The King patronizes literary and scientific Men.—Anecdotes.—The Family Quarrel.—Birth of Frederick William III.—Rapid Recuperation of Prussia.—The King’s Tour of Observation.—Desolate Aspect of the Country.—Absolutism of Frederick.—Interview between Frederick and D’Alembert.—Unpopularity of Frederick.—Death of the King of Poland.—Plans for the Partition of Poland.—Intrigues of Catharine.—Interview between Frederick and the Emperor Joseph.—Poland seized by Russia, Prussia, and Austria.—The Division of the Spoil.—Remorse of Maria Theresa.—Indifference of Frederick to public Opinion.
There still remained to Frederick twenty-three years of life. He now engaged very vigorously in the endeavor to repair the terrible ravages of war by encouraging agriculture, commerce, and all useful arts. He invited the distinguished French philosophers Helvetius and D’Alembert to visit his court, and endeavored, though unavailingly, to induce them to take up their residence in Berlin. They were both in sympathy with the king in their renunciation of Christianity.
There are many anecdotes of Frederick floating about in the journals whose authenticity can not be vouched for. The two following are doubtless authentic. Frederick, as he was riding through the streets of Berlin, saw a crowd looking upon a picture which was posted high up on a wall. He requested his groom to see what it was. The servant returned with the reply, “It is a caricature of your majesty, seated on a stool, with a coffee-mill between your knees, grinding with one hand, and picking up the beans which have fallen with the other,”
“Take it down,” said the king, “and hang it lower, that the people may not hurt their necks in looking at it.”
The crowd heard what he said. With bursts of laughter they tore the caricature in pieces, scattered it to the winds, and greeted the king, as he rode away, with enthusiastic shouts of “Our Fritz forever.”
The Crown Prince Frederick had married the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick. She was a very beautiful, proud, high-spirited woman. Her husband was a worthless fellow, dissolute in the extreme. She, stung to madness, and unrestrained by Christian537 principle, retaliated in kind. A divorce was the result. The discarded princess retired to the castle of Stettin, where she lived in comparative seclusion, though surrounded with elegance.
FREDERICK THE GREAT, ?T. 59.
Upon one occasion she ordered a very rich silk dress directly from Lyons. The custom-house dues were heavy. The custom-house officer detained the dress until the dues should be paid. The haughty princess, exceedingly indignant, sent an order to him to bring the dress instantly to her, and she would pay the538 demand. As soon as he entered her apartment, she snatched the dress from his hands, and with her open palm gave him two slaps in the face, ordering him immediately to leave the house175
The officer drew up a statement of the facts, and sent it to the king, with the complaint that he had been dishonored in discharging the duties intrusted to him by his majesty. The king sent the following reply:
“To the custom-house officer at Stettin. The loss of the excise dues shall fall to my score. The dress shall remain with the princess; the slaps to him who received them. As to the pretended dishonor, I entirely relieve the complainant from that. Never can the appliance of a beautiful hand dishonor the face of an officer of customs.”
Frederick, with his own pen, gives the following account of this family quarrel, which resulted in the divorce of the Crown Prince and Elizabeth:
“Not long ago we mentioned the Prince of Prussia’s marriage with Elizabeth of Brunswick. The husband, young and dissolute, given up to a profligate life, from which his relatives could not correct him, was continually committing infidelities to his wife. The princess, who was in the flower of her beauty, felt outraged by such neglect of her charms. Her vivacity and the good opinion she had of herself brought her upon the thought of avenging her wrongs by retaliation. Speedily she gave into excesses scarcely inferior to those of her husband. Family quarrels broke out, and were soon publicly known. The antipathy which ensued took away all hope of succession. The brothers of the king, Henry and Ferdinand, avowed frankly that they would never consent to have, by some accidental birth, their rights of succession to the crown carried off. In the end, there was nothing for it but proceeding to a divorce.”176
Within three months after the divorce, the Crown Prince, anxious for an heir, married, on the 18th of April, 1769, the Princess Frederica Louisa, of Hesse-Darmstadt. A son was born to them, who became Frederick William III.
539 Under the energetic administration of Frederick, Prussia began, very rapidly, to recover from the desolation which had overwhelmed it. The coin, in a little more than a year, was restored to its purity. In the course of two years Frederick rebuilt, in different parts of his realms, fourteen thousand five hundred houses. The army horses were distributed among the impoverished farmers for plow teams. Early in June, 1763, the king set out on a general tour of inspection.
“To form an idea,” he writes, “of the general subversion, and how great were the desolation and discouragement, you must represent to yourself countries entirely ravaged, the very traces of the old habitations hardly discoverable. Of the towns some were ruined from top to bottom; others half destroyed by fire. Of thirteen thousand houses the very vestiges were gone. There was no field in seed, no grain for the food of the inhabitants. Sixty thousand horses were needed if there were to be plowing carried on. In the provinces generally there were half a million population less than in 1756; that is to say, upon four millions and a half the ninth man was wanting. Noble and peasant had been pillaged, ransomed, foraged, eaten out by so many different armies; nothing now left them but life and miserable rags.
“There was no credit by trading people even for the necessaries of life. There was no police in the towns. To habits of equity and order there had succeeded a vile greed of gain and an anarchic disorder. The silence of the laws had produced in the people a taste for license. Boundless appetite for gain was their main rule of action. The noble, the merchant, the farmer, the laborer, raising emulously each the price of his commodity, seemed to endeavor only for their mutual ruin. Such, when the war ended, was the fatal spectacle over these provinces, which had once been so flourishing. However pathetic the description may be, it will never approach the touching and sorrowful impression which the sight of it produced.”
The absolutism of Frederick placed all legislative, judicial, and executive powers in his hands. He was law-maker, judge, and executioner. The liberty, property, and lives of his subjects were at his disposal. He could call others to assist him in the government, but they were merely servants to do his bidding.
“During the war,” writes Frederick, “the councilors and ministers540 had successively died. In such time of trouble it had been impossible to replace them. The embarrassment was to find persons capable of filling these different employments. We searched the provinces, where good heads were found as rare as in the capital. At length five chief ministers were pitched upon.”
The rich abbeys of the Roman Catholics were compelled to establish manufactures for weaving damasks and table-cloths. Some were converted into oil-mills, or “workers in copper, wire-drawers, the flaxes and metals, with water-power, markets, and so on.”
While on this tour of inspection, the celebrated French philosopher D’Alembert, by appointment, met the king at Geldern, and accompanied him to Potsdam. D’Alembert was in entire sympathy with the king in his renunciation of Christianity. In 1755 D’Alembert had, by invitation, met Frederick at Wesel, on the Rhine. In a letter to Madame Du Deffand, at Paris, dated Potsdam, June 25, 1763, D’Alembert wrote:
“I will not go into the praises of King Frederick, now my host. I will merely send you two traits of him, which will indicate his way of thinking and feeling. When I spoke to him of the glory which he had acquired, he answered, with the greatest simplicity,
“‘There is a furious discount to be deducted from said glory. Chance came in for almost the whole of it. I would far rather have written Racine’s Athalie than have performed all the achievements of this war.’
“The other trait I have to give you is this. On the 15th of February last, the day of concluding this peace, which is so glorious to him, some one said to him, ‘It is the finest day of your majesty’s life.’ The king replied,
“‘The finest day of life is the day on which one quits it.’”177
Helvetius, another of the distinguished French deistical philosophers, was invited to Berlin to assist the king in his financial operations. To aid the mechanics in Berlin, and to show to the world that the king was not so utterly impoverished as many imagined, Frederick, on the 11th of June, 1763, laid the foundation of the sumptuous edifice called “The New Palace of Sans Souci.”
541 Frederick, though now at peace with all the world, found no nation in cordial alliance with him. He had always disliked England, and England returned the dislike with interest. The Duchess of Pompadour, who controlled France, hated him. Maria Theresa regarded him as a highway robber who had snatched Silesia from her and escaped with it. Frederick, thus left without an ally, turned to his former subject, now Catharine II., whom he had placed on the throne of Russia. On the 11th of April, 1764, one year after the close of the Seven Years’ War, he entered into a treaty of alliance with the Czarina Catharine. The treaty was to continue eight years. In case either of the parties became involved in war, the other party was to furnish a contingent of twelve thousand men, or an equivalent in money.
On the 5th of October, 1763, Augustus, the unhappy King of Poland, had died at Dresden, after a troubled reign of thirty years. The crown was elective. The turbulent nobles, broken up into antagonistic and envenomed cliques, were to choose a successor. Catharine, as ambitious as she was able and unprincipled, resolved to place one of her creatures upon the throne, that Poland, a realm spreading over a territory of 284,000 square miles, and containing a population of 20,000,000, might be virtually added to her dominions. Carlyle writes:
“My own private conjecture, I confess, has rather grown to be, on much reading of those Rulhières and distracted books, that the czarina—who was a grandiose creature, with considerable magnanimities, natural and acquired; with many ostentations, some really great qualities and talents; in effect, a kind of she Louis Quatorze (if the reader will reflect on that royal gentleman, and put him into petticoats in Russia, and change his improper females for improper males)—that the czarina, very clearly resolute to keep Poland hers, had determined with herself to do something very handsome in regard to Poland; and to gain glory, both with the enlightened philosophe classes and with her own proud heart, by her treatment of that intricate matter.”
In the court of the czarina there was a very handsome young Pole, Stanislaus Poniatowski, who had been an acknowledged lover of Catharine. Though Catharine had laid him aside for other favorites, she still regarded him with tender feelings. He was just the man to do her bidding. By skillful diplomacy she542 caused him to be elected King of Poland. That kingdom was now entirely in her hands, so far as it was in the power of its monarch to place it there.
This, however, stirred up great strife in Poland. The nobles were roused. Scenes of confusion ensued. The realm was plunged into a state of anarchy. Frederick, being in cordial co-operation with the czarina in all her measures, instructed his minister in Warsaw to follow her policy in every particular. It has generally been supposed that Frederick was the first to propose the banditti division of the kingdom of Poland between Prussia, Russia, and Austria by means of their united armies. This is not certain. But, whoever may have at first made the suggestion, it is very certain that Frederick cordially and efficiently embarked in the enterprise.178
Poniatowski was elected King of Poland on the 7th of September, 1764, and crowned on the 25th of November. He was then thirty-two years of age, and the scarcely disguised agent of Catharine. Two or three years passed of wars and rebellions, and all the usual tumult of this tumultuous world. In August, 1765, the Emperor Francis died. He was at Innsprück, attending the marriage festivities of his second son Leopold. About nine o’clock in the evening of the 18th, while sauntering through the rooms in the midst of the brilliant gala, he was struck with apoplexy. He staggered for a moment, fell into the hands of his son Joseph, and instantly died.
Joseph, the oldest son of Maria Theresa and Francis, by the will of his mother became emperor. But Maria Theresa still swayed the sceptre of imperial power, through the hands of her son, as she had formerly done through the hands of her amiable and pliant husband. The young emperor was fond of traveling. He visited all the battle-fields of the Seven Years’ War, and put up many monuments. Through his minister at Berlin, he expressed his particular desire to make the acquaintance of Frederick. The interview took place at Neisse on the 25th of August, 1769. His majesty received the young emperor on the grand staircase of the palace, where they cordially embraced each other.
“Now are my wishes fulfilled,” said the emperor, “since I have the honor to embrace the greatest of kings and soldiers.”
543 “I look upon this day,” the king replied, “as the fairest of my life; for it will become the epoch of uniting two houses which have been enemies too long, and whose mutual interests require that they should strengthen, not weaken, one another.”
There were dinner-parties, and military reviews, and operas to beguile the time. The interview lasted three days. The king and the emperor often walked out arm in arm. Frederick wro............