Frederick the Great

by Nancy Mitford

  The Austrian army never moved and in October the campaign came to an end. The chief business of this war lay in the feeding of vast static armies; the soldiers, who did more foraging than fighting, called it the ‘Potato War’. By the Treaty of Teschen, May 1779, the Habsburgs gave up their claim to Bavaria, but took the small rich district of Burghausen. The Empress said, ‘I am not partial to Frederick but I must do him the justice to confess that he has acted nobly and honourably; he promised me to make peace on reasonable terms, and he has kept his word.’ So the Wittelsbachs were firmly established in Bavaria; they became kings in 1806 and produced the extraordinary Ludwig II. The influence of Prussia was now paramount in Germany.

  As soon as Frederick got back to Potsdam he took up the case of the miller Arnold. One of his favourite nephews, Duke Leopold of Brunswick, had a Private Arnold in his regiment who told him a long story of legal injustice to his brother, a miller. As it seemed that the miller had indeed been treated badly, Leopold went to his uncle, who ordered an investigation. The facts were as follows: Arnold took his water-mill on lease from Count von Schmettau; further up, the river flowed through the estate of Landrat von Gersdorf who, in 1770, deflected some of the water by making a fish-pond. The miller said that there was not now enough pressure to turn his wheel and on this pretext he refused to pay his rent. Count von Schmettau said he must pay or be evicted—if Arnold was really short of water he must sue Gersdorf. He gave him four years’ respite, then had him up in the local magistrate’s court (where Schmettau was suspected of having undue influence). Arnold lost the case and was evicted; the technical reason for the verdict was that, by an old law, Gersdorf could do as he liked with the water in his own stream. Also there seems to have been some doubt as to whether the pressure at the mill-wheel was really too much reduced to work it. For years Arnold and his energetic wife took the case from court to court, but they always lost. It was the sort of story that infuriated Frederick, who saw it as an example of the nobility trampling on modest folk with the sanction of a too rigid judiciary. He ordered it to go to the highest court of all; but once more the verdict was against the Arnolds.

  Frederick, suffering dreadfully from gout in his hands and his feet, and in a blinding rage, sent for Chancellor Fürst and the three judges who had tried the case. He was in his Berlin palace, his poor legs covered with rugs and his poor hands hidden in a muff. He told them that unjust judges were a greater danger to society than thieves. Fürst tried to speak. ‘Quick march,’ said the King, ‘your successor is appointed.’ As the Chancellor and the judges left the palace they were arrested and carried off to prison, where they found all the many magistrates who had had anything to do with Arnold. The next day the whole of the Berlin aristocracy and the high bourgeoisie called at Fürst’s house to express sympathy; Frederick could see the queue of coaches from his window. But outside his palace there gathered a vast crowd of what Carlyle calls ‘the dark peasant people’, most of them bearing petitions to say they had been quite as badly treated as the miller, if not worse. The rights and wrongs of the Arnold case are still argued to this day; Frederick’s interference angered the legal profession and complicated the administration of justice, especially in country places. Perhaps he felt that he had made a mistake; he never bothered his judges again.

  22. Winter

  So the King came to extreme old age. When he drove out in Berlin in his shabby carriage it went at a snail’s pace in order not to tire the ancient soldiers who formed his guard. While he was away at the Potato War two key figures in his life had disappeared within five days of each other. On 24 May 1778 the Earl Marischal sent for Hugh Elliot, the English Minister at Berlin: ‘Perhaps you have a message to give me for Lord Chatham [who had died on 11 May] whom I expect to see tomorrow. I will with pleasure take your dispatches.’ He duly took them the next day. He was about ninety and had been too frail for some time to go to the King’s suppers, but Frederick saw him every day and used to walk beside his bath chair in the gardens of Sans Souci. He was a grievous loss. Ermetulla went back to Neuchâtel where she lived to be a hundred, as boring as ever and in the end rather mad.

  On 30 May Voltaire died in Paris. Society people there said he had done more harm to his fellow men than a war, a plague or a famine. His letters were Frederick’s greatest joy, and latterly they had been so very affectionate, so filled with admiration, and so intimate that the quarrel seemed to be buried and forgotten at last. He used the same tone to other correspondents when writing about the King. Did he think he had destroyed that time bomb, the Mémoires pour servir à la Vie de M. de Voltaire, which is really a mémoire to serve for the destruction of the Great King? Had horrible Mme Denis hidden away a copy? It is only charitable to assume so, especially as in 1776 he wrote a second fragment of autobiography, Commentaire historique sur les Œuvres de l’ Auteur de la Henriade, unfortunately much less well known than the Mémoires pour servir, in which his friendship with Frederick falls into its real perspective. Here he says that the King was unaware of Freytag’s blunders at Frankfurt and that the adventure was very soon forgotten by both parties. It was a lovers’ quarrel, and (says Voltaire), ‘I must have been in the wrong’. It seems probable that Frederick never saw this work, which was not published under Voltaire’s name. The first he knew of the Mémoires pour servir was when Beaumarchais offered to sell him the manuscript; he replied, in effect, ‘Publish and be damned!’ No doubt he was wounded in his soul, since the Mémoires showed that Voltaire had really hated him for over forty years, and that when he had been such a kindly mentor to a young man searching for light in particularly dark surroundings, Voltaire was laughing at him all the time and thereafter had used him to his own ends. Frederick’s estimation of his fellow men was not improved by Voltaire’s baseness and duplicity. ‘You don’t know this damned race’, he said to a young schoolmaster who thought there was more good than evil in human beings. When a Berlin bookseller came to the palace and asked permission to sell the Mémoires Frederick said yes and hoped he would do well with it. He would merely ask him not to advertise it unduly. Autocratic though he had become, he never changed his attitude to free speech, especially where it concerned himself. Out riding one day he saw a crowd gazing at a vile caricature of him posted high above their heads. He told his A.D.C. to lower it. ‘They can’t see it properly up there’, he said. The crowd cheered him to the echo as he rode away.

  Frederick’s popularity at the end of his life has always been a subject of controversy, though he is generally admitted to have been idolized by the poor, the disinherited and the old soldiers he had led to the wars. Frederick himself thought that he had lived too long and that his people were probably as tired of him as the French had become of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He viewed the future without optimism. The despised Frederick William grew even fatter and stupider and more taken up with his women and their children. The King hardly ever saw him and minded the idea of being succeeded by him. He told Prince Henry that he loved his country too much to say après moi le déluge and that he would do what he could until his dying day to ensure its future; but he knew that when things went wrong after his death he would be blamed.

  According to the London papers Frederick was loathed in Berlin, but Hugh Elliot wrote to William Eden:

  You have no idea the joy the people express to see the King on horseback—all the Grub Street nonsense of a nation groaning under its burdens and governed with a rod of iron vanished before the sincere acclamations of all ranks who joined in testifying their enthusiasm for their monarch.

  In Breslau, where he still went every year for the army manœuvres, he was warmly greeted by the people, who always turned out to see him riding home of an evening. Somebody remarked that he seemed much loved here. ‘Put an old monkey on a horse’, said Frederick, ‘and they would cheer him the same.’ These manœuvres were a magnet to officers from all over the world who came to see the great King at work with his army.

  Sad to relate, he fell out with Catt afte
r an association of twenty-four years. He suspected him of taking bribes—one feels that this could not have been true. Catt, in his usual measured and dignified way, merely says that he was innocent and that it was a great sadness to him to be deprived of the King’s presence. There were no recriminations. He must have known that Frederick’s illnesses had made him strange.

  For company and jokes Frederick had a jolly young Italian, the Marchese Lucchesini, an excellent acquisition. Somebody said to the King that Lucchesini was clever enough to be used as an ambassador—Frederick agreed and said that was why he kept him in his household. After the death of the King he duly became an ambassador. He was not only very bright, well able to keep up with Frederick’s conversation, but also easy and tactful. He made no enemies. The suppers at Potsdam generally consisted of a few silent generals and Frederick and Lucchesini chatting away in French. Sometimes Frederick invited members of his Academy, which had gone sadly downhill of late, and, several times a year, the widow of Maupertuis. He still liked to see foreign visitors, especially Frenchmen. Ten years after their first meeting, the Prince de Ligne wanted to present his son ‘to the greatest man who ever lived’. He had to apply for permission to cross the Prussian frontier, which, since the Bavarian War, Frederick had closed to Imperial officers. Of course it was gladly given.

  The account of Ligne’s visit to Potsdam is the last portrait of Frederick written by a man of his own world, and it shows that in congenial company he could still be brilliant and gay—‘an old wizard who knows what people are thinking’. Ligne observes the eyes, strange and expressive as ever, the beautiful voice, the fascinating movement of his lips when speaking, his encyclopedic conversation and his extraordinarily courteous manners. If he asked a personal question he always said, Oserais-je vous demander? (Dare I ask you?)

  ‘I hadn’t realized you had got a grown-up son.’

  ‘He is even married, Sire, since a year ago.’

  ‘Dare I ask to whom?’

  ‘A Pole—a Massalska.’

  Frederick recalled that this lady’s grandmother had greatly distinguished herself by taking an active part in the siege of Danzig at the time of Stanislas Leczinski. They talked of all subjects under the sun; the King told stories of the wits he had known—Voltaire, Maupertuis and Algarotti (who had died in 1764), and then went back to the heroes of history: Francis I, Henri IV, Homer. Virgil was mentioned. ‘A great poet, Sire, but what a bad gardener!’ ‘To whom do you say it! Have I not tried to plant, hoe, dig and sow with the Georgics in my hand? My man says to me, “Monsieur, you’re a fool and so is your book—that’s not the way to work.” Oh my God, what a climate!’ Whenever Frederick said ‘Oh my God’, he would bring his hands slowly together and clasp them, in a way which made him look very good.

  He got the news that Charles of Lorraine had died and broke it to Ligne, who of course knew him well, having lived under his administration in the Austrian Netherlands. ‘The poor Prince depended upon too many people—I only had myself to look to. He was badly served and not always obeyed—none of that ever happened to me.’ Frederick went back to his pet theory, that one must cross the races of the Empire, and said that he had a liking for love-children. ‘Look at Maurice de Saxe and Anhalt.’ (A young Count von Anhalt, a bastard grandson of the Old Dessauer, was now one of Frederick’s favourite officers.)

  Ligne was more under the spell than ever. He went away and wrote what was, for a loyal subject of Maria Theresa’s, an extraordinary defence of Frederick’s policy, saying that the Empress had been wrong not to let him have Silesia in the first place and very wrong indeed to have instigated the Seven Years’ War. (Even Thomas Carlyle hardly goes as far.) The only thing about Frederick that Ligne did not admire was his taste in buildings and interior decoration. Ligne went much to Versailles, where the severe, dry, classical style Louis Seize was now the fashion. Frederick’s palaces seemed to him outmoded, provincial and overdone.

  Like Voltaire (and like most old people), Frederick thought that taste was declining. Voltaire had been outraged, just before his death, by a sudden fashion for Shakespeare in Paris. He said he had been the first to introduce to France ‘a few pearls I found in that vast manure heap’—now the manure heap was being swallowed whole. Frederick, who could only read Shakespeare in translation, had more excuse than Voltaire for seeing him as a barbarian. He had a horror of Romanticism in any form, and all savages—even noble ones, even if they were geniuses—filled him with despair. He found the new generation of writers unreadable and for his pleasure he went back to the great French classics of his youth. As for German literature, he doubted whether it would amount to much. He said two elements were missing: taste and language. The latter was too verbose: all civilized Germans spoke French so that their native tongue never became polished. Another drawback was the dialects, which were practically incomprehensible from one district to the next and of which none served as a model. German writers fell into the error of telling everything—they were bad historians, pedantic and dull, and were at their best in legal documents. Then he had second thoughts. He said that all the same, a taste for letters was certainly spreading—nature must now do her part and give birth to a few prodigies. The country of Leibniz must be able to produce others of that sort. Frederick himself would not live to see these happy days—he was Moses on the edge of the Promised Land. Meanwhile, he read Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen and said it was like a parody of the very worst efforts of Shakespeare.

  When Maria Theresa died in 1780 Frederick said she had honoured her throne and her sex. He had fought her but had never been her enemy. To Prince Henry: ‘Already half out of this world, I am obliged to redouble prudence and take steps and have my head full of all the odious projects to which that damned Joseph gives birth every day. I shall only be left in peace when my bones are covered with a little earth.’ He countered Joseph’s designs for the Empire with a Confederation of German Princes—that and signing a treaty of the most favoured nation with the future United States of America were his last political actions.

  At the Silesian manœuvres of 1784 the King was displeased with his army—he said he would as soon take a lot of tailors into battle and that if his generals did not show some improvement they would find themselves in the lock-up. The next year he realized that an effort had been made to satisfy him. The weather, always uncertain in August, was particularly bad, and one day the King, who scorned to wear a topcoat, was on horseback from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. in steadily pouring rain. When his boots were pulled off they were as full of water as two buckets. Then he gave a dinner for the generals and foreign visitors, among others those two erstwhile enemies, Lord Cornwallis and the Marquis de Lafayette. He went to bed in a high fever and never really recovered, though he made a tour of inspection in Silesia and attended manœuvres near Berlin before going home to Potsdam, to fall desperately ill.

  As well as all his usual miseries he now had appalling headaches and asthma, ‘a pitiless torturer that smothers you without finishing you off’. For months he spent his wakeful nights in an armchair. ‘If you are looking for a night-watchman,’ he said to a visitor, ‘you can employ me.’ Doctors came—he received them with his usual courtesy, pretending to believe in their remedies; but he knew that there was no cure for him. Sans Souci, where there were no stoves, became too cold as the winter drew on and he decided to move into the Potsdam town palace. But he always rode at Potsdam, keeping his carriage for Berlin, and he was too proud to break the rule; so he waited and waited, hoping in vain that one day he would feel able to get on his horse. In the end he had to be carried from Sans Souci to the palace in a sedan-chair at dead of night.

  In January 1786 he received his last foreign visitor of note, Mirabeau. The meeting was not a success. Frederick, like many others, was put off him by his extraordinary clothes and wig, his bad manners and general clumsiness. Ill and suffering as Frederick was he failed to go below the surface and discover the political genius of the man. He told Prince Henry that
Mirabeau was on his way to Russia where he would be safe to publish his sarcasms against his own country. Mirabeau, for his part, felt that he was not appreciated and Frederick did not charm him. His Histoire secrète de la Cour de Berlin is full of spiteful gossip about the King, who was not the only target; the book also aroused great fury in Dresden and Vienna. Prince Ferdinand, it said, was not the father of his children; Prince Henry, too, came in for some rough stuff: he was in Paris when the book appeared, and was asked what he thought about it. He replied with dignity that history would be his judge. Mirabeau’s huge and serious De la Monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand was compiled by a Prussian, Mauvillon, and is full of information on the economics of the time, written from a free trade point of view.