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 delusion25 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. a26 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’s27 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 the28 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 fran?aise, 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,29 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, books30 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 a31 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. to32 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 sacrifice33 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 inventions34 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.”35 “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 make36 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 c?sar. 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,37 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 to38 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 the39 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 his40 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 mischievous41 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 the42 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,43 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 cost44 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.
45 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 was46 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. but47 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 of48 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 addressed49 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 always50 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 of51 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.52 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,53 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 high54 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 fran?ais.
55 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.
