The court was in deeper mourning than ever I saw in my life, for the women all had black head clothes and Black veils that cover’d them all over, so no face was to be seen. The men all in long black cloakes and the rooms all hung with cloath the top as well as the bottom, and but four candles in each room, so that one could hardly distinguish the king from the rest but by the height of his cloake, which was held up by a gentleman of the bedchamber.7
Hand in hand with the ratcheting up of courtly splendour and ceremonial went a boom in cultural investment that was unprecedented in the history of the dynasty. The last decades of the Great Elector’s reign had seen a growth in representative building in the capital city, but this paled into insignificance beside the projects launched during the reign of his successor. A huge palace complex with an extensive pleasure garden was constructed in Charlottenburg under the direction of the Swedish master builder Johann Friedrich Eosander, and there was a proliferation of representative sculpture across the city, the most notable example being the striking equestrian statue of the Great Elector designed by Andreas Schlüter. The old war-scarred town of Berlin began to disappear beneath the broad paved streets and stately buildings of a graceful residential city.
In July 1700, as his quest for the royal title approached a successful conclusion, Frederick founded a Royal Scientific Society, later renamed the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, and thus acquired one of the most prized contemporary attributes of dynastic distinction.8 A medallion designed by the philosopher Leibniz to commemorate the inauguration of the society (which was officially established on 11 July, the sovereign’s birthday) displayed on one side a portrait of the Elector, on the other an image of the Brandenburg eagle flying upwards towards the constellation known as the Eagle and bearing the motto: ‘he strives for the stars he knows’.9
Was the Prussian royal title, with all the pomp and circumstance that attended it, worth the money and effort spent acquiring and living up to it? The most famous answer to this question was a scathing negative. For Frederick’s grandson Frederick II the entire exercise amounted to little more than an indulgence of the Elector’s vanity, as he explained in a remarkably spiteful portrait of the first Prussian king:
He was small and misshapen, his expression was proud, his physiognomy vulgar. His soul was like a mirror that throws back every object. [… ] He mistook vanities for true greatness. He was more concerned with appearances than with useful things that are soundly made. [… ] He only desired the crown so hotly because he needed a superficial pretext to justify his weakness for ceremony and his wasteful extravagance. [… ] All in all: he was great in small things and small in great things. And it was his misfortune to find a place in history between a father and a son whose superior talents cast him in shadow.10
It is certainly the case that Frederick’s court establishment incurred costs that were unsustainable in the longer term, and it is true that the first king took great pleasure in magnificent festivities and elaborately choreographed ceremonies. But the emphasis on personal foibles is in some respects misplaced. Frederick I was not the only European ruler to seek elevation to kingly status at this time – the Grand Duke of Tuscany had acquired the right to be addressed as ‘Royal Highness’ in 1691; the same right was acquired during the following years by the dukes of Savoy and Lorraine. More importantly from Berlin’s perspective, a number of rival German dynasties were angling for a royal title during the 1690s. The Elector of Saxony converted to Catholicism in order to get himself elected King of Poland in 1697, and negotiations began at around the same time over the possible succession of the Electoral House of Hanover to the British royal throne. The Bavarians and the Palatine Wittelsbachs were likewise engaged with (ultimately futile) plans to capture a royal title, either by elevation or, in the latter case, by securing a claim to the ‘royal throne of Armenia’. In other words, the coronation of 1701 was no isolated personal caprice, but part of a wave of regalization that was sweeping across the still largely non-regal territories of the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian states at the end of the seventeenth century. Royal title mattered because it still entailed privileged status within the international community. Since the precedence accorded to crowned heads was also observed at the great peace treaties of the era, it was a matter of potentially grave practical importance.
The recent growth of interest in the early modern European courts as political and cultural institutions has heightened our awareness of the functionality of courtly ritual. Courtly festivities had a crucial communicative and legitimating function. As the philosopher Christian Wolff observed in 1721, the ‘common man’, who depended upon his senses rather than his reason, was quite incapable of grasping ‘what the majesty of a king is’. Yet it was possible to convey to him a sense of the power of the monarch by confronting him with ‘things that catch his eye and stir his other senses’. A considerable court and court ceremonies, he concluded, were thus ‘by no means superfluous or reprehensible’.11 Courts were also densely interlinked with each other through family diplomatic and cultural ties; they were not only focal points for elite social and political life within each respective territory, but also nodes in an international courtly network. The magnificent celebrations of the coronation anniversary, for example, were observed by numerous foreign visitors, not to speak of the various dynastic relatives and envoys who could always be found at court during the season.
The international resonance of such events within the European court system was further amplified by published official or semi-official accounts, in which scrupulous attention was paid to details of precedence, dress, ceremony and the splendour of the spectacle. The same applied to the elaborately ritualized observances associated with mourning. The orders issued following the death of Queen Sophie Charlotte were not primarily intended to lend expression to the private grief of the bereaved, but rather to send out signals about the weight and importance of the court where the death had occurred. These signals were directed not only to a domestic audience of subjects, but also to other courts, which were expected to mark their acknowledgement of the event by entering into various degrees of mourning. So implicit were these expectations that Frederick I was furious when he discovered that Louis XIV had decided not to put the court at Versailles into mourning on Sophie Charlotte’s account, presumably as a means of conveying his displeasure at Berlin’s pro-Austrian policy in the War of the Spanish Succession.12 Like the other ceremonies that punctuated life at court, mourning was part of a system of political communication. Seen in this context, the court was an instrument whose purpose was to document the rank of the prince before an international ‘courtly public’.13
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the coronation ritual of 1701 is the fact that it did not become the foundation stone of a tradition of sacral coronations in Prussia. Frederick’s immediate successor, Frederick William, had developed during his youth a deep antipathy to the refinement and playfulness cultivated by his mother and showed no taste as an adult for the kinds of ritual display that were a defining feature of his father’s reign. Upon his accession, he not only dispensed entirely with a coronation ritual of any kind, but substantially dismantled the court establishment his father had created. Frederick II inherited his father’s dislike of dynastic ostentation and did not restore the ceremony. As a consequence, Brandenburg-Prussia became a kingdom without coronations. The defining ritual of the accession remained, as in earlier times, the oath of homage in Königsberg of the Prussian estates and in Berlin of the other estates of the Hohenzollern dominions.
It is clear none the less in retrospect that the acquisition of the kingly title inaugurated a new phase in the history of the Brandenburg polity. First, it is worth noting that the rituals associated with the coronation remained dormant within the collective memory of the dynasty. The Order of the Black Eagle, for example, founded by Frederick I on the eve of the coronation to reward the kingdom’s most distinguished friends and servants, was gradually alienated f
rom its courtly function, but it enjoyed a revival in the 1840s during the reign of Frederick William IV, when a number of the original conferral ceremonies were reconstructed from the archives and reintroduced. King William I chose upon his accession in 1861 to dispense with the homage (which many contemporaries judged to be obsolete) and instead to revive the practice of self-coronation in Königsberg.14 It was this same monarch who scheduled the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to fall on 18 January, the anniversary of the first coronation. The cultural resonance of the coronation ritual within the life of the dynasty was thus more enduring than its sudden abandonment after 1713 might suggest.
The coronation of 1701 also signalled a subtle shift in the relationship between the monarch and his spouse. Of the seventeenth-century wives and mothers of the Brandenburg Electors, several had been powerful independent figures at court. The most outstanding in this respect had been Anna of Prussia, wife of John Sigismund, a spirited, iron-willed woman who responded to her husband’s intermittent drunken rages by throwing plates and glasses at his head. Anna was an important player in the labile confessional politics of Brandenburg after her husband’s conversion to Calvinism; she also maintained her own diplomatic network and virtually ran a separate foreign policy. This continued even after the death of her husband and the accession of her son George William in 1619. In the summer of 1620, Anna entered into separate negotiations with the King of Sweden over the latter’s marriage to her daughter, Maria Eleonora, without so much as consulting her son, the head of state. In 1631, as Brandenburg’s greatest wartime crisis came to a head, it was the Elector’s Palatine wife Elisabeth Charlotte and her mother Louise Juliane, rather than George William himself, who managed the delicate diplomatic relationship between Brandenburg and Sweden.15 In other words: women at court continued to pursue interests informed by their own family networks and quite distinct from those of their husbands. The same can be said of Sophie Charlotte, the intelligent Hanoverian princess who married Frederick III/I in 1684, but who spent long sojourns at her mother’s court in Hanover (she was staying there when she died in 1705) and remained an advocate of Hanoverian policy.16 She was an opponent of the coronation project, which she saw as damaging to Hanoverian interests. (She is reported to have found the coronation itself so tedious that she took pinches of snuff during the proceedings in order to provide herselfwith ‘some pleasant distraction’.)17
Against this background, it is clear that the coronation set the relationship between the Elector and his spouse within a new framework. It was the Elector who crowned his wife, having first crowned himself, and thereby made her his queen. This was, of course, a mere symbolic detail without practical consequences and, since there were no further coronations in the eighteenth century, it was not re-enacted. But the ceremony none the less signalled the beginning of a process by which the dynastic identity of the wife would be partially merged into that of her husband, the crowned head of a royal household. The concomitant masculinization of the monarchy, coupled with the fact that the House of Hohenzollern now enjoyed a clear pre-eminence among the Protestant German dynasties from which spouses were recruited, narrowed the freedom of movement available to the ‘first ladies’ of Brandenburg-Prussia. Their eighteenth-century successors were not without personal gifts and political insight, but they would not develop the kind of autonomous weight in politics that had been such a striking feature of the previous century.
The independent, extra-imperial sovereignty secured by the Great Elector had been solemnized in the most dramatic possible way. The special prominence that Brandenburg had acquired among the lesser European powers after 1640 by virtue of its military prowess and the determination of its leadership was now reflected in its formal standing within the international order of precedence.18 The Viennese court recognized this and soon came to regret the role it had played in facilitating the Elector of Brandenburg’s elevation. The new title also had a psychologically integrating effect: the Baltic territory formerly known as Ducal Prussia was no longer a mere outlying possession of the Brandenburg heartland, but a constitutive element in a new royal-electoral amalgam that would first be known as Brandenburg-Prussia, later simply as Prussia. The words ‘kingdom of Prussia’ were incorporated into the official denomination of every Hohenzollern province. It may have been true, as opponents of the coronation project were quick to point out, that the sovereign of Brandenburg already possessed the fullness of royal power and thus had no need to adorn himself with new titles. But to accept this view would be to overlook the fact that things are ultimately transformed by the names we give them.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
It is difficult to imagine two more contrasting individuals than the first and the second Prussian kings. Frederick was urbane, genial, courteous, mild mannered and gregarious. He spoke several modern languages, including French and Polish, and had done much to cultivate the arts and intellectual enquiry at his court. He was, by the judgement of the Earl of Strafford, who had spent many years (under his earlier title, Lord Raby) as ambassador in Berlin, ‘good natured, affable [… ] generous and just [… ] magnificent and charitable’.19 Frederick William I, by contrast, was brusque to the point of brutality, distrustful in the extreme and given to violent rages and attacks of acute melancholy. Although possessed of a quick and powerful intelligence, he barely managed to master written German (he may well have been dyslexic). He was profoundly sceptical of any sort of cultural or intellectual endeavour that was not of immediate practical (by which he mainly meant military) utility. The sometimes harsh, contemptuous tone of his speech is conveyed in the following marginalia to incoming government papers:
10 November 1731: Ivatyhoff, the Brandenburg Agent in Copenhagen, requests an increase in his allowance. [Frederick William: ‘The rasckal wants an increase – I’ll count it out on his back’]
27 January 1733: Letter proposing that von Holtzendorff be sent to Denmark [Frederick William: ‘To gallows with Hotzedorff [sic ] how dare you sujest me this rogue but as he’s a curr he’s good enough for the gallows go tell hym that’]
5 November 1735: Report from Kuhlwein [Frederick William: ‘Kuhlwein is an idiott he can kis my arss’]
19 November 1735: Order to Kuhlwein [Frederick William: ‘You filth don’t interfeer in my family or youll find there’s a barrow waiting for you in Spandau fortress’]20
Within days of his accession in February 1713, Frederick William laid an axe to the tree of his father’s court establishment. There was, as we have seen, no follow-up to the coronation of 1701. Having scrutinized the financial accounts of the royal household, the new king embarked on a drastic cost-cutting campaign. Two-thirds of the servants employed at the court – including the chocolatier, a brace of castrato singers, the cellists, composers and organ-builders – were sacked without notice; the rest had to accept salary reductions of up to 75 per cent. A substantial quantity of the jewels, gold and silver plate, fine wines, furniture and coaches accumulated during his father’s reign was sold off. The lions of the royal menagerie were presented as gifts to the King of Poland. Most of the sculptors engaged during Frederick’s reign promptly left Berlin when they were informed of their revised conditions of employment. A sense of panic gripped the court. In a report filed on 28 February 1713, the British envoy William Breton observed that the king was ‘very busye cutting off pensions and making great retrenchments in his civill list, to the great grief of many fine gentlemen’. The queen dowager’s household had been especially hard hit and ‘the poore maids [had] gone home to their friends with heavy hearts.’21
The weeks following the accession must have been particularly traumatic for Johann von Besser, who had served Frederick III/I as his master of ceremonies since 1690. Besser had helped to shape the ritual culture of the royal court and was the author of a detailed official account of the coronation. As his life’s work collapsed around him, he was unceremoniously struck from the state list. A letter he sent
to the new king requesting consideration for another post was tossed into the fire on receipt. Besser fled Berlin and subsequently found employment as an adviser and master of ceremonies at the still sumptuous Saxon court in Dresden.
The court established under Frederick quickly withered away. What took its place was a leaner, cheaper, rougher and more masculine social scene. ‘As the late King of Prussia was scrupulous in the ceremonies of the greatest nicety, his present Majesty, on the contrary, has scarce left the least footsteps of it,’ the new British envoy Charles Whitworth reported in the summer of 1716.22 At the centre of the monarch’s social life was the ‘Tabakskollegium’ or ‘Tobacco Ministry’, a group of between eight and twelve councillors, senior officials, army officers and assorted visiting adventurers, envoys or men of letters who gathered in the evenings with the monarch for general conversation over strong drink and pipes of tobacco. The tone was informal, often crude, and non-hierarchical – one of the rules of the Tobacco Ministry was that one did not stand to honour the arrival of the king. The subjects of discussion ranged from Bible passages, newspaper reports, political gossip, hunting anecdotes to more risqué matters such as the natural aromas given off by women. Participants were expected to speak their minds, and hefty arguments sometimes broke out; indeed, these appear on occasion to have been encouraged by the monarch himself. In the autumn of 1728, for example, a theological dispute between a Friedrich August Hackemann, a visiting professor from the University of Helmstedt, and the Berlin-based popular writer David Fassmann degenerated into a mud-slinging match, to the great amusement of the other guests. According to a contemporary report by an envoy resident in Berlin, Hackemann was eventually goaded into calling Fassmann a liar, whereupon the latter
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