Force and coercion played a role in securing the acquiescence of local elites, but protracted negotiations, mediation and the convergence of interests, though less spectacular, were far more important.69 The Brandenburg administration pursued a flexible two-track approach, with the Elector pushing hard at intervals for key concessions and his officials working to restore consensus in between. Towns too, could benefit from this pragmatic approach. In return for rendering a formal declaration of fealty to the Elector in 1665, the little Westphalian city of Soest in the County of Mark was allowed to retain its ancient ‘constitution’, incorporating a unique system of self-government and municipal justice run by elected functionaries recruited from the corporate elites70
If we survey the situation at the end of the century from the vantage point of the rural localities, then it is clear that the nobility had conserved much of its jurisdictional autonomy and socio-economic power and remained the dominant force in the land. They retained the right to assemble at their own behest in order to deliberate on issues affecting the welfare of their regions. They controlled the collection and allocation of taxes in the countryside. More importantly, Estate bodies at district level (Kreisstaände) retained the right to elect the district governor (Landrat), ensuring that this crucial figure in the administration remained – into the late eighteenth century – an intermediary who answered not only to the sovereign, but also to local corporate interests.71
If, however, we focus instead on the political power structures of the Hohenzollern territories, it becomes plain that the relationship between the central administration and the provincial estates had been irreversibly transformed. Plenary assemblies of the corporate representatives of the provincial nobilities became increasingly rare – the last such meeting of the Altmark and Mittelmark nobilities took place in 1683. Thereafter the business of the Estates and their dealings with government were managed through small deputations of permanent delegates known as ‘lesser committees’ (engere Ausschüsse). The corporate nobility had retreated from the high ground of the state, focusing its collective attention on the locality and relinquishing its territorial political ambitions. Court and country had grown apart.
LEGACY
At the close of the seventeenth century, Brandenburg-Prussia was the largest German principality after Austria. Its long scatter of territories stretched like an uneven line of stepping-stones from the Rhineland to the eastern Baltic. Much of what had been promised in the marriage and inheritance contracts of the sixteenth century had now been made real. As the Elector told a tearful bedside gathering on 7 May two days before his death, his reign had been, by God’s grace, a long and happy one, though difficult and ‘full of war and trouble’. ‘Everyone knows the sad disorder the country was in when I began my reign; through God’s help I have improved it, am respected by my friends and feared by my enemies.’72 His celebrated great-grandson, Frederick the Great, would later declare that the history of Prussia’s ascent began with the reign of the Great Elector, for it was he who had established ‘the solid foundations’ of its later greatness. Echoes of this argument resound in the great nineteenth-century narratives of the Prussian school.
It is clear that the military and foreign-political exploits of this reign did define, in formal terms, a new point of departure for Brandenburg. From 1660, Frederick William was the sovereign ruler of Ducal Prussia, a territory outside the Holy Roman Empire. He had superseded his ancestral political condition. He was no longer merely an imperial potentate, but a European prince. It is a mark of his attachment to this new status that he sought from the court of Louis XIV the official denomination ‘Mon Frère’ traditionally accorded only to sovereign princes.73 During the reign of his successor Elector Frederick III, the Ducal Prussian sovereignty would be used to acquire the title of king for the House of Hohenzollern. In due course, even the ancient and venerable name of Brandenburg would be overshadowed by ‘Kingdom of Prussia’, the name increasingly used in the eighteenth century for the totality of the northern Hohenzollern lands.
The Elector himself was alert to the import of the changes that had been wrought during his reign. In 1667, he composed a ‘Fatherly Instruction’ for his heir. The document began, in the manner of the traditional princely testament, with exhortations to lead a pious and God-fearing life, but it soon broadened into a political tract of a type without precedent in the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Sharp contrasts were drawn between past and present: the Elector reminded his son of how the acquisition of sovereignty over Ducal Prussia had annulled the ‘intolerable condition’ of vassalage to the Crown of Poland that had oppressed his forebears. ‘All this cannot be described; the Archive and the accounts will bear witness to it.’74 The future Elector was also urged to develop an historical perspective on the problems that beset him in the present. Industrious consultation of the archive would reveal not only how important it was to maintain good relations with France, but also how these should be balanced with ‘the respect that You, as an Elector, must have for the Reich and Emperor’. There was also a strong sense of the new order established by the Peace of Westphalia and the importance of defending it if necessary against any power or powers that should set out to overturn it.75 In short, this was a document acutely sensitive to its own location in history and charged with an awareness of the tension between historical continuity and the forces of change.
Closely linked to the Elector’s alertness to historical contingency was an acute sensitivity to the vulnerability of his achievement: what had been made could always be unmade. The Swedes would always be waiting for the next chance ‘by cunning or by force’ to wrest control of the Baltic coast from Brandenburg. The Poles, together with the Prussians themselves, would take the first opportunity to return Ducal Prussia to its ‘prior condition’.76 It followed that the task of his successors would not be to extend further the territories of the House of Brandenburg, but to safeguard what was already rightfully theirs:
Be sure at all times that you live as far as possible in mutual trust, friendship and correspondence with all the Electors, princes and Estates of the Empire, and that you give them no cause for ill-will, and keep the good peace. And because God had blessed our House with many lands, you should look only to their conservation, and be sure that you do not awaken great envy and enmity through the quest for further lands or jeopardize thereby what you already possess.77
It is worth emphasizing this note of edginess. It articulates one of the abiding themes of Brandenburg-Prussian foreign policy. Underlying Berlin’s view of the world there was always a sharp undertone of vulnerability. The restless activism that would become a hallmark of Prussian foreign policy began with the remembered trauma of the Thirty Years War. We hear it resounding in the doleful phrases of the ‘Fatherly Instruction’: ‘For one thing is quite certain, if You simply sit still, in the belief that the fire is still far from Your borders: then Your lands will become the theatre on which the tragedy is played out.’78 We hear it again in Frederick William’s words of 1671 to the chief minister Otto von Schwerin: ‘I have experienced neutrality before; even under the most favourable conditions, you are treated badly. I have vowed never to be neutral again until I die.’79 It is one of the central problems of Brandenburg-Prussian history that this sense of vulnerability proved so inescapable.
4
Majesty
CORONATION
On 18 January 1701, Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg was crowned ‘King in Prussia’ in the city of Königsberg. The splendour of the event was unprecedented in the history of the House of Hohenzollern. According to one contemporary report, 30,000 horses were required to relay the Electoral family, their retainers and their luggage, all packed into 1,800 carriages, eastwards along the road from Berlin to the place of coronation. On their way, they passed villages hung with decorations, their main thoroughfares lined with burning torches, or even draped with fine cloth. The celebrations began on 15 January in Königsberg, when heralds wearing bl
ue velvet livery emblazoned with the new royal coat of arms passed through the city, proclaiming the Duchy of Prussia a sovereign kingdom.
The coronation itself began on the morning of 18 January in the audience chamber of the Elector, where a throne had been erected specially for the occasion. Dressed in a scarlet and gold coat glittering with diamond buttons and a crimson mantle with an ermine lining and attended by a small gathering of male family members, courtiers and senior local officials, the Elector placed the crown on his own head, took his sceptre in hand and received the homage of those present. He then passed into the chambers of his wife, whom he crowned as his queen in the presence of their household. After representatives of the Estates had rendered homage, the royal couple processed to the castle church in order to be anointed. Here they were greeted at the entrance by two bishops, one Lutheran and one Reformed (Calvinist), both of whom had been appointed to their offices specifically for this purpose, in deference to the bi-confessional character of the Brandenburg-Prussian state. After some hymns and a sermon, a royal fanfare of drums and trumpets announced the high point of the service: the king rose from his throne and knelt at the altar while the Calvinist Bishop Ursinus wet two fingers of his right hand in the oil and anointed the forehead and the right and left wrists (above the pulse) of the king. The same ritual was then performed upon the queen. To the accompaniment of a musical acclamation, the clergymen involved in the service gathered before the throne and rendered homage. After further hymns and prayers, a senior court official stood up to announce a general pardon for all offenders, excluding blasphemers, murderers, debtors and those guilty of lèsemajesté.1
In terms of the proportion of territorial wealth consumed, the coronation of 1701 must surely be the most expensive single event in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia. Even by the standards of an age that revelled in courtly ceremonial as an expression of power, the Prussian coronation was unusually splendid. The government levied a special crown tax to cover its expenditures, but this brought in a total of only 500,000 thalers – three-fifths of this amount were paid out for the queen’s crown alone, and the royal crown, fashioned of precious metal and studded over its entire surface with diamonds, accounted for the rest and more besides. Reconstructing the total cost of the festivities is difficult, since no integrated account survives, but it has been estimated that around 6 million thalers were spent in all for the ceremony and attendant festivities, about twice the annual revenues of the Hohenzollern administration.
The coronation was singular in another sense too. It was entirely custom-made: an invention designed to serve the purposes of a specific historical moment. The designer was Frederick I himself, who was responsible for every detail, not only of the new royal insignia, the secular rituals and the liturgy in the castle church, but also for the style and colour of the garments worn by the chief participants. There was a staff of experts to advise on monarchical ceremonial. Foremost among these was the poet Johann von Besser who served as master of ceremonies at Frederick’s court from 1690 until the end of the reign and possessed a wide-ranging knowledge of English, French, German, Italian and Scandinavian courtly traditions. But the key decisions always fell to the Elector.
The ceremony that resulted was a unique and highly self-conscious amalgam of borrowings from historical European coronations, some recent, others of older vintage. Frederick designed his coronation not only with a view to its aesthetic impact, but also in order to broadcast what he regarded as the defining features of his kingly status. The form of the crown, which was not an open band, but a domed metal structure closed at the top, symbolized the all-embracing power of a monarch who encompassed in his own person both secular and spiritual sovereignty. The fact, moreover, that the king, in contrast to the prevailing European practice, crowned himself in a separate ceremony before being anointed at the hands of his clergy, pointed up the autonomous character of his office, its independence from any worldly or spiritual authority (save that of God himself). A description of the coronation by Johann Christian Lünig, a renowned contemporary expert on the courtly ‘science of ceremony’, explained the significance of this step.
Kings who accept their kingdom and sovereignty from the Estates usually only take up the purple mantle, the crown and sceptre and mount the throne after they have been anointed: [… ] but His Majesty [Friedrich I], who has not received His Kingdom through the assistance of the Estates or of any other [party], had no need whatever of such a handing-over, but rather received his crown after the manner of the ancient kings from his own foundation.2
Given the recent history of Brandenburg and Ducal Prussia, the importance of these symbolic gestures is obvious enough. The Great Elector’s struggle with the Prussian Estates and particularly the city of Königsberg was still a memory with the power to disturb – it is a telling detail that the Prussian Estates were never consulted over the coronation and were informed of the forthcoming festivity only in December 1700. Equally important was the independence of the new kingdom from any kind of Polish or imperial claim. Everyone knows, the British envoy George Stepney had reported to James Vernon, Secretary of State for the Northern Department, in 1698,
the value this Elector sets upon [… ] the absolute soveraignety wherewith he possesses the Ducal Prussia, for in that respect he exceeds in Power all other Electors and Princes of the Empire, who are not so independent but derive their grandeur by investiture from the Emperor, for which reasons, the Elector affects to be distinguished by some more extraordinary title than what is common to the rest of his colleagues.3
6. Frederick I, King in Prussia (Elector 1688–1701; king 1701–13), painted after his coronation, attributed to Samuel Theodor Gericke
One of the reasons for adopting the title ‘King in Prussia’ – an unusual title that occasioned some amusement at the European courts – was that it freed the new crown from any Polish claims pertaining to ‘royal’ Prussia, which was still within the Polish Commonwealth. In negotiations with Vienna, particular care was expended to ensure that the wording of any agreement would make it clear that the Emperor was not ‘creating’ (creieren) the new royal title, but merely ‘acknowledging’ (agnoszieren) it. A much disputed passage of the final agreement between Berlin and Vienna paid lip service to the special primacy of the Emperor as the senior monarch of Christendom, but also made it clear that the Prussian Crown was an entirely independent foundation, for which the Emperor’s approval was a courtesy rather than an obligation.
In 1701, as so often before, Berlin owed its good fortune to international developments. The Emperor would probably not have cooperated in the Elector’s elevation had it not been for the fact that he stood in urgent need of Brandenburg’s support. The epochal struggle between Habsburg and Bourbon was about to enter a new and bloody phase, as a coalition of European powers gathered to oppose French designs to place a grandson of Louis XIV on the vacant Spanish throne. Anticipating a major conflagration, the Emperor saw that he would have to make concessions in order to win Frederick’s support. Wooed with attractive offers from both sides, the Elector hesitated, swinging from one option to the other, but eventually decided to align himself with the Emperor in return for the Crown Treaty (Krontraktat) of 16 November 1700. Under this agreement, Frederick undertook to supply a contingent of 8,000 men to the Emperor and made various more general assurances of support for the House of Habsburg. The Viennese court agreed, for its part, not only to recognize the foundation of the new title, but also to work towards its general acceptance, both within the Holy Roman Empire and among the European powers.
The establishment of the royal title brought a massive expansion of the courtly establishment and a great unfurling of elaborate ceremonies. Many of these had an overtly historical dimension. There were splendid festivities to mark the anniversary of the coronation, the birthday of the queen, the birthday of the king, the conferral of the Order of the Black Eagle, the unveiling of a statue of the Great Elector. In this respect Frederick’s reign institu
tionalized the heightened historical consciousness that had been a feature of his predecessor’s understanding of his office and that had been percolating through the courts of western Europe since the late sixteenth century.4 It was Frederick who appointed Samuel Pufendorf Court Historiographer in 1688. Pufendorf’s remarkable history of the Great Elector’s reign was the first to make systematic use of archived government papers.
While other courts were preoccupied with the battles and sieges of the war currently waging over the Spanish succession, one contemporary English observer remarked with a note of exasperation, life in Berlin was an unceasing round of ‘shows, dancing and other such like devertions’.5 For the foreign envoys posted in Berlin, this quantum leap in courtly splendour meant that life became more expensive. In a report filed in the summer of 1703, the British envoy extraordinary (later ambassador) Lord Raby, noted that his ‘equipage, which in London was thought very fine, is nothing to those that are here’. The British despatches of this period are filled with complaints at the inordinate expense involved in maintaining appearances at what had suddenly become one of Europe’s most splendid courts. Apartments had to be refurnished, servants, carriages and horses kitted out to a more exacting and costly standard. ‘I find I shall be no gainer by my embassy,’ Raby dolefully commented in one of many veiled pleas for a more generous allowance.6
Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the new taste for elaborate ceremonial was the regime of mourning that followed the death of the king’s second wife, Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, in February 1705. The queen had been visiting her relatives in Hanover at the time of her death. A senior court official was ordered to take two battalions of Brandenburg troops to Hanover and bear the corpse back to Berlin, where it was to lie exposed on a bed of state for six months. Strictest orders were given that the ‘deepest mourning that is possible’ should be observed throughout the king’s dominions. All who came to court were ordered to cover themselves in long black cloaks and all apartments, coaches and equipages, including those of the foreign envoys, were to be ‘put into deep mourning’.
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