Frederick the Great Read online

  NANCY MITFORD (1904–1973) was born into the British aristocracy and, by her own account, brought up without an education, except in riding and French. She managed a London bookshop during the Second World War, then moved to Paris, where she began to write her celebrated and successful novels, among them The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, about the foibles of the English upper class. Mitford was also the author of four biographies: Madame de Pompadour (1954), Voltaire in Love (1957), The Sun King (1966), and Frederick the Great (1970)—all available as NYRB Classics. In 1967 Mitford moved from Paris to Versailles, where she lived until her death from Hodgkin’s disease.

  LIESL SCHILLINGER is a journalist, critic, and translator. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and has written on literature, culture, theater, politics, and travel for many publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, and The Independent on Sunday. Among her translations are The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas (fils) and Every Day, Every Hour by Nataša Dragnić. Her illustrated book of neologisms, Wordbirds, will be published in October 2013.

  OTHER BOOKS BY NANCY MITFORD

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  Madame de Pompadour

  Introduction by Amanda Foreman

  The Sun King

  Introduction by Philip Mansel

  Voltaire in Love

  Introduction by Adam Gopnik

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  NANCY MITFORD

  Introduction by

  LIESL SCHILLINGER

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1970 by Nancy Mitford

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Liesl Schillinger

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Adolf von Menzel, Flute Concerto at Sans Souci, 1852; Frederick the Great plays flute, C. P. E. Bach accompanies him at the keyboard; Agostini Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Mitford, Nancy, 1904–1973.

  Frederick the Great / by Nancy Mitford ; introduction by Liesl Schillinger.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Originally published: London : Hamilton, 1970.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-623-8 (alkaline paper)

  1. Frederick II, King of Prussia, 1712–1786. 2. Prussia (Germany)—Kings and rulers—Biography. 3. Prussia (Germany)—History—Frederick II, 1740–1786.

  I. Title.

  DD404.M57 2013

  943'.053092—dc23

  [B]

  2012048406

  eISBN 978-1-59017-642-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Other Books by Nancy Mitford

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  1. The Father

  2. The Unhappy Family

  3. Escape

  4. Rehabilitation

  5. Marriage

  6. Out of a Rembrandt into a Watteau

  7. The Throne

  8. Check to the Queen of Hungary

  9. Diplomats’ Nightmare

  10. The King’s Friends

  11. The Second Silesian War

  12. Thoughts on Warfare

  13. Sans Souci

  14. The Poet

  15. The Reversal of Alliances

  16. The Seven Years’ War

  17. Ma Sœur de Bayreuth

  18. The Great Frederick

  19. Man is made to work

  20. The Uncle of Germany

  21. The Potato War

  22. Winter

  Sources

  Index

  Introduction

  In 1969, Nancy Mitford, the sparkling, supercilious British debutante turned novelist, began work on a biography of Frederick the Great, the eighteenth-century Prussian king who outfoxed the combined forces of France, England, Russia, and the Holy Roman Empire to make Prussia master of Germany. The reader who opens this book may wonder what attracted an apolitical Francophile socialite to a fearsome Teuton whose foes reviled him as a “monster,” a “sodomite,” a “busybody,” and “the compleatest tyrant that God ever sent for a scourge”; and whose friends (notably the French sage Voltaire) could be almost as uncomplimentary. Mitford and “der alte Fritz” (as his soldiers called him) hardly sound like a natural pairing.

  In a letter in March 1970, a few months before the publication of the Frederick biography, Nancy wrote to her sister Jessica that the BBC was about to interview her and planned to ask if her books were “really a description of the Mitford family.” “Very true,” Nancy wrote matter-of-factly: “History is always subjective & the books we yawn over are often the descriptions of the home life of some dreary old professors.” Mitford’s own colorful, privileged life made her feel an affinity to the colorful, privileged men and women whose biographies she composed. “These were not ordinary people,” she remarks at the beginning of Voltaire in Love, her 1957 retelling of Voltaire’s long romance with the (married) philosopher and flirt, the Marquise du Châtelet. Her description of Voltaire—“droll, impertinent, inquisitive, dancing, elegant, and brittle”—mirrors the description many gave of Mitford herself. While reading up on Voltaire, she became intrigued by his fraught, self-serving friendship with Frederick the Great; she also became curious about the German leader. Frederick may not have been “dancing, elegant, and brittle” like Voltaire, but his character chimed with Mitford’s in other ways. Said to be “brilliant, teasing and aggressive,” the king possessed a keen, intuitive intelligence and a social poise that inspired admiration but could also provoke suspicion and unease.

  Born in London in 1904, raised in the Cotswolds on a country estate called Swinbrook, Mitford began in her twenties to write sharply observed, romantic, somewhat chilly, and very popular novels about the social world of the British aristocracy, the most celebrated of which would be The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. In 1946 she moved to Paris to be near her French lover—the (married) diplomat Gaston Palewski—and began writing a series of biographies about royal, noble, and notable figures of the ancien régime, all of them, with the exception of Frederick, French. Her first was of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. Her last, coming after a lavishly illustrated account of the reign of Louis XIV called The Sun King, was Frederick the Great.

  Mitford’s biographies are written in the same arch, conversational style one finds in her novels and letters: when her heroes and heroines quarrel and cry, they find themselves “in floods” (a well-worn Mitford family expression); a battle frontier may be deemed “touchingly” undefended; cruelty may be called “naughtiness,” while anything appealing will be “delicious.” Writing to her friend Hugh Thomas, the historian of the Spanish Civil War, Mitford dismissed Voltaire in Love as “just a Kinsey report of his romps with Mme du Châtelet and her romps with Saint-Lambert and his romps with Mme de Boufflers and her romps with Panpan and his romps with Mme de Grafigny . . . I could go on for pages.” And yet, for all her lightness of tone, she exposed her subjects’ shady trysts and mercenary motives not only with gossipy glee but with accuracy and rigor. In the case of Fr
ederick, however, her intentions appear more ambitious, her tone gentler. Her aim seems to have been nothing less than the rehabilitation of a man whom she regarded as less popular with his contemporaries than he should have been and underappreciated in modern times.

  Frederick II, the future king of Prussia, born January 24, 1712, was the third son of Frederick William I of Prussia and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover. (Sophia Dorothea, Mitford notes, was English—the daughter of George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, and also was a “gossip, a bore and a snob” who spent years fruitlessly trying to marry off her Germanic children to their English cousins.) Frederick was the first of their male progeny to survive infancy. The first heir had died after a crown was jammed on his head at his christening; the second had been killed by the concussive effect of celebratory cannons fired too near his cradle. The crown prince himself barely made it through his teens. An attractive youth, clever, musical, high-spirited, and entranced by the aesthetic and philosophical charms of France, he in no way embodied his father’s brusque, ascetic male ideal. Frederick William I, anti-intellectual, anti-French, hostile to luxury, and bedeviled by gout and porphyric rages, regarded his son, according to Mitford, as a disobedient, effeminate fop. When the teenaged Frederick curled and fluffed his hair in the latest Versailles fashion, and studied Latin and flute in secret, his father beat him about the face with a cane, kicked him, and pulled his hair to teach him to respect Teutonic simplicity.

  After that harsh lesson went unheeded, the king threw the teenaged Frederick in prison and beheaded his best friend (and possibly lover), Hans Hermann von Katte. Chastened, or simply terrified, Frederick now toed the line. Yet Frederick’s abject repentance, his slavish devotion, and his new concentration on military affairs didn’t prevent his father from denouncing him as “wicked” and “full of hypocrisy.” All the same, when he was twenty-one, after marrying a princess of his father’s choosing, Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (to whom he was not in the least bit attracted), the prince was granted a house of his own, at Rheinsberg, which he rebuilt “in the delicious, light and airy taste of the day.” Once out from under his father’s roof, Frederick wrote a fan letter to his literary hero, Voltaire, though he was still too fearful of his father’s wrath to propose a meeting. A lifelong correspondence ensued which was to be, Mitford writes “Frederick’s greatest joy.” When Frederick William I died, in May 1740, the twenty-eight-year-old crown prince must have felt liberated, but Mitford, who had a controlling, erratic, but beloved father of her own, emphasizes that both Frederick and his older sister Wilhelmine felt genuine “affection and pity” for their “curious, furious but in some ways touching father.” Late in life, she notes, Frederick would write in his memoirs that this bullying man “penetrated and understood great objectives and knew the best interests of his country better than any minister or general.”

  It was the son, however, who was to become known as “the Great.” “Frederick knew where he was going,” Mitford writes. “There was no improvisation: every step he took had been carefully prepared.” Once in power, he quickly undid the miseries his father had inflicted on the Prussian people, abolishing the torture of civilians, advocating religious tolerance, giving freedom to the press, forbidding censorship of books, and filling his library with the volumes of philosophy and verse that his father had abominated—as well as books on history and military strategy. Voltaire, lolling in France with the Marquise du Châtelet at her husband’s country estate, Cirey, was so impressed when he learned of the Prussian reforms that he wrote the new king a fawning letter, addressing him as “Your Humanity,” and turned up the heat on their friendship. In September 1740, three months into his reign, Frederick contrived to meet Voltaire in the Duchy of Cleves, and after dining with him, wrote in rapture to one of his secretaries, “his table talk is so dazzling that you could write a brilliant book simply by recording it.”

  Frederick’s most engrossing occupation was to be war, and no sooner had he ascended to the throne than he set out on a program of conquest designed to expand Prussian power and prestige. By the end of 1740, Frederick was fighting his expansionist Austrian neighbor, Maria Theresa, to win Silesia for Prussia. It took two wars and five years to make her cease resistance and after the Peace of Dresden put an end to her belligerence, on Christmas Day, 1745, Mitford writes, Frederick “was determined never to take the offensive again.” “His object now,” she declares, “was to make the new Prussian State happy and prosperous and a power to be reckoned with,” and to “see to the administration of a larger, richer land than that which he had inherited.” For a while, the king did occupy himself in peaceful pursuits, building the rococo palace of Sans Souci, in Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin, “one of the most elegant and charming small towns in the Empire.”

  But in 1756, the bellicose Maria Theresa, now empress consort of the Holy Roman Empire, began to plot anew, enlisting France, Britain, and Russia to help her overturn Prussian dominance. The Seven Years’ War ensued. “What do you say to this league against the Marquis de Brandebourg?” (Louis XV’s epithet for the Prussian ruler), Frederick wrote to a friend in 1757, as all Europe’s soldiers mustered on his borders. Against such odds, he wrote in a tone of resignation, “There is little glory in defeating me.” In the event, the Prussian monarch defeated the massed enemy, though he was to spar again with Maria Theresa one last time, in 1778, when he was old and sick, in the War of the Bavarian Succession (a.k.a. “The Potato War”), in which the empress tried to annex Bavaria, only to be defeated by Frederick once again. “I am not partial to Frederick,” she said at the Treaty of Teschen, in 1779, in which she renounced Habsburg claims to Bavaria, “but I must do him the justice to confess that he has acted nobly and honourably; he promised me to make peace on reasonable terms, and he has kept his word.”

  Maria Theresa was unusual among Frederick’s foreign rivals in feeling any impulse to do him justice. Louis XV, king at Versailles, “disliked and distrusted him,” Mitford writes, and saw him as a “mocking Voltairean sodomite.” Two-faced Voltaire, upon whom Frederick lavished generosity for forty years, betrayed his patron in a mean-spirited posthumous memoir. “No doubt [Frederick] was wounded in his soul,” Mitford feelingly remarks. Duc de Belle-Isle, a French ambassador and “brilliant, amusing, civilized soldier,” who rushed to meet the young king in 1741, after he had won his first battle, at Mollwitz, pronounced himself “fascinated” by Frederick, acknowledged the king had a “first-class intelligence,” but claimed he had “no heart whatever.” The waspish British diplomat Charles Hanbury Williams, so loathed by Frederick that he was barred from Sans Souci, got back at his non-host by deriding his entourage as sissy “he-muses.” Nearly one hundred years after Frederick’s death, the Victorian historian Lord Macaulay would lastingly tarnish his legacy by denouncing him as an aggressor and tyrant “from whose vices History averts her eyes and which even Satire blushes to name.”

  Significantly, Mitford barely mentions Frederick’s great nineteenth-century defender, Thomas Carlyle, whose eight-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia infuriated Britons who resented its glorification of a man they preferred to see as a pariah. And late in the twentieth century, long after Bismarck had unified Germany and soon after Hitler had demonized it, Mitford knew it was still a tricky proposition to praise the man who laid the groundwork for Prussia’s rise. Nonetheless, she bravely announces in her book that she “feels obliged” to refute the “calumnies” of Frederick’s detractors. Was it true that he “considered himself a literary genius,” as Voltaire asserted? Mitford counters that “He was for ever saying the contrary” and poking fun at his rough “Teutonic muse disguised in French.” Was he homosexual, as nearly everyone jeered? Mitford, who had no problem with homosexuality, suspects that the king probably was, but adds her “general impression” that “there was never anything in the nature of a minion,” and that he was “less interested in sex than in friendship.” Was Frederick a faithless friend? “Nothing c
ould be more untrue,” she insists. He may have been merciless in his teasing (something of which Mitford herself was accused); but she maintains that “few people have had more loved, loving and constant friends than Frederick the Great.”

  Undeniably, Mitford was smitten with the man. Unlike her notorious sister Diana Mosley, who was enamored of Adolf Hitler, and who had left her first husband, Bryan Guinness, to marry the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, Nancy Mitford was not tainted by her Teutonic crush. Indeed, Mitford reviled her sister’s Fascism, and lampooned Diana’s hero worship in 1935 in the comic novel Wigs on the Green. (She heavily edited the book to reduce acrimony, but the two sisters later fell out over Diana’s Nazi sympathies; and in 1940, during the Second World War, Nancy informed on Diana to ensure her arrest, telling the Ministry of Economic Warfare that she was “an extremely dangerous person.”) Still, by the 1970s, the sisters were on “speakers” again, and eagerly tracked Nancy’s progress on “Fred the Great,” as the Mitford sisters called the king in their voluminous correspondence. Diana wrote to their sister Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, that Nancy “LOVES Fred & can’t bear him to be denigrated.” Nancy had told her, Diana wrote, that her biography of Frederick would be her greatest work.

  Here, for the first time, Mitford would stretch her literary powers to relay complicated military and diplomatic history. While maintaining her breezily authoritative voice, she would scrupulously reconstruct the battles and strategic wrangles of a distant era, using her gift for social observation and cultural perception to make her account not only correct but alive; every step invested with personality. Understandably, this achievement made her proud. In any case, the book was to be her last. She contracted Hodgkin’s disease while researching the biography; her sisters hid the seriousness of her condition from her for fear that it would hamper her progress. In secret, they colluded with her editors to advance the book’s deadline, so as to speed their sister’s work. Mitford’s illness went into remission long enough for her to write the book, and see it published, in 1970; but soon after, the disease returned with a vengeance. She died at her home in Versailles in 1973.