Frederick the Great

  So the Brunswick wedding duly happened. Frederick William gave his daughter-in-law the palace of Schönhausen, near Berlin, where she lived while Frederick went to the wars. His father had sent 10,000 men to help the Emperor against the French who were besieging Philippsburg on the Rhine. The Austrians were commanded by Prince Eugene, and Frederick was enchanted to think that he would fight his first battles under the tutelage of that legendary hero. But he soon realized that Eugene was old and had lost his magic. There was no engagement; Philippsburg fell and Frederick learnt nothing except that the Imperial army was in poor shape. He said that though his body was with the Austrians, his wishes were for a French victory.

  At the siege of Philippsburg he acquired a French friend, the Comte de Chasot. He had killed a member of the powerful Boufflers family in a duel and had fled to the Imperial ranks with a statement, signed by his colonel, that honour had demanded the duel. Frederick invited him to dinner, enchanted to meet a real Frenchman from France. The party was in full swing and Chasot, a jolly soul, was having a great success, when his horses arrived, sent after him by his fellow officers. Prince Eugene said: ‘You’d better sell them and we’ll give you some that speak German.’ Prince Liechtenstein bought them there and then—for much more than they were worth. The Prince of Orange said: ‘It always pays to sell horses to people who are dining well.’ Chasot stayed on with Frederick, not to fight against his own country but to chat and play the flute.

  More valuable than Chasot was Hans Karl von Winterfeldt whom Frederick also now met for the first time. Five years older than he, an officer whom Frederick William had already singled out for special jobs, a brilliant, single-minded, reliable German soldier, he had no airs and graces and peace-time accomplishments, and spoke no French. Frederick loved him deeply and unchangingly. ‘He was my friend and a good man, a man of soul.’

  On his way home Frederick went to Bayreuth to see Wilhelmine. It was rather a horrid surprise to her when he told her, most disagreeably, that she had better stop playing at queens and lead the life of a country lady—then she would be able to pay her debts, which he had no intention of doing. She cried. He offered to console her with a little music. Frederick often teased Wilhelmine but he always loved her best in the world. They spoke of their father’s possibly approaching end—he was seriously ill. Frederick, who was longing to succeed him, said how much he admired the behaviour of his father-in-law, the Duke of Brunswick, who had shown such politeness towards his son by dying. (At about this time the Prince of Wales was fervently praying that George II would be drowned on his way to Hanover.) Wilhelmine liked to think of her mother as a dowager. ‘It will be a furious blow to her.’

  At Potsdam, finding his father in a ghastly state, Frederick was very kind and loving to him, but began to make dispositions for his death, which seemed inevitable. He intended to take advantage of the weakness of the Imperial army and to invade Silesia there and then. But the King recovered. He was turning from his old loyalty to the Emperor whose behaviour over the English marriages rankled and who had also double-crossed him by promising Jülich and Berg to both him and Count von Sulzbach. Frederick William was always helping the Emperor in various ways but seemed to get nothing in return; he decided to send no more troops for the next campaign. The war was nearly over, and in October 1735 Louis XV and Charles VI arrived at a settlement by which Stanislas Leczinski was to rule over Lorraine while the Duke of that ancient province, the fiancé of Maria Theresa, was given the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. He minded passionately, and so did the Lorrainers, who now became to all intents and purposes French. Augustus of Saxony was then elected King of Poland. In concluding this treaty Charles VI did not even consult Frederick William in spite of the fact that anything to do with Poland concerned him vitally.

  In the summer of 1735 Frederick went to Prussia on a tour of inspection. At Frederick William’s accession it had been a miserably poor, wild, empty country where the old German gods still seemed to hang about among the ruined castles of the Teutonic knights. Frederick William was colonizing it with religious refugees, mostly from Salzburg where the Protestants were much persecuted. He organized every detail of the immigration and administration himself: the design of the towns, the crops to be grown, the extermination of vermin—from bears and wolves to squirrels. Huguenot immigrants were taught German and obliged to speak it. Frederick always affected to despise Prussia. He loathed the Gothic past and anything that reminded him of it, and he said there was not a single thinking person in the whole region. However, on this occasion he took trouble to please his father—he even sent home samples of the peasants’ bread—and though in some of his letters he declared that he was bored to death among the savages, he was truly very much impressed by the contrast between Frederick William’s lands and the surrounding Poland. In Prussia, order, prosperity and hundreds of children; in Poland, a desert.

  At the Prussian capital, Königsberg, Frederick paid his respects to Stanislas Leczinski who had taken refuge there, having been thrown out of Poland for the second time in his life. Frederick William had resisted a great deal of pressure from both Austrians and Russians to give him up—he even made him a small allowance. The ex-King and Frederick got on very well. They had long discussions on a subject which was always to fascinate Frederick, the immortality of the soul. Stanislas, a highly civilized, amusing, cynical man, was a tepid Roman Catholic; his holy daughter, the Queen of France, tried without much effect to keep him on the right road. Frederick hated and despised the Christian religion which had wrought such devastation in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War; his views on God were to be contradictory all his life. Like Voltaire, whose influence over him was already considerable, he believed in a Superior Being but not in one who bothers about individuals. In the bottom of his heart he seems to have believed in immortality; but he liked to startle people with a mixture of Bayle’s metaphysics and Voltaire’s jokes.

  When he returned to Brandenburg after his tour of Prussia, Frederick was on better terms with his father than ever before; both realized that, as long as they lived apart, they could get on perfectly well. ‘Keep away from Jupiter,’ said Frederick, ‘there is less danger of thunderbolts.’

  6. Out of a Rembrandt into a Watteau

  Frederick’s two little houses at Ruppin could not accommodate a Crown Princess, so Frederick William bought a property for him at near-by Rheinsberg. When he went campaigning the house was handed over to Knobelsdorff to be rebuilt according to Frederick’s ideas, that is to say in the delicious, light and airy taste of the day. It was said that going from Wusterhausen to Rheinsberg was like stepping out of a Rembrandt into a Watteau. The young couple began their life together there in 1736. Remusberg, Frederick called it (there was an improbable local legend that Remus had died there and was buried on an island in the lake), and here he surrounded himself with congenial souls, more like guests than courtiers. He was happy for the first time in his life. He, who had been so bored at Wusterhausen that he wished to erase the time there from his memory, was never bored again. He had his regimental duties at Ruppin; the rest of the day belonged to him.

  There is no more agreeable and fruitful environment for intellectual work than a well-run country house. The worker can spend as much time as he likes in his own apartment; when he comes downstairs for meals or for a promenade he finds cheerful company, intelligent conversation and music or theatricals in the evening. At Rheinsberg the worker was Frederick; he spent many hours alone in one of the two round towers that he and Knobelsdorff had preserved from the old house; here he had his library.

  Frederick had a touching desire to find out the causes of all he saw around him, and he thought that the best way of doing so would be to study literature and philosophy. In later life, having found out that le fond des choses is not so easily determined, he spoke ironically of his young ambitions; nevertheless, at Rheinsberg he acquired a solid grounding in European thought from Classical times. He was also preparing himself to be a king. ?
??Good intentions, love of mankind, and the hard work of a solitary can perhaps be beneficial to society and I flatter myself that I am not among its idle, useless members’, he wrote to Schaumburg-Lippe, thanking him for a huge man he had sent him for Frederick William. The only thing he wanted at Rheinsberg was books, more books and the money with which to buy them. He borrowed money from German princelings saying that, if he died, the repayment would be a true source of pain to Frederick William. He read six or seven hours a day, and sometimes all night. Every evening there was a concert except when the household got up a play, generally by Racine or Voltaire. On Sunday Frederick did not go to church with the others; he galloped over to Ruppin loudly declaiming a sermon by one of the great French preachers which he would then deliver, in French, to his soldiers. He knew all Bossuet by heart. German was never spoken at Rheinsberg where half the inhabitants, including the cook, were French.

  The household consisted of about twenty people. The Crown Princess had six ladies-in-waiting and a chaplain. The ladies, all Prussian, were no doubt rather provincial but seem to have been bright and gay; it was noticed however that the Prince had no mistress among them. At this time he did not object to female society; indeed he said that conversation languished without it. Three of the men were already attached to Frederick: La Motte Fouqué, Keyserling and Chasot (the French deserter); these soldiers stayed with him all their lives. Fond as he was of Keyserling and Chasot, his feelings for Fouqué were on a different level. He was about forty, a good, serious man; he never asked for anything; on the contrary, he said that Frederick did far too much for him, with the result that he received more favours than anybody else. In 1739 he quarrelled with the Old Dessauer and had to leave Brandenburg; Frederick took care of his children and sent them ‘to the school behind my house’—the next year he became King and the two men were never separated again. Fouqué was one of his most valued generals. Too many of Frederick’s friends died young or were killed in battle but Fouqué lived to a ripe old age. The other pearl of great price at Rheinsberg was Frederick’s secretary, Charles Étienne Jordan. He was also a French refugee, aged thirty-six, a Protestant pastor, rather rich, a widower with one daughter. To console himself at the death of his wife he had travelled and had been to England and the Netherlands. Frederick always said Jordan was the friend he had loved the most: ‘wise discreet Jordan, more lovable than Erasmus’; ‘good Jordan of my soul’; ‘so tender-hearted he would weep to think of the horrors in America’. On succeeding to the throne Frederick wrote: ‘I am your friend and brother more than your King.’ He was the only person to whom Frederick said tu. Jordan never lodged at Rheinsberg but lived in the town with his little girl.

  The Crown Prince and Princess and most of these friends were painted by Antoine Pesne, a Frenchman who had been brought to Berlin by Frederick’s grandfather Frederick I on Pesne’s return from the Italian journey always undertaken by painters in those days. He was an old fellow now, fifty-three, with a wife, Anne du Buisson, whom he had married in Rome. She, her father, three brothers and two sisters were all flower painters; the whole family lived together and Frederick persuaded them to settle at Rheinsberg where they were happy. Pesne was a dear. Knobelsdorff, Frederick’s architect, a Protestant from Silesia, had also gone to Italy to study art but he despised the ‘servile and perfidious’ Italians and all their doings since the Emperor Contstantine. Everything had to be Greek; so vases, colonnades and statues multiplied in and around the house. The only typical courtier among these people was Baron Bielfeld, who wrote an account of the life at Rheinsberg. The others, honest and busy, were all truly devoted to the Prince and got on well together.

  The atmosphere seems to have been idyllic, and the idyll was to last four years, a long time at Frederick’s age. When they were old, both he and his wife regarded it as their happiest time. Of the Crown Princess we know little except that she was dull, with a tendency to fussiness bordering on hysteria and that she used to gaze into Frederick’s eyes hoping to forestall his slightest wish. Frederick said he ‘paid his tribute to Hymen’ but there was no sign of a baby and this was a grief to Frederick William. He sent a splendid green velvet bed but with no result. He loved his daughter-in-law and never burst out at her. From time to time he summoned Frederick; at first he would be loving and hold Frederick under his charm, then the irritation exacerbated by physical agony took over. ‘If he can’t bear the sight of me why not leave me in peace at Remusberg?’ In remorse after one of these meetings Frederick William gave Frederick his stud farm, which brought a good income; Frederick was touched and delighted.

  In 1738 two members of fashionable cosmopolitan society visited Rheinsberg. They were an older and a younger man, travelling to England after having visited Russia together. Lord Baltimore, aged thirty-eight, was in the household of the Prince of Wales; scandalously debauched (according to Lord Lyttelton who had met him at Lunéville), he was a frequenter of foreign courts and his finances were not in too good a state. His friend was a handsome young Venetian, Algarotti; of the same age as Frederick, he had that Italian polish—a combination of the manners, tact and intelligence of an ancient race, a childlike joie de vivre and an easy sexuality—that operates so powerfully on the less sophisticated northerner. These were the first people of their kind whom Frederick had ever met; perhaps they confirmed him in an already latent homosexuality; he was certainly entranced by them and fell in love with Algarotti—so had Lord Hervey, Voltaire, Mme du Châtelet, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and many another. When Frederick knew him better and the glamour had worn off he said he was agreeable and many-sided but a wheedler with an eye to the main chance. But he was always fond of him. Lord Chesterfield called him ‘a led wit of Lord Hervey’s . . . a consummate coxcomb’, and Voltaire, ‘the most lovable of Italian amateurs; highly agreeable conversation’. Algarotti wrote books, now forgotten, on philosophy. The visitors stayed only a few days at Rheinsberg, but the Italian was soon to reappear.

  All his life Frederick loved to write and receive letters—the post-bag was a joy to him. He signed his letters Fédéric, which seemed more French and therefore more civilized than Frédéric—beautiful Friedrich, rich in peace, was never used. As soon as he was settled at Rheinsberg he wrote his first letter to Voltaire. It reads like a child’s homework—one feels he copied it out over and over again in his desire to please and possibly impress the man who had been his guiding star from childhood. No sparkle, no originality, not a joke. Also the Prince had to be careful, much as he longed to see Voltaire, not actually to invite him to Rheinsberg. Until Frederick William and his cane went to a better world that would have been rash indeed. Voltaire replied, hailing the advent of a Prince-philosopher; if the tumult of affairs and the wickedness of mankind did not change his divine nature Prussia could expect to have a Golden Age. He too was guarded in his hopes for a meeting; he had heard of the cane. Frederick sent Keyserling as his ambassador to Cirey; after this he and Voltaire wrote to each other until Voltaire’s death.

  His other correspondents at Rheinsberg were his father, to whom he sent amusing accounts of local doings; ‘Maman’ Camas, his mother’s lady-in-waiting and the wife of an old soldier; Grumbkow; and distinguished foreigners of all sorts. His letters always have a point of interest but they are at their most serious, least affected by the fashionable flippancy, in his correspondence with Ulrich von Suhm, formerly Saxon minister to Berlin, who had befriended him when he was a boy. Suhm was now representing Augustus III at the court of the Empress Anne of Russia. He and Frederick wrote on all subjects from metaphysics to European politics. Frederick wished to be informed about Russia, always a subject of preoccupation with him. Suhm replied, stressing its enormous size, that if Russia were highly populated like other European countries it would be master of the world. He says it is invincible in defence—the soldiers are first-class, utterly obedient. He loves St Petersburg for its beauty and the clear, cold air. He thinks highly of Biron, the Empress’s lover—Frederick says so does Keyse
rling who was at school with him and that he, Frederick, would not mind accepting a loan from him, though not from the Empress. He can’t get enough books (this was always his cry until his succession)—could he borrow some from Russia if he promised to return them? He would also like thirty skins of black sable. To Frederick’s grief Suhm died at Warsaw on his way home in 1740. He said the Prince was the most lovable and truly good person he had met during his pilgrimage through life.

  Frederick now applied himself to literary composition at which he laboured for the rest of his days. His collected works begin with an essay (1736) on the state of Europe, drawn mostly from information given him by Grumbkow. Here are his conclusions. Germany, fatally divided into small states and cursed with a language which is only a series of barbaric dialects, is a field waiting to be tilled. Italy is also divided: an ancient garden run to seed which, since all the alleys, statues and vases still exist, could easily be refertilized and could flower again. Full-blooded England, happy and rich, though without a single painter, sculptor or musician, mistress of groaning Scotland, tyrant of Ireland, makes little impact on the Continent. Austria, a noble old dame in fusty purple, has an internal malady likely to become dangerous at the death of the Emperor. Holland has subsided into cheese-making. France, light-hearted, funny, lovable from birth, can’t help being rich and strong (‘If God made the world for me he put France there for my entertainment’). Russia is a chaos, organized only yesterday and thrown into the path of history by a demiurge. Frederick notes that France and England will always be on different sides and that he can ally himself to whichever of them suits his book. As for Austria, it is necessary as a barrier against the Turks, but that is no reason why it should dominate Germany.