Frederick the Great

by Nancy Mitford

  Frederick the Great’s childhood and youth have been described by his sister Wilhelmine in her memoirs. She is fundamentally truthful and her account is borne out by the foreign diplomats in dispatches to their governments. She and Frederick were more like twins than an ordinary brother and sister—exactly alike to look at. They were not always on the best of terms, but there was an affinity. At an incredibly early age Wilhelmine encouraged her brother to read and study, and it was she who spurred him on to fame. From her book one would think that these two were the only children, but in fact a large family was arriving: Sophia Dorothea had a new baby nearly every year; fourteen in all were born, and ten lived to be grown up. But Wilhelmine and Frederick were the most interesting of them and they clung together through the storms of their early days.

  In spite of Frederick William’s loathing and contempt for the subjects of His Most Christian Majesty, he put his little son in the charge of two French Protestants. Mme de Roucoulle was appointed governess to the royal children and Jacques Duhan de Jandun tutor to Frederick. Mme de Roucoulle had brought up Frederick William; she must have been like her name, a cooing, laughing, agreeable, rather silly person—deeply religious. She had been a great friend of Queen Sophia Charlotte and was always talking about her; little Princess Wilhelmine decided to model herself on this grandmother.

  Jacques Duhan had an enormous influence over Frederick’s intellectual formation. He was born in 1685; his father, who had been the secretary of Turenne, Louis XIV’s general, had emigrated to Brandenburg in 1687. As far as possible the Protestant émigrés were given the same jobs as they had held at home, and the nobles became officers. So the elder Duhan went into the army. He educated his son himself and when he was old enough Jacques Duhan also became a soldier. He was noticed by Frederick William for his extraordinary courage at a siege; the King had no idea that he was a scholar. He had a horror of intellectuals and would never willingly have delivered his son into the hands of one.

  As well as a tutor, Frederick, at the age of seven, had a governor, the sixty-year-old General Count Finck von Finckenstein, a well-known European warrior. In those days a soldier could join any army as long as he was not asked to fight against his own king—it was considered a good military education to go campaigning with different leaders. Finck had fought with the Prince of Orange against the French in 1676; then in the French army under Luxembourg against the Spaniards; then he joined the Great Elector, Frederick’s great-grandfather, and thereafter always fought against the French. The Emperor ennobled him, at the request of Prince Eugene, after Blenheim. Frederick’s household was completed by Lieutenant-Colonel von Kalkstein, and Rentzel, another Prussian, who was a drill master and a flautist. It was he who started Frederick on music and taught him to play the flute, an accomplishment which was to mean so much to him. He loved these men: they were to be lifelong friends, and all the elements of his future can be found in them: French civilization, warfare and music.

  Frederick William laid down rules for the education of his son. He was to learn no history before the sixteenth century and then only that which had some bearing on the House of Hohenzollern. Latin was forbidden. Frederick William had the deepest contempt for the Classical civilizations which the Germanic race had brought low; he tolerated only those political, social, religious and artistic schools of thought which sprang from a German source. The French were written off as derivative and effeminate. Frederick, said his father, is destined to rule over Prussia in this century; a lot of knowledge which might be useful to the Emperor or the King of France will clutter up his brain to no purpose. (Frederick William seemed to think that a brain is like a box and can hold only a certain amount.) Fusty old rules of etiquette are also to be avoided: the King of Prussia can get up in the morning without assistance and go to bed when he feels sleepy, after smoking his pipe. The child must know about his father’s lands, scattered all over central Europe, and about those to which his family lay claim: Western Pomerania,* Silesia, Mecklenburg, Jülich and Berg. He must learn mathematics, essential to the art of warfare, must study political economy and human rights and be able to express himself clearly and elegantly in French and German. (Frederick William himself always spoke French with his wife.) The Prince should have attractive manners and the greatest horror of laziness and Catholicism. The horror of laziness remained; as for Catholicism, Frederick grew up with contempt for all religions, but he always thought the Roman Catholic the most mischievous. He must learn theology and hope, as his father does, that Calvinists and Lutherans will soon make up their differences (which partly hinged on the interpretation of Christ’s words at the Last Supper: ‘is’, said Luther, ‘represents’, said Calvin). He must never be left alone night or day. He should rise at 6 a.m., kneel, thank the Almighty for having allowed him to live through the night and ask that he should be prevented from doing anything which would separate him from God. Then, at the double, he must wash his hands and face without soap, have his hair combed, but not powdered, while he drinks his tea or coffee. At 6.30 a.m. Duhan comes in with all Frederick’s servants and reads prayers, a chapter of the Bible and a psalm. From 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. lessons. Then he washes with soap, is powdered and goes to the King, staying until 2 p.m. Lessons until 5 p.m. when he can do as he likes until bedtime at 10.30 p.m. ‘He must try to be clean and tidy and not so dirty. That is my last word’, said Frederick William who, himself, had such a mania for cleanliness that he allowed no upholstered furniture or curtains in his rooms. But Frederick was dirty, all his life.

  All went well until Frederick was eight when he began to implore Duhan to teach him Latin and Classical history. Duhan, who was longing to do so, was unable to resist; but one day the King came in and found them reading the Golden Bull which, since it was the charter of the German Electors, was thought by Duhan to come within the King’s curriculum. Unfortunately, the Golden Bull is in Latin. The cane, from which Frederick William was never separated, flailed in all directions. ‘Ich will dich Schurke, be-auream bullam!’ (I’ll Golden Bull you). Duhan was not dismissed, but that was the end of Latin lessons for Frederick, to his lifelong regret. More divinity was prescribed: ‘Anybody would have thought my father wanted me to be a theologian!’ Duhan was a born teacher; the boy soon knew how to learn by himself from books; he acquired a good style in French prose, an abiding passion for French literature and a grounding in history and geography. In spite of much reading of Luther’s Bible, which was the model for the German language, Frederick’s German was always idiosyncratic, incorrect, colourful and amusing; he very seldom spoke it and was hardly capable of writing it.

  At first Frederick William loved his little Fritz and was proud of him. He hoped that they could be more like two brothers than father and son. He took the child to army manœuvres and gave him a toy in the shape of a regiment of 131 small children, the Crown Prince Cadets, to do as he liked with. It was reviewed by both Peter the Great and Grandfather George I and got a barrel of beer for good marksmanship. But the bright morning soon clouded over. Frederick William’s disease began to take a terrible hold; he suffered tortures. To distract himself he learnt to paint—the strange results are signed F.W. in tormentis pinxit. In 1719 he was thought to be dying of ‘nephritic colics’; eight years later he had a nervous breakdown and talked of abdicating. As his illness grew worse so did his temper.

  Unfortunately, Queen Sophia Dorothea was no help to him. He loved her, she knew, always treated her with respect and never hit her (or an officer—nobody else was spared). But she pretended to be frightened of him. She bore him a grudge for the simple life she led; she thought she was cut out to be a real queen with a court and much gallant coming and going, balls for visiting sovereigns and so on—she would have preferred her silly father-in-law as a husband, a thousand times. She was a gossip, a bore and a snob, attaching importance to trivial things and looking down on the Hohenzollern family. Her father became King of England in 1714 and this inflated her ideas. Her influence on Frederick and
Wilhelmine was not good. Always grumbling about their father, she turned them against him and encouraged them to displease him. She was a luxurious woman—her trousseau had been bought in Paris, chosen by Madame, the sister-in-law of Louis XIV—and her rooms in the palace, decorated in her own way with curtains and upholstered furniture, seemed a haven of civilization to the children, who loved to be with her. They took her at her own value when they were little; when they first grew up they saw through her, but in her old age they loved her again. She had charm, but she was a shallow, idle person full of pretence—by way of liking the arts without bothering to learn about them, and fond of political intrigue though without knowledge of politics.

  Her aim in life was to marry Wilhelmine and Frederick to their English cousins, Frederick Prince of Wales and Princess Amelia; this ‘affair of the English marriages’ bore no fruit except tons of archives. Carlyle devotes to it one of the eight volumes of his History of Friedrich II of Prussia; and it is a curious and amusing example of the diplomacy in those days. The children set their hearts on marrying their grand relations and though they had never seen them imagined themselves in love. Their father was unfavourable to the English connection and the Queen told them that he was standing in the way of their happiness, as usual. George I might have liked the marriages but George II was always lukewarm. He loathed his cousin and brother-in-law who had bullied him ferociously when they were small—indeed their grandmother had to stop Frederick William’s visits to Hanover for fear he should kill little George—and the loathing was reciprocated. The two men called each other ‘my brother the drill-sergeant’ and ‘my brother the play-actor’. As for Sophia Dorothea, Lord Hervey says George II had for her the contempt she deserved and a hatred she did not deserve. It must be said that she was good to her unfortunate mother, shut up for life by George I, and did all she could to get her out of prison. She seemed to be succeeding when Dorothea of Celle died the year before her husband’s death would have released her.

  By the time Frederick was twelve it had become obvious that he and his father were on the worst of terms. Frederick was a polite, delicate little boy who hated rough ways. He was always in trouble: was beaten for wearing gloves in cold weather, for eating with a silver fork, for throwing himself off a bolting horse. If his father’s rages terrified him they also fascinated him, and as he grew older he and Wilhelmine leagued together to tease the King, going as far as they dared and then skipping out of his way when they had worked him up to a frenzy. In this game their mother’s room was ‘home’, the sanctuary; she had an arrangement of screens behind which they could dodge, making their escape through a second door or crawling under her bed, giggling audibly, sometimes knocking down a screen on purpose to make sure their poor, distracted father knew exactly what was going on. Sophia Dorothea never took her husband’s part. She must have known how ill he was but never showed him any sympathy; she told all and sundry that he was mad and that she went in fear for her life. Nor did Frederick try to please his father; he treated him like an enemy and did everything in his power to annoy. He paraded scepticism in matters that he knew would hurt, mocked the Scriptures, scoffed at ghosts and yet was annoyingly clever in flooring Frederick William with theological arguments. When he really agreed with his father which, in the bottom of his heart, he often did, he would have died sooner than admit it. They seemed to have no tastes in common. Frederick William’s favourite pastime was hunting, which Frederick disliked all his life. He loved riding—a day never went by without several gallops —but thought that hunting was cruel and dull. He was forced to ride to hounds by his father, but infuriated him by disappearing, to be found talking to his mother in her carriage or playing the flute in a forest glade. Worse still, he hated or pretended to hate anything to do with the army. His father knew that he called his uniform his shroud. If he was beaten, starved, humiliated and generally ill-treated it was to a large extent his own fault and his mother’s.

  Frederick William was not only profoundly irritated by him but also puzzled. ‘What goes on in this little head?’ Frederick never gave himself away; the only person with whom he talked secrets was Wilhelmine and even she hardly understood his nature. He had icy self-control, never flew into rages, and received his father’s blows and insults with an air of maddening indifference. There is no doubt that he was treated with intolerable cruelty. Terror reigned in the house; the Queen, generally pregnant, cried every day. Luckily the King was by no means always there: he travelled incessantly seeing to the administration of his lands.

  When Frederick was fourteen he was appointed Major of the Potsdam Grenadiers, in other words the giants, and spent part of his time at Potsdam. A very small major he must have seemed; as a grown-up man he measured five feet seven; he was a particularly thin and peaky boy whose face seemed to contain only two enormous blue eyes—dazzling, like the sun. He began to go out in society, to Mme de Roucoulle’s Wednesdays, sometimes to Finck and sometimes to his father’s tabagie. Here he had to pretend to smoke and drink, both of which habits he loathed to the end of his days, while his father watched him with bloodshot eyes: ‘What goes on in this little head?’

  Other people who saw him were struck by his great and growing intelligence. Duhan was with him at Potsdam and together they laid the foundation of Frederick’s library. The catalogue still exists, written in Frederick’s own hand. There were books on mathematics and science, history books of every sort, books on art, music and politics, and translations from the classics—practically all, even German histories, were in French. He also had every great French writer since Rabelais, everything so far published by Voltaire, the works of Mme Guyon and a French rhyming dictionary. He already longed to become a French poet and his eyes were turned with rapture towards Paris. Like many Francophiles he adored the French for reasons which would bring cynical chuckles from a Frenchman; indeed Lavisse says that if he was sometimes disappointed by the French émigrés in Berlin he put it down to the years they had spent being contaminated by Germans. He made no attempt to hide these feelings from his father; on the contrary he flaunted them in order to tease. He made French jokes—esprit à la française—and pathetic attempts at elegance, growing his hair and combing it in the French style. When Frederick William saw this he took him off to a barber and said the disgusting locks were to be sheared there and then. Frederick cried. The kind barber snipped and snipped, hardly cutting anything at all; wetted the hair; flattened it and left quite enough to be fluffed up again when the King was not about.

  Frederick William now greatly preferred his second son, Augustus William, aged four. ‘I wouldn’t put much money on any of my children but I think this one will be a gentleman’ (honnête homme). Excessive in everything, he sometimes kissed the poor child for a quarter of an hour at a time. He was thought to be casting about for ways of disinheriting Frederick in favour of Augustus William. Frederick, for his part, began to plot against his father, trying to form a faction which would be attached to himself in the event of the King being shut up. He set about it with a brilliant deceitfulness far beyond his fourteen years. He made friends with Rothenburg, the French minister to Berlin, to whom he confided sentiments and activities so dangerous that Rothenburg dared not write a report of them to his government. There was plenty of inflammable material in Brandenburg; people were getting tired of being governed by an autocrat whose sage administration was less apparent than his mad behaviour. Fortunately, Rothenburg was a sensible fellow: he talked to Frederick like an uncle and told him to do nothing rash, that his only hope was to wait and make himself loved. Meanwhile, Frederick William, who always knew more of what was going on than he seemed to, began to have his suspicions. He made Frederick drunk and interrogated him but the child gave nothing away.

  The crux of the whole matter was the English marriages, which were an obsession with the Queen and her children. Wilhelmine was now of marriageable age and Frederick quite old enough to be betrothed. The King’s only adviser on such matters, Grumbkow, w
as taking his orders from Vienna, and the Emperor was violently against the marriages—France and England were enjoying one of their rare and fleeting moments of friendship and this was giving him much anxiety; he had no wish to see English influence spreading in Germany. On the whole Frederick William was loyal to the Emperor as a matter of German policy. He despised Charles VI and said he was as poor as a painter, but he considered that Germany must have an emperor and might as well stick to the House of Austria. He would have thought it very low to fight the head of that house with France as an ally. At the same time, the weaker the Emperor was the better, and the less likely to interfere with the internal policies of the princes. Charles VI used to hold out hopes that he would arrange for Frederick William to succeed the childless ruler of Jülich and Berg, two duchies which he greatly coveted: he had no real intention of doing so; it was a dishonest way of keeping the King on his side.