not recognise him. This change at least was not designed by the father who wished him dead, yet to this may be ascribed much of his novel energy.

It is still less certain that his character had gained from the second education. Many of the striking traits of old reappear. Frederick is still before all else brilliant—a gay and versatile young man with elastic spirits and a passion for music, society, and intellectual conversation. Despite his father’s hatred of all things French, Frederick still looked on Paris as the Mecca of civilisation. His literary ambitions were more pronounced than ever. At Cüstrin he had gone back to verses—verses always Gallic, copious, and bad. A Prussian patriot lamented that while he knew not whether his ancestors had won Magdeburg at cards or in some other way, he had Aristotle’s rules of composition by heart. Yet, for all his perseverance, Lord Mahon speaks with justice of “his two kinds of prose, the rhymed and unrhymed.” In the darkest hours of his struggle against all Europe, he sat down to rhyme in French. “He does not really know the Germans at all,” complained his tutors. Though sometimes brutal, he prided himself on his ceremonious politeness—a German version of Louis XIV. All through his career he was wont at times to put on the great monarch. “Hush, gentlemen,” once exclaimed Voltaire when his royal host thus suddenly stiffened, “the King of Prussia has just come in.” His morals were no better after confronting death than before. “The flesh is weak,” he writes to his mother, “but I do not believe that Cato was Cato when he was young.” It was said that the motive of his amours was vainglory rather than the satisfaction of vicious desires. No one, wrote harsh critics, could rely upon his word, and few if any could tell of a disinterested act that he had done.

Yet in some respects Frederick had gained. His talent for diplomacy grew with the need for it. His father’s schooling had this effect—that he learned to outwit his father. The closing years of Frederick William’s life were cheered by the mirage of a good son and a good husband, which of all Frederick’s fabrications was perhaps the cleverest. Progress in diplomacy was attended by increase of self-control. Frederick learned in a hard school to disguise his true emotions and to feign what he did not feel. Hence arises a difficulty which Carlyle constantly encounters as he strives to approach his hero with paternal sympathy and to penetrate into his inner man. He is forced to speak of Frederick’s “polished panoply,” and to describe him as “outwardly a radiant but metallic object to mankind.”

The King’s handiwork may be discerned in the increasing poverty of affection that his son displayed. Frederick William had killed his friend, proscribed his associates, banished his sister, placed his mother under a cloud, and forced upon him a wife whom he despised. It is not surprising that Frederick’s heart, never of the tenderest, grew harder year by year. He turned to the friendship of men, always difficult for kings to win, and doubly difficult for an autocrat who was not prone to self-sacrifice. It was remarked of him in later life that he softened only in illness, and that the sure sign of his recovery was renewed harshness towards those about him. His intimates were chiefly devotees of art and letters, among whom Voltaire was chief. But the very name of Voltaire, whom Frederick first adored and then expelled, hints at the transient nature of these ties. As his sister, his mother, and Madame de Camas were one by one removed by death, he became bankrupt of affection, and his old age was consoled only by the fidelity of his servants and of his dogs.

Such was Frederick at his marriage, but his very defects contributed for a time to his social success. An accomplished man, with great flashing eyes and flexible, resonant voice, “musical even in cursing,” he had a genuine relish for the circle of which he was the centre. His schooling had given him skill in seeming what he pleased, and whatever affection he possessed was given to his friends. At Rheinsberg, where he built himself a house and lived from 1736 till 1740, he was gay, hospitable, and refined, living in apparent amity with his wife and fitting himself by study and by administration to fill the throne in his turn.

The year after Frederick’s marriage, the year 1734, was of high importance in his career. The war of the Polish Succession had broken out between France and the Empire, and Prussia fulfilled her obligations by sending an auxiliary force of ten thousand men to serve on the Rhine under Eugene. In this campaign, which proved inglorious, Frederick played the part of an eager novice, dogging the footsteps of the aged hero and copying even his curt manner. There he laid to heart several fruitful facts—that the great commander never accepted praise to his face, that the enemy feared him more than they feared his army, and that other German troops cut a sorry figure beside the men of Prussia. And—though his father had ordered him to keep out of harm’s way—he proved by his calm while cannon-balls were splintering trees around him that the traditional courage of the Hohenzollerns had descended to him.

Next year (1735) he begged to go to the war again, but the King, who had been near death from dropsy, put him off with a journey to Ost-Preussen. This was the first of those official tours of inspection which later became one of the chief occupations of Frederick’s years of peace. In 1736 he began a far more agreeable pursuit. It was then that he established himself at Rheinsberg, and, that, to quote his own testimony, he began to live.

To live, in Frederick’s vocabulary, meant to read. He plunged into books, comparing, annotating, analysing, and learned by four days’ trial the lesson of the zealous freshman—that man needs more than two hours’ sleep a day. To the remonstrances of the doctors he replied that he would rather suffer in body than in mind. Books were supplemented by conversation, the society of ladies, music, theatricals, literary effort of every kind. His Anti-Machiavel, a treatise on the duty of princes, attracted the attention of Europe, and men of liberal mind awaited with impatience the moment at which he would be able to put his virtuous maxims into practice. Meanwhile he revelled in intercourse with philosophers and learned men. Frederick styled his house “the temple of friendship,” and his guests rejoiced to find that the palace of a Crown Prince could be Liberty Hall.

Yet the hand of Frederick William was not entirely invisible. Thrice every Sunday must the master of the house tear himself from philosophy to go to church, and he was also compelled to read the sermons which his father’s favourite chaplains had composed. His own select preacher was Voltaire, with whom and with his intimates he “reasoned high Of providence, fore-knowledge, will and fate, Passion and apathy and glory and shame.” From history he learned much for every department of life; from philosophy chiefly contempt for religion and a deep-rooted fatalism which sustained him at many moments of disaster. He speaks of

“this Necessity, which orders all things, directs our intercourse and determines our fate.” “I know too well that we cannot escape from the inexorable laws of fate ... and that it would be folly to desire to oppose what is Necessity and was so arranged from all eternity. I admit that consolation drawn from the impossibility of avoiding an evil is not very well fitted to make the evil lighter, but still there is something calming in the thought that the bitter which we must taste is not the result of our fault, but pertains to the design and arrangement of Providence.”

In such discussions passed many hours of the halcyon period, 1736–1740. Of perhaps higher value was the insight into the possibilities of human providence which Frederick gained during his visits to Ost-Preussen. There he saw how the hand of his father had turned a wilderness into the most blooming of his provinces, so that a land which the King had found swept bare of men by the plague now contained half a million prosperous inhabitants. When at last (May 31, 1740) he took the place of the father whose last hours his presence had consoled, it was with a conviction that if his foreign policy had been contemptible, he had shown himself heroic at home.

VOLTAIRE.

FROM THE STATUE BY HOUDON AT THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAIS.

The time had come when the domestic organisation of Prussia was to acquire a new significance in Europe. At Rheinsberg, while protesting that he desired nothing more in life than to be left in peace with his books and his friends, Frederick had been steadily pursuing the study of politics. In 1738 he had set down on paper “Considerations” which pointed to the need of a new champion to defend the liberties of Europe against the stealthy and menacing expansion of France. It remained to be seen whether Prussian foreign policy would in future be influenced by her singular constitution. To appreciate the meaning and the value of Frederick’s innovations in both systems we must portray the situation that he found on his accession. This demands in the first place a brief scrutiny of Europe as it was at Frederick William’s death.

CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF 1740

In his instructions for the education of his successor, Frederick prescribed a thorough course of European history from the time of the Emperor Charles V. (1519–1556) to his own reign. This had been the favourite study of his own youth, so that at his accession he realised to the full that modern Europe owed little of its political contour to chance, but much to the aspirations and struggles of the several states during the last two centuries. For modern Europe was no older than Charles V. Right through the Middle Ages the Christian world maintained that supreme authority, like truth, ought to be one, and that every Christian should look up to the Emperor in matters temporal as he looked up to the Pope in matters spiritual. On the secular side, however, this theory had crumbled beneath its own weight. Even a Charlemagne could not really rule the world. As the various races of mankind who lived in England, France, Spain, and Scandinavia gradually came under the sway of a few national rulers, the Emperor dwindled into a dignified president of German princes. His lordship of the world survived only in distracting claims to rule more widely and more exclusively than his attenuated power could warrant. Two sharp shocks heralded modern times. First Columbus bestowed upon his masters, the Kings of Spain, a new world which had never heard of Pope and Emperor and which the Emperor at least did not pretend to sway. Then Luther, wrestling blindly with the papacy, shattered the central pillar of the mediæval world, and modern history, the biography of a group of independent states, began.

These states, however, did not enjoy unchallenged independence. Each had to work out its own religious settlement, and—if it embraced the Reformation—had to repel, with whatever help it could find, the rescue-work of the Pope and his allies. To the end of the sixteenth century, through the careers of Charles V., Elizabeth, William of Orange, Henry of Navarre, Romanist and Protestant States always tended to fall apart into two hostile camps. Even in Frederick’s time religious affinity always counted for something. He had laid history to heart and, as we shall see, profited in his dealings with England by the old cry of “Church in danger.” On his lips the cry was a mere ruse. The day of crusades was over. In the sixteenth century Spain, Austria, and Italy rejected the Reformation; England established its own Church; France came to terms with the Huguenots. At the great Peace of Westphalia Germany established parity between the warring creeds, a boon tardily won by thirty years of desolation. Thenceforward affairs of state came first in every land. Louis XIV.’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 proved that religious aggression was to be feared only as the sequel of undue political preponderance. From the birth of modern states down to our own time, the bugbear of the nations has been world-rule and their watchword equilibrium.

The first prince who threatened to restore in fact if not in form the world-rule which had broken down in the Middle Ages was Charles V., the scion and pattern of the House of Hapsburg, whose career is the narrative of European politics from 1519 to 1556. France, which he threatened most, took the lead against him, began the long duel between Bourbon and Hapsburg, and thus guarded the liberties of Europe till the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1648). Then Louis XIV. threatened to make France in her turn mistress of the world. The equilibrium which he, as absolute ruler of the foremost State of Europe, seemed to have overthrown, was painfully re-established at Utrecht (1713). A new and greater Thirty Years’ War was thus brought to an end. It left the States weary and timid, dreading France as a century earlier they had dreaded Spain, clinging to peace lest the whole fabric of Europe should collapse and with it the gains which they had made or hoped to make should vanish. France, conscious of weakness in spite of the glories of Louis XIV., turned to diplomacy and won Lorraine. England, ridden on a loose rein by Walpole, followed her natural bent towards the sea. For Austria and the Hapsburg Charles VI., the great problem was to keep what had already been heaped together. Only Spain was not afraid to break the peace, and in the long run she gained parts of Italy by her boldness.

Most of the territorial profits made by European Powers during the years 1713–1740 were made at the expense of Charles VI., either as head of the Hapsburgs or as Emperor. As it became certain that he would have no son, he grew more and more reckless in sacrificing the welfare of the Empire to that of his House. The future of his heir was indeed precarious. For there was not and never had been an Austria in the same sense in which there was an England, a France, or a Spain; that is, a well-knit nation, preferring ruin to dismemberment. “Austria” meant the dominions of the elder branch of the House of Hapsburg just as “Prussia” under Frederick I. meant the dominions of the elder branch of the House of Hohenzollern. In the case of the Hapsburg agglomeration, however, the subjects were too many, too miscellaneous, and too rich for the work of a Frederick William to be possible. Germans, Hungarians, and Italians were only the chief among a motley crowd of races which had come under the sceptre of Charles VI.’s ancestors and which he strained every nerve to hand down to his daughter undispersed.

The method which Charles selected was to proclaim that his dominions were one and indivisible, and descended to a female heir if no male were forthcoming. This he did by the famous Pragmatic Sanction, a document which for fifteen years, from 1725 to 1740, was the pivot of European politics. From State after State Charles purchased a guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction, which amounted to an undertaking to recognise his daughter, Maria Theresa, as heir to the Hapsburg dominions. For this he yielded to Spain broad lands in Italy, for this he sacrificed commercial prospects to the sea-powers England and Holland, for this he consented that Lorraine should pass from Germany to France, for this he followed Russia into a Turkish war which cost him great tracts on either side the Danube. For this, too, he committed what was perhaps the most dangerous of all his blunders. He played fast and loose with a time-honoured ally, and estranged the King of Prussia.

Ever since the Peace of Westphalia had given them freedom to make alliances where they would, the policy of the Hohenzollerns had been to maintain a good understanding with Austria. It might, indeed, happen, as after 1679, when Louis XIV. hired them, that some other course became so advantageous that for the moment they adopted it. In general however, the Emperor had most to give. To him the German princes still looked for investiture, for arbitration, and for promotion, and if a State desired to exercise its troops, who was so likely as the lord of the long Hapsburg frontiers to be at war? King Frederick William might reasonably hope that the Power which had given his father the crown, which had led Prussians to victory before Turin, and which had permitted him to keep conquests in Swedish Pomerania (1720), would reward his devoted service by favouring his pretensions to inheritance on the Rhine.

Though a forceful squire, as a statesman the King lacked imagination. He was master of the finest soldiers in Europe, yet he dared not vindicate his claims to Jülich-Berg without the help of the Emperor, and he could not understand that the Emperor might be reluctant to help the master of the finest soldiers in Europe. Such was, however, the truth. The rise of the Hohenzollerns had long been watched at Vienna with not unnatural jealousy. Even against the Turk Prussians were but sparingly enlisted. The gift of the crown had been hotly opposed and bitterly regretted. When Frederick William cried, “The Emperor will have to spurn me from him with his feet: I am his unto death, faithful to the last drop of my blood,” it was already a Hapsburg maxim that a new Vandal kingdom must not arise on the shores of the Baltic.

The statesmen at Vienna valued the Prussian alliance enough to employ Grumbkow and the Austrian ministers at Berlin to hoodwink Frederick William. As we have seen, they lavished pocket-money and sacrificed a bride in the hope of securing ascendancy over his son. But they blundered greatly when to please England and thereby to further the Pragmatic Sanction, they bade the King break off a marriage which all the world knew was fixed for the very next day, and they blundered still more when to please France and Holland with the same end in view they withdrew the promise of supporting him in Jülich-Berg. In 1732 Frederick William, for the only time in his life, met Charles VI. face to face and the truth with regard to the relations between Hapsburg and Hohenzollern began to dawn upon him. All his life he had been the vassal of an Emperor whom he had imagined as a German overlord, heir to the dignity of the Cæsars, who when the time was ripe would look with paternal complacency upon the Prussian claims. The vision faded and revealed a rival monarch, pompous, contemptuous, and shifty. The shock of disillusionment was terrible, but before his death he saw clearly. Once, it is said, he pointed to Frederick with the words, “There stands one who will avenge me.” It is certain that with failing breath he warned his son against the policy of Vienna.

Thus, even supposing that Frederick’s view of politics had been no wider than his father’s, that he had come to the throne resolved merely to keep up a great army and to win Jülich-Berg, he would none the less have possessed remarkable freedom of action. In foreign politics he was fettered by only one great treaty, that of Berlin (December, 1728), by which Prussia undertook to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction. But it was possible to contend that this agreement, which was made in secret to secure the Emperor’s assistance in Jülich-Berg, became void in 1739, when Austria entered into conflicting engagements with France.

Circumstances, too, were favourable to Frederick’s liberty. The very existence of the Pragmatic Sanction, a violent remedy against dissolution, was a guarantee that Austria would be harmless for years to come. If Charles VI. and his heir were loath to uphold Prussia on the Rhine, they would be very unlikely to risk their own existence by taking up arms against her. In other quarters Prussia had little to fear. Hanover, the parvenu electorate which lay like a broad barrier across the direct road from Berlin to the West, had become a dependency of England in 1714, and therefore was not dangerous. Whatever might be the wishes of George II., it was certain that Walpole would not spend blood and treasure to maintain the House of Pfalz-Sulzbach, Prussia’s rival in Jülich-Berg, at Düsseldorf. The Dutch, it is true, felt themselves menaced by a Prussian garrison in Cleves, but their course had by this time become that of a mere cock-boat in the wake of Great Britain. France alone remained to be considered, and France, with a frontier fifty leagues from Berg, was guided by a Walpole of her own, Cardinal Fleury, now nearing the close of his eighty-seventh year. If then Frederick elected to make Prussia more considerable among the Powers of the West by pressing his claims to Berg he could fling his sword into the scales of justice without great fear that a stronger hand would turn the balance against him.

Adventure in the Rhine countries had much to commend it to the young King. His House undoubtedly possessed some title to Berg, and it had been the secular policy of the Hohenzollerns to forego no claim without arguing to the death. The busy and fertile Rhineland was a gold-mine in comparison with the sterile Mark. Frederick, as an enthusiast for the higher civilisation of the West, might well feel drawn towards a duchy which lay more than half-way along the direct line from his capital to Paris. And, greatest merit of all in the eyes of a dynasty of merchants, Berg was eminently salable. The Rhenish duchies were like good accommodation-lands in the midst of thriving farms. Many rulers would always be glad of them and their price would therefore be high.

But the arguments against staking all on Berg were also strong. A statesman trained between the Elbe and the Oder could hardly be unaware that Prussia’s heritage in the West was a mere windfall and that by interest as by situation she belonged to the system of the North. Her natural outlook was towards the Baltic, which formed the only free road between her centre and her eastern wing. It was by foregoing lands on the Baltic that she had gained rich bishoprics to the westward in 1648. Baltic Powers, Poland, Russia, and above all Sweden, had steadily influenced her politics since the advent of the Great Elector. History and geography alike seemed to beckon young Frederick to the sea. Let us therefore cast a glance at those among his neighbours whom he had to take account of, whatever plan he might devise.

FREDERICK WILLIAM THE FIRST.

AFTER THE PAINTING BY F. W. WEIDEMAN.

Just as the traditional enemy of the Bourbon was the Hapsburg, so the traditional enemy of the Hohenzollern was the Vasa. This gifted House had ruled in Sweden since 1520 and had chosen for their country a path which it was not strong enough to follow to the end. They had striven to turn the Baltic into a Swedish lake by conquering all its coasts. Success seemed nearest when in 1630 Gustavus landed in Germany, and at the point of the sword compelled his kinsman of Brandenburg to favour his adventure. The result of these bold steps was for Sweden a swift blaze of glory; for Brandenburg a decade of misery inflicted in great part by Swedish hands. In 1648 the great treaty compensated the Swedes for their work by driving the Great Elector from the mouth of the Oder. Their ambition to be masters of the Baltic shores, however, remained, and the Great Elector suffered much at their hands before the Peace of Oliva (1660) confirmed his sovereignty over Ost-Preussen. What happened at Fehrbellin and after it has been already told. The meteoric career of Charles XII. (1697–1718), who began by humbling Prussia, but ended by losing Stettin to her, is no part of our story, except in so far as it interested and influenced young Frederick. It suffices that in 1740 Sweden was factious and impotent, and that her aged King still held that part of Pomerania which Prussia did not possess. To acquire Western Pomerania was therefore a possible object for Frederick’s ambition.

The central mass of the Hohenzollern dominions touched along almost the whole of its eastern frontier a Power whose decline was even more visible than that of Sweden. The Polish Republic, which almost encircled Ost-Preussen, formed perhaps the strangest spectacle that Europe has ever seen. A vaster country than any of the Western Powers, Poland remained in the Middle Ages. Her constitution, indeed, seemed to have no other end than to make progress impossible. There were only two classes, nobles and serfs, the free and the unfree. But where every freeman was noble, many nobles were poor. These served for hire, and were distinguished, it is said, from men of lower birth by the privilege of being flogged upon a Turkey carpet. The direction of this vast country rested with a few thousand feudal chiefs who elected a nominal King from within their own body or outside it. They made the laws themselves, but a single dissentient voice could wreck the work of a whole Diet, as the annual session of Parliament was termed, and of late years this right had commonly been exercised. What trade there was, was left to the despised class of German burghers. The fighting force grew every year more feeble. While Austria could boast a Eugene and Russia a Peter, while the parade-ground at Potsdam was trodden by ever-growing masses of men who handled modern weapons with the precision given by daily practice, the Poles were blindly trusting in feudal levies generalled by a puppet King.

At Frederick’s accession, however, Poland still possessed two elements of strength besides her vast bulk and the knightly courage of her sons. These were the Saxon connexion and the port of Danzig. Two years earlier, at the price of war with France (1733–1738) and loss of lands in Italy, Charles VI. had secured the Polish crown for the son of the late King, Augustus III., the Elector of Saxony. The Emperor made this sacrifice to win support for the Pragmatic Sanction and to propitiate Russia, who looked upon Poland as her own if the French candidate were expelled. And, as the road from Dresden to Warsaw passed through the Hapsburg province of Silesia, Augustus had good reason to be faithful to the daughter of Charles VI.

Poland none the less promised much to a king of Prussia who could wait. Her artificial connexion with Saxony, established by foreign Powers against the will of a majority of the Poles, could only weaken the frail bonds which bound the State together. Poland, all the world had long known, would one day fall in pieces, and who should hinder Prussia from gathering some of them? For the moment, however, Augustus could defend his new dominions. A king of Prussia in a fever to act at once could not assail Poland without laying bare his flank to Saxony and to her Imperial ally.

But could Prussia in 1740 afford to wait? If Augustus’s dream were to be fulfilled would not she be in jeopardy? The Elector hoped that the Emperor would cede to him a part of Lower Silesia, so that Prussia might be for ever divided and hemmed in by a Saxon-Polish State. Had we no other guide than the map, we might be tempted to guess that it was to avert this peril that Frederick seized Silesia. If it were true it were a grievous fault. Augustus, who was no statesman, might dream of a hereditary crown, but a firm Saxony-Poland was in fact impossible. Dresden and Warsaw were centuries apart. Out of two such halves no strong whole could be compounded. The one was German, the other Slav; the one industrial, the other primitive; the one Lutheran, the other partly Romanist and partly Orthodox. Compounds so discordant could have found no abiding unity in a monarchy based on the treason of their common head against the constitution of each. Nor could such a State have barred for a decade the path of the Muscovite Colossus which Peter had already roused and which Catherine and Alexander were soon to reinspire.

In weighing Frederick’s wisdom we must not forget that the share of Poland which he might expect that Prussia was destined to acquire, and which did, in fact, fall to her during his own lifetime, would change Ost-Preussen from an isolated province into a strong limb of a well-knit State. It gave her the lower waters of a third great arterial river—the Vistula. But it came to her in 1774 shorn of its chief glory, the old portal of the Vistula and strong tower of Poland, the matchless town of Danzig. Frederick had seen that fair city, a hearth of German culture among the Slavs, with its giant Marienkirche towering over a mass of battlements and gates and churches of stately civic halls and mansions hardly less stately, the whole forming a Venice of the North beside which his capital was but a market town. He must have taken note of the foundation of all this grandeur, great warehouses on busy wharves, canals crowded with masts and hulls from many lands. And he cannot have been blind to the fact that within a few miles of this prize lay Ost-Preussen, and that, since Augustus had surrendered Curland, within a few miles of Ost-Preussen lay Russia. Seldom has a king had clearer warning to look before he leaped.

Thus, without departing from the policy of the men who had made Prussia what she was, the young King had his choice between adventure on the Rhine or across the Peene and a policy of expectant watchfulness on the Vistula. But if he were capable of building upon the foundations of his forefathers the loftiest structure that they would bear, then a still more glorious conquest might be his. Lord of Stettin and of the ports of Ost-Preussen, he might claim a share in what all the nations coveted, the empire of the sea.

It is one of the most grotesque facts in history that the Emperor William II., when he cried, “Our future lies upon the water,” should have been uttering as prophecy what ought to have been commonplace for a century and a half. Even in 1740 the truth that the New World offered a fairer career than the Old was not hidden from statesmen less astute than Frederick. Since the Armada foundered in 1588, the nations of Europe had been realising it one by one. Spain and Portugal, the first in the field, still held a vast heritage across the ocean, but their monopoly was not as unchallenged as of old. First the Dutch, who as subjects of Spain had monopolised that carrying-trade which seemed to be beneath the dignity of an Iberian gentleman, enriched themselves so rapidly that they were able to throw off the yoke of Philip II. and to establish a colonial and commercial empire of their own. Then England, tardily comprehending the changing conditions of life, grappled with their little republic in a long and doubtful struggle. Finally weight told, and after the Revolution of 1688 England under her Dutch King led the way and Holland followed in a campaign against a rival dangerous to both. For France had been guided by Colbert into the path of greatness beyond the seas, and it was by grasping at Spain and the Indies that Louis XIV. aroused the keenest apprehensions that he might become dictator of the world. Only at the cost of two mighty wars had the danger from France been averted for a generation. By the Peace of Utrecht (1713) the Sea Powers gained security for themselves and for their commerce, but the prize of North America still remained to be fought for between France and England.

In the early years of the eighteenth century other competitors put to sea. Under Peter the Great, the new land Power, Russia, struggled to become maritime, though her horizon, as yet, hardly extended beyond European waters. But in 1722 the Emperor Charles VI. made his port of Ostend the headquarters of a new Imperial East India Company, and England, France, and Holland joined in an outcry against German competition. Nine years later they were appeased. The Hapsburg sacrificed the future of his House to its past. To purchase guarantees of the Pragmatic Sanction he withdrew his support from the Company, which none the less was able to maintain itself for more than sixty years.

If then the tide had set so strongly towards distant continents that even conservative ill-knit Austria was swept along with it, we may well ask, what of Prussia? The history of our own time makes the question more pertinent. North Germany has shown beyond dispute not only that she can now build ships, a fact which proves little or nothing as to her powers in the past, but also that she can fill them with brave and skilful seamen, whose character only many generations of worthy forefathers could create. These forefathers were the Prussians of Frederick’s day, poor, fearless, and docile, living on the borders of the Baltic, speeding and welcoming its fleets at Memel, at Pillau, at Colberg, and above all at Stettin. Why, it may be wondered, was Frederick blind to the signs of the times? Why did not he at the very outset of his reign hasten to employ the power of the Crown, which Frederick William had raised so high, to equip a Prussian Baltic Company, a Prussian West Africa Company, even a Prussian East India Company?

Never was the political situation more favourable to such an enterprise than when Frederick grasped the reins. No neighbour could enforce a veto upon Prussian maritime enterprise. Poland was in the last stage of impotence and decay. Russia, who might form a good customer, was not yet equipped for conquest. Austria could not afford to offend a German ally. Sweden had lost her sting and her province of Pomerania was a hostage at Frederick’s mercy. The Sea Powers would view the enterprise askance, but they too had given hostages to Prussia. If England played foul, the master of eighty thousand men could overrun Hanover in a fortnight and the Dutch would think twice ere they provoked the lord of Cleves. Of all Powers Denmark, the surly janitor of the Baltic, was perhaps the best able to injure Prussian commerce with impunity, but the heir of the Great Elector might be trusted to find a way with Denmark. Thus Europe seemed to invite Prussia to follow the destiny which nature prescribed, and which led to wealth. Firmly governed, armed to the teeth, learned, Protestant, and rich, she might have pursued her old opportunist policy on the mainland with full confidence that the future would bring her wider boundaries and yet greater strength.

In an earlier generation and with smaller means the Great Elector had perceived that the true path for Prussia lay across the seas. Balked of Stettin, he strove to make Pillau and Memel his London and Amsterdam. His little Armada of ten frigates attacked the Spaniards with success. In a humble way there began to be Brandenburgish West Indies, and in 1683 Fort Great-Fredericksburgh was built upon the Brandenburgish Gold Coast. But the Great Elector’s son and grandson lacked either his firm hand or his imagination. While Frederick I. was squabbling with the Dutch about armchairs, the Dutch were driving his subjects from West Africa. Frederick William, the apostle of domestic economy, was impatient of flunkeys, universities, and colonies, the several extravagances of his father and of his grandfather. Would Frederick II. prove himself more enlightened?

We see with amazement that he did not. A prince who was accounted clever, who had spent the first decade of manhood in pondering on high politics, who revered the memory of the Great Elector, and followed the fortunes of England with keen interest—how could such an one ignore what the movement of the times and the course of after events seem to point out so clearly? Among his first acts was the establishment of a new department of manufactures. He commanded the head of it to take measures for improving the condition of existing industries, for introducing new ones, and for bringing in foreign capital and foreign hands. Why did he not at the same time establish a department of marine? Why did he wait till East Frisia fell to Prussia before making even a half-hearted effort to win profit from the sea?

A partial explanation may lie in the fact that Frederick lacked the inspiration drawn from travel. The stupid fears of Frederick William that his son would become too Frenchified in his life or too Austrian in his politics had closed to Frederick the doors of the best school of his time. Who knows how much profit the Great Elector brought to his State from his education in Holland, or Peter the Great from his journeys in the West? Save at Danzig, Frederick had hardly seen with his own eyes the dignity which commerce might create. Save for two stolen days in Strasburg in the first months of his reign, a secret visit to Holland in 1755, and a meeting with the Emperor in Moravia in 1770, he was fated never to gain fresh knowledge of what would now be foreign lands except at the head of his army.

Again, Frederick’s political economy was unfavourable to Prussian commerce. At Cüstrin he learned from Hille that the only trade by which a country can profit is that which adds to its stock of gold and silver. His father had carried this idea to its logical conclusion. He had seized the precious metals and locked them up. Like a timid farmer who thinks that the bank will break, he had hidden in his cellars the hoard which represented the economies of a lifetime. Frederick therefore found a treasure of more than twenty-six million marks, at a time when the weekly wage of a common soldier hardly exceeded one.

It seems clear that a policy of hoarding could be wise only when war was in sight. In time of war that Government would be happiest which had most coined money with which to pay its troops. But in time of peace not even Frederick William could take a breed from barren metal by keeping it locked up. Profit could be drawn from it in either of two ways. The coined metal might be spent to advantage, so that the State bought something, such as a school, or a farm, or a flock of sheep, which would in the future be worth more than the sum laid out. Or it might be lent to citizens who would pay for the use of it and establish with its aid some business which might be taxed. By locking up the surplus funds of the country, however, the King stifled commerce at the birth. Frederick did not detect the fallacy, and Germany waited till the nineteenth century for her commercial rise.

Though nimble-witted and fond of philosophy, the King was hardly profound. His lector, the Swiss de Catt, tells a significant story of his first discussion with a singular stranger on a Dutch vessel, whom he did not suspect to be the lord of Prussia. Frederick, he says,

“tried to prove that creation was impossible. At this last point I stood out in opposition. ‘But how can one create something out of nothing?’ said he. ‘That is not the question,’ answered I, ‘the question is, whether such a Being as God can or cannot give existence to what has yet none?’ He seemed embarrassed and added, ‘But the Universe is eternal.’ ‘You are in a circle,’ said I, ‘how will you get out of it?’ ‘I skip over it,’ said he, laughing; and then began to speak of other things.”

He wrote incessantly on history and politics, always with the clearness and sprightliness that seem inseparable from the French tongue which he employed, and always with the confidence of a journalist and of a king. Of his ancestor Joachim I. he says: “He received the surname of Nestor in the same way as Louis XIII. that of ‘the Just’; that is, for no reason that any one can discover”—and this is a very fair example of his style. Sense, lucidity, concise statement, even wit, distinguish his writings. He made so many confident generalisations on political affairs that some have almost of necessity proved correct. But of deep insight, still less of great constructive power, there is little trace.

In freedom from illusions, however, Frederick surpassed some rival statesmen. This was abundantly illustrated at the very outset of his reign. He saw, as Charles VI. could not, that the claim of the Emperor to be lord of the world rested on no firm basis. Early in 1737 he had written: “If the Emperor dies to-day or to-morrow, what revolutions will come to pass! Every one will wish to share his estate, and we shall see as many factions as there are sovereigns.” The discovery, indeed, was by no means new. More than a century earlier Gustavus Adolphus had told the Germans that their constitution was rotten. But Frederick informs the Emperor pointedly that he is only first among his peers. He was equally clear-sighted in the choice of means to spread his views. William the Silent had perceived a fact dark to many statesmen since his time—that the public opinion of Europe is worth much and that it may be courted through the Press. Frederick had already composed the earliest of his many pamphlets, which he intended to publish anonymously as the work of an Englishman, to rouse the Sea Powers against France.

More significant than all else was the fact that he viewed his own strength with clearer eyes than his father’s. Frederick William had never been able to convince himself that Prussia was a strong State: Frederick wears no blinkers and with his accession the day of half measures is over. Two years before this he had written to Grumbkow words which express his real opinion of the old policy of his House. The affair of Berg, which he as Crown Prince earnestly hoped would enable him to win fame on the battle-field, had then entered upon a phase adverse to Prussian expectations. Austria had been prevailed on to join with France and the Sea Powers in claiming that it should be referred to the arbitration of a congress, and Frederick William, though disgusted, had decided to give way. Of this decision Grumbkow approved, writing, “I am persuaded that a King of Prussia, like a King of Sardinia, will always have more need of the fox’s hide than of the lion’s.” Frederick replies (March, 1738):

“I confess that I perceive in the answer a conflict between greatness and humiliation to which I can never agree. The answer is like the declaration of a man who has no stomach for fighting and yet wishes to seem as if he had. There were only two solutions, either to reply with noble pride, with no evasions in the shape of petty negotiations whose real value will soon be recognised, or to bow ourselves under the degrading yoke that they wish to lay upon us. I am no subtle politician to couple together a set of contradictory threats and submissions, I am young, I would perhaps follow the impetuosity of my nature; under no circumstances would I do anything by halves.”

Close observers held that a change of king would be followed by a change of policy and that Frederick was likely to attempt great things. What these would be no one, with the possible exception of the young King himself, had the least idea. What in the opinion of the present writer they should have been is sufficiently indicated above. What they were, will be shown in the following chapter.

At first, for all his determination to lose no time, the results of his accession seemed but small. No human being could maintain that he was swayed by his affections. Though Duhan, Keith, and Katte’s father received some measure of compensation for their sufferings, Frederick’s behaviour towards those concerned in his early struggles emboldened the wits to say that his memory was excellent as far back as 1730. His Rheinsberg friends expected to share the spoils of office. They were disappointed in a way that has reminded Macaulay of the treatment of Falstaff by Henry V. Frederick was as masterful as his father. The aged Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, who had created the Prussian army, and the aged General von Schulenburg, who had risked all rather than condemn Katte to death, were humiliated by royal reprimands. Grumbkow, with whom he had corresponded for more than eight years in terms of affectionate intimacy, might have caused him a moment’s embarrassment, but he had just died—“for me the greatest conceivable gain,” the King assured his sister. He broke up his father’s useless and costly regiment of giant grenadiers, a measure which Frederick William had himself advised, but he increased the effective strength of the army by nearly ten thousand men. At the same time he sounded, more clearly even than his ancestor George William, the note of religious toleration for which Brandenburg had been honourably distinguished in the time of her greatest peril. “In this country,” he instructed his officials, “every one shall get to heaven in his own way.”

VIEW OF GLATZ IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

FROM AN OLD PRINT.

The crowned philosopher always recognised the difference between the things which were Cæsar’s and the things which were God’s. The scion of a Calvinist House, he began his reign by authorising the Lutherans to restore their ritual, which had been arbitrarily simplified by his father. He was soon to court the favour of Breslau by supplying her with Protestant preachers, and of Glatz by bestowing vestments upon a statue of the Virgin. When Romanist Europe expelled the Jesuits, he seized the opportunity of picking up well-trained teachers cheap. Some of his papist subjects had a fancy for buying handkerchiefs which bore the effigies of saints. Frederick, eager to encourage the linen manufacture, bade his officials find out which saints were the most popular and adjust the supply to the demand.

A story cited by Carlyle illuminates Frederick’s views upon the relations between Church and State. He was questioning the monks of Cleve, to whom the old dukes had assigned an income from the royal forest-dues for masses to be said on their behalf. “‘You still say those masses then?’ ‘Certainly, your Majesty.’ ‘And what good does anybody get out of them?’ ‘Your Majesty, those old sovereigns are to obtain heavenly mercy by them, to be delivered out of purgatory by them.’ ‘Purgatory? It is a sore thing for the Forests, all this while! And they are not yet out, those poor souls, after so many hundred years of praying?’ Monks have a fatal apprehension, No. ‘When will they be out, and the thing complete?’ Monks cannot say. ‘Send me a courier whenever it is complete!’ sneers the King,” and leaves them to finish the Te Deum which they had begun to greet his arrival.

Lastly, the forms with which Frederick took up the kingship showed that the fears of his father and the hopes of enlightened men were alike without foundation. It became clear that the philosopher-king, though he relieved famine and tempted learned foreigners to Berlin, would not revert to the ill-timed pageantry of his grandfather. Nor—though he freed the press and restricted to a few cases the use of torture—would he anticipate the glory of some Hohenzollern who is still unborn by fostering a spirit of individual liberty among his people. Impatient of coronation, which he classed among the “useless and frivolous ceremonies which ignorance and superstition have established,” he received the homage of his subjects by proxy everywhere save in Ost-Preussen, Brandenburg, and Cleve. At Königsberg he paid homage to the memory of liberties which his ancestors had crushed, and which he had no intention of animating anew. The ceremony at Berlin was made memorable by one of his rare displays of feeling. When he appeared on the balcony of the Castle and looked down upon the surging crowd in the square below, he was so affected that he remained standing many minutes, silent and buried in thought. Then, recovering himself, he bowed to the multitude, and rode off to attend a military review.

EUROPE 1740

G. P. Putnam’s Sons. London, & New York.

It is, however, on his journey to Wesel, his Rhenish capital, that he reveals most clearly how the Crown Prince has changed into the King. Wilhelmina had found him of late so careless, even so uncivil, a correspondent that the news of his coming to Baireuth prostrated her with joy. He seemed to her so altered in countenance and developed in form that, just as after his imprisonment at Cüstrin, she hardly recognised him. But a less welcome change was only too perceptible. Wilhelmina found her brother’s caresses forced, his conversation trivial, their sister, the Margravine of Ansbach, more favoured than herself. The remainder of the journey proved that Frederick at least remained true to the French. At Frankfort he disguised himself for a flying visit to Strasburg. There his little party put up at an inn, sent the landlord to invite officers to their table, and visited the theatre. The mask was penetrated by a runaway Prussian whose tall brother had been kidnapped for the army and who recognised the son of his former King. The greatest pleasure of all came last. At Wesel, besides dealing with the affair of Herstal, which will be described in the next chapter, Frederick for the first time paid homage in person to Voltaire.

At the end of October Wilhelmina visited Berlin, but her brother welcomed her coldly. She found abundant proofs that he had become inscrutable. She describes in her Memoirs how the Queen Mother had shut herself up, equally astonished and mortified at her complete exclusion from affairs of State. “Some complained of the little care he had to reward those who had been attached to him as prince royal; others, of his avarice, which they said surpassed that of the late King; others of his passions; others again of his suspicions, of his mistrust, of his pride, and of his dissimulation.” This criticism from an unwonted quarter may possibly be explained away. It has been suggested that the King’s treatment of his sister at Baireuth was due to the same policy of repelling every possible claimant to influence his policy, which may be held to excuse the snubs inflicted upon Dessau and Schulenburg and the dignified exile of Frederick’s mother and wife. His conduct at Rheinsberg, whither Wilhelmina followed him, does not admit of the same excuse.

“The little spare time that he had,” she complains, “was spent in the company of wits or men of letters. Such were Voltaire, Maupertuis, Algarotti, and Jordan. I saw the King but seldom. I had no ground for being satisfied with our interviews. The greater part of them was spent either in embarrassed words of politeness or in outrageous witticisms on the bad state of the Margrave’s finances; indeed he often ridiculed him and the princes of the empire, which I felt very much.”

CHAPTER IV
THE SILESIAN ADVENTURE, 1740–1742

The proceedings of Frederick in 1740, trivial as some of them are, reveal him as a statesman, just as the events of 1730 revealed him as a man. They therefore possess an interest such as hardly any other part of his reign can claim. For a few months he is free to choose his own path in life, guided only by instinct and education. Thus an element of free-will is present which is to some extent lacking in two notable crises of his fortunes—the tragedy of 1730 and the miracle of 1757. This year sums up, as it were, the eight and twenty which had gone to make Frederick what he was: it shapes his course in the six and forty that were to follow.

In the story of Prussia, 1740 inevitably suggests comparison with 1640, when the Great Elector likewise stood at the parting of the ways. Then and for years afterwards the choice had lain between existence and ruin; now it was between increase by natural growth and perhaps speedier increase by speculation. For a century Prussia had seldom departed from a policy of thrift and autocracy at home and opportunism abroad. Would she now abandon it? Frederick’s early measures showed that he intended no sweeping changes in domestic politics. We may therefore postpone an examination of the system which he there pursued. For us he is at present only the lord of ninety thousand of the best-drilled troops in the world, entangled in no alliances and hampered by no fears. What choice would be for him the wisest?

Calm reflection on the situation of Europe in 1740 seems to show that Frederick’s strength was to sit still. Signs were abundant that the peace which had prevailed almost from his birth could not endure much longer. Apart from the problem of Austria, grave questions had arisen which not even a Walpole and a Fleury could settle otherwise than by the sword. France and England, it was felt, would soon resume the duel which the Peace of Utrecht had but interrupted, and would struggle for primacy in America and in the world. Spain and England were already at war, and Europe knew that the Bourbon Kings of Spain and France, who were uncle and nephew, were joined in close alliance. To strike at King George without crossing the sea France must aim at Hanover, and the sword of Frederick, the neighbour of Hanover, would be bid for by both sides. According to the convenient theory then current, a prince could hire out an army without committing his State to war, so that Frederick stood to gain much,—money, military glory, experience for his men, perhaps even territory for his House,—while he need stake nothing save that which he had long desired to hazard,—his own life and the lives of his soldiers.

A Hohenzollern was the last man in the world to undervalue what he might wish to sell. Frederick strove to persuade Europe that in him a new and greater Gustavus had appeared. He increased his army ostentatiously and bade his representative at Versailles speak of his active and impetuous way of thinking.

“You can say,” he continues, “that it is to be feared that this increase kindles a fire which may set all Europe in a blaze; that it is the way of youth to be adventurous, and that the alluring visions of heroic fame may disturb and have disturbed the peace of countless nations in the world.”

The prospect of acquisitions in the Rhineland seemed first to engage his thoughts. In hopes of winning Berg he not only made overtures to France, but even invited the help of Russia. The fruit of these negotiations was small. Their significance, however, is great, since they showed that Frederick intended to choose his allies without regard to the tradition of his House in favour of Austria, and also that he would not shrink from favouring Muscovite development by employing Cossacks in Western Germany.

At the same time that he bargained in this spirit with foreign Powers, Frederick compelled his brother Germans to mark the change of accent which he was introducing into the old language of his House. Brandenburg had taken up the informal protectorate of the German Protestants when the Saxon Elector by becoming Romanist (1697) resigned it. Frederick William devised a safe but effective method of checking Romanist aggression. If any German prince persecuted Protestants, the King of Prussia used forthwith to apply similar oppression to his own papist subjects. Thus, without stirring from Berlin, he stayed the hand of persecutors in the distant valleys of the Neckar and the Salzach. His son soon proved himself ready to go to greater lengths.

Claims and counter-claims as to territory had arisen between one of the great Romanist princes, the Archbishop of Mainz, and the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, the heir of one of the earliest champions of the Reformation. The former relied on his own troops and on those of neighbouring bishops, while he also possessed the support of the Emperor, whose right to judge the case had been challenged by his opponent. The Landgrave appealed to the King of Prussia and to other princes of the Empire. Frederick’s reply was immediate, emphatic, and successful. “In case of need,” he wrote to his brother-Elector of Mainz, “we should not know how to refrain from affording to the aforementioned His Dilection the Lord Landgrave William the necessary protection and help against unlawful force and disturbance.” At these words the hostile coalition—Elector, bishops, and Emperor—melted away. The young King, it was apparent, had entered the field of German politics with éclat.

Equally peremptory and equally successful was Frederick’s verdict for his own claims in a dispute with the Bishop of Liège with regard to Herstal, a tiny barony lying on the Meuse to the westward of Aix-la-Chapelle. The inhabitants had resisted the officers of his father, who would gladly have sold Herstal to Liège, and the Bishop, who wished to buy but could not come to terms, had egged them on. Frederick, scorning the advice of his ministers, resolved to use his strength as a giant. From Wesel he sent the following ultimatum to the Bishop:

“Cousin! Knowing all the attacks that you have made upon my unquestionable rights over my free barony of Herstal, and how the seditious men of Herstal have been supported for some years in their detestable disobedience to me, I have ordered my privy-councillor Rambonnet to visit you on my behalf, to demand from you in my name a sincere and categorical explanation within the space of two days, whether you wish to protect the mutineers of Herstal in their abominable disorder and disobedience. In case you refuse, or delay that just reply which I demand of right, you will render yourself solely responsible before all the world for the consequences which your refusal will inevitably bring after it. I am, etc.”

“This is strong, this is lively,” cried the ambassadors at Berlin when they read it; “it is the language of Louis XIV.; it is a beginning which shows what we must expect some day from this prince.” Their prophecy was to be fulfilled sooner than they anticipated. In the meantime the new diplomacy won another triumph. The Bishop made no reply to the ultimatum and in a week’s time the Prussians, sowing apologies broadcast over Europe, seized his county of Hoorn. The apologies concluded with the assertion: “His Majesty will never put from him a just and reasonable arrangement with the said prince, as the sole end which his justice and moderation have in view in this affair, these two invariable principles being the pole-star of all his actions.” The “just and reasonable arrangement” proved to be the payment of two hundred thousand thalers to the King.

Frederick could therefore congratulate himself that within five months of his accession he had taught both Prussia and Europe that he was stronger than his father. It was clear that he was resolved not to be hoodwinked by man or woman. He had rejected the advice of his cautious ministers with the pleasantry that when they spoke of war they resembled an Iroquois talking of astronomy. The event had gone far towards silencing the taunt of Europe that “the Prussians never shoot,” and towards establishing the truth of Frederick’s well-known simile, “The Emperor is an old phantom of an idol and has no longer any nerves.”

A king of Prussia with such a spirit as Frederick had already shown was not likely to rest long upon his oars. But it was chance that determined the course that he was next to steer. The Herstal treaty, which confirmed his second diplomatic victory, was signed on October 20th. Six days later a swift courier brought to Rheinsberg the news that on that same day the Emperor, Charles VI., had died. Frederick lay ill of fever. He defied his doctors, took quinine, and was well. He sent for his cautious minister Podewils and for the dauntless soldier Schwerin, and wrote to Voltaire:

“The least expected event in the world forbids me this time to open my soul to yours as is my wont.... I believe that in June it will be powder, soldiers and trenches rather than actresses, ballets and theatres.... This is the moment of the entire transformation of the old system of politics: the stone is loosed which Nebuchadnezzar beheld when it rolled upon the image of four metals and destroyed it.”

Two days later he expressed himself with still greater confidence: “I am not going to Berlin, a trifle like the Emperor’s death does not demand great commotions. All was foreseen, all was thought out in advance. So it is only a question of carrying out designs which I have long had in my mind.”

These designs were, in brief, so to use the political situation created by the death of Charles VI. as to add to Prussia the whole, or at least the north-western part, of the Hapsburg province of Silesia—the fertile basin of the upper Oder. In conception and in execution the idea was Frederick’s own. It is the pediment of his fame as a hero of his nation. All the world knows that the capture of Silesia converted Frederick the Second into Frederick the Great. It is therefore imperative that at this point, with judgment unclouded by the smoke of battle and the incense of victory, we should address ourselves to the double enquiry, Was it necessary? and Was it right? postponing but not evading the further question, Was it wise?

THE RATHHAUS IN BRESLAU.

FROM A STEEL ENGRAVING.

The plea that Silesia was necessary to Prussia, that the existence of Prussia could only be prolonged or her people safeguarded or fed if Silesia were hers, may be dismissed at once. Necessity is the usual pillar of a claim to extend the area of dominion over lands lately rescued from barbarism. The Law of Nations declares that, when under such conditions two civilised states desire the same territory, one may further its claim by showing that without this addition the territory which it already has would be rendered worthless. But what might give a good title to Fashoda would be absurd if applied to Breslau. Frederick had himself investigated the subject nine years before when studying under Hille at Cüstrin. He then concluded that Silesia did Prussia commercial injury by exporting to her goods at lower rates than the merchants of Brandenburg could afford to take. This state of things, he and Hille thought, demanded a protective tariff. It could not by any stretch of imagination dictate or justify the annexation of a province. Nor from a military point of view was there imperative necessity for acquiring Silesia. It was no doubt desirable for Prussia that she should avert future danger by thrusting a wedge between Saxony and Poland, and that more than one-fifth of the road from Vienna to Berlin, by way of Breslau, should be in Prussian hands. But no Prussian could maintain in 1740 that if Glogau and Breslau remained Austrian his state would be imperilled in the same sense as the German Empire would have been imperilled if Metz and Strasburg had remained French in 1871, or as the British Empire would be imperilled to-day if Pretoria and Johannesburg were still in hostile hands. The plea of hereditary right, not that of necessity, was put forward by Frederick as the basis of his claims. In 1740 the latter would have seemed equally absurd in law and in fact.

The second question, Was it right for Prussia to attempt to acquire Silesia for her own profit? may seem to have little claim to discussion by Frederick’s biographers, because considerations of right and wrong counted for little with Frederick himself. There seems to be no evidence that Frederick either in his public or private life practised the stale hypocrisies of truth and morality. What it seemed to him profitable to do, that he did; what it seemed to him profitable to say, that he said. “If there is anything to be gained by being honest, let us be honest; if it is necessary to deceive, let us deceive,” are his own words. In the case of Silesia, his avowal to Podewils, who urged that some legal claim could be furbished up, is sufficiently explicit. On November 7th the King writes: “The question of right (droit) is the affair of the ministers; it is your affair; it is time to work at it in secret, for the orders to the troops are given.” Two days later he received the news of the death of the Empress of Russia, which was worth more to him than a thousand title-deeds. Russia had no clear rule of succession, and usually fell into anarchy at the demise of the Crown. Frederick could therefore strike southward with confidence that his flank was safe.

The question, Was it right? has, however, a deeper historical interest than that involved in the biography of a king of Prussia. Frederick’s indifference to all right renders it unnecessary to reflect in his case upon the spectacle of a good man cheerfully doing evil in the service of the State—of Sir Henry Wotton setting out with a jest “to lie abroad,” or of Cavour exclaiming, “If we did for ourselves what we do for Italy, what scoundrels we should be!” But it is to be borne in mind that in 1740 it was impossible to lay down with certainty the duty of a state towards its neighbours. The standard of right and wrong for states in their dealings with one another was not yet fixed. Nearly a quarter of a century later it was possible for Frederick to write, “The jurisprudence of sovereigns is commonly the right of the stronger.” But Maria Theresa was taught that sovereigns must rule their peoples as branches of one Christian family.

Hitherto the old idea that a state was the property—the estate—of the king had not lost all its influence. Even in England, which was already the leader of the world in politics, the dynasty elected by the nation had great weight in determining foreign policy. Without the knowledge of any Englishman, William III. had committed England to the partition of Spain, and in defiance of most Englishmen George II. was soon to commit her to the defence of the Pragmatic Sanction. But if England was not yet wholly free from the ancient notion, much more did Austria and Prussia, bundles of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern lands, resemble the estates of their rulers.

From this two consequences followed, vital in that day, almost incomprehensible in ours. It was, in the first place, a maxim universally accepted among the rulers of the Continent that the inhabitants of a province had little or no share in choosing their overlord. They might possess rights, even the right not to be divided between several lords, but they could be sold or exchanged or given away by one overlord to another without their own desire or even consent. This maxim was accepted to the full by both Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, whose fortunes had been made by the union of family estates, and who never hesitated to barter those estates to advance their own fortunes. Thus the fact that a province would be happier under an overlord who professed the same religion with itself would, according to the ideas prevalent in 1740, afford no good reason for change. Religious oppression by a ruler, it was universally admitted, entitled other rulers to interfere. But religious differences between ruler and ruled gave no such right.

In so far, then, as States still resembled estates, the relations between them varied according to the personal character of their kings and princes. The nation ruled by an honourable king observed its engagement strictly, at whatever inconvenience to itself. If a State evaded its engagements the king’s honour was held to have been tarnished. Unfortunately for Europe, this theory had been shaken, if not shattered, by the reign of Louis XIV. The Apollo of France, the cynosure of the Christian world, the king who was the very fount of honour and in person the very pattern of chivalry, had in his dealings with the Dutch and the Germans shown himself a kinsman of Machiavelli and of Bismarck. His conspicuous severance of political from personal morality shook the faith of the world, and in the corrupt generation which followed Louis XIV. and nurtured Frederick even the standard of personal morality sank low.

At the death of Charles VI., therefore, men were perplexed about the source of law as between State and State. It seemed no longer sufficient to trust in princes, and yet what new code could be set up? Frederick’s attack upon Silesia struck a deadly blow at the remnant of the old system. His whole career was to influence the new profoundly.

In answer to our two first questions it would therefore appear that the attack upon Silesia was not dictated to Frederick by hard necessity, and that, tried by the old standard of honour between princes, it was clearly wrong. The third question—Was it wise?—is of a different order, for it is far from certain that the wisdom or folly of Frederick’s act has been sufficiently tested by time. A safe step towards the truth, indeed, is to examine the international situation and calculate Frederick’s chances of success, as a statesman would compute them from the facts which lay before him in 1740. First of all, however, we must account for the fact that Frederick, who was only the third Hohenzollern to wear a crown, found himself in a position to assail the dynasty which had held for centuries the foremost place in Germany.

The House of Hapsburg, perhaps to a greater extent than any other of the ruling families in Europe, lay under the spell of its own past. This was due in part to its native pride and sluggish blood, in part to its long association with the oldest and most dignified institution of the Christian world—the Holy Roman Empire. From 1438 onwards the descendants of Rudolf of Hapsburg had been chosen in unbroken sequence to fill the office which entitled its possessor to style himself Lord of the World. The radiance of old Rome had gilded Vienna for so long a time that it seemed to have transfigured the race that reigned there. Thus the Hapsburgs grew proud with a pride which no other House could rival, and no Hapsburg was prouder than Charles VI., the Anglo-Austrian candidate in the War of the Spanish Succession. His pride was fatal, for it banished him from the world of fact. He could never comprehend how Europe could leave off fighting to make him King of Spain, nor how the King of Prussia, who served him with towel and basin as Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, could cherish aims and aspirations which conflicted with his own. Pompous ceremonies and parchments made up so large a part of his own life that he came to believe that they expressed realities. Hence he made the cardinal error of his life. He committed the future of his House to the Pragmatic Sanction. Domestic economy was beneath his notice. While Frederick William was crying out because his son’s tutors permitted an item “for the housemaids at Wusterhausen,” to appear in the accounts, dishonest stewards were debiting the Emperor with twelve buckets of the best wine for the Emperor’s bath and two casks of old Tokay for Her Majesty’s parrots. When Charles VI. died the treasury was almost empty; the army seemed to have passed away with Prince Eugene; the ministers were blunderers of seventy and the sovereign a woman of twenty-three.

Maria Theresa had, however, much in her favour. Though untried in affairs of State, it was certain that her birth, her beauty, her piety, her courage, her wifely devotion, and her unfailing goodness of heart would win the affection of her subjects. And the realm of the Hapsburgs needed only loyalty to be strong. Its broad and smiling provinces could furnish inexhaustible supplies of men and food, and the rank and file had proved their courage in a hundred wars. Besides, after all the trouble and sacrifices of Charles VI., in what quarter could immediate danger arise? The rulers of Bavaria, Saxony, Spain, and Sardinia had each a claim to some part of his inheritance, but they could each and all be confuted or bought off. A miscellaneous empire like that of the Hapsburgs could never be wholly free from such disputes. What might well give confidence for the future was the fact that France, so long the moving spirit of Europe and the implacable foe of Austria, had in 1738 given to the Pragmatic Sanction the most ample guarantee that the wit of man could devise. What her king had then undertaken, her all-powerful minister had lately confirmed. In January, Fleury had written to the Emperor:

“The King will observe with the most exact and inviolable fidelity the engagements which he has made with you, and if I may speak of myself after a name so worthy, I venture to flatter myself that my pacific intentions are well enough known for it to be supposed that I am very far from thinking of setting Europe on fire.”

Both King and Cardinal were sincere, and the best proofs of their sincerity were the signs of coming strife between them and England. It was clearly to the interest of France that they should keep their pledge.

If she had nothing to fear from France, Maria Theresa had everything to hope from Prussia. It is hardly necessary to say that Frederick William, the devoted vassal of the Emperor, had been among the first to guarantee the Pragmatic Sanction. His son, so Austrian statesmen might argue, had to thank the Emperor for protection when he lay in prison, for secret supplies of money, for experience in the field, above all for admission by way of marriage to the outer circle of the Imperial family itself. Now he expressed himself in terms which convinced the consort of the Queen, Francis of Lorraine, that his attitude towards the young couple was that of a father. Francis even flattered himself with expectations of Prussian support in his candidature for the office of Emperor. Although the Austrian resident at Berlin wrote towards the end of October, 1740, that the gossips spoke of dangerous designs upon a portion of Silesia, and although, on November 19th, Maria Theresa gave utterance to a fear that the price of Prussian protection would be a slice of her hereditary dominions, still no one at Vienna had the least suspicion of the blow that Frederick was preparing.

What was hidden from the victims was hidden also from Europe and from Berlin. Till the end of November, the only clear fact was that Prussia was arming fast. Envoys besieged Podewils and the King, and even Voltaire journeyed to Rheinsberg in the hope of piercing the veil. All their efforts were vain. The conviction that Silesia was in danger gathered strength, but no one could be sure that Frederick would move at all, or that if he moved it would not be towards the Rhine. He astutely feinted in the direction of Berg by strengthening the garrisons in Cleves and repairing the roads to the West. At the same time he toiled hard to baffle official curiosity at home and abroad and to feel the pulses of the Powers, especially that of France. Wilhelmina, who saw her brother revelling in the social pleasures of Rheinsberg, had no idea of what was in the wind.

At last, when secrecy was no longer profitable, the King’s design was allowed to appear. On November 29th, the English ambassador wrote from Berlin that the project of invading Silesia was as good as avowed. Frederick had yet to meet and to brave the Marquis di Botta, who came from Vienna on a special mission to the Prussian Court and encountered the stream of troops flowing towards Silesia. At their meeting the King dropped the mask of friendship. “I am resolved,” he said in effect, “to safeguard my rights over parts of Silesia by occupying it. Yield it to me and I will support the throne of Maria Theresa and procure the imperial crown for her husband.” “Impossible for us,” urged the Austrian, “and for you, criminal in the eyes of all Europe.” Argument was plainly futile, and both fell to threats. “The Prussian troops make a handsomer show than the Austrian,” said Botta, “but ours have smelt powder.” “The Prussian troops will prove themselves as brave as they are handsome,” replied the King. Three days later, on December 12th, he attended a masquerade in the apartments of the Queen, questioned the French ambassador with regard to the disposition of Fleury, and afterwards supped in public. To the last moment the routine of pleasure was performed.

Next morning Frederick set out for Silesia. He had first to shake off two lads of fourteen and ten, his brothers Henry and Ferdinand, the youngest colonels in his army, who seized the skirts of his coat and begged him to take them to the war. A day’s drive brought him to Frankfurt-on-Oder, and between Frankfurt and the frontier of Silesia was encamped an army of 19,000 men with seventy-four guns. The heart of the despot not yet twenty-nine years old beat high with lust of adventure and with confidence of success. On the evening of December 16th, he wrote to Podewils from Silesian soil:

“I have crossed the Rubicon with waving banners and resounding music; my troops are full of good-will, the officers ambitious and our generals consumed with greed for fame; all will go as we wish and I have reason to promise myself all possible good from this undertaking.... I will either perish or have honour from it.”

Frederick’s next step was to issue to the world a document, of which one thousand copies had been printed in deepest secrecy exactly a month before. This was designed to reassure the people of Silesia as to the intentions of the King of Prussia. It was dated December 1st and gave out that a general war was threatening, in which Silesia, “our safeguard and outwork,” would be involved and the security of Prussia threatened. To avert this peril the King saw himself compelled to despatch troops to Silesia.

“This is by no means intended to injure Her Majesty of Hungary, with whom and with the worshipful House of Austria we rather most eagerly desire to maintain the strictest friendship and to promote their true interest and maintenance according to the example of our glorious forefathers in our realm and electorate. That such is our sole intention in this affair, time will show clearly enough, for we are actually in course of explanation and agreement with Her Majesty.”

Commentary on this profession, if not sufficiently supplied by Frederick’s interviews with Botta, was afforded two days after his entry into Silesia. Then for the first time a Prussian representative, Borcke, informed the rulers of Austria of his master’s proceedings. Shamefaced and without hope of success, he began the unwelcome task by offering to the Archduke Francis his master’s guarantee for the Hapsburg lands in Germany, a place in the Prussian alliance with England, Holland, and Russia, his vote at the Imperial election, and a loan of two million florins. Then he named the price—the cession of all Silesia. “Rather the Turks before Vienna,” cried the Archduke, “rather the Netherlands to France, rather any concession to Bavaria and Saxony.” And when he grew calmer and spoke of negotiation, the door opened and Maria Theresa asked whether her husband was there.

Next day the subject was broached anew by a more Olympian plenipotentiary, Oberhofmarschall Gotter, who had arrived after Borcke’s message was made known. He found Vienna stirred to its depths and the English ambassador declaring that if such a thing were done Frederick would be excommunicated from the society of Governments. None the less he took the high tone and strove to intimidate the pliable Archduke.

“‘I bear,’ he said, ‘in one hand safety for the House of Austria and in the other, for Your Highness, the Imperial crown. The treasures of the King my master are at the service of the Queen, and he brings her the succour of his allies, England, Holland and Russia. As a return for these offers and as compensation for the peril which he incurs by them, he asks for all Silesia, and will take no less. The King’s resolve is immovable. He has the will and the power to possess himself of Silesia, and if it be not offered to him with a good grace these same troops and treasures will be given to Saxony and Bavaria, who are asking for them.’”

Gotter’s words seem to strike the keynote of the Silesian adventure. His silence as to legal claim throws into strange relief the preposterous character of the moral claim which he advances. Saxony and Bavaria had made no overtures to Frederick, and Frederick, as soon became apparent, was willing to accept much less than the whole of Silesia. The spirit of Maria Theresa breathed in the calm and dignified reply of the Archduke. Her high-minded confidence in Providence, her allies, her people, and herself blunted all the weapons of Prussia—the threats and cajolings addressed to the sovereign and the three hundred thousand thalers offered to the ministers. Austria declared that the invasion must cease or she would not even negotiate. Thereupon Gotter and Borcke joined their voices to the loud and unceasing chorus of remonstrance with which Prussia and Europe assailed the ears of Frederick in vain.

The young King’s firmness may be ascribed in part to an overweening confidence in his own talents and in part to the favourable progress of his enterprise. He knew himself to be a cleverer man than his father and he had boundless faith in prompt and decided action. His success in the affairs of Mainz and Herstal could not but have augmented his self-esteem. The sight of the well-found and eager army which a word from him had assembled filled him with a sense of omnipotence. He declared that it must not be said that the King of Prussia marched with a tutor at his elbow. The minister of France, who admitted his great power of becoming what he wished, smiled maliciously at what he wished to become.

“Fully convinced of his superiority in every department, he already thinks himself a clever statesman and a great general. Alert and masterful, he always decides upon the spot and according to his own fancy. His generals will never be anything but adjutants, his councillors anything but clerks, his finance-ministers anything but tax-gatherers, his allies among the German princes anything but his slaves.”

Frederick’s whole career is a vindication of this estimate.

Already, both in Silesia and in Europe, good progress had been made. No Austrian armies disputed Frederick’s advance, for Charles VI’s grandiose projects had denuded his home provinces of troops. The natural defences of Silesia, too, were all on the wrong side. Mountains formidable though by no means impassable screened it from loyal Bohemia and loyal Moravia, and thus blocked the direct paths to Vienna. Only a few hills and streams barred an attack from the side of Saxony and no natural obstacle intervened between Breslau and Berlin. The strong portal looking towards Prussia was Glogau, which closed the Oder, the great natural highway of Silesia. Breslau, the capital, a city which Frederick could praise as the finest in Germany, was too big to be a fortress by nature and too independent to be made one by art. In the main Protestant, and therefore ill-disposed towards Austrian rule, it stood firmly upon its right to provide for its own defence and refused to receive a garrison. Glogau was therefore the only formidable fortress in Lower Silesia, the half of Silesia where Protestant feeling was strongest and which was most exposed to the Prussian invasion. The south-eastern half, Upper Silesia, contained two other strong places of high importance—Brieg, which commanded the upper Oder, and Neisse, which secured the backdoor of the province towards Austria. But Glogau, Brieg, and Neisse were all ill-supplied and undermanned. Without a field army to use them as bases and supports they could not oppose a serious obstacle to the army of the King.

THE BOARD OF FINANCES AT NEISSE.

FROM A STEEL ENGRAVING.

Frederick’s worst foe, indeed, was the weather, which tested the endurance of the Prussians and found it great. Torrents of rain fell from the eighteenth of December to the twentieth.

“Waters all out,” says Carlyle of the latter day, “bridges down, the country one wild lake of eddying mud. Up to the knee for many miles together; up to the middle for long spaces; sometimes even up to the chin or deeper, where your bridge was washed away. The Prussians marched through it, as if they had been slate or iron.... Ten hours some of them were out, their march being twenty or twenty-five miles; ten to fifteen was the average distance come.”

Their unshaken discipline was the trophy of Frederick William and the best omen for the adventure of his son. On December 22d he knocked at the door of Silesia and was not dismayed at finding it shut. Wallis, the Governor of the province, had thrown himself into Glogau, had worked manfully to make it defensible, and now stood firm. Without siege-guns Frederick could hardly hope to take the place, and for a few days his own command was brought to a standstill. He summoned the reserve under the younger Prince of Anhalt-Dessau to join him at Glogau and used the delay to organise a system by which Silesia should feed his troops for the future, but should feed them with the minimum of inconvenience and waste. Meanwhile the enterprise continued to be fortunate. On December 27th Schwerin and the right wing surprised Liegnitz, an industrial town within sight of the western wall of mountains, and on the same day the Young Dessauer brought the reserve to Glogau and set Frederick free. “Thou wilt shortly see Silesia ranked in the list of our provinces,” wrote the King. “Religion and our brave soldiers will do the rest.”

In Silesia and in Europe alike the philosopher-king counted much on religion. He cheerfully accepted the rôle of Protestant hero assigned him by the people, first of Berlin, then of Silesia, and finally of England. Never was this rôle more serviceable than in his dealings with Breslau. Leaving the Young Dessauer to blockade Glogau, he pressed on to the capital and, aided by the frost, accomplished the journey of seventy miles in three days. Much display of friendship and a little sharp practice sufficed to win the city, and Frederick, gracious and debonair, entered it in great state. Thus in three weeks from his departure from Berlin the King destroyed the Austrian civil government of Silesia. Half the province lay almost passive in his grasp, and he had secured a base for the conquest of the other half.

The remainder of the month of January, 1741, was spent in pressing home the advantage already won. The smaller towns, Ohlau, which would be useful as a base till Brieg could be acquired, Ottmachau, and Namslau, capitulated one by one. It was true that the activity of the young Austrian general, Browne, produced an ever-increasing disposition to resist, and that Glatz, hedged in by hills, defied the besiegers. But the area under Prussian control was steadily increased. Brieg was masked as Glogau had been, and Neisse, after a futile bombardment of four days, was treated in the same way. Schwerin was set free to drive Browne through the mountains into Moravia and to lead the army into winter quarters. On the 29th of January, Frederick returned to Berlin and plunged with zest into the whirlpool of diplomacy which had been stirred to its depths by his adventure.

Great as was his trust in resolute action and in accomplished facts, he could not disguise from himself the truth that on one side his calculations had broken down. Austria, inspired by a Queen whose high soul it was not in Frederick’s power to measure, was not one whit nearer to compliance with his demands. Russia, as he foresaw, was likely to do little to help her, but the action of the Western Powers was less easy to calculate. Frederick felt sure of one thing above all else—that under no circumstances would France and England be on the same side. He therefore devoted himself to the task of winning the alliance of one and the neutrality of the other.

Frederick’s simultaneous courtship of two Powers whose latent enmity to each other was beginning to reappear throws valuable light on his diplomatic methods and upon his regard for the truth.

“A veracious man he was, at all points,” says Frederick’s greatest biographer; “not even conscious of his veracity; but had it in the blood of him; and never looked upon ‘mendacity’ but from a very great height indeed. He does not, except where suitable, at least he never should, express his whole meaning, but you will never find him expressing what is not his meaning. Reticence, not dissimulation.... Facts are a kind of divine thing to Frederick; much more so than to common men; this is essentially what Religion I have found in Frederick.”

By his verdict that Frederick was a “veracious” man and his seizure of Silesia a righteous act, Carlyle robs the story of his life of half its value. The plain meaning of the facts which he adduces seems to be that he was an astute man, careless of truth and right. Hence we may enquire with keen interest, How far can such means lead to lasting success? In deference to a great name, however, two of Frederick’s letters may be placed side by side. It will then be unnecessary to recur to this ungracious topic. From this time forward it will be assumed that the reader has formed his own opinion of Frederick’s truthfulness.

So soon as he realised that his negotiation with Austria might break down, Frederick turned to France. On January 5, 1741, he wrote to Fleury from Breslau:

“My dear Cardinal, I am deeply impressed by all the assurances of friendship which you give me and I will always reply to them with the same sincerity. It depends only upon you, by favouring the justice of my title to Silesia, to make eternal the bonds which will unite us. If I did not make you a sharer in my plans at first it was through forgetfulness rather than for any other reason. It is not everyone who is as unfettered amid his work as yourself, and to Cardinal Fleury alone is it granted to think of and to provide for everything.”

And in sending the letter he added:

“I ask nothing better than a close union with His Most Christian Majesty, whose interests will always be dear to me, and I flatter myself that he will have no less regard for mine.”

At the same time he was making proposals for a close union with the natural enemy of France. In the same month, January, 1741, he addressed the following sentences to George II.:

“My Brother! I am delighted to see that I have not deceived myself in placing confidence in Your Majesty.

“As I have had no alliance with anyone I have not been able to open my mind to anyone; but as I see Your Majesty’s good intentions I regard you as already my ally, from whom I ought in future to have nothing secret or concealed. Far from desiring to disturb Europe, I demand only that heed be paid to the justice of my uncontestable rights. I place unbounded confidence in Your Majesty’s friendship and in the common interests of Protestant princes, which require that those oppressed for their religion should be succoured. The tyranny under which the Silesians have groaned is frightful, and the barbarity of the Catholics towards them inexpressible. If the Protestants lose me they have no other resort.

“If Your Majesty desires to attach to yourself a faithful ally of inviolable constancy, this is the time: our interests, our religion, our blood is the same, and it would be sad to see ourselves acting against each other: it would be still more grievous to oblige me to concur in the great plans of France, which I intend to do only if I am compelled.”

The question of alliances was still unsettled on February 19th, when Frederick again left Berlin for the scene of war. Prussia might be doomed to act alone; her safety lay in her own right hand. New armies were set on foot, but a skirmish at Baumgarten, in which he narrowly escaped capture, proved to Frederick that the Austrians were moving and that his own troops were not all that could be desired. Nor was the Prussian strategy above criticism. The Old Dessauer, the father of the army, held up his hands in horror at the dispositions of Schwerin. Weak detachments were cantoned everywhere and the mountain-passes not secured, although Neisse, Brieg, and Glogau were still Austrian, and the Prussians would be at the mercy of an army entering Silesia from the Bohemian side.

But soon the King’s spirits, which had been depressed by the danger of a European coalition against him, were raised and the military situation greatly improved by a brilliant feat of the Young Dessauer. Glogau, Frederick had been pleased to decree, must be taken. At midnight on March 8th-9th, therefore, a combined assault was made with that perfect organisation and cool courage which already distinguished the Prussian infantry. In an hour the work was done, at a speed which made the loss on each side the merest trifle. Frederick could congratulate his lieutenant on “the prettiest military stroke that has been done in this century,” and himself on the acquisition of an open highroad to Breslau. The capital now became a safe central storehouse for the Prussians, and its value as a base of operations was greatly enhanced by the gain of control over the Oder. So far as Glogau itself was concerned, it may be convenient to remark that the work had never to be done a second time. In a wall near the northern portal may be seen a stone inscribed F. R. 1741—a token of Prussian sovereignty which from that day to this has suffered no erasure.

The next task was to secure Neisse, the Glogau of Upper Silesia. The problem was complicated by the fact that the Austrians had succeeded in flinging a thousand men into the fortress, and that a relieving army under Marshal Neipperg was known to be on its way from Vienna. Frederick therefore determined to turn the blockade into an active siege, while one covering army was established to the westward., and Schwerin received orders to concentrate another to the south-east. The detachments were being called in for this purpose when the King had to acknowledge a surprise which led to the first pitched battle of the war and which might have ruined his whole enterprise. While Schwerin was carefully shutting the south-eastern gate of Silesia in Neipperg’s face, the marshal passed him on his right and, by a creditable march over roads supposed to be impracticable, arrived at Neisse on April 5th. The advantage of this bold move was soon apparent. Frederick and Schwerin, who had been within an ace of capture, were also marching northwards, but they were separated from their friends by the river Neisse and by a superior force of the enemy. Neipperg was strong in cavalry and longed to follow up his advantage by crushing the Prussians in detail.

Frederick was saved, however, by Neipperg’s ignorance of the strength and position of his foes. With a force of less than sixteen thousand men, the marshal’s plain duty was to use his temporary superiority in numbers by meeting the enemy in the field and striving to destroy him. Failing in this, he might make for Ohlau and the magazine. But after crossing the Neisse, he lost touch with Frederick’s force and believed himself to be between hostile armies on the north and south-east. Snow and rain hampered his movements and chilled his men. He therefore abandoned the initiative, and on April 9th sat down within sight of friendly Brieg to await events. He was right in supposing that a Prussian force lay to the south-east of him. It was the army of Frederick and Schwerin, which had received reinforcements from all sides. It was three times as strong as he believed it could be, and it was within five miles of his camp. He was wrong, however, in supposing that a stronger force lay to the north in Ohlau. Ohlau was weak and Frederick was hastening thither to save his heavy artillery and magazine. Neipperg lay right across his path and a battle was inevitable. It would soon be proved whether the Prussian troops were indeed as brave as they were handsome, or whether Europe was right in thinking that Prussia would pay dear for the presumption of her King.

Frederick realised the importance of the crisis. For two days, it is said, he could neither eat nor sleep. On April 8th he wrote to his brother and heir, Prince Augustus William, bidding him farewell if the next day should be his last. In that event he commended to his care four of his friends, “those whom in life I have loved the most,” as well as two of his servants. The next day, however, proved tempestuous and the Prussian attack was postponed till April 10th. Then the morning sun shone out upon a plain hardened by frost and covered to a depth of two feet with snow. The Prussian baggage was packed at five o’clock, and by nine the whole force had silently taken rank. An hour later, the march northward began, the army pressing slowly through the snow towards Ohlau, and feeling for the enemy who lay across their path. At last the vanguard surprised an Austrian outpost, captured twenty men, and learned that Neipperg lay encamped in and about Mollwitz, a village less than two miles ahead.

How twenty-two thousand men could have approached so close to the enemy unperceived, it is hard to understand. Neipperg, it is true, did not expect to be attacked. There was some screen of woods between the Prussians and Mollwitz, and the country-folk were Protestants who volunteered information only to the Prussians. But the day was clear and the scene as flat as the parade-ground at Potsdam; the Austrians were particularly well supplied with scouts and their general’s avowed plan was to shape his course according to the movements of his opponents. None the less it was in fact not till after ten o’clock that he received the alarm, and by that time the Prussians were methodically ranking themselves for battle. Had the same opportunity come to Frederick later in life, he would, as he himself declares, have flung troops upon Mollwitz and the neighbouring villages and put the Austrians to flight before they could form. But in this first fight every traditional precaution was carefully observed, “the faithful apprentice-hand,” says Carlyle, “still rigorous to the rules of the old shop.”

While Neipperg was bustling and hurrying to collect his army from three villages and to draw it up in front of Mollwitz, the Prussians were manœuvring into place as though they were on parade. Two long lines were formed across the plain. These were three hundred paces apart, so that if the front were pierced, which was hardly supposed possible, the rear could fire their flintlocks without massacring their comrades. Heavy guns to the front, cavalry on the wings, were the orders, and, as the enemy were superior in cavalry, Frederick copied an expedient of the great Gustavus by placing two regiments of grenadiers between the squadrons of horse on either wing. At length all was ready, and at midday the Prussian cannonade began, galling the Austrian cavalry and as yet unanswerable by the Austrian guns.

Neipperg had ordered the cavalry to wait till a general advance could be made. But the left wing, refusing to be shot down like dogs, suddenly defied their officers and dashed at the Prussian right. They lost all formation, but they found a foe unschooled in their tactics. First pistol-shot, then a stroke with a sabre as sharp as a razor right at the head of the enemy’s horse, finally, as horse and man went down, a thrust from the rear at the rider—such an attack was beyond the experience of the Prussian cavalry, and they could not stand against it. As often as Austrian horse met Prussian on the day of Mollwitz they gained an easy victory. They captured some of the guns, plundered the baggage, tore several gaps in the line, and drove the King himself in headlong flight from his first battle.

PLAN OF MOLWITZ, APRIL 10, 1741.

For some time Frederick was driven helplessly here and there amid his ruined cavalry in a fight which was unlike anything that he had ever seen and which he was impotent to control. His generals begged him to quit the field. To his inexperienced eye all seemed lost, and at last Schwerin confirmed his fears. “There is still hope,” said this tried captain to his sovereign, “but in case of the worst it would be well if your Majesty in person would bring troops from Ohlau and Strehlen.” Bewildered and despairing, the King turned his back on the wreck of all his hopes and fled far to the south-east. Distancing many of his attendants in a swift ride of more than thirty miles, he arrived at Oppeln on the Oder, only to be repulsed by the unexpected fire of a party of Austrian hussars who had seized the town and who captured some of his worse-mounted companions. To this check, for he then doubled back towards his army, he owed the fact that at the close of a ride of nearly fifty miles he received the news of victory without delay.

When Frederick left the field it was about four o’clock. The havoc in the Prussian ranks had been wrought by unsupported charges of horse. Schwerin could still count upon his infantry, which in the midst of the whirlwind had stood firm as a rock and by sheer steadiness and speed of firing had tumbled masses of cavalry into ruin. His first act was to send to the Young Dessauer, who commanded the second line, an exhortation to do his duty and to keep his men from firing volleys into the backs of their comrades. The Young Dessauer, who hated Schwerin, replied that he needed no judge save the King and that he would do his duty without any reminders.

After this exchange of courtesies, Schwerin braced himself to the task of retrieving the day. He assured his infantry that the King was well, that no battle could be won or lost by cavalry alone, and that he placed his trust in them. He then ordered his right wing forward against the Austrian infantry. These were raw levies and gave signs of unsteadiness before the Prussians came within range. Range, in days of weak powder and clumsy muskets, was some forty-five paces, and the sight of the enemy bearing down upon them, shoulder to shoulder, was too much for undisciplined men to face. Neipperg drew supports from his right, but even his victorious cavalry soon refused to face the fire which was poured in by men perfectly trained and furnished with the iron ramrods invented by the Old Dessauer. The Austrian infantry, which was able at the best to fire less than half as fast as the enemy, hid trembling one behind another and tried to endure a torment to which they could not reply. As the sun was sinking Schwerin pressed his advantage home. With sounding music and waving banners, in irresistible advance, the Prussian left swept down upon the weakened Austrian right. Neipperg saw that the battle was lost. He retreated first behind Mollwitz then, seeing that his men would not stand, round the Prussian left and eventually to Neisse.

Except that his magazine was saved and that he was soon able to capture Brieg, Frederick derived little immediate military advantage from what he describes as “one of the rudest battles fought within the memory of man.” The chief profit of Neipperg’s march had evaporated before the battle, at the moment when Frederick and Schwerin became superior in numbers. In spite of Mollwitz the Austrian army remained on Silesian soil, and it was better placed near Neisse than near Brieg. In killed and wounded each side had lost about 4500 men, nearly one-fourth of the combatants engaged. And in spite of Frederick’s hoarded millions and well-filled regiments, it was clear that, if the contest were to remain a duel between himself and Maria Theresa alone, the size and natural wealth of Austria must tell in the long run. After Mollwitz, Frederick would still have been glad to accept Lower Silesia as the price of his alliance with Austria and a contribution to her exchequer.

Prussia’s greatest gain from Mollwitz was increase of prestige. Though her cavalry did not regain their nerve for many a day, her infantry, the backbone of the army, had proved that it was indeed as brave as it was handsome. Frederick never alluded to his own departure from the field. In later life he accustomed himself to inaugurate the Prussian military year by celebrating the anniversary of the triumph which he had not seen. Every fifth of April the Guards were twice ordered to the charge and dismissed with the words, “Thus did your forefathers at Mollwitz.” The traditional Austrian contempt for Prussia had received its first signal rebuke. The story survives among the villagers of Mollwitz that when the call to arms disturbed one of Neipperg’s officers at dinner he called to the landlord to keep the dishes hot. “We will come back soon,” he promised, “but we have to go and dust the Prussians’ jackets for them.”

Victory in the field reconciled Prussian opinion to Frederick’s Silesian adventure, but this was a small gain in comparison with its effect on opinion in Europe, especially in France. At the Court of Louis XV. the party opposed to Fleury and to peace had been gathering strength day by day. Hot-headed men and women, blind to the true interests of their country, could see in Austria only the hereditary enemy from whom lands and laurels were to be won. Chief among them was Marshal Belleisle, a man who conceived great schemes and advocated them with eloquence and charm. His plan was that France should ally herself with Prussia, procure the Imperial crown for Charles Albert of Bavaria, and, in spite of all her pledges to support the Pragmatic Sanction, endow both the Bavarian and Saxon claimants with Austrian lands. Having thus humbled Austria and made the fortunes of Austria’s rivals, France might gain the Netherlands and Luxemburg for herself and dictate to a divided Germany for ever.

Before Mollwitz, Belleisle had progressed with this policy so far as to be entrusted with a mission to the Diet which assembled at Frankfort to elect an Emperor. Frederick’s victory encouraged all the enemies of the Hapsburgs and thus lightened the task of Belleisle. In May, 1741, Charles Albert accepted the rôle marked out for him, and early next month the King of Prussia, despairing of an alliance with England, came to terms with France. By a treaty signed at Breslau in the deepest secrecy, he agreed to renounce his claims to Jülich-Berg, and undertook to vote for Charles Albert at the Diet. France in return guaranteed him in the possession of Lower Silesia, and undertook to safeguard Prussia by sending an army to support Charles Albert within two months and by stirring up Sweden to make war on Russia. The coalition against Austria gathered strength as it proceeded, and with the exception of the English and the Dutch no nation hesitated to desert the Pragmatic Sanction.

The idea with which Frederick began the Silesian adventure was at length realised. He had, as he anticipated, stirred up general confusion, amid which the strong man who knew his own mind could hardly fail to carry off some spoils. To France, as the moving spirit, he was all gratitude and devotion. But his real design henceforward was to leave his confederates to subdue Austria, while he himself devoted all his powers to grasping what Prussia could hope to retain. What he gained from Belleisle’s work was made manifest in the summer and autumn of 1741. While the Bavarians and French were advancing in triumph down the Danube towards Vienna, the Austrians could take no thought for Silesia. Frederick, therefore, had leisure to train his cavalry and consolidate his conquest. He treacherously destroyed the municipal independence of Breslau, which he had bound himself to preserve, but did little actual fighting. Neisse, protected by Neipperg’s army, seemed still too strong to be attacked.

Meanwhile the extreme peril of Maria Theresa’s throne forced the Queen to make trial of desperate remedies. By throwing herself upon the generosity of the Hungarians, the traditional rebels against her House, she more than doubled the force at her disposal. Her endeavour to purchase France was futile, but a hint from Frederick was now enough to inaugurate negotiations with Prussia. Early in October these issued in the famous convention of Klein Schnellendorf. In deep secrecy, for Fleury had written that the King of Prussia was false in everything, even in his caresses, and the French ambassador kept a watchful eye upon his movements, Frederick met Neipperg at a castle in the neighbourhood of Neisse. Each was accompanied by one companion, while the English ambassador, Lord Hyndford, who had arranged the interview, acted as clerk and witness. There Frederick, who had just written to Belleisle a letter full of encouragement, sold his allies for his own profit. It was agreed that after a sham siege of Neisse the Austrians should evacuate Silesia, and that Prussia should become neutral in fact though not in show. To Neipperg, whose army would now be free to act against the French in Bohemia, Frederick gave wise counsel for the campaign. “Unite all your troops, then strike home before they can strike you.” If the Austrians should succeed, Frederick might join them; if not, he would be compelled to look to himself. To deceive the French, the English ambassador was to report him as deaf to all propositions. If any word of the convention got abroad, the King declared he would deny all and regard all as void.

This conspiracy against Frederick’s allies was punctiliously carried into effect so long as it was profitable to Prussia. For fifteen days Neisse submitted to a bombardment and two hundred cannon-shot were fired off by either side. After seven days Neipperg’s army made off, attended by a Prussian corps in seeming pursuit, and at the time appointed the strong fortress was surrendered. On the very same day the King accepted a treaty for the partition of Austria. The Prussians then, as arranged, went into winter quarters in Upper Silesia, which Austria was eventually to retain, and from time to time sham skirmishes took place to hoodwink the French.

At the beginning of November the King left Neisse for Berlin, pausing on his way to view the scenes of all his triumphs. At Brieg and Glogau he inspected the fortifications, but at Breslau he drove in state to the grand old Rathaus and received the homage of Lower Silesia, the province secretly ceded to him at Klein Schnellendorf. The ceremony was immediately followed by the reorganisation of the Government in Church and State. The province was simply made Prussian, with absolute religious equality, heavy but not harsh taxation, and a regular system of conscription.

At Klein Schnellendorf Frederick had hinted that if the Austrians were not successful in Bohemia they could not expect him to do more than stand neutral. The event soon showed what he meant. Before the end of November Prague was stormed in brilliant fashion by the Bavarians, French, and Saxons. Frederick’s allies had succeeded where he expected them to fail. He at once proclaimed his intention of standing by the winning side. “My fingers itch for brilliant and useful action on behalf of my dear Elector,” he wrote to Belleisle. He broke all the provisions of the convention of Klein Schnellendorf and derided the suggestion that such a pact could ever have existed. “Should I be so foolish as to patch up a peace with enemies who hate me in their hearts, and in whose neighbourhood I could enjoy no safety?” the King demanded. “The true principles of the policy of my House demand a close alliance with France.” Such was the substance of the argument which Frederick addressed to Fleury.

Lord Hyndford, however, had witnessed all that passed at Klein Schnellendorf, and would not allow England to be duped by lies. Frederick therefore told him frankly that he intended to set the convention at defiance. The allies, he showed, had 150,000 men against Austria’s 70,000 and could do with her what they would. If she published the convention she would only expose her own folly, and perhaps she would not be believed. Then, besides treating Upper Silesia as his own and laying hands on the adjoining county of Glatz, he ordered the conquest of Moravia. Ere the year was out Schwerin was in Olmütz, the chief town of the North, and it seemed as though the allies would filch yet another province from the Queen. “Alas!” wrote the philosopher-king on one occasion to Voltaire, “trickery, bad faith and double-dealing are the leading feature of most of the men who are at the head of the nations and who ought to set them an example.”

Never was the fortitude of Maria Theresa more needed or more illustrious than in these winter months. The earlier gleams of light—Vienna spared and Frederick bought off—only made yet more black the clouds which now gathered over her throne. Her father had flattered himself that he bequeathed to her the support of united Europe. Within a year of his death the greater part of Europe was leagued to despoil her. France, Spain, Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, the Elector Palatine, the Elector of Cologne formed the coalition, and the accession of Sardinia was the prelude to a severe struggle on the side of Italy. The loss of Bohemia almost without a blow made the Queen well-nigh forgetful of Silesia until the perfidy of Frederick opened the former wound anew. At the same time a revolution at St. Petersburg extinguished for the time being the Austrian influence in Russia and thereby increased the King’s security. Then came the attack upon Moravia, and before the end of January, 1742, the Imperial crown passed from the Hapsburg family by the election of the head of a rival House—Charles Albert of Bavaria.