Frederick the Great

by Nancy Mitford

  Back at Berlin, d’Argens rushes to Sans Souci where the gallery is finished—absolutely wonderful—the prettiest thing outside Rome. He wants to tell Frederick that Catt is perfect and he must never have any doubts on that subject. What would Louis XIV say if he knew that Pondicherry had fallen, taxes were higher than at any time in his reign and 150,000 men were dead in Germany—all to increase the power of Austria and engineered by a whore from the rue Saint-Denis (Mme de Pompadour) and a bad poet from the seminary of Saint-Sulpice (Cardinal de Bernis)?

  The day of great pitched battles seemed to be over; Frederick’s army and treasury were too much depleted for him to take the offensive. For much of 1761 he was shut up at Bunzelwitz, near Schweidnitz. Though nobody dared to attack him, he was powerless to prevent the fall of Schweidnitz or the Austrians from settling for the winter in Silesia and Saxony. In the north the Allies had taken the port of Kolberg and Pomerania lay at their mercy. All these places were now paying taxes and supplying recruits to the enemy instead of to Frederick. The death of his Uncle George had been another blow. Frederick had not cared for him but he said he was an honourable man who would never abandon an ally. The new King was English through and through and took little account of his German possessions; the colonial war with France was won and George III wanted peace. He was under the influence of Lord Bute and Pitt left the Cabinet. Bute invited Frederick to contribute to a settlement by giving up some territory; when he refused to do so his English subsidies were cut off. He wrote to the Duchess: ‘Messieurs the English have betrayed me. It has given poor M. Mitchell a stroke.’ The Duchess suggested that she should write to George III’s mother, who was the Duke of Saxe-Gotha’s sister. But Frederick said no, it would do no good and might cause a family coldness. He was furious with Bute for saying that England would always sacrifice her allies when it was in the national interest to do so, having forgotten, no doubt, that he himself used to sing that very song.

  In the Histoire de la Guerre de Sept Ans Frederick described his situation at the end of 1761, when he was wintering in Breslau, as follows. Among the King’s generals, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick (in the Rhineland) was the only one to finish the campaign without losses. The Prussians had done badly wherever they fought. Prince Henry had lost the Saxon mountains and so little territory remained to him that he could hardly feed his troops. The enemy (in Saxony) held all the strong places and one could expect the worst very soon. But, bad as was the plight of H.R.H., it was nothing to the King’s. The loss of Schweidnitz resulted in that of the mountains and half of Silesia. The King now held only Glogau, Breslau, Neisse and Kosel; he controlled both banks of the Oder, but the Russians had laid waste to the countryside and there was no food left. The army had to defend itself against the Austrians on one side and the Russians on the other; communications with Berlin were precarious. But the most desperate loss was that of Kolberg. Nothing could now prevent the Russians from taking Stettin, Berlin and Brandenburg in the spring. The King had 30,000 men in Silesia, Prince Henry hardly more, and the troops which had fought the Russians in Pomerania were ruined. Most of the duchies and principalities were occupied or destroyed—one did not know where to turn for recruits or horses or goods, where to find food or how to get munitions.

  The King’s only hope now was that the Turks might come into the war against Austria; but if they made no move at the opening of the next campaign he thought he would commit suicide. ‘Having sacrificed my youth to my father and my maturity to the State, I believe I have the right to dispose of my old age.’

  Mitchell had written to Lord Bute: ‘I cannot conceal from your Lordship that I am in the greatest anxiety of mind about the King of Prussia.’

  On 5 January 1762 Frederick, having received one of d’Argens’s ever-hopeful letters, answered, ‘I have often told you the age of miracles is over.’ Had he but known it, the miracle which was to save him was happening that very day: the death of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia. She was fifty-three and for years had been in poor health. At the beginning of the war Frederick had rather counted on her dying soon—in which case it seemed certain that the Russian front would collapse. Latterly he had not given this possibility a thought. ‘Morta la bestia, morto il veneno,’ he said on hearing the news. It had been slow in coming. A fortnight after the death the Danish envoy in Berlin heard it and maddened people by saying an important crowned head had died but refusing to say which; and everybody else had to wait three more days. The immediate results were dramatic. Elizabeth’s nephew and successor was mad and his folly was the saving of Frederick, for one of its manifestations was an hysterical idolatry of the King of Prussia. The very day he came to the throne Peter III ordered his troops in Germany to change sides and put themselves under Frederick’s command, while East Prussia and the other Russian conquests were handed back to him. The Swedes, whose participation in the war had always been half-hearted, took the opportunity of getting out of it and gave up Pomerania. Frederick once more had the revenues of these places.

  To d’Argens: ‘The Messalina of the North is dead and we are rid of the people whom the Hyperboreans vomited over us.’ So d’Argens and Berlin are no longer in danger. But then what if the new Emperor should die? Not very likely—he is young and they are not living in the age of the Medicis. It seems the Queen of Hungary spends her time weeping and praying but as for Frederick, a sweet tranquillity possesses his soul. Charlottenburg must immediately be restored, d’Argens to be in charge.

  Too soon the world realized that Russia was in the age of the Medicis: Peter III was strangled by order of his wife, a Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst who used to play as a child with Prince Henry. The following year, she murdered Frederick’s nephew, the deposed Ivan VI, after which Catherine the Great never had another rival to deal with, and ruled the Russias until her death in 1796. Frederick said the Russian prisoners in Prussia were divided over the succession, about half favouring Ivan, so no doubt she had acted prudently. She reversed nearly all her late husband’s policies but by great good luck for Frederick she found letters from him urging Peter to behave better to her, and so, although she put an end to the Russo-Prussian alliance, she did not recommence the war. Frederick managed to persuade the Russian general to stay on a few days after he had been ordered to go home and help with a skirmish against Daun, after which the troops went off, all the officers begging for copies of Frederick’s Poésies Diverses. ‘Probably the only place in the world where I shall pass for a good French poet will be in Russia.’

  France was ruined and longed for peace; it was realized at Versailles that the Austrians would never now get back Silesia, the condition upon which France was to receive the Austrian Netherlands. Her war effort ground to a halt. So to all intents and purposes Frederick and Maria Theresa were left to face each other alone. The only major engagement that summer was fought by Prince Henry who won a decisive victory over the Prince de Stolberg, his best action and the last of the war. Frederick said, ‘You alone have the glory of breaking down Austrian obstinacy.’

  The French and English signed a treaty at Fontainebleau (3 November 1762) which was very dreadful for France. As Pitt had planned, Frederick had won Canada and India for England on the battlefields of Germany. Louis XV and Frederick had never declared war, so they had no peace to negotiate; the French simply evacuated those of Frederick’s Rhineland possessions which they were occupying. Austria, Prussia and Saxony agreed to peace terms which were signed at Hubertusburg, 15 February 1763, and which amounted to a status quo ante bellum. It seemed mysterious at the time that Frederick, who was really beaten to his knees, should have got away with such huge rewards as Upper and Lower Silesia and Glatz; and many rumours were rife in the chancelleries as to the reason of the Austrian collapse. Some said that the Emperor refused to lend his wife any more money to carry on the war—certainly both he and Archduke Joseph were against it, while Daun doubted the wisdom of going on with it. Probably Maria Theresa thought that, in spite of the punishment the Prussians had r
eceived, she could never hope to conquer them by herself. The Duchess wrote to Voltaire on 31 December 1762:

  Perhaps you don’t know that for twenty-four hours we had the honour to possess under our roof the Great Frederick . . . His spirit is unchanged, grand, brilliant and fascinating. I can never express his courtesy and goodness to us. But I found him terribly aged.

  19. Man is made to work

  Now that peace had come at last Frederick’s life was as much in ruins as his country. His physical sufferings were always severe and often atrocious; his high spirits had almost gone and he had even lost his fierceness. Fouqué begged him to be angry sometimes as it was good for his health, but his anger took the form of a calm and deadly sarcasm. At fifty-one he was an old man. But he still had energy and he devoted it to the good of his country, according to his lights. He wrote to the Duchess on the very day he signed the Treaty of Hubertusburg: ‘This peace brings enormous labour with it—but man is made to work.’ In his memoirs he paints an appalling picture of the misery to which his country was reduced: ‘Nobody who has not seen it with his own eyes can have any idea of it.’ He must have dreaded his return to Berlin because he put it off for as long as he could; he travelled about the ravaged province of Silesia and only arrived in the capital six weeks after signing the peace. He said he found nothing there but empty walls and the memory of those he had loved. His faithful Berliners had made him a triumphal coach and awaited him with flags and flowers; he could not face them and slipped through dark, unlighted, side streets to arrive unperceived at the palace. The Queen gave a small family dinner for him, to which Mitchell and Vanderelst the Dutch minister were also invited. But the next morning he did get into the coach, with Ferdinand of Brunswick, and they received a rapturous welcome. Then he began his work. The deputations which came to congratulate him were told to cut out the thanks-giving and let him know what they needed to put agriculture on its feet again. His first step was to distribute 35,000 army horses, free, to the peasants.

  Frederick has been blamed for never delegating the burdens of administration and for seeing to everything himself. There is nothing so unbearable, says Lord Macaulay, as to be governed by a busybody. Later in the reign, after the recovery of Prussia, this criticism probably becomes valid, but in 1763 it was the King’s own unsleeping labours and the simple, imaginative steps he took that were needed. No detail ever escaped his eagle eye and he regarded nothing as being out of his province. For instance, during the Battle of Kunersdorf he had noticed various mistakes in the cultivation of the farmland there; now he spoke about them and reforms were made.

  Prussia was the only belligerent Continental country to be solvent after the war. Frederick had kept enough cash in hand to pay for two more campaigns and this money was now used to restore the country’s economy. Many towns had had to pay enormous indemnities to the enemy; Berlin was repaid out of the treasury, but everywhere else the bourgeoisie was left to carry the burden—Frederick had decided to give priority to the nobles and the peasants, in other words the army and agriculture. The bourgeoisie was divorced from both. He reckoned that a ninth of the population had perished (120 generals had been killed), so he encouraged immigrants, to work on the land, by all the means in his power. They were mostly of German or Polish stock, although there were Greeks and other Mediterraneans. He had an agency in Venice. He thought that mixed races produced intelligent people. Like Queen Victoria he was tired of looking into blue eyes and wanted to bring in strong dark blood—he even thought of building a mosque to encourage Turks. By the end of his reign one-sixth of his subjects were born foreigners. Work was put in hand to improve the sandy soil of Brandenburg. Wherever a bush or a tree would grow, one was planted; wherever a farm could exist, one was built. The State controlled everything—it found markets for the farm produce in good years and helped the peasants through the bad ones—and the State was Frederick himself. He did what he could to help the peasants who, all over Europe, were a downtrodden class. He prevented the enclosure of their land (which was happening elsewhere in the Empire) and allowed the peasants on the huge royal estates to hold hereditary farms. But in those days it was regarded as a sad but inescapable fact that the prosperity of a State depended on an underpaid and overworked peasantry. As they were so wretched they were naturally not very clever. Frederick’s simple agrarian reforms, such as the rotation of crops and improvement of the livestock by selective breeding, were hampered by the conservatism of the countrymen. All his authority was needed to overcome it and he was driven nearly mad by the stupidity and wastefulness he saw and by the failure to carry out, or even to understand, his orders. The richer Silesians were more virtuous and less dense than the Prussians; he loved them more and more. He spent at least two months at Breslau every year, for the army manœuvres. At the end of his life he said that in the forty years he had governed Silesia he had only signed one death-warrant there.

  The Duchess wrote to Voltaire, ‘Frederick is working night and day for the good of his people, by whom he is adored.’ But it almost seemed as if he were trying to get rid of this adoration: he was amazingly harsh, almost cruel, in his conduct of affairs. His army reforms were not softened by any human touch: he never once praised or congratulated his men after the war. His first action was to dismiss all the young bourgeois officers whom he had been obliged to employ during the last campaigns and whose mates had died for him in hundreds. He preferred foreign officers with the requisite number of quarterings to native Prussians without them. He had no superstitious idea that the nobility provided better human material than any other class; he simply thought that, given their outlook and the organization of society, they were in their proper place as commanders. The ideal officer was a large land-owner leading the tenants with whom he had been brought up. Yet such men could count on no special treatment. Quintus Icilius begged him to do something for those officers who had ruined themselves by paying and feeding the men out of their own pockets. ‘Your officers have stolen like ravens’, was the reply; ‘I’m damned if I’ll give them a penny.’ Those generals who had been taken prisoner, including the beloved Fouqué, were put in the cells on their return to await court martial. Fouqué, who, the King said, had fought like a Roman before he was captured, got off, but General von Finck was sentenced to a year in Spandau. Frederick placed young civilian inspectors, responsible to himself, over the colonels who had hitherto been all-powerful in their own domain. The last insult was that he now paid each regiment according to what he considered had been its performance in the wars. With so few veterans left the new soldiers had to be trained from the very beginning; it was seven years before the King was satisfied with them, although in 1764 he wrote to Fouqué to say that his army was rising like a phoenix from its ashes. In spite of everything Frederick was popular in the army to the end of his life; he amused the men with his oddity and many were the stories they told about ‘Old Fritz’. Besides, they were proud of him and proud to be led by such a hero.

  He was determined to turn Prussia into an industrial country but his ideas were old-fashioned, based on those of Colbert, and rigidly protectionist. The Prussian recovery could have been more startling than it was had he gone about its organization in a more modern way. His adviser was the French philosopher Helvétius, whom he persuaded to leave his English exile and go to Berlin. Helvétius made him change the Prussian system of tax collecting for the French, and Frederick bitterly hurt the feelings of the bourgeoisie by importing French tax-gatherers to put it into effect. He had got it into his head not only that the Prussian methods were hopeless but that the officials were dishonest; he put a Frenchman, M. de Launay, over them. The Prussians execrated him for his influence at court and his enormous salary. Mitchell wrote:

  The directors of the new excise, mostly recommended by Helvétius, are all French of low condition and totally ignorant of the language, manners and customs of the country. Three of them are bankrupts, of whom M. de Candi was one. He, however, had a dispute with Launay and was
shot by him. The new projects of the excise give the utmost dissatisfaction to the subjects and have alienated their affection for their sovereign to a degree hardly to be described.

  Only ten per cent of the tax-gatherers were French but the idea of them infuriated the Prussians. However, adverse public opinion never prevented Frederick from getting his own way.

  His most famous industrial venture was the Berlin china factory, into which he put his heart and soul. Some of his friends at Meissen consented to leave Saxony during the war and take their secret process to Berlin (another bad mark for him with the Saxons) and they were soon turning out porcelain of a rare quality. Frederick sent the first piece of china made there to the Duchess (10 January 1763): ‘If my homage is found unworthy of the goddess it can be broken, thrown away and forgotten. Your friendship is my most precious possession.’ Like the French kings with their Sèvres he bullied people into buying Berlin; he always used it at his own table and sent presents of it to his friends at home and abroad. But most European princes now made their own porcelain, and the Berlin never sold as well as he had hoped. Other industries also disappointed him. He had stolen a lot of sheep from the Saxons, partly for the stock and partly to create an artificial shortage of wool; but even so his own wool trade stagnated. Silk did well, owing to the bright and beautiful colours on which he insisted, cotton developed fast and linen was a good export. Mining in Silesia, rich in minerals, was nothing much until, in the seventies, Frederick acquired a remarkable Saxon, von Heinitz (who educated Humboldt), and appointed him Minister for Mines. Some of the Prussian goods were of poor quality; others, like clocks made in Berlin by his Swiss subjects from Neuchâtel, were too expensive. When he asked why his paper was so bad he was told there were not enough good rags for making it. He said he knew why—he was for ever seeing housemaids lighting the fires with rags; this practice must be forbidden at once. There was not much of a market for manufactured goods inside Prussia, as the peasants were too poor to buy them, nor, with his old-fashioned economy, could Frederick’s exports compete with the great trading cities like Hamburg and Leipzig. To sum up, it may be said that in spite of the practical difficulties—soil, climate and so on—agriculture flourished while industry lagged behind. A financial crisis in 1766, general to most of the Empire, was a setback. When that was over, Prussia by degrees recovered from the war.