Frederick the Great Read online

  Mitford had planned to write her autobiography next. We can only regret that she never had the chance to do that; and yet, in writing about Frederick, at the end of her life, she succeeded in conveying her own most deeply felt concerns and priorities. She highlights the king’s passion for wit, writing, and aesthetic beauty; reiterates his patrician belief in the importance of stewardship and good governance; stresses his staggering capacity for hard work; and above all, underscores the love and loyalty he showed to relatives and close friends, though he had no children and only a notional spouse. All of these characteristics are hallmarks of her own life. It would go too far to call Frederick the Great a double biography, but in absorbing her portrait, we also see the portraitist. Both Mitford and Frederick the Great have been painted by history as curiously hard-carapaced creatures, so prolific in achievement and so self-defined that they seem invulnerable. But Mitford, like none other, perceived the heart beneath the armor that yearned for an enlightened Europe and leapt when it sensed excellence.

  Carlyle had extolled Frederick long before Mitford got to him, praising his martial prowess and his determination to draw Germany into the modern age; but what struck Mitford about the king’s campaigns was that, even after a long day of marching and fighting, he would stay up most of the night writing letters to relatives and intimates. Wars came and went, but his correspondence never slackened. His letters, she declares, are “among the most entertaining ever written.” Nor were his literary skills confined to the epistolary, she notes: his light verse sparkles with “brilliant flashes,” while the history he wrote (in French) of the Seven Years’ War “puts him in the first rank of French writers and modern historians.” Mitford knew most people would never read his literary work—it “has fallen into oblivion,” she mourned, and therefore would never know him as she did. In this biography, she corrects that omission, revealing the man as she saw him: solitary but affectionate, brilliant, embattled, and misunderstood—a kindred spirit indeed.

  —LIESL SCHILLINGER

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  Dedicated to my sister Diana

  Acknowledgements

  My principal helpers have been Prince Clary and Mr Nicholas Lawford, both learned in matters concerning the Empire. Prince Clary has saved me from making many a gaffe and has read my manuscript. Mr Raymond Mortimer has once again put his taste and learning at my disposal. Professor Francis Carsten has kindly read the book and made some useful suggestions. Miss Madeau Stewart provided me with facts about Frederick and his flute. Madame Gaudin has helped in many ways and has typed the book. Miss Irene Clephane has done a splendid cleaning-up and the index. The Librarian of the London Library has been indispensable. I am also indebted to Mr Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, Monsieur Michel Catargi and Herr Martin von Katte.

  I stayed in Prague with His Excellency the French Ambassador, Monsieur Roger Lalouette, who arranged for me to see what was relevant to the book. I was taken round the town by Monsieur Ousovsky and given many facts by Professor Polisensky. Mademoiselle de Passavent made everything easy.

  In East Germany Mrs Law and I had the greatest kindness. Dr Joachim Menzhausen of the Grünes Gewölbe at Dresden, Herr H.-J. Giersberg at Potsdam and Frau A. Kondeyne at Rheinsberg showed us many wonderful things, while Professor Mittenzwei at Berlin gave me an invaluable history lesson. Herr Ernst Friedlander organized our visit and was unfailingly thoughtful. Miss Elizabeth Matthews arranged everything from London. My sister Pamela kindly came to Germany and was a great help.

  Owing to illness I was unable to go to Silesia, but Prince Donnersmark and Dr Grossman have provided much information.

  Finally, Mrs Law has been the king-pin of the book and I can hardly believe that without her it would have seen the light of day.

  1. The Father

  Frederick the Great was born on 24 January 1712, the year of Denain, Louis XIV’s final and victorious battle in the War of the Spanish Succession; when he died, seventy-four years later, people were discussing Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace. Few would deny that, for a member of the European ruling classes, this was an enviable span of life, since it encompassed the essence of the eighteenth century. Frederick used to say that he was happy to have spent his first three years in the reign of the Great King and to have been the contemporary of Voltaire. He was the third son of his parents: two little Fredericks had died, one from having a crown forced upon his head at the time of the christening and the other when the guns greeting his birth were fired too near his cradle; the third Frederick, allergic to neither crowns nor guns, survived, and so, luckily for him, did his elder sister, Wilhelmine.

  The preponderant power in Europe was France, richer and more powerful than the Empire, and the centre of art, literature and learning. Many of the German states were politically dominated by the French, although the evident aim of French statesmen was to keep Germany weak and divided. When the princes began to desire a better way of life than that of the robber baron it was to Paris rather than Vienna that they turned. Those who could read did not care for German writers (the Prussian Queen Sophia Charlotte’s patronage of Leibniz was an exception); they sent to Paris for their books. Anybody with pretensions to gentility, and rulers everywhere, spoke French. The German princes, according to how much money they could squeeze out of their subjects, built palaces, pavilions, orangeries, follies, theatres and opera-houses modelled upon Versailles and often designed—in a more florid taste to suit less civilized people—by French architects. The admirable German craftsmen, the best of whom went to work in Paris, made furniture and panelling for these buildings in the French style but with a charmingly rustic air and more than a touch of peasant art. The French influence was strengthened in the Protestant states, especially in Prussia, by the thousands of Huguenots who had settled there during the persecutions of Louis XIV; a high proportion of the Prussian bourgeoisie in the early eighteenth century had been born in France. Frederick the Great’s great-grandmother was a French refugee, Eleanor d’Olbreuse who was married for her charm and beauty by the Duke of Celle—he was also descended from Admiral de Coligny.

  The head of the House of Hohenzollern, Elector of Brandenburg since the fifteenth century, became King in Prussia in 1701. After 1714, when the Elector of Hanover became King of England, there were three German Electors with kingdoms outside the Empire, since the Elector of Saxony was King of Poland. All preferred their electorates to their kingdoms. Prussia had belonged to the Hohenzollerns since 1618; geographically it was part of Poland, most inconveniently divided from Brandenburg by the Polish province of West Prussia. By degrees the Hohenzollern properties which were scattered over the Empire became known collectively as Prussia. They were difficult to defend—it was said of them that their frontier was the army—and difficult to administer. The most important of them, Brandenburg, though not directly engaged in the Thirty Years’ War, had been ruined by the opposing armies which fought all over its territory, the Elector George William having been too weak to keep them out. His son Frederick William, known as the Great Elector, was the founder of modern Prussia; single-handed and at a very early age he put his country on its feet again; he reformed and strengthened the army; with French help, he countered Imperial diplomacy at the Peace of Westphalia and acquired six hundred square miles of new territory. He taught his people to put the State before the individual and regarded himself as its first servant. During his reign Prussia became the most powerful of the minor German states and leader of the Protestants in the Empire. The Habsburgs began to realize that the Hohenzollerns were uncomfortable neighbours.

  The son of the Great Elector was King Frederick I of Prussia. He was a civilized man with a love of art, but there was something absurd about him. Though the newest and the least important of European kings, he modelled himself upon the most important, the Sun King. He copied him slavishly, even to the extent of taking a mistress, though vastly preferring his wife. His time-table was that of Louis XIV until the hour of the evening party at Versail
les, when he reverted to German ways and held a tabagie, shutting himself up to drink beer in a small smoky room with a few pipe-puffing friends. His wife, Sophia Charlotte, the friend of Leibniz, was the sister of George I of England, a charming, clever, musical princess. She saw her husband as he was and used to say that he was taken up with the infinitely little. His finances were always in a disastrous state—he overspent on such unproductive things as silver, pictures and fine furniture; he loved all forms of pomp and the outward display of riches. He left some beautiful buildings, having fallen upon a talented architect, Andreas Schlüter. The houses of Frederick I and his Queen were those in which Frederick the Great lived until he began building for himself. They were the royal palace at Berlin, Charlottenburg, a garden residence for Queen Sophia Charlotte, at that time outside the city, and the palace at Potsdam.

  After losing his first two grandsons in infancy Frederick I, by then a widower, married again, thinking to secure the succession. It was an unfortunate venture, and unnecessary, as his daughter-in-law soon had a third son, Frederick the Great, and thereafter eleven more children. At fifty, Frederick I was incapable of making love; his second wife was a perfect nuisance, and proved the death of him. She went mad and surged into his room in her underclothes. Frederick, not expecting the apparition, thought she was a certain White Lady who appears to Hohenzollerns presaging death. ‘Weisse Frau’, he cried, fell unconscious, and died a few days later. The Queen had to be kept, an expensive lunatic, for another twenty years. Frederick’s son, Frederick William, buried him as he would have wished, with expensive, long-drawn-out ceremonies and as much pomp as if he had been an emperor. Then he settled down to reign in his own, different way. He was twenty-five.

  The first twenty-eight years of Frederick the Great’s life were overshadowed by his curious, furious but in some ways touching father. When all passion between the two men was spent, and old Frederick, now the Great, was writing his memoirs, he said of Frederick William: ‘His spirit was transcendent; he penetrated and understood great objectives and knew the best interests of his country better than any minister or general.’ These interests were a sound economy and a valid system of defence. In his own father’s time, Frederick William had seen the Swedes and the Russians dictating the policy of a weak, bankrupt Prussia; he was determined to be independent; for this a full exchequer was necessary. After his accession to the throne he began to practise a frugality considered by his fellow princes as a comical miserliness; unlike them he did not treat public funds as his own pocket-money. He dismissed the Council of State and reduced the power of the ministers or took over their departments himself. He had no facility for communicating with his fellow men; he never read and could hardly write, but he had a talent for finance and administration, and understood the foreign affairs of his day. He said a king must not lead an easy, woman’s life: ‘I am the King of Prussia’s Finance Minister and his Field Marshal.’ He established a vast building programme to attract people to the towns, depopulated during the Thirty Years’ War, reorganized the police, created arsenals and factories and built hospitals ‘for those unlucky objects of our disgust and our compassion’. In ten years Frederick William had a sound exchequer and a full treasury and was the only German ruler who could say as much.

  Frederick William hated everything that his father had liked; above all he abominated the French, their ways, their civilization and even their food. When criminals were to be hanged he dressed them up in French clothes in order to give people a horror of such fashions. He practised German, Protestant virtues, was faithful to his wife, honourable, brave and hard-working. When he came to the throne he sold most of his father’s horses, the best of his furniture and all his jewels, dismissed nearly all the courtiers and settled down to the life of a country gentleman, giving himself no royal airs. He said, ‘I’, ‘my wife’, ‘Fritz’, instead of ‘we’, ‘the Queen’, ‘the heir to this great country’, as his father would have; and he dined every night with his wife and his children of whom he saw much more than most upper-class people did in those days. He had married, for love, his first cousin Sophia Dorothea, the sister of George II, and he always loved her.

  Frederick William had few intimates. His only advisers were his cousin and greatest friend, the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, and General Count von Grumbkow. These two men, and especially Grumbkow, had a good deal of influence over the events of the young Frederick’s early life. Anhalt-Dessau, known as the ‘Old Dessauer’, was the ruler of a tiny principality marching with Brandenburg. He was ten years older than Frederick William, and a Field Marshal in the Prussian army. Although, like the King, he was rather inarticulate, the advice he gave was always to the point. A remarkable soldier and strategist, he had spent his life in camps—his very face was the colour of gunpowder. He invented modern drill, marching in step, most of the words of command that are used to this day, and he increased the fire power of the infantry by the invention of iron ramrods. Prince Eugene thought that he and his Prussians had been indispensable to the Allied victory at Blenheim. He helped Frederick William to turn the Prussian army into a first-class fighting machine, the most up-to-date in Europe. The Old Dessauer was a violent and wilful man. When very young he had fallen in love with a bourgeoise, the daughter of an apothecary, murdered her fiancé, and committed the unheard-of eccentricity of marrying her. He was perfectly happy with her for more than fifty years. The Emperor legalized the marriage, a most unusual step in such a case, and the children were Princes of Anhalt-Dessau.

  Grumbkow was a very different sort of person, an able minister, civilized and witty. Frederick William knew that he was sold to the court of Austria; he was not at all disturbed—he said it brought in foreign currency and made no difference to his policy. But he underestimated the devilish cleverness of Grumbkow, and he may not have known quite to what extent all his servants were bought for the Emperor. The concierge of the palace at Berlin was an Austrian agent, and so was Frederick William’s minister in London. General Count von Seckendorf, the Austrian minister to Prussia, was one of those accomplished bribers or blackmailers who know exactly how to succeed with each individual. He also had a high military reputation—Prince Eugene told the Emperor that if anything happened to him he must send for Seckendorf; probably for this reason Frederick William liked him and admitted him to his own little coterie. His colleagues did not enjoy such favour—Frederick William loathed foreigners so much that Berlin was said to be the purgatory of ambassadors.

  Unfortunately King Frederick William, in whom there were excellent qualities and who did much for his country, was ill. Like George III he had an hereditary disease, prevalent among descendants of Mary Queen of Scots, which drives its victim mad with prolonged and terrible sufferings. It is now known as porphyria, a derangement of the metabolism; its symptoms are some of the most horrible miseries with which mankind is afflicted—gout, piles, migraine, abscesses and boils, as well as appalling, unexplained pains in the stomach. Frederick William was strange at the best of times and, under the influence of the agonies he endured, his eccentricities became past a joke. He was the terror of those who had to do with him; uncontrollable rages were triggered off by apparently harmless remarks or even looks. One key-word which never failed in its effect was ‘France’. In the streets of Berlin and in the intimacy of his home he would make play with his dreaded cane, hitting people in the face, breaking their teeth and noses. There was no redress; anybody who tried to defend himself would have been killed. The King had a pathetic desire to be popular: ‘Love me’, he roared at a passer-by who, he thought, had given him an unfriendly look—whack, whack, whack. Once, in a rage with Augustus the Strong, he smashed up a whole dinner service because it was made at Meissen. While still very young he was enormously fat, with bulging eyes and an unhealthy-looking marbled complexion; with the years his disease became more agonizing.

  In his misery he took to drink. Every evening he held a tabagie where the smoking and drinking released some sort of communic
ation with his fellow men. The company, which always included the Old Dessauer and Grumbkow, and often Seckendorf, consisted mainly of soldiers. All got drunk, and the grossest scenes would occur, most of them connected with the baiting of Gundling. Half-way between a fool and a professor, Gundling came into Frederick William’s household to read the newspapers to the family at dinner. He could explain any points of history or geography that might crop up—his mind was crammed with odd, unrelated, perfectly accurate facts on which he would gladly dissert at boring length. He was made to be teased. But at the tabagie, when they were all drunk and Gundling more drunk than any, they began by teasing and ended by physically torturing him. When they exaggerated, by setting him on fire for example, he would ask to leave the court but Frederick William always got him back by some sort of bribe; he made him a baron or raised his wages or simply hugged him. In fact Gundling could not have borne to leave—he was a masochist and the tabagie was the joy of his life.

  Frederick William’s oddest whimsy was the collection of giants for his Potsdam Grenadiers. They were an obsession; he would spend any money, even risk going to war with his neighbours, to have tall men (often nearer seven than six feet in height, and generally idiotic) kidnapped, smuggled out of their native lands and brought to him. Finally, he acquired over two thousand of them. His agents were everywhere. Kirkman, an Irish giant, was kidnapped in the streets of London, an operation which cost £1,000. A tall Austrian diplomat was seized when getting into a cab in Hanover; he soon extricated himself from the situation, which remained a dinner-table topic for the rest of his life. The biggest of the giants was a Prussian—no ordinary man could reach the top of his head. When the Grenadiers marched beside the King’s carriage they held hands over it. The kidnapping became so expensive that Frederick William tried breeding giants. Every tall man in his dominions was forced to marry a giantess. But that method proved slow and unreliable—too often the children of such marriages were a normal size. So he went on with the kidnapping while letting his fellow rulers know that the most acceptable present to him would be a giant. The Russians and the Austrians were particularly obliging in this respect. The Grenadiers were his greatest joy; when he was ill or depressed he would have two or three hundred of them marched through his room to cheer him up. The philosopher Wolf, thought by the civilized world to be the brightest jewel in Frederick William’s crown, was banished on pain of hanging because somebody saw fit to tell the King that one of Wolf’s propositions, if reduced to its fundamental meaning, would allow the Grenadiers to desert without committing a sin against God.