Frederick the Great

by Nancy Mitford

  Frederick, who interfered in most things, left his judges alone (except, as we shall see, on one famous occasion). His law reforms were a source of great satisfaction to him. The death sentence had to be ratified by him, and never was, except in cases of murder. When a father and daughter were once sentenced to death for incest Frederick asked how they could be certain that he was her father, and let them off. He never executed women who had killed their babies. At a time when in England and most European countries people were executed for stealing Frederick only signed between eight and twelve death-warrants a year.

  To the end of his days the King expected the Austrians to force another war on him and as soon as the Seven Years’ War was over he began to cast about for allies. The Bourbons and Habsburgs seemed irrevocably bound together by a series of marriages. The English had no goodwill left for him, quite the contrary: having themselves behaved badly, they very naturally hated him. His reputation in England was that of an aggressor and a tyrant, ‘from whose vices History averts her eyes and which even Satire blushes to name’ (Lord Macaulay). Besides, as Mitchell observed, the English would never care for a Prince who said, ‘The butcher kills for the necessities of man but he does not enjoy killing; the sportsman kills for pleasure and should therefore be classed below the butcher.’ For some time England had been treating him as a potential enemy rather than an ally, and in 1762 Frederick’s envoy to Russia was shown a report from Prince Galitzin, in London, of a conversation with Lord Bute: he advised Peter III not to make peace with Frederick, since to do so might delay a general settlement. Frederick hated the English Prime Minister so much that one of his own horses, named Lord Bute, was put to the plough and other humiliating work. There remained Catherine the Great. Frederick signed a treaty with her and took immense pains to be on good terms with her, but he could hardly look upon such an ambitious and powerful woman as a reliable ally, even apart from the fact that, having seen the Russians at work, he was disinclined ever to call them into western Europe again. Although this treaty, after various ups and downs, proved durable and became a cornerstone of Prussian policy, Frederick thought it was his duty to make his country powerful enough to be independent of all alliances, and the rest of his life was given up to this objective.

  Frederick, probably owing to his illness, was now becoming decidedly eccentric and his habits of economy touched on miserliness. His uniform was patched and his boots were fit to be thrown away. His one suit of plain clothes was never renewed. His Italian greyhounds, fearfully spoilt, made messes everywhere and tore the silk of his curtains and chairs to ribbons; Sans Souci began to look like a rich man’s house inhabited by a tramp. But he was still generous to old friends. Fouqué, who lived in the country, wrote to say that presents of money were unnecessary though he loved the coffee, the china and the ear-trumpet he had just received.

  In view of all his public thrift and private parsimony Frederick’s new building venture caused a good deal of surprise and annoyed the bourgeoisie considerably. The moment the war was over he put in hand an enormous palace, the Neues Palais, in the park of Sans Souci, and decorated it regardless of cost. He never lived in it but went there from time to time with visiting sovereigns or house parties of young people. Some thought he built it to show the world he was far from ruined; others that the palace was intended to be a shop front for Prussian goods. Perhaps the truth was that Frederick, whose life for the past seven years had been so hard and had now become so bleak, thought that fate owed him a little pleasure. The palace was built in three years; it is impressive and contains some very beautiful interior decoration. Bearing a closed crown on the roof are the naked figures of the Empress, the Tsarina and Mme de Pompadour.

  20. The Uncle of Germany

  Frederick wrote constantly to the Duchess and told her all his news. M. d’Alembert has arrived at Potsdam (June 1763), even better in real life than in his books—natural, frank and peaceful by nature and very gay and witty. Frederick wants him to oblige the public by writing two works: an amplification of his Éléments de Philosophie et de Géometrie and an account of all the discoveries in physics since Bacon. If an old lady (the Empress Elizabeth) had not spat some blood and died, all the glimmerings of good sense and reason that illuminate Germany would have been smothered in triumphant superstition. But Frederick, who has much cause for rejoicing, finds nothing to console him for the fact that, now the war is over, he never sees his divine Duchess face to face. He is thinking of ways and means by which he can do so. He is sorry to hear that the Duke is not well, and he noticed, when last at Gotha, that he did not look like a good life—she had better make up her mind to an approaching separation. Now Frederick is expecting a crowd of nephews and great-nephews and -nieces—he’ll soon be the Uncle of Germany, as Mlle de Sonsfeld used to be Everybody’s Aunt. When one can’t be a grandfather one falls back on being a great-uncle and making the young giggle with one’s senile ramblings—it’s the fifth act of the play and one ends by being booed. (He told Prince Henry that he really ought to give a ball for the children but there seemed not to be enough people to ask—perhaps he should advertise for guests in the Intelligenzblatt.) There are many bankrupts at Amsterdam and Hamburg among financiers who made huge fortunes out of the war—how odd to think that the princes who ought to have been ruined by it are quite solvent. Things always happen differently from what one expects. Why are we born? Why this idiotic childhood? Why do we bother to educate the young? Why are we for ever eating, drinking, sleeping, pulling down, amassing and dissipating? It seems rather puerile when one thinks that death passes a sponge over all that has been.

  Frederick had sympathy for young people and was one of those who remember in old age what it is like to be young. Mme de Camas, in charge of the Queen’s household, wrote to him of a maid-of-honour who was in the family way and must be disgraced. He replied, ‘Somebody takes a poor girl in a moment of tenderness, says a lot of pretty things to her and gives her a child. Is it so dreadful? I’m bound to say I prefer a nature which is too loving to these dragons of chastity. You must get the poor girl away from the court without a scandal and preserve her reputation if you can.’ Mme de Camas was not pleased, but she had to obey.

  He often had his house full of nephews and nieces and was touchingly anxious to amuse them, once getting the great actor Lekain to come all the way from Paris on their account. He would urge them to go and visit Voltaire, saying that nothing was so useful to society as belles-lettres—a comfort and a consolation all through life and in the end the only pleasure left to somebody lucky enough to have cultivated a taste for them in youth. These young guests never knew for how long they were expected to stay; when the King was tired of them he would say, ‘I’m so sorry to hear you have got to leave tomorrow—ah well, pleasant moments cannot last for ever.’

  Unfortunately the heir, Frederick William, was a disappointment. When he was quite young, during the war, Frederick had been fond of him and proud of his looks—he was a blond giant—but too soon he became fat, self-indulgent and stupid. When Frederick sent him to visit foreign courts he did more harm than good, and was ignored or treated as a joke. He was married to his first cousin twice over, Elizabeth of Brunswick who, beautiful and high-spirited, refused to accept his infidelities in the usual meek way of princesses, and having had one daughter (the future Duchess of York) began to take lovers herself. This led to such tremendous quarrels that all hope of an heir disappeared. The King’s brothers, saying they refused to see their heritage bestowed upon a bastard, made him consent to a divorce—reluctantly, as he was fond of Elizabeth. He was always good to her. She went to live at Stettin where she survived until 1840 and made a centre for visitors to that town; she seems to have been unfailingly cheerful. Frederick William married again and became a family man par excellence, with two wives, two mistresses, countless concubines and a horde of children, all of whom he brought up himself. He really had time for nothing but filling cradles and rocking them.

  As much as Fr
ederick despised Frederick William he loved his younger brother, a second Prince Henry, who was beautiful, good and studious, with the judgment of a grown-up man. He called him his child: ‘He has stolen my heart.’ But in 1767 death once more took away a creature to whom the King was attached; the young man caught smallpox. Frederick’s letter telling Prince Henry that their nephew was no more is stained with tears. ‘Grief is eating into me—I know that everything comes to an end but this, my dear brother, does not diminish one’s sadness.’ It is probable that, had the smallpox taken the elder brother, Frederick would have worked with Henry and given him responsibility as he never did with Frederick William—not that the history of Prussia would have been different, since nothing could have stopped the French Revolution from sweeping the board; but Frederick’s old age might have been happier.

  That same year he lost the Duchess. He paid her a visit in the spring—in October she was dead. She was in a way replaced, as a much-liked female correspondent of the King’s, by the Electress Maria Antonia of Saxony. Augustus III, Augustus’s eldest son and Count Brühl all died within weeks of each other, soon after the end of the Seven Years’ War; the new Elector was a little boy of thirteen. His forty-year-old mother, Maria Antonia, became Regent. She was the daughter of the Emperor Charles VII, but had more spirit than he and more looks than her mother. She first wrote to send Frederick an opera she had composed; she asked him to do what he could to see that her son should be elected to the Polish throne. Frederick told her right out that it was impossible; the Empress Catherine wanted a puppet of her own in Poland so there was nothing to be done. But the friendship blossomed. The Electress paid a nine-day visit to Potsdam and said she had never had such an amusing time in her life and thereafter she and the King wrote to each other regularly.

  A nephew Frederick thoroughly disliked was the son of Ulrica, King Gustavus of Sweden, who was murdered at a masked ball in 1792. Nor was Frederika, the only child of Wilhelmine, anything but a worry to him. When she was sixteen and he twenty she had married a Prince of Württemberg. Frederick said at the time that they were too young and too much in love to be happy for long, and when the Prince began to take mistresses he said Frederika must make up her mind that their relationship would never be the same again—her best plan would be to turn her husband into her dearest friend. Wilhelmine had successfully done that very thing, but perhaps Frederika had not the character to do so; in any case the marriage was unhappy, childless and ended in divorce.

  Although Frederick was so loving to his wife’s brothers and sisters, whom he counted as his own, and to their children, and although, in his old age, he had less objection than formerly to the company of women, he remained as cold as ever to the Queen. When he dined at her house, which he did several times a year, he never spoke to her; he merely bowed and took his place at the table, opposite her. About fifteen years before his death he astounded the company by going up to her and asking after her health; they seem never to have exchanged another word.

  Prince Henry also got rid of his childless wife after the war, giving her a wing of his Berlin palace to live in and forbidding her to go to Rheinsberg. He was probably a homosexual—after an early age he had no women in his life. We hear of him dancing as a slave girl in the market, not that that means much, since people in those days loved dressing up as the opposite sex: that most manly of men, Frederick’s father, would dance with the Old Dessauer. As the years went by, Frederick and Prince Henry grew ever more intimate, though Henry was still eaten up with his jealousy of the King and said dreadful things about him to all and sundry, even foreign visitors to Rheinsberg. When Frederick’s Histoire de Mon Temps appeared, two years after his death, Henry poured out his malice in marginal notes to it; Frederick’s homage to his father calls forth the observation that ‘these are the only true words in the whole book’. In 1791 he put up a memorial at Rheinsberg to Augustus William and those officers who had distinguished themselves in the Silesian wars. Winterfeldt was not among them and, even more extraordinary, nor was Frederick. All the same the King was his lodestar, and he for his part noticed, or pretended to notice, nothing. His letters to Henry are written on an even tone of brotherly love. He wrote to him nearly every day, telling him all the State secrets and all that went on at Potsdam, the illnesses and deaths of his dogs and his own dreadful ills. These letters generally began ‘Mon très cher frère’, occasionally ‘Mon cher cœur’, or, if Henry had overstepped the mark with tiresome complaints, ‘Monseigneur’. Henry was always called Henri by his brothers and sisters, as Frederick was Fédéric, Amelia Amélie and Ulrica Ulrique. But there are a very few letters to Henry from the King in German, and these begin ‘An meinen Bruder Henrych’. He built a palace for him in the Unter den Linden, Berlin, and rewarded him for his services in the war by giving him the property of their childless cousin, the Margrave Charles of Brandenburg, who had died in 1762. Henry was now a rich man.

  The only intimate friend from old times whom the King found at Berlin on his return was d’Argens. Frederick owed him a great deal for his unfailingly optimistic and spirited letters during the war, and was truly very fond of him, but he no longer found him easy to live with. They were both ill, their nervous systems not up to much. Frederick made his usual mistake of seeing d’Argens all the time, and began to overdo the teasing. This note shows what it must have been like: ‘I promise to laugh at your jokes; to say that the place at Aix is the most beautiful in all Europe; that you’ve got the best laundress in the kingdom and the best valet of all the wise men . . .’ In 1765 d’Argens went home to Provence for a year and their letters were most loving. But when he came back the teasing was just the same and in 1768 he again asked permission to go home. He wrote pathetically from Dijon saying that nobody could have more admiration, attachment or respect for the King than he. He lived in gilded rooms at Potsdam but only left them in terror and hardly ever returned to them without having his heart wounded by some harsh joke. After that, silence, until, in July 1769, the King wrote to say that he hoped for him in September. He did not return then, and died in February 1771, a sad ending to a friendship of nearly thirty years. Frederick wrote three long, kind letters in his own hand to the Marquise—if there was anything at all he could do for her she only had to say the word. By her replies we can see that she bore him no grudge. He put up a monument to d’Argens in the Minims’ church at Aix-en-Provence.

  Lord Keith, accompanied by his little horde of Tartars, had been Governor of Neuchâtel since 1754. He had disliked it from the day of his arrival—the climate was so bad that one had to be indoors for eight months of every year and there was nobody to chat to; a book such as Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois aroused no excitement in that deadly place. A pastor who, evoking the love of God, had suggested that He would be unlikely to punish anybody for ever, was being persecuted by his colleagues; the population was engaged in desperate disputes about whether punishment after death was eternal or not. Frederick said surely those who longed for eternal punishment could have it without wishing it on others. As to punishment here on earth, he learnt to his horror that the ‘question’ and the stool of repentance, long ago abolished in Prussia, were still used in Neuchâtel. There was no theatre or opera and that, he said, accounted for the bigotry—men need a spectacle and, if there is nothing better, will make do with the Sacred Scaramouche. Milord Maréchal very nobly put up with the gloom of Neuchâtel in order not to add to the King’s burdens.

  In 1759 Frederick had asked his new ally George II to forgive Lord Keith and reverse his attainder, and an Act of Parliament was passed to that effect. Meanwhile, the Milord had gone to Spain on a secret mission to see if Charles III would use his good offices to call off the French, who were fighting Prussia without having declared war. Unfortunately Charles III was the son-in-law of Augustus III so there was nothing to be done there, but Milord resumed his friendship with the whole Royal family, the grandees and Wall, the Irish-born Minister for Foreign Affairs. He thus got wind of a
secret family pact between the French and the Spanish Bourbons. He sent a report to Pitt who would have immediately declared war on Spain had he not been overridden by his colleagues in the Cabinet and forced to resign. In the event no harm was done to the Spaniards, while Lord Keith had greatly furthered his own interests in England. However, when his mischief became known to Wall he had to get out of Spain quickly, and it was to London that he fled.

  He was well received by the King, took the oath of allegiance and went back to Neuchâtel. The British Government soon did more for him. His confiscated lands, like those of other Jacobites, had been bought by the York Building Society, now in liquidation; in 1763 the estates of the Earls of Panmure, Southesk and those of the Earl Marischal were put up to public auction in Edinburgh. The owners all went to the sale, nobody bid against them and each retrieved his own lands for a song, amid loud cheering. It seemed as if Lord Keith had come home for good. But he had hardly settled into Keith Hall before he caught a fearful cold; he was soon complaining loudly of the climate and the neighbours—even drearier, it seemed, than at Neuchâtel. Nor was he popular with them. They thought he had become a courtier and had forgotten old friends; they were shocked by his behaviour to the Spaniards; and his strictures on Charles Edward, whom he accused of every vice under the sun, including cowardice, were badly received. The provincial Scotch were not aware of the depths to which their Prince had sunk since the romantic days of Flora Macdonald. Meanwhile, Frederick was imploring the Milord to go and live at Sans Souci.