Back in Berlin, Frederick William gave a dinner-party of men only for Hotham at Charlottenburg. Everybody got drunk and one of the toasts was ‘Wilhelmine, Princess of Wales’. Of course this news flew to the palace, and the Queen thought at last her wish had come true; she was beside herself with joy, embraced the Princess of Wales and called her governess, Mlle de Sonsfeld, ‘Milady’. This optimism went on for some days; Frederick William seemed to be pondering over Sir Charles’s propositions. But George II stuck to his original offer of both marriages or neither, while Frederick William said that his son was not old enough to marry and furthermore that the English were too fond of meddling in Continental politics and, with their mania for keeping a balance of power, would end by giving France the ascendancy. Then he furiously told Hotham that he had heard from London—the idea there was that once Frederick was married to Princess Amelia, Prussia would become a dependency of Hanover. That, said Hotham, had been put about by Seckendorf and Grumbkow; and in order to prove his point he gave Frederick William a letter from Grumbkow to Reichenbach telling him exactly what to put in his next dispatch. At this, Frederick William flew into a furious rage with Hotham for interfering between himself and his servants. He shouted insults at Sir Charles, flung the letter on the ground, some say he lifted his boot as though to kick His Excellency, and rushed from the room slamming the door. He said later that he knew all about Grumbkow but he supposed he might be allowed to employ the rogues that suited him. His Britannic Majesty having thus been publicly insulted in the person of his envoy, the said envoy had no choice but to pack his bags and prepare to leave Berlin, which he did, in spite of conciliatory messages from Frederick William and the tearful entreaties of Frederick. The affair of the English marriages was over; Grumbkow and Seckendorf had triumphed.
*He was a Courlander of the same family as the philosopher Keyserling, 1880–1946.
3. Escape
The departure of Sir Charles Hotham threw Frederick into despair. The King told him he was not fit for marriage, in other words that he would not be allowed an establishment of his own but must face ever-increasing persecution in his father’s house for an indefinite period. While Hotham was in Berlin there had seemed to be hope; now there was none. Frederick William said, ‘If my father had treated me as I treat you I wouldn’t have put up with it—I would have killed myself or run away.’ Frederick loved life and had no intention of killing himself, but he was determined to run away.
A new English envoy appeared in Berlin, Captain Guy Dickens, or, as the children called him, ‘Gidikins’. Frederick made a secret rendezvous with him at the gate of the Potsdam palace; he was accompanied by Katte and took Dickens into his confidence. He told him that his plan was to spend six weeks in Paris and then go to England. Dickens passed on the information to George II, who was quite as reluctant to receive Frederick as Louis XV was. The King sent word that the time was not ripe and begged the Prince to put off his journey. Furthermore, he promised that if he did so he would pay his debts as he had done already, more than once. Frederick, who owed 7,000 thalers, asked for 15,000, and promised not to escape from Potsdam. Meanwhile, Colonel von Rochow got wind that something was going on and he spoke to Katte about it. Frederick’s grown-up friends knew the danger he was in, but his behaviour was, as he said himself years later, furieusement inconsidéré and Katte’s was worse. He threw out dark hints and boasted of the Crown Prince’s confidence. He had the money, the maps and Frederick’s grey topcoat in his keeping. Lieutenant Keith, now posted at Wesel, and his young brother, one of Frederick William’s pages, were in the plot—the latter most reluctantly.
In July 1730 Frederick William went on a tour of Germany to pay neighbourly visits and to inspect his own outlying lands. After some hesitation he decided to take Frederick—it seemed safer than to leave him at home. Frederick saw the journey as a God-sent opportunity for flight since it would bring him near the French frontier. He travelled in a coach with Rochow, General von Buddenbrock and another officer—elderly, distinguished veterans of the wars of Prince Eugene; they were enjoined not to let Frederick out of their sight. The page Keith was in attendance on the King but Katte was left behind, trying vainly to get leave so that he could join the party somewhere on the road. It was arranged that when Frederick gave the signal he would come, leave or no leave. They wrote every day by messenger. As the grey coat had been left with Katte, Frederick bought some red cloth and had it made up by the tailor of one of his hosts. Colonel von Rochow was aware of this.
The journey began with Leipzig, Altenburg, Saalfeld, Coburg, Bamberg and Erlangen. At Erlangen, Rittmeister (cavalry captain) von Katte paid his duty to Frederick; he was Katte’s first cousin and was there looking for giants. Nuremberg and Heilbronn took the travellers on to Ansbach to stay with Frederick’s young sister. Here Frederick got a letter brought by Katte’s soldier servant. He had come by way of Erlangen where he asked the Rittmeister how he could find the Crown Prince. Owing to Katte’s careless talk the Rittmeister had heard rumours of a dangerous project; he gave the soldier another letter to carry, from himself to Rochow, advising him to be vigilant. The next thing that happened was that a letter from Frederick to Katte, on which he had forgotten to write ‘Berlin’, was delivered to the Rittmeister. He opened it, read it and sent it to Rochow.
When the travellers left Ansbach they passed by the battlefield of Blenheim. Marlborough had been dead only eight years; Eugene was still alive, and all the senior officers in Frederick William’s suite, including of course the Old Dessauer and Seckendorf, had fought in the battle. They took the Crown Prince over the ground and explained every detail of the action to him. He was always to be interested in the battles of Marlborough and Prince Eugene. Then on to Augsburg whence Frederick wrote again to Katte. He said that as they had not been able to meet he thought it would be better to give up the idea of the French frontier and that as soon as Katte got a signal he must go to The Hague and ask for the Comte d’Alberville. He should bring the Count’s topcoat and money and remember that if anything went wrong the Count would have taken refuge in some monastery where nobody would think of looking for such a heretic. He told the page Keith to get two good horses; Keith hated the whole business but could not say no to the Prince. Frederick had half hoped to find Katte at Ludwigsburg, where he and his father stayed with Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Württemberg, but there was no sign of him.
The next stop was a little town called Sinzheim. Frederick William did not fancy the inn there and preferred to sleep in the outbuildings of a farm-house. There were two barns, one for the King and the other for Frederick and his three companions. Frederick thought the moment had now come or never. He decided to slip away at dawn with Keith, who had got the horses, and be over the Rhine before anybody could catch up with them. At two o’clock, when daybreak was glimmering and his guardians were snoring, Frederick silently dressed, put on his new coat and crept out of the barn. But of course Rochow, not born yesterday, had made dispositions, and he was woken up by his valet who told him that the Crown Prince was outside in a red coat. Rochow went outside. Sure enough, there was Frederick, leaning on one of the carriages while Keith came towards him riding one horse and leading another.
‘What’s this—what are you doing?’ said Rochow. Keith calmly replied that the horses were for him and the other page and he had understood there was to be an early start.
‘Not before five. Go back to the stables.’
Frederick strolled towards the King’s barn and ran into Seckendorf. Rochow said, ‘How do you like His Royal Highness in his red coat?’
Nothing was said to Frederick William and the party got on the road as arranged. Though Frederick’s carriage had started an hour before his father’s, the King was at Mannheim first. He was seen to be uneasy, quite incapable of making small talk with his host, the Elector Palatine. At last the Elector sent an equerry to look for the Prince, who was not far off and very soon turned up. The King knew all; the wretched Keith had lost hi
s head and made a full confession during the journey. When Rochow arrived Frederick William questioned him and he was obliged to confirm the story. However, nothing was said, except that before dinner Frederick William muttered to his son, ‘Still here? I thought you’d be in Paris by now.’ But he often made this sort of observation, and Frederick was not sure that it meant the worst.
The next stop was Darmstadt where they stayed with the Prince of Hesse; then on to Frankfurt to embark on yachts which would take them via Bonn and Cologne to Wesel, which was a Hohenzollern possession. As Frederick’s carriage approached Frankfurt Rochow told him that he had orders to take him straight to the royal yacht where he was to wait while the King was receiving a municipal welcome. Things were beginning to look nasty, but they were worse than either Frederick or his companions knew. For, in Frankfurt, Frederick’s latest letter to Katte had fallen into Frederick William’s hands. It had gone by mistake to the Rittmeister, who had sent it to the King. This letter has disappeared but it would have been written in French and in the jaunty, joking tone which Frederick affected with his friend. It threw Frederick William into a blind fury.
He had hitherto bottled up his feelings out of consideration for his hosts; now, further maddened by the letter, he had got the Prince on a Hohenzollern yacht. When he arrived on board there were scenes of the utmost violence. The King drew his sword; General von Buddenbrock threw himself in front of the Prince, saying, ‘Over my dead body’. So the cane was brought into play and soon Frederick’s face was running with blood. At last Buddenbrock and the others extricated him and hurried him off to another yacht, and the party set sail for Bonn. Frederick was seeing the Rhine for the first time in his life. At Bonn he managed to send word to Lieutenant Keith at Wesel, telling him to fly, which he did, and he had a talk with Seckendorf during which he ate humble pie and begged the General to do what he could for Keith and Katte. At Wesel he had another interview with his father, very much on the lines of the first. He made things even worse by reminding Frederick William that he had taunted him for putting up with his bad treatment. After that he was a prisoner, guarded by two soldiers with fixed bayonets.
Meanwhile, the news had reached Berlin. Frederick William wrote to the Queen’s Mistress of the Robes, Mme de Kamecke: ‘Fritz has tried to desert and I am obliged to put him under arrest. Please tell my wife without alarming her too much. And spare a thought for a most unhappy father.’ He also ordered the arrest of Katte. This would never have taken place but for the suicidal behaviour of the young man. His Colonel gave him a day in which to make himself scarce. In the afternoon a fellow officer met him in the street: ‘Still here, Katte?’ He replied vaguely that he would be off that evening. When he had not gone the next morning they were obliged to arrest him. Frederick thought the reason was that he was after some girl.
When the King arrived in Berlin, having kept everybody in agonized suspense by lingering on the way, there was a reign of terror. Foreign diplomats describing it to their governments hardly expected to be believed. Frederick William beat and kicked Wilhelmine, shouting that he knew she had had a baby by Katte. He then lurched after the smaller children, who scattered in a fright; he might have killed one of them had not Mme de Kamecke lost her temper with him and cried out: ‘Go to the devil, but leave these children alone!’ The next day he thanked her for it. Nevertheless, he shut up Wilhelmine in two rooms with Mlle de Sonsfeld. The Queen was made to drink to the downfall of England. A Frenchman who had lent money to Frederick was hanged in effigy (he had fled), and a young girl who used to play tender duets with the Crown Prince was publicly whipped. Frederick William sent for Katte and beat and kicked him before handing him over to the army to be questioned. He wanted to have him put to the torture but Grumbkow drew the line at that. Katte told no more than was known already, adding that he would have followed the Prince but had never really expected him to go.
Frederick was shut up in the fortress of Küstrin, in solitary confinement. His door might only be opened four times a day, for meals and the removal of the chaise percée. Nobody was allowed to speak to him. He asked for Holy Communion but Frederick William knew that this was in order to have somebody, even if only a pastor, to chat to; he sent a message to say that the suitable time would be after the court martial. That seemed distinctly ominous. Grumbkow and other officers came to interrogate him; he adopted a bantering tone with Grumbkow, but his answers to the interrogation were brilliant. Try as they might the military lawyers could not get him to admit to having planned desertion; if he had not, the affair was merely a family one between himself and his father; he had broken no law. Frederick William was half pleased, half furious with the boy for being so clever.
There was soon much sympathy for him among his gaolers. The governor of Küstrin began to obey only the letter of Frederick William’s rules. The door was not opened but a hole was made in the ceiling of his cell through which came the governor’s little boy of seven with books, pens and paper and delicious things to eat. Then the Old Dessauer sent Captain Baron de La Motte Fouqué to keep him company, a charming person, a friend for life.
Frederick William was more miserable and tormented than ever before; he could not make up his mind what to do with the boy. His own violent physical reactions were often accompanied by a perfectly lucid grasp of a situation, and he realized that Frederick had come to a cross-roads; his future and that of his country depended on the path which he would follow, and it was Frederick William’s duty, as his father, to put him on the good one. If he failed, would it be right to bequeath the State for which he had slaved and the best army in the world to ‘a little French marquis’, a frivolous ne’er-do-weel? But in his heart he knew there was more to Frederick than that, just as Frederick knew in his heart that his father was better than a crowned ogre. Recalling this time in later life, Frederick said, ‘I never ceased to revere him’, and spoke of his sensibility. The Queen, who might have been such a valuable link between the two men, was useless to them; she moaned about the palace, flogging that dead horse, the English marriages. Frederick William’s only confidant was the Old Dessauer. He told him that at least his conscience was clear; he had never spared the rod in his efforts to bring up the boy properly. He was shocked to hear from Grumbkow that Frederick was still for ever laughing and teasing. Did he take nothing seriously? He must be made to understand that life is more than little tunes, jokes and French verses.
The military tribunal sat at the end of October 1730. It was composed of a president, Lieutenant Colonel von der Schulenburg, who was a relation of Katte’s, Grumbkow, General Count von Schwerin, one of Frederick William’s best soldiers who had known and loved Frederick from a baby, another general, and nine officers down to the rank of captain. Katte was sentenced to prison for life. As for the Crown Prince, had he been convicted of desertion the penalty would have been death, but the court declared itself incompetent to try a Prince of the Empire and the case was sent back to the King. But in the tribunal’s report the Prince was given his styles and titles which had not been used since the escape, and the escape itself was not called desertion but retirade, échapade or Absentirung.
The King changed Katte’s sentence to that of death. He said Katte was not guilty of a mere juvenile escapade and that he was not an ordinary officer but an officer of the King’s Guard. If such as he were unfaithful the whole structure of the State would be in peril. Katte had plotted with the rising sun. Should he get off lightly (a life sentence would only be for Frederick William’s life) the King would never be able to trust his Guards again. Justice must be done. Frederick William’s severity was probably due to his conviction that Frederick and Katte were lovers. Katte’s father, the General, wrote to the King who replied: ‘Your son is a canaille; so is mine; there is nothing we can do about it.’ His grandfather, the Field Marshal, wrote and got a more sympathetic but negative reply. After that, Frederick William refused to see any more petitions. Katte’s mother was dead.
On the morning of
6 November Frederick was woken up in his cell by an old officer and some soldiers, all in tears. He thought they had come to execute him and told them to get it over quickly. But then he learnt that Katte had been brought to Küstrin the day before and was about to be beheaded in the courtyard outside Frederick’s window. The Prince broke down completely. He implored his gaolers to put off the execution on any excuse, to give him time to write to the King. He would offer to renounce his succession to the throne if only his friend could be saved. In vain. At the appointed hour Katte, in such a cheerful mood that it seems probable he thought the whole thing was play-acting, and that there would be a last-minute reprieve, was led under the Prince’s window where ‘he saw his beloved Jonathan’.* Frederick blew him a kiss and said, in French, ‘My dear Katte, I beg your pardon a thousand times.’ ‘Monseigneur,’ said Katte with a low bow, ‘there is nothing to forgive.’ He then knelt down and prayed, and his head was cut off with a sabre. Frederick was spared the dreadful sight—he had fallen in a dead faint.
Frederick the Great Page 5
