Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  At the beginning of the next month it was Louise’s turn to be cheered wildly as she stood on the palace balcony to watch the Prussian troops leaving Berlin, the banners dipping as they passed. Her popularity with the army at this point knew no bounds. Here was their beloved patroness, she who had in peacetime attended those morning parades, danced at their balls, befriended young officers in trouble; now she was to be not only their queen but their goddess of victory. Moreover Louise herself had always reciprocated these feelings. When the Tsar praised her good relationships with the military, the Queen replied that ‘such a respected estate, whose vocation brought such toil and changes of fortune could not be admired enough’.35

  Unknown to the Queen on her balcony, one of those swift changes of fortune which would affect the destiny of the bonny Prussian soldiers beneath her had already taken place. In late October Napoleon had secured the capitulation of the Austrians at Ulm; on 13 November he entered Vienna; on 2 December, in a brilliant striking manoeuvre, he had utterly crushed the Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz. When the news reached the Queen in Berlin, she exclaimed that ‘no one who is a German can hear of this and not be moved’. She was right to see the chilling significance of the defeat. Prussia for her part was simply told she must accept the territorial changes imposed: Hanover for example could be retained, but Ausbach (‘the cradle of the Hohenzollern race’ as Louise tearfully told Frederick William), Neuchâtel and Cleves with its fortress of Wesel must be given up. In June 1806 the Holy Roman Empire would be brutally ended, the Confederation of the Rhine put in its place.

  The Queen, passionately opposed to the ratification of this Treaty, wrote: ‘There is only one thing to be done, let us fight the Monster, let us beat the Monster down, and then we can talk of worries!’36 Her words became a patriotic slogan for the party still resolutely opposed to dealing with Napoleon, just as the Queen herself was increasingly credited with all the qualities of inspiration the King so signally lacked. Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick William’s clever raffish cousin, remarked that if the people knew how much Louise had done, they would raise altars to her everywhere. Even without the benefit of altars, popular admiration expressed itself in a thousand ways. One unit demanded that its name be changed to the Queen’s Cuirassiers! Let Louise lead them!

  With a weak king and a valiant queen, there was the inevitable emergence of the Better-Man Syndrome. After this period of debate and anxiety was over, Hardenberg would quote the famous words of Catherine de Foix to her husband Jean d’Albret: ‘If we had been born, you Catherine and I Don Jean, we would not have lost our kingdom.’ Queen Louise, he said, had an equal right to address her husband thus.37

  It was not until the autumn of 1806 that the Prussian King’s hopes of treating with France were formally abandoned; he agreed at last to combine with the allies including Russia, Austria and England, to try to beat the ‘Monster’. By this time Queen Louise’s personal fixation against Napoleon as the source of all their woes had begun to be matched by the anger of the Emperor at what the Prussians considered her patriotic fervour but he deemed her womanly interference in dragging Prussia away from France. The Bulletin of the Army, an official propaganda publication, printed a conversation Napoleon was said to have had with Marshal Berthier: ‘a beautiful queen wants to see a battle, so let us be gallant. Let us march off at once to Saxony.’ It went on to report Napoleon’s outburst quoted earlier concerning the Queen with her army ‘dressed as an Amazon’. On another occasion: ‘So – Mademoiselle de Mecklenburg [an allusion to Louise’s birth outside Prussia] wants to make war on me, does she? Let her come! I am not afraid of women.’38

  This elevation of Queen Louise to something more than a pretty woman attired from time to time in a becoming adaptation of military uniform suited both sides, in fact. But the Queen’s true intentions were probably better interpreted by Thomas Hardy later in his poetic drama The Dynasts, than by Napoleon. Here Hardy has the loyal Berliners protest against Napoleon’s insulting epithet of Amazon: ‘Her whose each act Shows but a mettled modest woman’s zeal … To fend off ill from home!’39 Alas, the mettled but modest Louise, like Armida, but for very different reasons, would all too soon find that very home laid low.

  The French victory over Prussia at the double battle Jena-Auerstädt on 14 October 1806 virtually obliterated the Prussian army, that force which had, under Frederick the Great – dead only twenty years before – terrorized Europe. In the wake of the general destruction, the Queen found herself enquiring wildly for her husband: ‘Where is the King?’ ‘I don’t know, Your Majesty.’ ‘But, my God, isn’t the King with the army?’ ‘The army? It no longer exists.’40 The Prussian army, Prussia itself and for that matter Queen Louise were none of them ever to be quite the same after this ghastly day of national humiliation. (The French Marshal Davout would be made Duc d’Auerstädt for defeating an army twice his own strength.) A week before the battle, Frederick von Gentz, the philosopher–politician, had an interview with the Queen at the Prussian war camp in which she expressed herself ‘with a precision, a firmness and energy, and at the same time with a restraint and wisdom, that would have enchanted me in a man’.41 Afterwards, the Queen was transformed into both a fugitive and an invalid.

  Her flight from the French was real enough. Napoleon had hoped that the Queen who had defied him would be captured. Although he was cross that she had escaped, he was at least able to exult in the Bulletin of the Army: ‘She has been driven headlong from danger to danger … she wanted to see blood, and the most precious blood in the kingdom has been shed.’ As for Louise’s health, that finally collapsed as she made her painful way via Berlin and Königsberg to Memel, safe on the borders of Russia but already wrapped in the Baltic winter. Snow was falling in heavy flakes as her husband’s cousin Princess Anton Radziwill watched Louise depart from Königsberg, lying down in her coach, barely able to wave a hand in farewell.42

  What was the Queen doing at the war camp in the first place? The Duke of Brunswick, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, was appalled to find her there, on the scene of battle, in her little carriage. ‘What are you doing here, Madame? For God’s sake, what are you doing here?’ he exclaimed. Then he pointed at the fortress occupied by the French: ‘Tomorrow we will have a bloody decisive day.’ The Queen departed very early the next morning with the noise of the cannonades in her ears: already the French could distinctly perceive her amid the Prussian lines, and in the event missed capturing her by a mere hour. (Later the Queen would remark wryly that the Duke of Brunswick’s order to retreat was the first time she ever heard him express himself either positively or energetically.)43

  Queen Louise’s official explanation for her presence was the King’s need of her support; Gentz at least accepted this, as did General Kalkreuth. She propped up the King’s waning confidence, he believed, and besides her presence had its usual encouraging effect on the soldiers. Kalkreuth’s reasoning was undoubtedly correct. Yet the grim truth was that on a battlefield, for the Prussians, King and soldiers alike, the encouragement of their goddess could avail little against the superior French. And a fancy-dress Warrior Queen, however patriotic, had little place there, when she might have been captured and given cause for still further exultation on the part of her enemies.

  Queen Louise’s tribulations were not at an end with her flight to Memel. How freezing, how forlorn and how horribly crowded with refugees was beloved Memel now, compared to that sweet summer place where she had danced with the Tsar four years earlier! The Queen herself was ill most of the time. She was still recovering from typhus, while that combination of a weak heart and congestion of the lungs which would finally kill her was beginning to take its toll. Diplomatic negotiations to save something for Prussia from the wreck of its defeat caused her further anguish, as the Prussian King and his advisers struggled to conciliate France while not antagonizing Russia. Perhaps the Queen derived some ironic amusement from her riposte to the hated French Marshal Bertrand who asked her to u
se her influence to bring about a proper peace between France and Prussia. ‘Women have no voice in the making of war and peace’, replied the Queen, with dignity. When Frederick William sent her a soldier’s pigtail, to indicate that the sacred but old-fashioned costume of the Prussian army was at last being modernized, Louise both laughed and wept. But by June tears were constantly dripping down the Queen’s cheeks, ‘despite her brave little games’ as the British envoy, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, noted.44

  Meanwhile the ‘Monster’, in the Queen’s own room at Weimar, gloated over the notes and reports which he found in her drawers, mixed with the other more delicate objects of her toilette, still perfumed by the musk which was used to scent them. ‘It seems as if what they say of her is true’, he noted. ‘She was here to fan the flames of war.’ Then he dismissed Louise as ‘a woman with a pretty face, but little intelligence and quite incapable of foreseeing the consequences of what she does’. He even managed a kind of compassion: ‘Now she is to be pitied rather than blamed, for she must be suffering agonies of remorse for all the evil she has done to her country and to her husband, who, everyone agrees, is an honourable man, wanting only the peace and welfare of his subjects.’45

  But at the City Hall in Berlin, Napoleon ranted on concerning the excellent example of the Turks who kept women out of politics (shades of Voltaire’s salute to that ‘woman and a Christian’, Catherine the Great!) and would not listen to two elderly ecclesiastics who praised their queen’s kindness and goodness. When the wife of Prince Hatzfeld pleaded on her knees for her husband’s life, on the other hand, Napoleon was pleased to grant the request and issued a picture commemorating the incident; that presumably was the proper position for a woman. Queen Louise was already suffering furious humiliation at Napoleon’s insinuations concerning her relationship with the Tsar. She burst out in a letter otherwise written in French: ‘Und man lebt und kann die Schmach nicht rächen’ (And one lives and cannot take revenge for the humiliation).46 She was now further punished by the issue of a very different picture. At the tomb of Frederick the Great, in a caricature of that secret night visit and its vows depicted in the popular print, Louise was shown in the guise of Lady Hamilton to the Tsar’s Nelson. Since Lady Hamilton was then notorious in Europe as the late Nelson’s mistress, the implication was clear.

  It was at this time that Queen Louise was traditionally supposed to have transcribed this harpist’s song (set by Schubert) from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, with its mournful quatrain:

  Who never ate his bread in sorrow

  Who never spent the darksome hours

  Weeping and watching for the morrow

  He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers!47

  But the greatest humiliation lay ahead. Its prelude was another crushing defeat: that of the Russian army under General Bennigsen at Friedland, twenty-seven miles south of Königsberg, on 15 June 1807. A week later it was the Tsar Alexander’s turn to negotiate a truce. This was the prayer of Louise to Alexander before the battle: ‘You are our only hope: do not abandon us, not for my sake, but for my husband’s sake, for the sake of my children, their future and their destiny.’ Her prayer would go for nothing compared to the crudeness of Realpolitik. Louise’s ‘only hope’ was indeed about to abandon them, as she would shortly discover.

  At Tilsit, while the Emperor Napoleon of France and the Tsar Alexander of Russia met on an island in the middle of the river, King Frederick William of Prussia was condemned to await their summons standing in the pouring rain, on the shore. His unhappy stance perfectly illustrated the comment of the Austrian Prince Metternich: at Tilsit Prussia descended from the first rank ‘to be ranged among powers of the Third Order’.48 What was Prussia’s fate likely to be – what territorial sacrifices, what financial reparations would be demanded at a treaty negotiated under such unpromising circumstances?

  It was at this point that someone at the Prussian court, convinced that the Queen’s ‘fascinating affability’ would win over ‘this Monster vomited from hell’ (the King’s phrase on this occasion), had the idea of sending for Louise. One German biographer suggests that it was Hardenberg and General Kalkreuth who decided to use the Queen. Another name proposed is that of Murat, working on Frederick William. But on the French side Talleyrand was certainly very much against it and, accepting Louise’s putative powers as an enchantress, enquired of Napoleon angrily: ‘Sire, will you jeopardize your greatest conquest for a pair of beautiful eyes?’49

  We know from the testimony of those young British diplomats stationed at Memel – all of them half in love with the Queen – how reluctant she was to go. Her health alone might have precluded such an ordeal. To the King, however, Louise wrote that her arrival would be a proof of her love for him: for as she confided to her diary, ‘this burden is demanded’, whatever it might cost her to be pleasant and courteous towards Napoleon.50 Louise was condemned to the ‘burden’ by the romantic Prussian belief, which she herself obviously shared, that she could succeed where male diplomacy failed. Furthermore, hopeful signs elicited, as it seemed, from the ‘Monster’ only underlined the general atmosphere of expectation: he drank the Queen’s health and asked with some tenderness after her family’s welfare.

  Perhaps it was as well that the Prussian courtiers could not read Napoleon’s reassuring letter to Josephine on the subject of the Prussian Queen’s ‘coquetting’: ‘I am like cere-cloth, along which everything of this sort slides without penetrating. It would cost me too dear to play the gallant on this subject.’ The Queen herself might have been more affronted by the merry gossip of the time in London where bets were being taken on whether she would get Napoleon to fall in love with her. The playwright Sheridan took, on the other hand, the cynical line that Louise would fall in love with Napoleon: from an empress to a housemaid, ‘all women are dazzled by glory, and sure to be in love with a Man whom they begin by hating and who has treated them ill …’.51

  In the event what happened satisfied neither the optimists, the romantics nor the cynics. The Queen arrived in Tilsit on 6 July.52 Napoleon behaved extremely courteously all along, ending dinner especially early out of regard for her delicate health. When the Queen gently taxed him, ‘Sire, I know you accuse me of meddling in politics’, Napoleon responded gallantly, ‘Ah, Madame, you must not believe that I listen only to malicious gossip’ (thus splendidly ignoring the subject of his own Bulletins of the Army). Nor did Louise herself find the ‘Monster’ as odious as she had expected (although she certainly did not fall in love with him).

  But while Louise saw it as her role to plead with him, as the traditional Queen-in-distress – ‘I am a wife and mother and it is by these titles that I appeal for your mercy on behalf of Prussia’ – Napoleon responded blandly with compliments on her white embroidered crêpe de Chine dress made in Breslau, and the superb collar she wore of her favourite pearls. After Louise’s death, Countess Voss would comment sadly on the Queen’s love of pearls, with their connotation of tears, as opposed to diamonds, which stood for prosperity; certainly there were tears enough to be shed on this occasion. Again and again the Queen tried to steer the conversation away from clothes back to the fate of Prussia itself. Privately, Napoleon rather admired her for her polite tenacity, how she always got back to her subject: ‘perhaps even too much so, and yet with perfect propriety and in a manner that aroused no antagonism’. He even went as far to admit that ‘In truth, the matter was an important one to her …’. Publicly, he would have none of it.

  There is a celebrated story concerning the occasion following the dinner when Napoleon went to call on Louise in her Tilsit lodgings; like many celebrated stories which sum up the popular image of a particular character (or characters) – the story of Queen Jinga and her royal ‘chair’ is another noted example – it has several variants. It seems that the Queen pleaded with Napoleon to exclude certain Prussian possessions from the confiscation which was planned as part of the peace treaty. Those to be reallocated included all the Prussian territories west of
the Elbe, not omitting Magdeburg itself, on the river, most of Prussian Poland (to be reconstituted as the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw) and the Silesian fortresses. It is not known for certain exactly which provinces the Queen named to Napoleon, but attention has generally focused on Magdeburg.

  The most colourful version of the story has Napoleon asking for a single rose from the Queen’s arrangement of flowers. In reply, the Queen asked for an exchange: ‘A rose for Magdeburg, Sire.’ Some biographers have found this behaviour on the part of the Queen to be uncharacteristically arch. In another version (which accords better with Napoleon’s own description of Louise as relentless – but dignified – in pursuit of her aims) the Queen struck a tragic note more or less on Napoleon’s arrival: ‘Sire, Justice! Justice! Magdeburg! Magdeburg!’ There is no dispute however about the Queen’s lack of success in securing from Napoleon even the slightest diminution of the harsh terms imposed upon Prussia, including an enormous bill of financial reparation. (Ironically enough, her reproaches to the Tsar for abandoning them did move him guiltily to plead for an alleviation of the Prussian punishment;53 Louise, however, had been brought to Tilsit to woo Napoleon, not to reproach the Tsar.)

  Everyone had been wrong: Frederick William, Hardenberg, General Kalkreuth, all those who had pinned their hopes on the ‘fascinating affability’ of their Queen. Three years before, seeing Louise dressed as Statira, wife of Alexander the Great (on that same occasion when she had struck Madame de Staël dumb with her beauty), Sir George Jackson had reflected that ‘our queen of beauty’ too would have conquered Alexander, ‘had the hero the happiness of seeing her’. But the Queen of beauty had not conquered the Alexander of the hour: Napoleon. Much later, on St Helena, Napoleon referred to her ‘winning ways’ as well as her attempts to win him over. The Queen on the other hand wept bitterly and continuously afterwards, according to Countess Voss, referring over and over again to her ‘deception’ and reading her favourite Schiller (The Thirty Years’ War) for comfort. ‘In that house’, she told one of the young Englishmen at Memel, referring to Tilsit, ‘I was cruelly deceived.’54 Napoleon had become once more the ‘Monster’, ‘this inhuman being’ who must be beaten down for the sake of the future of Prussia, of her husband and of her children.