The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  The Queen’s tentative efforts at intellectual independence had however little in common with that kind of Amazonian behaviour described with all the richness of sexual violence in Kleist’s Penthesilea: ‘A nation has arisen, a nation of women, Bound to no overlord …’27 Louise’s submissiveness, her wifely wish to please, was most notably demonstrated by the continuous procession of children that she bore. Ten years after her marriage she had already borne seven; two of the children had died and there were also various miscarriages. Louise gave birth to a total of nine children in fourteen years, the last of them less than a year before her death.

  When Madame Vigée Le Brun met the Queen in 1801, she could not make an appointment before noon because, as Louise explained, ‘the King reviews the troops at ten every morning and likes me to attend’. The only blight on this picture of domestic and marital bliss appeared to be the plain looks of Louise’s numerous children. ‘They are not pretty,’ murmured the Queen sadly. ‘Their faces have a great deal of character’, was the painter’s tactful comment. Privately, she thought the youthful princes and princesses of Prussia downright ugly.28

  But for Prussia and its king – if not yet its queen – already problems existed along more serious lines than those of a military review or a homely royal family. The rise of Napoleonic France had placed Prussia in a quandary: neutrality? And if not neutrality, alliance with which of the various great powers involved? It was a profound Prussian conviction of the time that its army, built up by Frederick William’s great-uncle Frederick the Great, remained the finest in Europe. Time would test the validity of that belief. In the meantime Frederick William’s indecisive nature led him to see his fine army as a bastion of Prussia’s neutrality rather than as anything more aggressive.

  The King’s personal quandary however – neutrality versus alliance – remained. And it was this quandary, finally, which brought Louise to play the role of Warrior Queen. In 1803 the French forces occupied Hanover, a state which on the one hand Prussia was pledged to protect as a neutral zone, and on the other coveted for itself. Prussia was offered Hanover in return for a treaty with France. Frederick William hesitated unhappily. Napoleon made good use of his dilemma of conscience. The French judicial murder of the young Bourbon Prince the Duc d’Enghien on 21 March 1804 for alleged conspiracy horrified all royal Europe: but Louise was persuaded not to wear mourning for the Duc by the new Prussian Foreign Minister, the veteran statesman Carl-August von Hardenberg, who hoped to secure Hanover peaceably.

  Louise’s martial instincts were still nascent. Placatory gifts of dresses from the newly created Empress Josephine (Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor on 18 May) were accepted: pale grey satin magnificently embroidered with steel, and white satin embroidered with gold thread, further adorned with Alençon lace and Brussels point. The Queen’s attempts at influencing the King towards war were dated nearly a year later by Sir George Jackson to February 1805. It was not until September of the same year that she was generally reputed to head the ‘war party’.29

  What brought about the transformation? Napoleon himself angrily and publicly ascribed the change to another charismatic man: the Tsar Alexander I. There had been that magic summer at the Baltic coastal resort of Memel in 1802, the year following the accession of the young Tsar. The grandson of Catherine the Great, Alexander was an intensely attractive figure: even the crabby Countess Voss found him at this stage ‘irresistible’, with his handsome appearance and striking fair colouring (he was of course genetically far more German than Slav, his mother like his grandmother having been born a German princess).30 Memel, symbolically enough, was not only on the Baltic, but also on the borders of Prussia and Russia: here the two courts mingled and the two youthful royal families – already interrelated – relaxed together.

  Louise flowered. ‘She was today more beautiful than ever’, wrote Countess Voss of one particular June evening. There was dancing every night, and presents for Louise from the Tsar including earrings of her favourite pearls (even Countess Voss got a pearl necklace). No wonder the Countess wrote that she was ‘quite grieved that these pleasant days should come to an end’.31 But further delightful co-celebrations were planned by Alexander, such as a pageant based on the happy days at Memel for Louise’s birthday the following March; Louise’s current baby would be named Alexandrina with the Tsar as her godfather.

  For all Napoleon’s subsequent excoriations in which he vowed that the Prussian Queen had been ‘so good, so gentle’ until the Tsar’s baleful influence made her desert ‘the serious occupation of her dressing-table’ for politics,32 the story of an actual affair between Alexander and Louise was certainly a calumny. That primitive desire to find a Warrior Queen either preternaturally lustful or preternaturally chaste (Louise came in for both charges) may have played its part. The truth of Louise’s feelings for Alexander was probably subtler. What a contrast the romantic young Tsar – born in 1777, he was a year younger than Louise – presented to the vacillating and uncultured Frederick William! For Louise, well knowing her duty both as a wife and a queen, her unacknowledged sentimental devotion to the Tsar could be safely expressed in a public admiration for his policies and a trust in his political objectives. ‘I believe in you as I believe in God’, she wrote to Alexander at one point:’33 this idolatry was not the outburst of a voluptuous and satisfied woman.

  The late summer of 1805 brought persistent murmurs of war in the Prussian capital of Berlin. How could Prussia stand aloof while the French devoured half Europe? Frederick William reflected gloomily concerning his impossible position on 12 September: ‘Many a king has fallen because he loved war too well, but I may fall because I am in love with peace.’34 There was no doubt that the general Prussian mood veered towards war. Napoleon’s enemy the Tsar was cheered wildly at the opera in Berlin (the performance incidentally was of Armide). And when a secret pact was finally concluded between Russia and Prussia, agreeing to send an ultimatum to Napoleon, Louise’s influence over Frederick William was generally believed by those in the know to have brought it about. The treaty was signed on 3 November 1805. That night the three friends – Alexander, Louise and Frederick William – went secretly together to visit the tomb of Frederick the Great at the Tsar’s request (a popular contemporary print would depict them standing reverently beside the historic sepulchre). The episode represented the romantic culmination of Louise’s hopes that war would not only stop the unstoppable Napoleon, but bring honour to the Prussian King at last, by uniting him with the brave and honourable Tsar of Russia.

  At the beginning of the next month it was Louise’s turn to be cheered wildly as she stood on the palace balcony to watch the Prussian troops leaving Berlin, the banners dipping as they passed. Her popularity with the army at this point knew no bounds. Here was their beloved patroness, she who had in peacetime attended those morning parades, danced at their balls, befriended young officers in trouble; now she was to be not only their queen but their goddess of victory. Moreover Louise herself had always reciprocated these feelings. When the Tsar praised her good relationships with the military, the Queen replied that ‘such a respected estate, whose vocation brought such toil and changes of fortune could not be admired enough’.35

  Unknown to the Queen on her balcony, one of those swift changes of fortune which would affect the destiny of the bonny Prussian soldiers beneath her had already taken place. In late October Napoleon had secured the capitulation of the Austrians at Ulm; on 13 November he entered Vienna; on 2 December, in a brilliant striking manoeuvre, he had utterly crushed the Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz. When the news reached the Queen in Berlin, she exclaimed that ‘no one who is a German can hear of this and not be moved’. She was right to see the chilling significance of the defeat. Prussia for her part was simply told she must accept the territorial changes imposed: Hanover for example could be retained, but Ausbach (‘the cradle of the Hohenzollern race’ as Louise tearfully told Frederick William), Neuchâtel and Cleves with its fortress
of Wesel must be given up. In June 1806 the Holy Roman Empire would be brutally ended, the Confederation of the Rhine put in its place.

  The Queen, passionately opposed to the ratification of this Treaty, wrote: ‘There is only one thing to be done, let us fight the Monster, let us beat the Monster down, and then we can talk of worries!’36 Her words became a patriotic slogan for the party still resolutely opposed to dealing with Napoleon, just as the Queen herself was increasingly credited with all the qualities of inspiration the King so signally lacked. Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick William’s clever raffish cousin, remarked that if the people knew how much Louise had done, they would raise altars to her everywhere. Even without the benefit of altars, popular admiration expressed itself in a thousand ways. One unit demanded that its name be changed to the Queen’s Cuirassiers! Let Louise lead them!

  With a weak king and a valiant queen, there was the inevitable emergence of the Better-Man Syndrome. After this period of debate and anxiety was over, Hardenberg would quote the famous words of Catherine de Foix to her husband Jean d’Albret: ‘If we had been born, you Catherine and I Don Jean, we would not have lost our kingdom.’ Queen Louise, he said, had an equal right to address her husband thus.37

  It was not until the autumn of 1806 that the Prussian King’s hopes of treating with France were formally abandoned; he agreed at last to combine with the allies including Russia, Austria and England, to try to beat the ‘Monster’. By this time Queen Louise’s personal fixation against Napoleon as the source of all their woes had begun to be matched by the anger of the Emperor at what the Prussians considered her patriotic fervour but he deemed her womanly interference in dragging Prussia away from France. The Bulletin of the Army, an official propaganda publication, printed a conversation Napoleon was said to have had with Marshal Berthier: ‘a beautiful queen wants to see a battle, so let us be gallant. Let us march off at once to Saxony.’ It went on to report Napoleon’s outburst quoted earlier concerning the Queen with her army ‘dressed as an Amazon’. On another occasion: ‘So – Mademoiselle de Mecklenburg [an allusion to Louise’s birth outside Prussia] wants to make war on me, does she? Let her come! I am not afraid of women.’38

  This elevation of Queen Louise to something more than a pretty woman attired from time to time in a becoming adaptation of military uniform suited both sides, in fact. But the Queen’s true intentions were probably better interpreted by Thomas Hardy later in his poetic drama The Dynasts, than by Napoleon. Here Hardy has the loyal Berliners protest against Napoleon’s insulting epithet of Amazon: ‘Her whose each act Shows but a mettled modest woman’s zeal … To fend off ill from home!’39 Alas, the mettled but modest Louise, like Armida, but for very different reasons, would all too soon find that very home laid low.

  The French victory over Prussia at the double battle Jena–Auerstädt on 14 October 1806 virtually obliterated the Prussian army, that force which had, under Frederick the Great – dead only twenty years before – terrorized Europe. In the wake of the general destruction, the Queen found herself enquiring wildly for her husband: ‘Where is the King?’ ‘I don’t know, Your Majesty.’ ‘But, my God, isn’t the King with the army?’ ‘The army? It no longer exists.’40 The Prussian army, Prussia itself and for that matter Queen Louise were none of them ever to be quite the same after this ghastly day of national humiliation. (The French Marshal Davout would be made Duc d’Auerstädt for defeating an army twice his own strength.) A week before the battle, Frederick von Gentz, the philosopher–politician, had an interview with the Queen at the Prussian war camp in which she expressed herself ‘with a precision, a firmness and energy, and at the same time with a restraint and wisdom, that would have enchanted me in a man’.41 Afterwards, the Queen was transformed into both a fugitive and an invalid.

  Her flight from the French was real enough. Napoleon had hoped that the Queen who had defied him would be captured. Although he was cross that she had escaped, he was at least able to exult in the Bulletin of the Army: ‘She has been driven headlong from danger to danger … she wanted to see blood, and the most precious blood in the kingdom has been shed.’ As for Louise’s health, that finally collapsed as she made her painful way via Berlin and Königsberg to Memel, safe on the borders of Russia but already wrapped in the Baltic winter. Snow was falling in heavy flakes as her husband’s cousin Princess Anton Radziwill watched Louise depart from Königsberg, lying down in her coach, barely able to wave a hand in farewell.42

  What was the Queen doing at the war camp in the first place? The Duke of Brunswick, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, was appalled to find her there, on the scene of battle, in her little carriage. ‘What are you doing here, Madame? For God’s sake, what are you doing here?’ he exclaimed. Then he pointed at the fortress occupied by the French: ‘Tomorrow we will have a bloody decisive day.’ The Queen departed very early the next morning with the noise of the cannonades in her ears: already the French could distinctly perceive her amid the Prussian lines, and in the event missed capturing her by a mere hour. (Later the Queen would remark wryly that the Duke of Brunswick’s order to retreat was the first time she ever heard him express himself either positively or energetically.)43

  Queen Louise’s official explanation for her presence was the King’s need of her support; Gentz at least accepted this, as did General Kalkreuth. She propped up the King’s waning confidence, he believed, and besides her presence had its usual encouraging effect on the soldiers. Kalkreuth’s reasoning was undoubtedly correct. Yet the grim truth was that on a battlefield, for the Prussians, King and soldiers alike, the encouragement of their goddess could avail little against the superior French. And a fancy-dress Warrior Queen, however patriotic, had little place there, when she might have been captured and given cause for still further exultation on the part of her enemies.

  Queen Louise’s tribulations were not at an end with her flight to Memel. How freezing, how forlorn and how horribly crowded with refugees was beloved Memel now, compared to that sweet summer place where she had danced with the Tsar four years earlier! The Queen herself was ill most of the time. She was still recovering from typhus, while that combination of a weak heart and congestion of the lungs which would finally kill her was beginning to take its toll. Diplomatic negotiations to save something for Prussia from the wreck of its defeat caused her further anguish, as the Prussian King and his advisers struggled to conciliate France while not antagonizing Russia. Perhaps the Queen derived some ironic amusement from her riposte to the hated French Marshal Bertrand who asked her to use her influence to bring about a proper peace between France and Prussia. ‘Women have no voice in the making of war and peace’, replied the Queen, with dignity. When Frederick William sent her a soldier’s pigtail, to indicate that the sacred but old-fashioned costume of the Prussian army was at last being modernized, Louise both laughed and wept. But by June tears were constantly dripping down the Queen’s cheeks, ‘despite her brave little games’ as the British envoy, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, noted.44

  Meanwhile the ‘Monster’, in the Queen’s own room at Weimar, gloated over the notes and reports which he found in her drawers, mixed with the other more delicate objects of her toilette, still perfumed by the musk which was used to scent them. ‘It seems as if what they say of her is true’, he noted. ‘She was here to fan the flames of war.’ Then he dismissed Louise as ‘a woman with a pretty face, but little intelligence and quite incapable of foreseeing the consequences of what she does’. He even managed a kind of compassion: ‘Now she is to be pitied rather than blamed, for she must be suffering agonies of remorse for all the evil she has done to her country and to her husband, who, everyone agrees, is an honourable man, wanting only the peace and welfare of his subjects.’45

  But at the City Hall in Berlin, Napoleon ranted on concerning the excellent example of the Turks who kept women out of politics (shades of Voltaire’s salute to that ‘woman and a Christian’, Catherine the Great!) and would not listen to two elderly ecclesiastics who p
raised their queen’s kindness and goodness. When the wife of Prince Hatzfeld pleaded on her knees for her husband’s life, on the other hand, Napoleon was pleased to grant the request and issued a picture commemorating the incident; that presumably was the proper position for a woman. Queen Louise was already suffering furious humiliation at Napoleon’s insinuations concerning her relationship with the Tsar. She burst out in a letter otherwise written in French: Und man lebt und kann die Schmach nicht rächen’ (And one lives and cannot take revenge for the humiliation).46 She was now further punished by the issue of a very different picture. At the tomb of Frederick the Great, in a caricature of that secret night visit and its vows depicted in the popular print, Louise was shown in the guise of Lady Hamilton to the Tsar’s Nelson. Since Lady Hamilton was then notorious in Europe as the late Nelson’s mistress, the implication was clear.

  It was at this time that Queen Louise was traditionally supposed to have transcribed this harpist’s song (set by Schubert) from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, with its mournful quatrain:

  Who never ate his bread in sorrow

  Who never spent the darksome hours

  Weeping and watching for the morrow

  He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers!47

  But the greatest humiliation lay ahead. Its prelude was another crushing defeat: that of the Russian army under General Bennigsen at Friedland, twenty-seven miles south of Königsberg, on 15 June 1807. A week later it was the Tsar Alexander’s turn to negotiate a truce. This was the prayer of Louise to Alexander before the battle: ‘You are our only hope: do not abandon us, not for my sake, but for my husband’s sake, for the sake of my children, their future and their destiny.’ Her prayer would go for nothing compared to the crudeness of Realpolitik. Louise’s ‘only hope’ was indeed about to abandon them, as she would shortly discover.