This was men-only, locker-room stuff and indeed one of the enduring features of Frederick’s narrower social milieu was its pungently masculine tone. In this sense, the Frederician court was an elaboration of the Tobacco College he had contemplated with such disgust during his father’s reign. The masculinization that had transformed court life after 1713 was not reversed, indeed in some respects it was reinforced. Only during the Rheinsberg years, when Frederick was still crown prince, were women integrated into the social life of his court. Clearly there was not much room within this constellation for a functioning heterosexual marriage. Whether the union between Frederick and his wife, Elisabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, was ever consummated is unclear. What is certain is that from the time of his accession to the throne, Frederick severed social relations with his wife, consigning her to a twilight zone in which she retained her formal rights and attributes as consort and occupied a modest residence of her own (on a very tight budget), but was not encouraged to seek contact with the king.
This was an unusual course of action: Frederick took none of the more obvious contemporary options – he did not divorce her, nor did he banish her from the country or replace her with mistresses. Instead he condemned her to a kind of suspended animation, in which she was scarcely more than a ‘representative automaton’.15 From 1745, she was persona non grata at Sans Souci; other women were invited to the king’s elegant summer refuge (mostly to Sunday lunch), but not his wife. During the twenty-two years from 1741 to 1762, Frederick was only twice present to celebrate her birthday. Although she continued to preside over what remained of the Berlin court, the horizons of her life gradually narrowed to the perimeter of her suburban residence at Schönhausen. In a letter written in 1747, when she was thirty-one years old, she talked of ‘peacefully waiting for death, when God will be pleased to take me from this world in which I have nothing more to do [… ].’16 Frederick’s correspondence with her was conducted for the most part in a tone of icy formality and there were occasions on which he treated her with a remarkable lack of feeling. Best known of these is the unforgettable greeting ‘Madame has grown fatter’, with which he saluted his wife, after years of separation, on his return from the wars in 1763.17
Whether all this gets us any further in the quest for the ‘real Frederick’ is a moot question. Frederick’s persona was fashioned around a rejection of authenticity as a virtue in its own right. To the injunction of his brutish father: ‘be an honest fellow, just be honest’, the teen-age Frederick had responded with a sly, foppish civility, striking the pose of the wry, dissembling, morally agnostic outsider. In a letter of 1734 to his former tutor, the Huguenot Duhan de Jandun, he compared himself to a mirror that, being obliged to reflect its surroundings, ‘does not dare to be what nature made it’.18 A tendency to efface himself as a subject, as an individual, runs like a red thread through his writings. It can be found in the affected stoicism of his wartime correspondence, in the sarcasm and pastiche with which he kept even close associates at a distance, and in his inclination, when reflecting on matters of political principle, to merge the person of the king into the abstract structure of the state. Even Frederick’s lust for work, which was immense and never-ending, could be construed as a flight from the introversion that idleness brings. The protective screen Frederick threw up against the cruel regime imposed by his father was never dismantled. Frederick remained the self-styled misanthrope, lamenting the turpitude of humanity and despairing of happiness in this life. In the meanwhile he continued, with astonishing energy, to consolidate his cultural capital. He endlessly practised and played his flute until his teeth fell out, leaving his embouchure in ruins. He read and reread the Roman classics (in French) and honed his French prose-writing skills, devouring the latest works of philosophy and recruiting new conversation partners to fill the places vacated by friends who had died or betrayed him by taking wives.
THREE SILESIAN WARS
Why did Frederick invade Silesia and why did he do so in 1740? A banal answer to this question would be: because he could. The international setting was highly favourable. In Russia, the death of the Tsarina Anna in October 1740 had paralysed the political executive, as court factions struggled to dominate the regency of the infant successor Ivan VI. Britain, though a friend of Austria, had been at war with Spain since 1739 and was thus unlikely to intervene. Frederick also calculated (correctly) that the French would be generally supportive. He possessed the means to carry it off. His father had left to him an army of some 80,000 men, rigorously trained and well supported and equipped, but untested in battle. Frederick had also inherited a substantial war chest of 8 million thalers in gold, bagged in hessian sacks and piled in the cellars of the royal palace in Berlin. By contrast, the Habsburg monarchy, having suffered a sequence of disastrous setbacks in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–8) and the Turkish war (1737–9), was close to exhaustion.
The new Habsburg monarch, Maria Theresa, was a woman. This was problematic, because the laws governing inheritance within the House of Habsburg did not provide for female succession. Foreseeing this difficulty, Emperor Charles VI, the father of three daughters, had invested much effort and money in securing domestic and international approval for the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’, a technical device that would allow the dynasty to bend the rules. By the time of his death, most of the key states (including Prussia) had signalled their acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction. But it was doubtful that these undertakings would actually be honoured. Two German dynasties in particular, the Saxon and the Bavarian, had married their eldest sons to nieces of the Emperor in 1719 and 1722 respectively; they later argued that these compacts entitled them, in the absence of a male Habsburg heir, to parts of the monarchy’s hereditary lands. During the early 1720s, the Saxons and the Bavarians signed various treaties by which they promised to work together in making good these dubious claims. The Elector of Bavaria even went so far as to forge a sixteenth-century Austro-Bavarian marriage treaty that supposedly awarded most of the Austrian hereditary lands to Bavaria in the absence of a direct male line of succession. There were thus clear indications even before 1740 that trouble would break out when the Emperor died.
Prussia was among those German states that had ratified the Pragmatic Sanction, partly in order to expedite negotiations over the transfer of the Salzburg Protestants to the eastern borderlands of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1731–2. But relations between Prussia and the House of Austria had been deteriorating for some time. The Habsburgs had long regretted their support for Prussia’s acquisition of a royal crown in 1701, and from around 1705, when Emperor Joseph I came to the throne, they pursued a policy of containment that aimed at preventing any further consolidation of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany. Prussia and Austria fought on the same side, broadly speaking, during the War of the Spanish Succession, but the reports of the British envoys in Berlin reveal frequent tensions and resentments over issues ranging from the acknowledgement of titles to the deployment of coalition troops and delays in the payment of subsidies.19 Although Frederick William I (who acceded in 1713) was something of an imperial patriot who had no wish to contest the Emperor’s primacy, there was periodic friction over Protestant rights within the Empire and fury in Berlin over the Emperor’s willingness to have the complaints of the Estates of the Hohenzollern lands aired before the Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna, as if the King in Prussia were just a minor imperial potentate, a ‘Prince of Zipfel-Zerbst’, as Frederick William himself put it.
The breaking point for Frederick William I was the Emperor’s failure in 1738 to support the still outstanding Brandenburg claim to the Rhenish Duchy of Berg. Frederick William’s foreign policy was almost exclusively focused on securing the Berg title, and the Emperor had promised, as a quid pro quo for Berlin’s approval of the Pragmatic Sanction, to support Brandenburg against the other claimants in the region. In 1738, however, Austria broke this commitment and supported a rival claim. This came as a bitter blow to Frederick William, who is s
aid to have pointed to his son, saying: ‘There is the man who will avenge me!’20 A shared rage over Austrian ‘betrayal’ did much to bridge the divide between father and son during the last years of the reign, and a secret treaty of April 1739, by which France acknowledged Brandenburg’s ‘ownership’ of the Duchy of Berg, foreshadowed the orientation away from Austria and towards France that would be a feature of his son’s early reign. In his ‘last address’ to his son, delivered when the old king was dying on 28 May 1740, Frederick William warned the crown prince that the House of Austria should not be trusted and would always strive to diminish the standing of Brandenburg-Prussia: ‘Vienna will never forsake this invariable maxim.’21
Why Silesia? There was an outstanding Hohenzollern territorial claim to various parts of the province, based on the Habsburgs’ earlier appropriation of the Hohenzollern fief of Jaägerndorf (1621), and the Silesian Piast territories of Liegnitz, Brieg and Wohlau (1675), to which the Hohenzollerns claimed the right of succession. Frederick himself made light of these moth-eaten titles and historians have generally followed him in this, seeing the legal briefs drawn up in support of the Silesian claim as a mere fig-leaf for an act of naked aggression. Whether they should be dismissed altogether is questionable, given the elephantine memory of the Hohenzollern dynasty – and indeed of early-modern European dynasties in general – for unfulfilled inheritance claims.22 But a more pressing reason for the choice of Silesia was simply that this was the only Habsburg province that shared a frontier with Brandenburg. It happened also to be very lightly defended – there were only 8,000 Austrian troops stationed in the province in 1740. It was a long, thumb-shaped territory that extended to the north-west from the borders of Habsburg Bohemia to the southern margin of the Neumark. Through its length ran the river Oder, whose stream rises in the mountains of Upper Silesia and meanders to the north-west, bisecting Brandenburg and entering the sea at Stettin in Pomerania. Silesia yielded more income in tax to Vienna than any other of the hereditary Austrian lands. It was one of the most densely industrialized areas of early modern German Europe, with a substantial textiles sector specializing in linen manufacture, and its annexation would bring to the Prussian lands an element of productive intensity that they had hitherto lacked.
Yet there is little evidence to suggest that economic factors weighed heavily in Frederick’s calculations – the habit of assessing the value of territories in terms of their productive potential had not yet established itself. Strategic considerations were more important. Of these the foremost was probably the apprehension that the Saxons, who also had claims to make against the Austrians, would themselves attempt to take the province, or part of it, if the King of Prussia did not act first. Like Britain and Hanover, Saxony and Poland were at this time in personal union, Elector Frederick Augustus II of Saxony doubling as King Augustus III of Poland. The lands of the Saxon dynasty thus lay on either side of Silesia and it seemed highly likely that the Saxons would attempt to close the gap in some way. Sure enough, when Charles VI died, the Saxons offered Maria Theresa their support in return for the cession of a land corridor across Silesia between Saxony and Poland. Had this project been realized, the Saxon monarchy would have controlled a vast swathe of contiguous territory completely enclosing Brandenburg to the south and the east. It might well have eclipsed Prussia permanently, with long-term consequences that are difficult to imagine.
Frederick’s behaviour around the time of the attack on Silesia suggests a spontaneity verging on recklessness. He acted with breathtaking speed. He appears to have reached his decision to invade within a few days – perhaps in one day – of receiving the news of Charles VI’s unexpected death.23 His contemporary utterances convey a tone of youthful machismo and a thirst for renown. ‘Depart for your appointment with glory!’, he called to officers of the Berlin regiment about to leave for Silesia. References to his ‘rendez-vous with fame’ and his desire to ‘see his name in the gazettes’ recur frequently in the correspondence.24 To this we should add the personal animus that Frederick had harboured against the House of Habsburg since their involvement in the crisis precipitated by his attempted flight in the summer of 1730. Frederick had experienced in the most intimate way the meaning of Brandenburg-Prussia’s subordinate position within the Empire, and though he bore his tribulations with an outward show of equanimity, a smouldering resentment of his lot made itself felt in his refusal to be reconciled to the marriage arranged for him – with Austrian approval – to Elisabeth of Brunswick-Bevern. The emphasis on emotional motivation may run against the grain of Frederick’s later historical chronicles, in which he presents himself as the hyper-rational executor of a bloodless raison d’état, but it is fully in accordance with his more fundamental beliefs about the motive forces behind historical change: ‘It is the lot of human affairs to be guided by the passions of men,’ he wrote in his History of the House of Brandenburg, ‘and reasons which were originally childish can ultimately lead to great upheavals.’25
Whatever the relative weight of the motives behind it, the invasion of Silesia committed Frederick to a long, hard struggle over the newly won province. The Austrians counter-attacked in the spring of 1741, but the momentum of their campaign was broken on 10 April by a Prussian victory at Mollwitz to the south-east of Breslau, which gave the signal for a general war of partition, known as the War of the Austrian Succession. By the end of May, France and Spain had pledged in the Treaty of Nymphenburg to support the Bavarian Elector Charles Albert’s candidacy for the imperial throne and his dubious claim to most of the Habsburg hereditary lands (France and Spain were to be awarded Belgium and Lombardy for their pains). The League of Nymphenburg eventually included not only France, Spain and Bavaria, but also Saxony, Savoy-Piedmont and Prussia. Had the plans hatched by this coalition been realized, Maria Theresa would ultimately have been left with only Hungary and Inner Austria. Hyena-like, the states of western Europe gathered for the kill, each warily watching the others.
Although the emergence of the Nymphenburg coalition served Frederick’s interests in 1741, his commitment to it was half-hearted. He did not wish to see Austria dismembered and he certainly had no desire to see Saxony or Bavaria aggrandized at Austria’s expense. After the spring campaign, his money was running out fast and he had no intention of being dragged into further adventures by a coalition whose objectives he did not share. In the summer of 1742, Frederick abandoned his coalition partners and signed a separate peace with Austria. Under the terms of the Treaty of Breslau and a supplementary agreement signed in Berlin, Brandenburg-Prussia agreed to abstain from further campaigning in return for formally acknowledged possession of Silesia.
During the following twenty-four months, Frederick stayed outside the fight, monitoring its progress and making various military improvements. In August 1744, when the balance tipped back in Austria’s favour and a renewed counter-offensive against Silesia seemed likely, he re-entered the fray, scoring two further impressive victories at Hohenfriedeberg (June 1745) and Soor (September 1745). In December 1745, following a further Prussian victory at Kesselsdorf, Frederick once again left the Nymphenburg allies in the lurch to sign a separate peace with Austria. Under the terms of the Peace of Dresden, he agreed to withdraw once again from the war in return for a renewed ratification of his possession of Silesia. Having won two Silesian wars (1740–42 and 1744–5), Prussia would remain a non-combatant throughout the remainder of the War of the Austrian Succession. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed in October 1748, formally ended the war and reconfirmed Prussian ownership of Silesia with an international guarantee signed by Britain and France.
Frederick had pulled off an extraordinary coup. For the first time, a lesser German principality had successfully challenged Habsburg primacy within the Empire to place itself on an equal footing with Vienna. In this, the army created by Frederick’s father played a crucial role. The Prussian victories of the first two Silesian wars were due above all to the discipline and striking power of Frederick
William’s infantry. At the battle of Mollwitz (10 April 1741) in southern Silesia, for example, the Prussians initially lost control of the field after an Austrian cavalry charge against the Prussian right-flank cavalry. So great was the panic and confusion among the Prussian horsemen that Frederick was prevailed upon by his experienced commander General Kurt Christoph von Schwerin to flee the field – an incident that would often be retold and embellished by his enemies. But in the meanwhile, the infantry, packed in their lines between the two Prussian flanks, unaware that the king had left the field, moved forward in perfect order, ‘like moving walls’, according to an Austrian observer, using their coordinated weapon drill to concentrate firepower against the Austrian infantry lines and sweeping all before them. By evening, it was clear that the Prussians, despite heavy casualties, controlled the field.
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