Frederick the Great

by Nancy Mitford

  I read Virgil’s Georgics and in the morning I send my gardener to the devil, for he says that neither Virgil nor I know anything about gardening. My parsley is up, my elder tree sprouting and the wild geese are back. Your strawberry seeds have come. I go into my garden to see at my leisure all the progress of springtime, the bursting and the flowering and, to use Fontenelle’s expression, I take nature in flagrante. I thought, I presumed, dear Milord, that you knew you would be welcome here but as you want me to repeat it let me assure you that winter and summer and night and day, in all the seasons, at all times and every hour you will be received with open arms by your faithful friend.

  Keith secretly sold the estates he had so recently recovered and turned his back on the Bonny Land for ever.

  Milord Maréchal, one of those people who know everybody, had a very unexpected friend. In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote both to him and to Frederick asking for asylum at Neuchâtel. He told Keith that he was a persecuted author and begged for fire and water refused him elsewhere. To the King:

  I have said bad things about you and shall probably say more; driven away from France, from Geneva, and from the canton of Berne I seek an asylum in your dominions . . . I have deserved no favours from you and seek none but would inform His Majesty that I am in his power and that he can do as he likes with me.

  It so happened that Milord Maréchal admired Rousseau’s writings and he longed to meet him. Frederick, on the other hand, greatly disliked his books but immediately said that they must shelter the poor creature, whose only sin was to have a singular outlook on life. However, it might be a good idea to stop him writing while in Neuchâtel, where the inhabitants were ticklish enough and the clergy fanatical enough already. Rousseau sarcastically engaged not to read or write or do anything but think. He was lent a house in Môtiers and settled there with Thérèse Levasseur; he told Keith that he would spend his time making lace with the village women and conversing with him. The two men took to each other in a perfectly exaggerated way—‘my son’, ‘my father’—they decided never to part again. ‘The main point in life I consider to be perfect reliance on people with whom one lives—I should have had that with Jean-Jacques and Ermetulla.’ When Milord went to Scotland Jean-Jacques was to join him there and live for evermore at Keith Hall, ‘our castle in the air’, while Frederick thought of building a hermitage for him at Sans Souci. Both these schemes fell through, or Frederick would certainly have had another resounding affair with another philosopher. Jean-Jacques soon made Neuchâtel too hot to hold him; people were beginning to notice that he was a little mad and, as Voltaire said, not one of those jolly madmen who do nobody any harm, but a particularly spiteful one. Milord continued to protect him, saying that he had been made unjust by misfortune and must be treated as an invalid; Frederick took the same view. But after some years, during which Milord had given himself much trouble over Jean-Jacques, he saw that his touchiness and devious ways made him impossible as a friend. He settled some money on him and begged him to spare him any more letters, as he longed for peace and quiet in his old age.

  Lord Keith’s decision to go and live at Potsdam was never regretted either by him or by the King. Frederick built him a little house facing up the slope on which Sans Souci stands and backing on the town. It had a garden of its own with a door into the King’s. Milord had to buy an extra plot, as the King, having designed the house himself, had forgotten sheds for the wood, the dung and for smoking the meat. He lived surrounded by pets as well as by his Tartars; a dog—Herr Schnell—and many monkeys who escaped so often that the path between his house and Sans Souci is called the Monkey Walk to this day. A place was always laid for the old man at Frederick’s table which he could occupy or not, as he pleased, and they never seemed to tire of each other’s company.

  By degrees Frederick and Voltaire made up their quarrel. Voltaire’s attitude to him was very much that of Prince Henry—he could not resist him yet there was a stinking little residue of hatred. They never risked another meeting but their correspondence was full of love and affection. Voltaire said his years at Sans Souci had been the happiest of his whole life: ‘I shall never console myself for having to end my days far from you’, while Frederick said, ‘Whatever happens, I shall have been of your generation.’ Voltaire began to wash the King’s dirty linen (in other words, correct his verses) again, while he helped Voltaire with money and moral support for the victims of the French religious laws whose defence took up so much of the old poet’s time and energy. Frederick, however, pointed out that a difference should be made between the appalling death of the innocent Calas and the fates of those who had knowingly and openly broken a law. In their case it was the law that should be changed. He added that no death sentence ought ever to be implemented without the considered assent of the ruler. As they grew old the two men hated organized religion more than ever for the cruelty it engendered. Frederick said that the knowledge of human nature which he had acquired in his profession made him doubt whether another two centuries would be enough to do away with the ‘Superstition Christicol’. It was he who first used the word l’infâme (referring to clerical superstition), a term which Voltaire made famous in his phrase écrasez l’infâme.

  When the widowed Queen Ulrica of Sweden visited Frederick, whom she had not seen since her marriage in 1746, she said that Berlin seemed dull without Voltaire. Frederick replied that he had been noticing that for sixteen years.

  21. The Potato War

  The Emperor Francis died in 1765 and Archduke Joseph then became Emperor, and co-Regent, with his mother Maria Theresa, of her lands. Frederick was anxious to meet him but the pédagogues, Kaunitz and elle, forbade Joseph to have anything to do with the monster. In 1769, however, the international system received a jolt: the Turks attacked the Russians. They had managed their campaign so stupidly that there was no element of surprise and the Russians had a year in which to prepare. They did so with their usual inefficiency; when hostilities began the leadership and commissariat were equally bad on both sides; but the Russians were soon winning so easily that their neighbours became alarmed. It seemed sensible to draw together, so Kaunitz and elle allowed Joseph to meet Frederick at Neisse. He fell at once under the King’s charm: ‘a genius and a wonderful talker but one senses the rogue in every word he says . . . we talk sixteen hours a day. He is quite unlike any of his portraits.’ Joseph, ever since the days when he had been lively as a squirrel in his mother’s arms, had been taught to consider the Prussian King as a rogue. He was still lively and Frederick was attracted to him: ‘His lovable nature was gay to the point of vivacity; but though he had a desire to learn he lacked the patience to study.’ Frederick behaved with an almost ironical politeness to his Emperor; he quite embarrassed him by springing to his stirrup whenever he mounted or dismounted, like a knight of olden times with his liege lord. The Prussians wore white uniforms like the Austrians, not wishing to meet them in the field blue of their erstwhile foes. Unfortunately, Frederick’s uniform was soon splattered with food and snuff and dogs’ hairs. ‘I am not clean enough for you,’ he said, ‘not fit to wear your colours.’ After this meeting the world was told that the two rulers had signed a treaty of neutrality in case of war between France and England and that Frederick had given the Emperor a copy of Maurice de Saxe’s Mes Rêveries. (It always lay by Joseph’s bed but, at his death, the pages were found to be uncut.) But rumour had it that they had been seen, not once but many times, bending over the map of Poland. When Frederick got home he hung a portrait of Joseph in his bedroom. ‘Better keep an eye on that young fellow’, he said; he thought him devouringly ambitious.

  Next year they met again in Moravia and this time Joseph was accompanied by Kaunitz, who had long political conversations with the King, preaching at him as he preached at Maria Theresa. The burden of his song was supposed to be the danger to Europe of the quarrel between Russia and Turkey, but once more the map of Poland was laid upon the table. He urged Frederick to use his influence with Cat
herine to make good feeling between the two Empresses. Frederick honestly did what he could, without much result. Also in the Emperor’s suite was the Prince de Ligne, one of the charmers of all time. His property near Brussels was in the Empire but he was more French than German—an enthusiastic soldier, man of letters and brilliant talker, he might have been made for Frederick. The two rulers found it easier to get on with each other when Ligne was there and they hardly let him out of their sight—a situation which was to be repeated when, eventually, Joseph met Catherine the Great. Ligne had fought in the Seven Years’ War and he and Frederick had many a gossip about the battles seen from different sides. He speaks in his memoirs of the magic of the King’s conversation. ‘People think he was jealous of Keith and Schwerin and delighted to have got them killed. This is how mediocrities love to belittle great men.’ Before they parted, the Prince was cordially bidden to Sans Souci.

  A few months later, in the winter of 1770, Prince Henry paid a visit to Catherine the Great, whom he had known as a child. She was beginning to enlarge her empire towards the west; she had already seized the Danubian principalities and was cocking an eye on Sweden and Poland. At the death of Augustus III she had, with Frederick’s approval and in defiance of Maria Theresa, placed her former lover, Poniatowski, on the throne and she now virtually controlled his anarchic country. The courtiers at St Petersburg thought Henry was a funny, stuffy little fellow with old-fashioned clothes and a most peculiar wig, but he got on with Catherine: they had the same taste for French literature and laughed at the same jokes. When he wrote home enthusiastic accounts of all he saw, Frederick replied, rather priggishly, that palaces and houses are of no interest compared with the establishment for educating girls which Henry had also been shown. The ostensible reason for his visit was to talk about the Russo-Turkish War; Frederick said that as, thank God, he was 900 miles from St Petersburg he left the discussions entirely to Henry. But presently a much more interesting subject came up. Somebody said the Austrians had seized two estates inside the Polish frontier on pretext of limiting the spread of the plague there. Catherine laughed: ‘Why don’t we all do that?’ Soon the joke became a reality and in a few months the First Partition of Poland between the two Empresses and Frederick took place. It affected about a quarter of the country—Austria and Russia each took ten times more than Prussia did.

  Frederick had long coveted the territory which lay between Brandenburg and East Prussia, so he made no difficulties and certainly felt no guilt at what others regarded as a robbery. Poland was as badly administered as Turkey and quite incapable of carrying out her historic mission of forming a barrier between Russia and the West; the people existed on the verge of starvation and lived more like animals than men; and Frederick knew that he could improve their lot. He made the common mistake of thinking that better living conditions make up to a people for loss of national identity. Maria Theresa did not see the matter with the same eye; she had always prided herself on never having broken the rules of international morality—furthermore she had not forgotten that it was the brave Poles under John Sobieski who had saved Vienna from the Turks in 1683. She made strenuous objections to the partition but they were overridden by Joseph and Kaunitz, to the amusement of Frederick who said, ‘She weeps but she takes.’ She took the province of Galicia, saying, ‘Placet, since so many great and learned men will have it so, but long after I am dead it will be known to what this violation of all that was hitherto held sacred will give rise.’ It gave rise to the total partitions of Poland in 1793 and 1795. Frederick would not have approved of them: to do away with the Polish State had never been his aim.

  When he went to inspect his new lands he told Prince Henry that West Prussia was a considerable acquisition but that, as it wouldn’t do to arouse jealousy, he was giving out that all he found there was sand, pines, heather and Jews. Indeed it was in a fearful condition. After a long visit in 1773 Frederick wrote to Voltaire:

  I have abolished serfdom, reformed the savage laws, opened a canal which joins up all the main rivers; I have rebuilt those villages razed to the ground after the plague in 1709; I have drained the marshes and established a police force where none existed . . . it is not reasonable that the country which produced Copernicus should be allowed to moulder in the barbarism that results from tyranny. Those hitherto in power have destroyed the schools, thinking that uneducated people are easily oppressed. These provinces cannot be compared with any European country—the only parallel would be Canada.

  Frederick thought that education was of prime necessity for a state because all depended on the next generation, but he had great difficulty in finding teachers. He was reduced to using old or invalid soldiers in some schools. So now that the great educating Order of the Jesuits was being turned out of every Catholic country, finally to be suppressed by a papal bull in 1773, he was delighted to welcome the fathers into his kingdom.

  One must never destroy things [he wrote to Voltaire]. It was a mistake to destroy the home of Jansenism at Port-Royal—how stupid the modern Jansenists have become! Why destroy those depositories of Greek and Roman civilization, those excellent professors of the humanities? Education will be the loser but as my brothers the very faithful, very Christian and apostolic Kings have thrown them out I am collecting as many as I can. I preserve the breed and presently I’ll sell them back again. I tell them so—I will easily get 300 thalers for you, my Father, and 600 for the Father Provincial.

  Voltaire remarked that Frederick, from having been a general in the army, was now the General of the Jesuits.

  At this time Voltaire was obsessed by the idea that Greece ought to be freed from Turkish rule. Frederick complained that having been bitterly scolded for his wars and having been told by the philosophes that all warfare was immoral he now received no fewer than twenty letters from his friend urging him to get mixed up in the troubles of the East. ‘Tell me,’ he wrote, ‘how can you stir up Europe to warfare when you and the encyclopédistes have expressed such sovereign contempt for warriors?’ To be sure, Voltaire said that on no account must democracy be restored in Greece: ‘Je n’aime pas le gouvernement de la canaille.’ Frederick had heard that the Greeks were quite as savage as the Turks, and he had no intention whatever of adding to his own problems by undertaking such a crusade. Catherine II played with the idea of putting her younger grandson on the throne of Constantine and gave him Greek nurses. When a third grandson was born Frederick said no doubt he was destined to become the Great Mogul.

  It was lucky that Frederick had got Milord Maréchal for company; his few remaining friends were dying fast. Mitchell went in 1771—the King stood weeping on his balcony as the coffin passed by—and ‘Maman’ Camas had died, at an enormous age. Quantz died in 1773, Fouqué died in 1774 and Quintus Icilius, whose death specially worried Prince Henry for his brother’s sake, followed in 1775, a horrible year for Frederick. He had lost too many teeth to be able to play his beloved flute any more (he allowed himself an extra hour in bed as compensation), was tormented by abscesses in his ear and on his knee and had a series of fearful attacks of gout. He kept his room for months and word went round that he was dying. The Austrian minister at Berlin duly informed Joseph, who sent a large army to Bohemia which, in the case of Frederick’s demise, was to advance on Brandenburg and demand Silesia. Thereafter Frederick mistrusted him more than ever. It was becoming evident that the Emperor intended to bring the German princes to heel and would soon challenge Frederick’s influence in the Empire.

  ‘If the Elector of Bavaria dies before me,’ Frederick wrote to Prince Henry, ‘we shall have to get on our horses again.’ Two years later, in 1777, this very thing happened: the senior branch of the Wittelsbachs became extinct and the Habsburgs decided to compensate themselves for the loss of Silesia by annexing Bavaria. Neither the distant and childless heir, nor his nephew the next heir, nor anybody else in the Empire, except Frederick, was in a position to do more than protest. Maria Theresa and Joseph had been told by their minister in B
erlin that the old King was far too ill to go to war. But, entirely opposed to such an enormous extension of Austrian territory, he began to mobilize.

  Many people in Prussia were against this war, which seemed a great risk to take for an insufficient reason, and at their head were the King’s brothers. Henry, now elderly and suffering from gout (though much less than Frederick was), no longer cared for soldiering and he was afraid that he would lose his high military reputation if things went wrong. However, when Frederick cracked the whip he reluctantly accepted to command an army. Ferdinand refused point-blank and got a sarcastic letter from the King urging him to take great care of his health and saying he was quite right to sacrifice his adored and favourite profession to it.

  Frederick addressed his officers. He said that though he was obliged, now, to travel in a coach, they would see him on a horse when the day of battle dawned. He left Berlin in April 1778 with an army of 100,000 and waited with it at Silberberg, not far from Glatz, while Kaunitz tried to find out whether he was bluffing or not. This time Saxony came down on Frederick’s side, so his communications were assured. The Austrian army was scattered and disorganized: had he wished to do so, he could easily have marched to Vienna and dictated his terms there. But he had lost his taste for warfare and would now do almost anything to avoid bloodshed. The disgust of his officers when this became apparent may be imagined but as usual he went his own way. Getting no further by negotiation, he and Henry took their troops into Bohemia in July. There was little fighting and most of what there was fell to Prince Henry, who distinguished himself in some minor actions brilliantly carried out. By this time the Austrians had assembled a large force; Frederick with his army sat on one bank of the Elbe, facing Joseph, Lacy and Loudon on the other. He never doubted that Joseph, in the prime of life, would be filled with an offensive spirit and he waited for this to manifest itself. Joseph was indeed longing to show the world what he could do with his fine army but he was held back by various considerations. Maria Theresa was against the war; the new accommodation between Russia and Turkey seemed to her an alarming factor in the balance of power; her French ally had refused to fight. In spite of an Austrian queen, France was returning to its old distrust of the Empire and the Foreign Minister, Vergennes, saw Frederick as the only brake on Austrian ambitions. Maria Theresa, saying that she and Frederick must not pull out each other’s grey hairs, began writing to him behind Joseph’s back.