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mildred_of_midgard) wrote in rheinsberg2021-02-06 09:37 am
Macaulay's Life of Frederick the Great
In 1842, Macaulay was working on his History of England, a monumental five-volume work that he would publish a few years later. In the process of researching English history, he apparently ran across enough Fritz to become fascinated and decided he needed to write a short bio to get Fritz out of his system. To his editor, he wrote:
[Fritz's] personal character, manners, studies, literary associates; his quarrel with Voltaire, his friendship for Maupertuis, and his own unhappy métromanie will be will be very slightly, if at all alluded to in a History of England. Yet in order to write the History of England, it will be necessary to turn over all the Memoirs, and the writings of Frederic, connected with us, as he was, in a most important war.
This despite the fact that his history as published doesn't even overlap with Fritz's lifetime. Fritz is just that fascinating! (He really is. :P)
So Macaulay put together a 100-page bio that got reprinted a lot in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It stops with the end of the Seven Years' War, meaning Macaulay explicitly did what many people tacitly do, ignore the second 23 years of a 46-year reign. Carlyle's bio manages 20 books about the first 23 years (1740-1763) and 1 book about the second 23 (1763-1786).
The copy I obtained from Google Books, published in 1882, has a description of the second half of the reign supplied by someone with less amazing prose and wit than Macaulay. When Macaulay's essay comes to an end and the book continues, the editor puts in a footnote:
The reader will not need to be reminded that the narrative of Macaulay ends here. The descent from the sunny uplands of his style is sudden and painful, but there is no help for it. Herr Kohlrausch goes on honestly enough, and we must let him finish the story or go without it altogether. Patience; it will soon be over, and as a sugar-plum for good children, we promise you near the close a gorgeous picture of the great king in his old age, by Carlyle.
I cannot say I disagree: the post-Seven Years' War material by Herr Kohlrausch is unremarkable. But I give you, in a series of thematically grouped subthreads, Macaulay's most quotable moments. I wouldn't read this for facts or opinions, but you can tell this is the author of the Lays of Ancient Rome: very ringing and memorable prose, often quoted by modern biographers (even if only to disagree with the sentiments expressed).
Oh, apparently Macaulay called Carlyle's style gibberish when he started reading Carlyle's multi-volume Fritz bio in 1858, and I agree wholeheartedly. Humorously quotable in small excerpts; I've never managed to penetrate it as a work.
Oh, one very important thing to keep in mind from this, apart from Macaulay's political opinions and lack of access to the sources we now have: he was a nineteenth century British minister, and his biases are way showing. Do not take this write-up as a source for facts or interpretations of Fritz's life: it tells you far more about Macaulay than about Fritz. I've written it up at such length because Macaulay has an amazing writing style, not because this is a valuable historical source.
But on to the entertaining parts!
FW
Macaulay is not an FW fan! To the point where the editor of my 1882 volume feels the need to add a footnote saying Macaulay is being unduly harsh. Macaulay apparently had some Daddy issues himself, according to an article I read that argued that while Carlyle's tastes and opinions occasionally overlap with FW's more than Fritz's and it shows (something I had noticed), Macaulay was the freethinking son of a pious father and might have identified with Fritz's struggles.
Frederick was succeeded by his son, Frederick William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by the most odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never been seen out of a mad-house.
He hated infidels, Papists, and metaphysicians, and did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The business of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drilled. The recreations suited to a prince were to sit in a cloud of tobacco smoke, to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon for three halfpence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot partridges by the thousand.
The history of [Fritz's] boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish work-house, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown.
FW putting an end to Fritz's Latin education:
Up went the king's cane, away ran the terrified instructor, and Frederick's classical studies ended forever. He now and then affected to quote Latin sentences, and produced such exquisite Ciceronian phrases as these: "Stante pede morire"—"De gustibus non est disputandus"— "Tot verbas tot spondera."
The second two of those are ungrammatical attempts to render Latin sayings. The first one I didn't recognize, but Googling seems to indicate that it's a translation into Latin of a saying that's found in various Germanic languages. So possibly, if it's not apocryphal, something Fritz knew from German.
The love that dare not speak its name:
Things became worse when the Prince-Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place [i.e. adolescence].- He was guilty of some youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with severity. At a later period he was accused, truly or falsely, of vices from which History averts her eyes and which even satire blushes to name—vices such that, to borrow the energetic language of Lord-Keeper Coventry, "the depraved nature of man, which of itself carrieth man to all other sin, abhorreth them." But the offenses of his youth were not characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however. transports of rage in the king, who hated all faults except those to which he was him self inclined, and who conceived that he made ample atonement to Heaven for his brutality, by holding the softer passions in detestation.
The king suspected that his son was inclined to be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist, his majesty did not very well know. The ordinary malignity of Frederick William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a Christian man, and all the conscience that he had stimulated his hatred.
Once his father knocked him down, dragged him along the floor to a window, and was with difficulty prevented from strangling him with the cord of the curtain. The queen, for the crime of not wishing to see her son murdered, was subjected to the grossest indignities.
The prince was an officer in the army; his flight was therefore desertion, and, in the moral code of Frederick William, desertion was the highest of all crimes. "Desertion," says this royal theologian in one of his half-crazy letters, "is from hell."
[Fritz] remained, however, long a prisoner; but he was not on that account to be pitied. He found in his jailors a tenderness which he had never found in his father; his table was not sumptuous, but he had wholesome food in sufficient quantity to appease hunger; he could read the Henriade without being kicked, and play on his flute without having it broken over his head.
Fritz ascends to the throne:
It soon became plain that, in the most important points, the new sovereign bore a strong family likeness to his predecessor. There was a wide difference be tween the father and the son as respected extent and vigor of intellect, speculative opinions, amusements, studies, outward demeanor. But the groundwork of the character was the same in both. To both were common the love of order, the love of business, the military taste, the parsimony, the imperious spirit, the temper irritable even to ferocity, the pleasure in the pain and humiliation of others. But these propensities had in Frederick William partaken of the general unsoundness of his mind, and wore a very different aspect when found in company with the strong and cultivated understand ing of his successor. Thus, for example, Frederick was as anxious as any prince could be about the efficacy of his army. But this anxiety never degenerated into a monomania, like that which led his father to pay fancy prices for giants. Frederick was as thrifty about money as any prince or any private man ought to be. But he did not conceive, like his father, that it was worth while to eat unwholesome cabbages for the sake of saving four or five rix dollars in the year.
Frederick was, we fear, as malevolent as his father; but Frederick's wit enabled him often to show his malevolence in ways more decent than those to which his father resorted, and to inflict misery and degradation by a taunt instead of blow. Frederick it is true by no means relinquished his hereditary privilege of kicking and cudgelling. His practice, however, as to that matter differed in some important respects from his father's. To Frederick William, the mere circumstance that any persons whatever, men, women, or children, Prussians or foreigners, were within reach of his toes and of his cane, appeared to be a sufficient reason for proceeding to belabor them. Frederick required provocation as well as vicinity; nor was he ever known to inflict this paternal species of correction on any but his born subjects; though on one occasion M. Thiebault had reason during a few seconds to anticipate the high honor of being an exception to this general rule.
Voltaire
The prince wrote to his idol in the style of a worshiper, and Voltaire replied with exquisite grace and address. A correspondence followed, which may be studied with advantage by those who wish to become proficients in the ignoble art of flattery.
No man ever paid compliments better than Voltaire...It was only from his hand that so much sugar could be swallowed without making the swallower sick.
After Fritz betrays his allies by concluding a separate peace during the First Silesian War; France sends Voltaire to spy on him and try to get him back to fighting for them:
The court of Versailles, in this peril, looked to Frederick for help. He had been guilty of two great treasons, perhaps he might be induced to commit a third.
Voltaire was selected for the mission. He eagerly undertook the task; for, while his literary fame filled all Europe, he was troubled with a childish craving for political distinction. He was vain, and not without reason, of his address, and of his insinuating eloquence; and he flattered himself that he possessed boundless influence over the King of Prussia. The truth was that he knew, as yet, only one corner of Frederick's character. He was well acquainted with all the petty vanities and affectations of the poetaster; but was not aware that these foibles were united with all the talents and vices which lead to success in active life; and that the unlucky versifier who bored him with reams of middling Alexandrians, was the most vigilant, suspicious, and severe of politicians.
The negotiation was of an extraordinary description. Nothing can be conceived more whimsical than the conferences which took place between the first literary man and the first practical man of the age, whom a strange weakness had induced to exchange their parts. The great poet would talk of nothing but treaties and guaranties, and the great king of nothing but metaphors and rhymes. On one occasion Voltaire put into his Majesty's hand a paper on the state of Europe, and received it back with verses scrawled on the margin. In secret they both laughed at. each other. Voltaire did not spare the king's poems ; and the king has left on record his opinion of Voltaire's diplomacy. "He had no credentials," says Frederick, "and the whole mission was a joke, a mere farce."
Voltaire about to move to Prussia:
Potsdam was, in truth, what it was called by one of its most illustrious inmates, the Palace of Alcina. At the first glance it seemed to be a delightful spot, where every intellectual and physical enjoyment awaited the happy adventurer. It was in vain that a long succession of favorites who had entered that abode with delight and hope, and who, after a short term of delusive happiness, had been doomed to expiate their folly by years of wretchedness and degradation, raised their voices to warn the aspirant who ap proached the charmed threshold...We have no hesitation in saying that the poorest author of that time in London, sleeping on a bulk, dining in a cellar, with a cravat of paper, and a skewer for a shirt-pin, was a happier man than any of the literary inmates of Frederick's court.
But of all who entered the enchanted garden in the inebriation of delight, and quitted it in agonies of rage and shame, the most remarkable was Voltaire.
Fritz and Voltaire are squabbling about the terms of Voltaire's employment:
It seemed that the negotiation would be broken off; but Frederick, with great dexterity, affected indifference, and seemed inclined to transfer his idolatry to Baculard d'Arnaud. His Majesty even wrote some bad verses, of which the sense was, that Voltaire was a setting sun, and that Arnaud was rising. Good-natured friends soon carried the lines to Voltaire. He was in his bed. He jumped out in his shirt, danced about the room with rage, and sent for his passport and his post-horses. It was not difficult to foresee the end of a connection which had such a beginning.
The honeymoon doesn't last long:
This eccentric friendship was fast cooling. Never had there met two persons so exquisitely fitted to plague each other...
Both were angry, and a war began, in which Frederick stooped to the part of Harpagon, and Voltaire to that of Scapin. It is humiliating to relate that the great warrior and statesman gave orders that his guest's allowance of sugar and chocolate should be curtailed. It is, if possible, a still more humiliating fact that Voltaire indemnified himself by pocketing the wax candles in the royal antechamber.
[Harpagon and Scapin are title characters in Molière plays: a miser and a schemer.]
D'Arnaud and D'Argens, Guichard and La Metrie, might, for the sake of a morsel of bread, be willing to bear the in solence of a master; but Voltaire was of another order. He knew that he was a potentate as well as Frederick; that his European reputation, and his incomparable power of covering whatever he hated with ridicule, made him an object of dread even to the leaders of armies and the rulers of nations. In truth, of all the intellectual weapons which have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants, who had never been moved by the wailing and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name.
We cannot pause to recount how often that rare talent was exercised against rivals worthy of esteem —how often it was used to crush and torture enemies worthy only of silent disdain—how often it was perverted to the more noxious purpose of destroying the last solace of earthly misery and the last restraint on earthly power. Neither can we pause to tell hew often it was used to vindicate justice, humanity, and toleration—the principles of sound philosophy, the principles of free government. This is not the place for a full character of Voltaire.
After Voltaire gets involved in fraudulent transactions and tries swindling a banker:
The king was delighted at having such an opportunity to humble his guest; and bitter reproaches and complaints were exchanged. Voltaire, too, was soon at war with the other men of letters who surrounded the king; and this irritated Frederick, who, however, had himself chiefly to blame. for, from that love of tormenting which was in him a ruling passion, he perpetually lavished extravagant praises on small men and bad books, merely in order that he might enjoy the mortification and rage which on such occasions Voltaire took no pains to conceal. His Majesty, however, soon had reason to regret the pains which he had taken to kindle jealousy among the members of his household. The whole palace was in a ferment with literary intrigues and cabals.
The big breakup in full swing:
Voltaire had in his keeping a volume of the king's poetry and forgot to return it. This was, we believe, merely one of the oversights which men setting out upon a journey often commit. That Voltaire could have meditated plagiarism is quite incredible. He would not, we are confident, for the half of Frederick's kingdom have consented to father Frederick's verses. The king, however, who rated his own writings much above their value, and who was inclined to see all Voltaire's actions in the worst light, was enraged to think that his favorite compositions were in the hands of an enemy as thievish as a daw and as mischievous as a monkey.
[Macaulay doesn't seem to be familiar with the explanation that Fritz was afraid that other leading Europeans would find out he had written such things about them.]
Macaulay's verdict on the Frankfurt episode:
It is absurd to say that this outrage is not to be attributed to the king. Was anybody punished for it? Was anybody called in question for it? Was it not consistent with Frederick's character? Was it not of a piece with his conduct on other similar occasions? Is it not notorious that he repeatedly gave private directions to his officers to pillage and demolish the houses of persons against whom he had a grudge—charging them at the same time to take their measure in such a way that his name might not be compromised? He acted thus towards Count Buhl in the Seven Years' War. Why should we believe that he would have been more scrupulous with regard to Voltaire?
Fritz and Voltaire start corresponding again during the Seven Years' War:
We do not know any collection of letters which throw so much light on the darkest and most intricate parts of human nature as the correspondence of these strange beings after they bald exchanged forgiveness. Both felt that the quarrel had lowered them in the public estimation. They admired each other. They stood in need of each other. The great king wished to be handed down to posterity by the great writer. The great writer felt himself exalted by the homage of the great king. Yet the wounds which they had inflicted on each other were too deep to be effaced, or even perfectly healed. Not only did the scars remain ; the sore places often festered and bled afresh.
The letters consisted for the most part of compliments, thanks, offers of service, assurances of attachment. But if anything brought back to Frederick's recollection the cunning and mischievous pranks by which Voltaire had provoked him, some expression of contempt and displeasure broke forth in the midst of his eulogy. It was much worse when anything recalled to the mind of Voltaire the outrages which he and his kinswoman had suffered at Frankfort.
[Insert sample Fritz/Voltaire exchange of mutual vitriol here.]
An explosion of this kind, it might be supposed, would necessarily put an end to all amicable communication. But it was not so. After every out break of ill-humor this extraordinary pair became more loving than before, and exchanged compliments and assurances of mutual regard with a wonderful air of sincerity.
The English ambassador, Mitchell, who knew that the King of Prussia was constantly writing to Voltaire with the greatest freedom on the most important subjects, was amazed to hear His Majesty designate this highly-favored correspondent as a bad-hearted fellow, the greatest rascal on the face of the earth. And the language which the poet held about the king was not much more respectful.
Macaulay thinks Selena should write that Yuletide AU where Voltaire saves Fritz:
It would probably have puzzled Voltaire himself to say what was his real feeling towards Frederick. It was compounded of all sentiments, from enmity to friendship, and from scorn to admiration; and the proportions in which these elements were mixed changed every moment. The old patriarch resem bled the spoiled child who screams, stamps, cuffs, laughs, kisses, and cuddles within one quarter of an hour. His resentment was not extinguished; yet he was not without sympathy for his old friend. As a Frenchman, he wished success to the arms of his country. As a philosopher, he was anxious for the stability of a throne on which a philosopher sat. He longed both to save and to humble Frederick. There was one way, and only one, in which all his conflicting feelings could at once be gratified. If Frederick were preserved by the interference of France, if it were known that for that interference he was indebted to the mediation of Voltaire, this would indeed be delicious revenge; this would indeed be to heap coals of fire on that haughty head.
MT
Macaulay is a fan of MT, but not an uncritical one:
Her situation and her personal qualities were such as might be expected to move the mind of any generous man to pity, admiration, and chivalrous tenderness. She was in her twenty-fourth year. Her form was majestic, her features beautiful, her countenance sweet and animated, her voice musical, her deportment gracious and dignified. In all domestic relations she was without reproach. She was married to a husband whom she loved, and was on the point of giving birth to a child when death deprived her of her father. The loss of a parent and the new cares of the empire were too much for her in the delicate state of her health. Her spirits were depressed and her cheek lost its bloom.
In the midst of distress and peril she had given birth to a son, afterwards the Emperor Joseph the Second. Scarcely had she risen from her couch, when she hastened to Pressburg. There, in the sight of an innumerable multitude, she was crowned with the crown and robed with the robe of St. Stephen. No spectator could refrain his tears when the beautiful young mother, still weak from child bearing, rode, after the fashion of her fathers, up the Mount of Defiance, unsheathed the ancient sword of state, shook it towards north and south, east and west and, with a glow on her pale face, challenged the four corners of the world to dispute her rights and those of her boy. At the first sitting of the Diet she appeared clad in deep mourning for her father, and in pathetic and dignified words implored her people to support her just cause. Magnates and deputies sprang up, half drew their sabers, and with eager voices vowed to stand by her with their lives and fortunes. Till then her firmness had never once forsaken her before the public eye, but at that shout she sank down upon her throne, and wept aloud.
MT plotting the Diplomatic Revolution:
The Empress-Queen had the faults as well as the virtues which are connected with quick sensibility and a high spirit. There was no peril which she was not ready to brave, no calamity which she was not ready to bring on her subjects, or on the whole human race, if only she might once taste the sweetness of a complete revenge. Revenge, too, presented itself to her narrow and superstitious mind in the guise of duty. Silesia had been wrested not only from the house of Austria, but from the Church of Rome. The conqueror had, indeed, permitted his new subjects to worship God after their own fashion; but this was not enough. To bigotry it seemed an in tolerable hardship that the Catholic Church, having long enjoyed ascendency, should be compelled to content itself with equality.
To recover Silesia, to humble the dynasty of Hohenzollern to the dust, was the great object of her life. She toiled during many years for this end, with zeal as indefatigable as that which the poet ascribes to the stately goddess who tired out her immortal horses in the work of raising the nations against Troy, and who offered to give up to destruction her darling Sparta and Mycenae, if only she might once see the smbke going up from the palace of Priam. With even such a spirit did the proud Austrian Juno strive to array against her foe a coalition such as Europe had never seen. Nothing would content her but that the whole civilized world, from the White Sea to the Adriatic, from the Bay of Biscay to the pastures of the wild horses of Tanais, should be combined in arms against one petty state.
Fritzian friends and family
The Keith brothers:
Alone of all his companions, they appear never to have had reason to complain of his demeanor to wards them. Some of those who knew the palace best pronounced that the Lord Marischal was the only human being whom Frederick ever really loved.
The Marquis D'Argens:
His was one of that abject class of minds which are superstitious with out being religious. Hating Christianity with a rancor which made him incapable of rational inquiry, unable to see in the harmony and beauty of the universe the traces of divine power and wisdom, he was the slave of dreams and omens—would not sit down to the table with thirteen in company, turned pale if the salt fell towards him, begged his guests not to cross their knives and forks on their plates, and would not for the world commence a journey on Friday. His health was a subject of constant anxiety to him. Whenever his head ached or his pulse beat quick, his dastardly fears and effeminate precautions were the jest of all Berlin. All this suited the king's purpose admirably. He wanted somebody by whom he might be amused, and whom he might despise. When he wished to pass half an hour in easy, polished conversation, D'Argens was an excellent companion; when he wanted to vent his spleen and contempt, D'Argens was an excellent butt.
Living with Fritz and why you don't want to do it:
His vanity, as well as his malignity, found gratification in the vexation and confusion of those who smarted under his caustic jests. Yet in truth his success on these occasions belonged quite as much to the king as to the wit...How to deal with him was the most puzzling of questions. To appear constrained in his presence was to disobey his commands and to spoil his amusement. Yet if his associates were enticed by his graciousness to indulge in the familiarity of a cordial intimacy, he was certain to make them repent of their presumption by some cruel humiliation. To resent his affronts was perilous: yet not to resent them was to deserve and to invite them.
It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how anything short of the rage of hunger should have induced men to bear the misery of being the associates of the Great King. It was no lucrative post...
Potsdam was, in truth, what it was called by one of its most illustrious inmates, the Palace of Alcina. At the first glance it seemed to be a delightful spot, where every intellectual and physical enjoyment awaited the happy adventurer. It was in vain that a long succession of favorites who had entered that abode with delight and hope, and who, after a short term of delusive happiness, had been doomed to expiate their folly by years of wretchedness and degradation, raised their voices to warn the aspirant who approached the charmed threshold...We have no hesitation in saying that the poorest author of that time in London, sleeping on a bulk, dining in a cellar, with a cravat of paper, and a skewer for a shirt-pin, was a happier man than any of the literary inmates of Frederick's court.
[Yes, I requoted the palace of Alcina passage, because it fit both there and here.]
Wilhelmine dies:
From the portraits which we have of her, by her own hand, and by the hands of the most discerning of her contemporaries, we should pronounce her to have been coarse, indelicate, and a good hater, but not destitute of kind and generous feelings. Her mind, naturally strong and observant, had been highly cultivated; and she was, and deserved to be, Frederick's favorite sister. He felt the loss as much as it was in his iron nature to feel the loss of any thing but a province or a battle.
Fritz as poet
If you want some shade-throwing about Fritz's poetry, Macaulay is your man. He also had some opinions about why Fritz was so bad:
The wish, perhaps, dearest to his heart was, that he might rank among the masters of French rhetoric and poetry. He wrote prose and verse as indefatigably as if he had been a starving hack of Cave or Osborn; but Nature, which had bestowed on him in a large measure the talents of a captain and of an administrator, had withheld from him those higher and rarer gifts, without which industry labors in vain to produce immortal eloquence or song. And, indeed, had he been blessed with more imagination, wit, and fertility of thought than he appears to have had, he would still have been subject to one great disadvantage, which would, in all probability, have forever prevented him from taking a high place among men of letters. He had not the full command of any language. There was no machine of thought which he could employ with perfect ease, confidence, and freedom. He had German enough to scold his servants or to give the word of command to his grenadiers; but his grammar and pronunciation were extremely bad.
Yet though he had neglected his mother tongue in order to bestow all his attention on French, his French was, after all, the French of a foreigner. It was necessary for him to have always at his beck some men of letters from Paris to point out the solecisms and false rhymes, of which, to the last, he was frequently guilty. Even had he possessed the poetic faculty—of which, as far as we can judge, he was utterly destitute—the want of a language would have prevented him from being a great poet. No noble work of imagination, as far as we recollect, was ever composed by any man, except in a dialect which he had learned without remember ing how or when, and which he had spoken with perfect ease before he had ever analyzed its structure. Romans of great talents wrote Greek verses; but how many of those verses have deserved to live? Many men of eminent genius have, in modern times, written Latin poems ; but. as far as we are aware, none of those poems, not even Milton's, can be ranked in the first class of art, or even very high in the second. It is not strange, therefore, that in the French verses of Frederick, we can find nothing beyond the reach of any man of good parts and industry.
[Macaulay thinks his histories are slightly better.]
On the whole, however, none of his writings are so agreeable to us as his Letters ; particularly those which are written with earnestness, and are not embroidered with verses.
Macaulay is also not the biggest fan of Voltaire as author:
It is not strange that a young man devoted to literature, and acquainted only with the literature of France, should have looked with profound veneration on the genius of Voltaire. Nor is it just to condemn him for this feeling. "A man who has never seen the sun," says Calderon in one of his charming comedies, "cannot be blamed for thinking that no glory can exceed that of the moon. A man who has seen neither moon nor sun cannot be blamed for talking of the unrivaled brightness of the morning star." Had Frederick been able to read Homer and Milton, or even Virgil and Tasso, his admiration of the Henriade would prove that he was utterly destitute of the power of discerning what is excellent in art. Had he been familiar with Sophocles or Shakespeare, we should have expected him to appreciate Zaire more justly. Had he been able to study Thucydides and Tacitus in the original Greek and Latin, he would have known that there were heights in the eloquence of history far beyond the reach of the author of the Life of Charles the Twelfth. But the finest heroic poem, several of the most powerful tragedies, and the most brilliant and picturesque historical work that Frederick had ever read, were Voltaire's.
[By "familiar with Shakespeare" I guess you mean reading Shakespeare as opposed to condemning Shakespeare unread?]
Fritz's personality
His personality in general:
It was entitled the Anti-Machiavel, and was an edifying homily against rapacity, perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust war—in short, against almost everything for which its author is now remembered among men.
Fritz in 1740:
His habit of canting about moderation, peace, liberty, and the happiness which a good mind derives from the happiness of others, had imposed on some who should have known better. Those who thought best of him expected a Telemachus after Fenelon's pattern. Others predicted the approach of a Medicean age— an age propitious to learning and art, and not unpropitious to pleasure. Nobody had the least suspicion that a tyrant of extraordinary military and political talents, of industry more extraordinary still, without fear, without faith, and without mercy, had ascended the throne.
Fritz in the Silesian Wars, deciding to abandon his allies now that he's got Silesia:
In the mean time, Frederick was meditating a change of policy. He had no wish to raise France to supreme power on the continent, at the expense of the house of Hapsburg. His first object was to rob the Queen of Hungary. His second was that, if possible, nobody should rob her but himself.
After the Second Silesian War:
By the public the King of Prussia was considered as a politician destitute alike of morality and decency, insatiably rapacious, and shamelessly false; nor was the public much in the wrong. He was at the same time allowed to be a man of parts—a rising general, a shrewd negotiator and administrator. Those qualities, wherein he surpassed all mankind, were as yet unknown to others or to him self ; for they were qualities which shine out only on a dark ground. His career had hitherto, with little interruption, been prosperous; and it was only in adversity, in adversity which seemed without hope or resource, in adversity that would have overwhelmed even men celebrated for strength of mind, that his real greatness could be shown.
Famous apocryphal anecdote. One blogger I found has tried and failed to trace it back further than Macaulay, who may have invented it:
He once saw a crowd staring at something on a wall. He rode up, and found that the object of curiosity was a scurrilous placard against himself. The placard had been posted up so high that it was not easy to read it. Frederick ordered his attendants to take it down and put it lower. " My people and I," he said, "have come to an agreement which satisfies us - both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please." No person would have dared to publish in London satires on George II. approaching to the atrocity of those satires on Frederick which the booksellers at Berlin sold with impunity.
One bookseller sent to the palace a copy of the most stinging lampoon that perhaps was ever written in the world, the "Memoirs of Voltaire," published by Beaumarchais, and asked for his majesty's orders. "Do not advertise it in an offensive manner," said the king; "but sell it by all means. I hope it will pay you well." Even among statesmen accustomed to the license of a free press such steadfastness of mind as this is not very common.
Macaulay's belief in religious freedom leads him to be opposed to anti-Semitism and one tiny aspect of English colonialism. One of the few works by him I have read is an essay on religious tolerance, and I remember it having some good and quotable arguments.
Religious persecution was unknown under his government—unless some foolish and unjust restrictions which lay upon the Jews may be regarded as forming an exception.
His policy with respect to the Catholics of Silesia presented an honorable contrast to the policy which, under very similar circumstances, England long followed with respect to the Catholics of Ireland.
Several pages devoted to Fritz's control issues, excerpted here:
Most of the vices of Frederick's administration resolve themselves into one vice—the spirit of meddling.
[Insert numerous examples.]
For his commercial policy, however, there is some excuse. He had on his side illustrious examples and popular prejudice. Grievously as he erred, he erred in company with his age. In other departments his meddling was altogether without apology. He interfered with the course of justice as well as with the course of trade.
It never occurred to him that a body of men whose lives were passed in adjudicating on questions of civil right, were more likely to form correct opinions on such questions than a prince whose attention was divided between a thousand objects, and who had probably never read a law-book through...
[Examples.]
He firmly believed that he was doing right and defending the cause of the poor against the wealthy. Yet this well-meant meddling probably did far more harm than all the explosions of his evil passions during the whole of his long reign. We could make shift to live under a debauchee or a tyrant, but to be ruled by a busybody is more than human nature can bear.
Fritz the terrier
Frederick, surnamed the Great, son of Frederick William, was born in January, 1712. It may safely be pronounced that he had received from nature a strong and sharp understanding, and a rare firmness of temper and intensity of will. As to the other parts of his character, it is difficult to say whether they are to be ascribed to nature or to the strange training which he underwent.
Fritz after the defeat at Kolin:
His resolution was fixed never to be taken alive, and never to make peace on condition of descending from his place among the powers of Europe. He saw nothing left for him except to die; and he deliberately chose his mode of death. He always carried about with him a sure and speedy poison in a small glass case; and to the few in whom he placed confidence he made no mystery of his resolution.
But we should very imperfectly describe the state of Frederick's mind, if we left out of view the laughable peculiarities which contrasted so singularly with the gravity, energy, and harshness of his character. It is difficult to say whether the tragic or the comic predominated in the strange scene which was then acted. In the midst of all the great king's calamities, his passion for writing indifferent poetry grew stronger and stronger. Enemies all around him, despair in his heart, pills of corrosive sublimate hidden in his clothes, he poured forth hundreds upon hundreds of lines, hateful to gods and men—the insipid dregs of "Voltaire's Hippocrene—the faint echo of the lyre of Chaulieu.
It is amusing to compare what he did during the last months of 1757 [his famous victories at Rossbach and Leuthen] with what he wrote during the same time. It may be doubted whether any equal portion of the life of Hannibal, of Caesar, or of Napoleon, will bear a comparison with that short period, the most brilliant in the history of Prussia and of Frederick. Yet at this very time the scanty leisure of the illustrious warrior was employed in producing odes and epistles, a little better than Cibber's, and a little worse than Hayley's.
We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
[Trissotin: a "scholar" and mediocre poet with lofty aspirations in a Molière play. The scare quotes are Wikipedia's, as I haven't read it.]
Mithridates: A famous Mediterranean king during Roman times associated with building up an immunity toiocane powder poison to prevent poisoning attempts (his father was poisoned), then trying to commit suicide via poison rather than be captured and paraded in a triumph by the Romans, and his whole immunity to poison backfiring. Oops! So he ended up needing a little help from a sword.
After his great victories:
But it was decreed that the temper of that strong mind should be tried by both extremes of fortune in rapid succession. Close upon this bright series of triumphs came a series of disasters, such as would have blighted the fame and broken the heart of almost any other commander. Yet Frederick, in the midst of his calamities, was still an object of admiration to his subjects, his allies, and his enemies. Overwhelmed by adversity, sick of life, he still maintained the contest, greater in defeat, in flight, and in what seemed hopeless ruin, than on the fields of his proudest victories.
The Seven Years' War continues, Fritz is still hanging in there:
The fifth year was now about to commence. It seemed impossible that the Prussian territories, repeatedly devastated by hundreds of thousands of invaders, could longer support the contest. But...he governed his kingdom as he would have governed a besieged town, not caring to what extent property was destroyed, or the pursuits of civil life suspended, so that he did but make head against the enemy. As long as there was a man left in Prussia, that man might carry a musket; as long as there was a horse left, that horse might draw artillery. The coin was debased, the civil functionaries were left unpaid; in some provinces civil government altogether ceased to exist. But there were still rye-bread and potatoes; there were still lead and gunpowder; and, while the means of sustaining and destroying life remained, Frederick was determined to fight it out to the very last.
The fifth year closed and still the event was in suspense. In the countries where the war had raged, the misery and exhaustion were more appalling than ever; but still there were left men and beasts, arms and. food, and still Frederick fought on. In truth he had now been baited into savageness. His heart was ulcerated with hatred. The implacable resentment with which his enemies persecuted him, though originally provoked by his own unprincipled ambition, excited in him a thirst for vengeance which he did not even attempt to conceal. "It is hard," he says in one of his let ters, "for a man to bear what I bear. I begin to feel that, as the Italians say, revenge is a pleasure for the gods. My philosophy is worn out by suffering. I am no saint, like those of whom we read in the legends; and I will own that I should die content if only I could first inflict a portion of the misery which I endure."
The war ends:
The peace of Hubertsburg put an end to the conflict which had, during seven years, devastated Germany. The king ceded nothing. The whole Continent in arms had proved unable to tear Silesia from that iron grasp.
The war was over. Frederick was safe. His glory was beyond the reach of envy. If he had not made conquests as vast as those of Alexander, of Caesar, and of Napoleon,—if he had not, on field of battle, enjoyed the constant success of Marlborough and Wellington, —he had yet given an example, unrivaled in history, of what capacity and resolution can effect against the greatest superiority of power and the utmost spite of fortune.
It's all Fritz's fault!
MT and the Pragmatic Sanction, which, remember, England supported:
No sovereign has ever taken possession of a throne by a clearer title...Even if no positive stipulations on this subject had existed, the arrangement was one which no good man would have been willing to disturb. It was a peaceable arrangement. It was an arrangement acceptable to the great population whose happiness was chiefly concerned. It was an arrangement which made no change in the distribution of power among the states of Christendom.
It seemed that justice, humanity, and the faith of treaties would have their due weight, and that the settlement so solemnly guaranteed would be quietly carried into effect. England, Russia, Poland, and Holland declared in form their intention to adhere to their engagements. The French ministers made a verbal declaration to the same effect. But from no quarter did the young Queen of Hungary receive stronger assurances of friendship and support than from the King of Prussia.
Yet the King of Prussia, the "Anti-Machiavel" had already fully determined to commit the great crime of violating his plighted faith, of robbing the ally whom he was bound to defend, and of plunging all Europe into a long, bloody, and desolating war, and all this for no end whatever except that he might extend his dominions and see his name in the gazettes.
We will not condescend to refute at length the pleas...[put forth by] Doctor Preuss.
This is where it gets really good:
Had the Silesian question been merely a question between Frederick and Maria Theresa, it would be impossible to acquit the Prussian king of gross perfidy. But when we consider the effects which his policy produced, and could not fail to produce, on the whole community of civilized nations, we are compelled to pronounce a condemnation still more severe. Till he began the war it seemed possible, even probable, that the peace of the world would be preserved.
On the head of Frederick is all the blood which was shed in a war which raged during many years and in every quarter of the globe— the blood of the column of Fontenoy, the blood of the brave mountaineers who were slaughtered at Culloden. The evils produced by this wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
Because...if two Germans fight each other that's bad, but English and French colonialism is just a natural part of the world? From the British minister in India, I suppose I expect nothing less.
But Culloden, wow, that's special. Okay, *Louis's* support for Charles had to do with wanting to divert the English from the Continent in 1745. *But*, Charles' motives had nothing to do with that, Jacobitism (like colonialism) way predated Fritz, and, most critically, actual support from Louis for the '45 was minimal. Charles raised funds mostly on his own, set out mostly on his own, arrived in Scotland, was told to go home (due to lack of French support!), announced, "I am come home," and proceeded to single-handedly drive a rebellion at the age of 24, which I've always thought had more to do with his age and his personality than French support.
It's not Fritz's fault!
Satirical verses against all the princes and ministers of Europe were ascribed to his pen...About women he was in the habit of expressing himself in a manner which it was impossible for the meekest of women to forgive; and, unfortunately for him, almost the whole continent was then governed by women who were by no means conspicuous for meekness.
Though the haughtiest of princesses, though the most austere of matrons, [MT] forgot in her thirst for revenge both the dignity of her race and the purity of her character, and condescended to flatter the low-born and low-minded concubine, who, having acquired influence by prostituting herself, retained it by prostituting others. Maria Theresa actually wrote with her own hand a note full of expressions of esteem and friendship to her dear cousin, the daughter of the butcher Poisson, the wife of the publican D'Etioles, the kidnapper of young girls for the Parc-aux-cerfs—a strange cousin for the descendant of so many Emperors of the West !
[The Parc-aux-cerfs was where Louis XV kept his mistresses. I had never heard that Pompadour had anything to do with it, so I looked it up, and a most reliable source quoted in a most reliable source, Nancy Mitford in Wikipedia, says that she did not. I mean, I'm inclined to agree, but I can't say for sure.]
Louis...had, indeed, wrongs of his own to resent. His feelings were not quick; but contempt, says the eastern proverb, pierces even through the shell of the tortoise: and neither prudence nor decorum had ever restrained Frederick from expressing his measureless contempt for the sloth, the imbecility, and the baseness of Louis.
The tastes and interests of Frederick would have led him, if he had been allowed an option, to side with the house of Bourbon. But the folly of the court of Versailles left him no choice. France became the tool of Austria, and Frederick was forced to become the ally of England
[Remember, England was at war with France during this war (and pretty much every war).]
Fritz, England's ally, totally fighting in self-defense against the Maenads during the Seven Years' war, which had nothing to do with his rape of Silesia in 1740:
The object of Frederick was to obtain possession of the Saxon State Papers; for those papers, he well knew, contained ample proofs that though apparently an aggressor, he was really acting in self-defense. The Queen of Poland, as well acquainted as Frederick with the importance of those documents, had packed them up, had concealed them in her bed-chamber, and was about to send them off to Warsaw, when a Prussian officer made his appearance. In the hope that no soldier would venture to outrage a lady, a queen, a daughter of an emperor, the mother-in-law of a dauphin, she placed herself before the trunk, and at length sat down on it. But all resistance was vain. The papers were carried to Frederick, who found in them, as he expected, abundant evidence of the designs of the coalition. The most important documents were instantly published, and the effect of the publication was great. It was clear that, of whatever sins the King of Prussia might formerly have been guilty, he was now the injured party, and had merely anticipated a blow intended to destroy him.
How convenient that Fritz is in the wrong when he fights against England, and in the right when he's allied with England!
Miscellanea
A couple quotes that didn't fit anywhere else.
Fritzmania in England after Rossbach and Leuthen:
Yet even the enthusiasm of Germany in favor of Frederick hardly equaled the enthusiasm of England. The birthday of our ally was celebrated with as much enthusiasm as that of our own sovereign, and at night the streets of London were in a blaze with illuminations. Portraits of the Hero of Rosbach, with his cocked hat and long pigtail, were in every house. An attentive observer will, at this day, find in the parlors of old-fashioned inns, and in the portfolios of printsellers, twenty portraits of Frederick for one of George II. The sign-painters were everywhere employed in touching up Admiral Vernon into the King of Prussia.
Some young English men of rank proposed to visit Germany as volunteers, for the purpose of learning the art of war under the greatest of commanders. This last proof of British attachment and admiration Frederick politely but firmly declined. His camp was no place for amateur students of military science. The Prussian discipline was rigorous even to cruelty.
Gay young Englishmen of twenty thousand a year, accustomed to liberty and to luxury, would not easily submit to these Spartan restraints. The king could not venture to keep them in order as he kept his own subjects in order. Situated as he was with respect to England, he could not well imprison or shoot refractory Howards and Cavendishes.
Dissing Boswell, sorryselenak:
The Grand Duke Peter, her nephew, who now ascended the Russian throne, was not merely free from the prejudices which his aunt had entertained against Frederick, but was a worshiper, a servile imitator, a Boswell, of the great king.
[Fritz's] personal character, manners, studies, literary associates; his quarrel with Voltaire, his friendship for Maupertuis, and his own unhappy métromanie will be will be very slightly, if at all alluded to in a History of England. Yet in order to write the History of England, it will be necessary to turn over all the Memoirs, and the writings of Frederic, connected with us, as he was, in a most important war.
This despite the fact that his history as published doesn't even overlap with Fritz's lifetime. Fritz is just that fascinating! (He really is. :P)
So Macaulay put together a 100-page bio that got reprinted a lot in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It stops with the end of the Seven Years' War, meaning Macaulay explicitly did what many people tacitly do, ignore the second 23 years of a 46-year reign. Carlyle's bio manages 20 books about the first 23 years (1740-1763) and 1 book about the second 23 (1763-1786).
The copy I obtained from Google Books, published in 1882, has a description of the second half of the reign supplied by someone with less amazing prose and wit than Macaulay. When Macaulay's essay comes to an end and the book continues, the editor puts in a footnote:
The reader will not need to be reminded that the narrative of Macaulay ends here. The descent from the sunny uplands of his style is sudden and painful, but there is no help for it. Herr Kohlrausch goes on honestly enough, and we must let him finish the story or go without it altogether. Patience; it will soon be over, and as a sugar-plum for good children, we promise you near the close a gorgeous picture of the great king in his old age, by Carlyle.
I cannot say I disagree: the post-Seven Years' War material by Herr Kohlrausch is unremarkable. But I give you, in a series of thematically grouped subthreads, Macaulay's most quotable moments. I wouldn't read this for facts or opinions, but you can tell this is the author of the Lays of Ancient Rome: very ringing and memorable prose, often quoted by modern biographers (even if only to disagree with the sentiments expressed).
Oh, apparently Macaulay called Carlyle's style gibberish when he started reading Carlyle's multi-volume Fritz bio in 1858, and I agree wholeheartedly. Humorously quotable in small excerpts; I've never managed to penetrate it as a work.
Oh, one very important thing to keep in mind from this, apart from Macaulay's political opinions and lack of access to the sources we now have: he was a nineteenth century British minister, and his biases are way showing. Do not take this write-up as a source for facts or interpretations of Fritz's life: it tells you far more about Macaulay than about Fritz. I've written it up at such length because Macaulay has an amazing writing style, not because this is a valuable historical source.
But on to the entertaining parts!
FW
Macaulay is not an FW fan! To the point where the editor of my 1882 volume feels the need to add a footnote saying Macaulay is being unduly harsh. Macaulay apparently had some Daddy issues himself, according to an article I read that argued that while Carlyle's tastes and opinions occasionally overlap with FW's more than Fritz's and it shows (something I had noticed), Macaulay was the freethinking son of a pious father and might have identified with Fritz's struggles.
Frederick was succeeded by his son, Frederick William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by the most odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never been seen out of a mad-house.
He hated infidels, Papists, and metaphysicians, and did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The business of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drilled. The recreations suited to a prince were to sit in a cloud of tobacco smoke, to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon for three halfpence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot partridges by the thousand.
The history of [Fritz's] boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish work-house, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown.
FW putting an end to Fritz's Latin education:
Up went the king's cane, away ran the terrified instructor, and Frederick's classical studies ended forever. He now and then affected to quote Latin sentences, and produced such exquisite Ciceronian phrases as these: "Stante pede morire"—"De gustibus non est disputandus"— "Tot verbas tot spondera."
The second two of those are ungrammatical attempts to render Latin sayings. The first one I didn't recognize, but Googling seems to indicate that it's a translation into Latin of a saying that's found in various Germanic languages. So possibly, if it's not apocryphal, something Fritz knew from German.
The love that dare not speak its name:
Things became worse when the Prince-Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place [i.e. adolescence].- He was guilty of some youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with severity. At a later period he was accused, truly or falsely, of vices from which History averts her eyes and which even satire blushes to name—vices such that, to borrow the energetic language of Lord-Keeper Coventry, "the depraved nature of man, which of itself carrieth man to all other sin, abhorreth them." But the offenses of his youth were not characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however. transports of rage in the king, who hated all faults except those to which he was him self inclined, and who conceived that he made ample atonement to Heaven for his brutality, by holding the softer passions in detestation.
The king suspected that his son was inclined to be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist, his majesty did not very well know. The ordinary malignity of Frederick William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a Christian man, and all the conscience that he had stimulated his hatred.
Once his father knocked him down, dragged him along the floor to a window, and was with difficulty prevented from strangling him with the cord of the curtain. The queen, for the crime of not wishing to see her son murdered, was subjected to the grossest indignities.
The prince was an officer in the army; his flight was therefore desertion, and, in the moral code of Frederick William, desertion was the highest of all crimes. "Desertion," says this royal theologian in one of his half-crazy letters, "is from hell."
[Fritz] remained, however, long a prisoner; but he was not on that account to be pitied. He found in his jailors a tenderness which he had never found in his father; his table was not sumptuous, but he had wholesome food in sufficient quantity to appease hunger; he could read the Henriade without being kicked, and play on his flute without having it broken over his head.
Fritz ascends to the throne:
It soon became plain that, in the most important points, the new sovereign bore a strong family likeness to his predecessor. There was a wide difference be tween the father and the son as respected extent and vigor of intellect, speculative opinions, amusements, studies, outward demeanor. But the groundwork of the character was the same in both. To both were common the love of order, the love of business, the military taste, the parsimony, the imperious spirit, the temper irritable even to ferocity, the pleasure in the pain and humiliation of others. But these propensities had in Frederick William partaken of the general unsoundness of his mind, and wore a very different aspect when found in company with the strong and cultivated understand ing of his successor. Thus, for example, Frederick was as anxious as any prince could be about the efficacy of his army. But this anxiety never degenerated into a monomania, like that which led his father to pay fancy prices for giants. Frederick was as thrifty about money as any prince or any private man ought to be. But he did not conceive, like his father, that it was worth while to eat unwholesome cabbages for the sake of saving four or five rix dollars in the year.
Frederick was, we fear, as malevolent as his father; but Frederick's wit enabled him often to show his malevolence in ways more decent than those to which his father resorted, and to inflict misery and degradation by a taunt instead of blow. Frederick it is true by no means relinquished his hereditary privilege of kicking and cudgelling. His practice, however, as to that matter differed in some important respects from his father's. To Frederick William, the mere circumstance that any persons whatever, men, women, or children, Prussians or foreigners, were within reach of his toes and of his cane, appeared to be a sufficient reason for proceeding to belabor them. Frederick required provocation as well as vicinity; nor was he ever known to inflict this paternal species of correction on any but his born subjects; though on one occasion M. Thiebault had reason during a few seconds to anticipate the high honor of being an exception to this general rule.
Voltaire
The prince wrote to his idol in the style of a worshiper, and Voltaire replied with exquisite grace and address. A correspondence followed, which may be studied with advantage by those who wish to become proficients in the ignoble art of flattery.
No man ever paid compliments better than Voltaire...It was only from his hand that so much sugar could be swallowed without making the swallower sick.
After Fritz betrays his allies by concluding a separate peace during the First Silesian War; France sends Voltaire to spy on him and try to get him back to fighting for them:
The court of Versailles, in this peril, looked to Frederick for help. He had been guilty of two great treasons, perhaps he might be induced to commit a third.
Voltaire was selected for the mission. He eagerly undertook the task; for, while his literary fame filled all Europe, he was troubled with a childish craving for political distinction. He was vain, and not without reason, of his address, and of his insinuating eloquence; and he flattered himself that he possessed boundless influence over the King of Prussia. The truth was that he knew, as yet, only one corner of Frederick's character. He was well acquainted with all the petty vanities and affectations of the poetaster; but was not aware that these foibles were united with all the talents and vices which lead to success in active life; and that the unlucky versifier who bored him with reams of middling Alexandrians, was the most vigilant, suspicious, and severe of politicians.
The negotiation was of an extraordinary description. Nothing can be conceived more whimsical than the conferences which took place between the first literary man and the first practical man of the age, whom a strange weakness had induced to exchange their parts. The great poet would talk of nothing but treaties and guaranties, and the great king of nothing but metaphors and rhymes. On one occasion Voltaire put into his Majesty's hand a paper on the state of Europe, and received it back with verses scrawled on the margin. In secret they both laughed at. each other. Voltaire did not spare the king's poems ; and the king has left on record his opinion of Voltaire's diplomacy. "He had no credentials," says Frederick, "and the whole mission was a joke, a mere farce."
Voltaire about to move to Prussia:
Potsdam was, in truth, what it was called by one of its most illustrious inmates, the Palace of Alcina. At the first glance it seemed to be a delightful spot, where every intellectual and physical enjoyment awaited the happy adventurer. It was in vain that a long succession of favorites who had entered that abode with delight and hope, and who, after a short term of delusive happiness, had been doomed to expiate their folly by years of wretchedness and degradation, raised their voices to warn the aspirant who ap proached the charmed threshold...We have no hesitation in saying that the poorest author of that time in London, sleeping on a bulk, dining in a cellar, with a cravat of paper, and a skewer for a shirt-pin, was a happier man than any of the literary inmates of Frederick's court.
But of all who entered the enchanted garden in the inebriation of delight, and quitted it in agonies of rage and shame, the most remarkable was Voltaire.
Fritz and Voltaire are squabbling about the terms of Voltaire's employment:
It seemed that the negotiation would be broken off; but Frederick, with great dexterity, affected indifference, and seemed inclined to transfer his idolatry to Baculard d'Arnaud. His Majesty even wrote some bad verses, of which the sense was, that Voltaire was a setting sun, and that Arnaud was rising. Good-natured friends soon carried the lines to Voltaire. He was in his bed. He jumped out in his shirt, danced about the room with rage, and sent for his passport and his post-horses. It was not difficult to foresee the end of a connection which had such a beginning.
The honeymoon doesn't last long:
This eccentric friendship was fast cooling. Never had there met two persons so exquisitely fitted to plague each other...
Both were angry, and a war began, in which Frederick stooped to the part of Harpagon, and Voltaire to that of Scapin. It is humiliating to relate that the great warrior and statesman gave orders that his guest's allowance of sugar and chocolate should be curtailed. It is, if possible, a still more humiliating fact that Voltaire indemnified himself by pocketing the wax candles in the royal antechamber.
[Harpagon and Scapin are title characters in Molière plays: a miser and a schemer.]
D'Arnaud and D'Argens, Guichard and La Metrie, might, for the sake of a morsel of bread, be willing to bear the in solence of a master; but Voltaire was of another order. He knew that he was a potentate as well as Frederick; that his European reputation, and his incomparable power of covering whatever he hated with ridicule, made him an object of dread even to the leaders of armies and the rulers of nations. In truth, of all the intellectual weapons which have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants, who had never been moved by the wailing and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name.
We cannot pause to recount how often that rare talent was exercised against rivals worthy of esteem —how often it was used to crush and torture enemies worthy only of silent disdain—how often it was perverted to the more noxious purpose of destroying the last solace of earthly misery and the last restraint on earthly power. Neither can we pause to tell hew often it was used to vindicate justice, humanity, and toleration—the principles of sound philosophy, the principles of free government. This is not the place for a full character of Voltaire.
After Voltaire gets involved in fraudulent transactions and tries swindling a banker:
The king was delighted at having such an opportunity to humble his guest; and bitter reproaches and complaints were exchanged. Voltaire, too, was soon at war with the other men of letters who surrounded the king; and this irritated Frederick, who, however, had himself chiefly to blame. for, from that love of tormenting which was in him a ruling passion, he perpetually lavished extravagant praises on small men and bad books, merely in order that he might enjoy the mortification and rage which on such occasions Voltaire took no pains to conceal. His Majesty, however, soon had reason to regret the pains which he had taken to kindle jealousy among the members of his household. The whole palace was in a ferment with literary intrigues and cabals.
The big breakup in full swing:
Voltaire had in his keeping a volume of the king's poetry and forgot to return it. This was, we believe, merely one of the oversights which men setting out upon a journey often commit. That Voltaire could have meditated plagiarism is quite incredible. He would not, we are confident, for the half of Frederick's kingdom have consented to father Frederick's verses. The king, however, who rated his own writings much above their value, and who was inclined to see all Voltaire's actions in the worst light, was enraged to think that his favorite compositions were in the hands of an enemy as thievish as a daw and as mischievous as a monkey.
[Macaulay doesn't seem to be familiar with the explanation that Fritz was afraid that other leading Europeans would find out he had written such things about them.]
Macaulay's verdict on the Frankfurt episode:
It is absurd to say that this outrage is not to be attributed to the king. Was anybody punished for it? Was anybody called in question for it? Was it not consistent with Frederick's character? Was it not of a piece with his conduct on other similar occasions? Is it not notorious that he repeatedly gave private directions to his officers to pillage and demolish the houses of persons against whom he had a grudge—charging them at the same time to take their measure in such a way that his name might not be compromised? He acted thus towards Count Buhl in the Seven Years' War. Why should we believe that he would have been more scrupulous with regard to Voltaire?
Fritz and Voltaire start corresponding again during the Seven Years' War:
We do not know any collection of letters which throw so much light on the darkest and most intricate parts of human nature as the correspondence of these strange beings after they bald exchanged forgiveness. Both felt that the quarrel had lowered them in the public estimation. They admired each other. They stood in need of each other. The great king wished to be handed down to posterity by the great writer. The great writer felt himself exalted by the homage of the great king. Yet the wounds which they had inflicted on each other were too deep to be effaced, or even perfectly healed. Not only did the scars remain ; the sore places often festered and bled afresh.
The letters consisted for the most part of compliments, thanks, offers of service, assurances of attachment. But if anything brought back to Frederick's recollection the cunning and mischievous pranks by which Voltaire had provoked him, some expression of contempt and displeasure broke forth in the midst of his eulogy. It was much worse when anything recalled to the mind of Voltaire the outrages which he and his kinswoman had suffered at Frankfort.
[Insert sample Fritz/Voltaire exchange of mutual vitriol here.]
An explosion of this kind, it might be supposed, would necessarily put an end to all amicable communication. But it was not so. After every out break of ill-humor this extraordinary pair became more loving than before, and exchanged compliments and assurances of mutual regard with a wonderful air of sincerity.
The English ambassador, Mitchell, who knew that the King of Prussia was constantly writing to Voltaire with the greatest freedom on the most important subjects, was amazed to hear His Majesty designate this highly-favored correspondent as a bad-hearted fellow, the greatest rascal on the face of the earth. And the language which the poet held about the king was not much more respectful.
Macaulay thinks Selena should write that Yuletide AU where Voltaire saves Fritz:
It would probably have puzzled Voltaire himself to say what was his real feeling towards Frederick. It was compounded of all sentiments, from enmity to friendship, and from scorn to admiration; and the proportions in which these elements were mixed changed every moment. The old patriarch resem bled the spoiled child who screams, stamps, cuffs, laughs, kisses, and cuddles within one quarter of an hour. His resentment was not extinguished; yet he was not without sympathy for his old friend. As a Frenchman, he wished success to the arms of his country. As a philosopher, he was anxious for the stability of a throne on which a philosopher sat. He longed both to save and to humble Frederick. There was one way, and only one, in which all his conflicting feelings could at once be gratified. If Frederick were preserved by the interference of France, if it were known that for that interference he was indebted to the mediation of Voltaire, this would indeed be delicious revenge; this would indeed be to heap coals of fire on that haughty head.
MT
Macaulay is a fan of MT, but not an uncritical one:
Her situation and her personal qualities were such as might be expected to move the mind of any generous man to pity, admiration, and chivalrous tenderness. She was in her twenty-fourth year. Her form was majestic, her features beautiful, her countenance sweet and animated, her voice musical, her deportment gracious and dignified. In all domestic relations she was without reproach. She was married to a husband whom she loved, and was on the point of giving birth to a child when death deprived her of her father. The loss of a parent and the new cares of the empire were too much for her in the delicate state of her health. Her spirits were depressed and her cheek lost its bloom.
In the midst of distress and peril she had given birth to a son, afterwards the Emperor Joseph the Second. Scarcely had she risen from her couch, when she hastened to Pressburg. There, in the sight of an innumerable multitude, she was crowned with the crown and robed with the robe of St. Stephen. No spectator could refrain his tears when the beautiful young mother, still weak from child bearing, rode, after the fashion of her fathers, up the Mount of Defiance, unsheathed the ancient sword of state, shook it towards north and south, east and west and, with a glow on her pale face, challenged the four corners of the world to dispute her rights and those of her boy. At the first sitting of the Diet she appeared clad in deep mourning for her father, and in pathetic and dignified words implored her people to support her just cause. Magnates and deputies sprang up, half drew their sabers, and with eager voices vowed to stand by her with their lives and fortunes. Till then her firmness had never once forsaken her before the public eye, but at that shout she sank down upon her throne, and wept aloud.
MT plotting the Diplomatic Revolution:
The Empress-Queen had the faults as well as the virtues which are connected with quick sensibility and a high spirit. There was no peril which she was not ready to brave, no calamity which she was not ready to bring on her subjects, or on the whole human race, if only she might once taste the sweetness of a complete revenge. Revenge, too, presented itself to her narrow and superstitious mind in the guise of duty. Silesia had been wrested not only from the house of Austria, but from the Church of Rome. The conqueror had, indeed, permitted his new subjects to worship God after their own fashion; but this was not enough. To bigotry it seemed an in tolerable hardship that the Catholic Church, having long enjoyed ascendency, should be compelled to content itself with equality.
To recover Silesia, to humble the dynasty of Hohenzollern to the dust, was the great object of her life. She toiled during many years for this end, with zeal as indefatigable as that which the poet ascribes to the stately goddess who tired out her immortal horses in the work of raising the nations against Troy, and who offered to give up to destruction her darling Sparta and Mycenae, if only she might once see the smbke going up from the palace of Priam. With even such a spirit did the proud Austrian Juno strive to array against her foe a coalition such as Europe had never seen. Nothing would content her but that the whole civilized world, from the White Sea to the Adriatic, from the Bay of Biscay to the pastures of the wild horses of Tanais, should be combined in arms against one petty state.
Fritzian friends and family
The Keith brothers:
Alone of all his companions, they appear never to have had reason to complain of his demeanor to wards them. Some of those who knew the palace best pronounced that the Lord Marischal was the only human being whom Frederick ever really loved.
The Marquis D'Argens:
His was one of that abject class of minds which are superstitious with out being religious. Hating Christianity with a rancor which made him incapable of rational inquiry, unable to see in the harmony and beauty of the universe the traces of divine power and wisdom, he was the slave of dreams and omens—would not sit down to the table with thirteen in company, turned pale if the salt fell towards him, begged his guests not to cross their knives and forks on their plates, and would not for the world commence a journey on Friday. His health was a subject of constant anxiety to him. Whenever his head ached or his pulse beat quick, his dastardly fears and effeminate precautions were the jest of all Berlin. All this suited the king's purpose admirably. He wanted somebody by whom he might be amused, and whom he might despise. When he wished to pass half an hour in easy, polished conversation, D'Argens was an excellent companion; when he wanted to vent his spleen and contempt, D'Argens was an excellent butt.
Living with Fritz and why you don't want to do it:
His vanity, as well as his malignity, found gratification in the vexation and confusion of those who smarted under his caustic jests. Yet in truth his success on these occasions belonged quite as much to the king as to the wit...How to deal with him was the most puzzling of questions. To appear constrained in his presence was to disobey his commands and to spoil his amusement. Yet if his associates were enticed by his graciousness to indulge in the familiarity of a cordial intimacy, he was certain to make them repent of their presumption by some cruel humiliation. To resent his affronts was perilous: yet not to resent them was to deserve and to invite them.
It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how anything short of the rage of hunger should have induced men to bear the misery of being the associates of the Great King. It was no lucrative post...
Potsdam was, in truth, what it was called by one of its most illustrious inmates, the Palace of Alcina. At the first glance it seemed to be a delightful spot, where every intellectual and physical enjoyment awaited the happy adventurer. It was in vain that a long succession of favorites who had entered that abode with delight and hope, and who, after a short term of delusive happiness, had been doomed to expiate their folly by years of wretchedness and degradation, raised their voices to warn the aspirant who approached the charmed threshold...We have no hesitation in saying that the poorest author of that time in London, sleeping on a bulk, dining in a cellar, with a cravat of paper, and a skewer for a shirt-pin, was a happier man than any of the literary inmates of Frederick's court.
[Yes, I requoted the palace of Alcina passage, because it fit both there and here.]
Wilhelmine dies:
From the portraits which we have of her, by her own hand, and by the hands of the most discerning of her contemporaries, we should pronounce her to have been coarse, indelicate, and a good hater, but not destitute of kind and generous feelings. Her mind, naturally strong and observant, had been highly cultivated; and she was, and deserved to be, Frederick's favorite sister. He felt the loss as much as it was in his iron nature to feel the loss of any thing but a province or a battle.
Fritz as poet
If you want some shade-throwing about Fritz's poetry, Macaulay is your man. He also had some opinions about why Fritz was so bad:
The wish, perhaps, dearest to his heart was, that he might rank among the masters of French rhetoric and poetry. He wrote prose and verse as indefatigably as if he had been a starving hack of Cave or Osborn; but Nature, which had bestowed on him in a large measure the talents of a captain and of an administrator, had withheld from him those higher and rarer gifts, without which industry labors in vain to produce immortal eloquence or song. And, indeed, had he been blessed with more imagination, wit, and fertility of thought than he appears to have had, he would still have been subject to one great disadvantage, which would, in all probability, have forever prevented him from taking a high place among men of letters. He had not the full command of any language. There was no machine of thought which he could employ with perfect ease, confidence, and freedom. He had German enough to scold his servants or to give the word of command to his grenadiers; but his grammar and pronunciation were extremely bad.
Yet though he had neglected his mother tongue in order to bestow all his attention on French, his French was, after all, the French of a foreigner. It was necessary for him to have always at his beck some men of letters from Paris to point out the solecisms and false rhymes, of which, to the last, he was frequently guilty. Even had he possessed the poetic faculty—of which, as far as we can judge, he was utterly destitute—the want of a language would have prevented him from being a great poet. No noble work of imagination, as far as we recollect, was ever composed by any man, except in a dialect which he had learned without remember ing how or when, and which he had spoken with perfect ease before he had ever analyzed its structure. Romans of great talents wrote Greek verses; but how many of those verses have deserved to live? Many men of eminent genius have, in modern times, written Latin poems ; but. as far as we are aware, none of those poems, not even Milton's, can be ranked in the first class of art, or even very high in the second. It is not strange, therefore, that in the French verses of Frederick, we can find nothing beyond the reach of any man of good parts and industry.
[Macaulay thinks his histories are slightly better.]
On the whole, however, none of his writings are so agreeable to us as his Letters ; particularly those which are written with earnestness, and are not embroidered with verses.
Macaulay is also not the biggest fan of Voltaire as author:
It is not strange that a young man devoted to literature, and acquainted only with the literature of France, should have looked with profound veneration on the genius of Voltaire. Nor is it just to condemn him for this feeling. "A man who has never seen the sun," says Calderon in one of his charming comedies, "cannot be blamed for thinking that no glory can exceed that of the moon. A man who has seen neither moon nor sun cannot be blamed for talking of the unrivaled brightness of the morning star." Had Frederick been able to read Homer and Milton, or even Virgil and Tasso, his admiration of the Henriade would prove that he was utterly destitute of the power of discerning what is excellent in art. Had he been familiar with Sophocles or Shakespeare, we should have expected him to appreciate Zaire more justly. Had he been able to study Thucydides and Tacitus in the original Greek and Latin, he would have known that there were heights in the eloquence of history far beyond the reach of the author of the Life of Charles the Twelfth. But the finest heroic poem, several of the most powerful tragedies, and the most brilliant and picturesque historical work that Frederick had ever read, were Voltaire's.
[By "familiar with Shakespeare" I guess you mean reading Shakespeare as opposed to condemning Shakespeare unread?]
Fritz's personality
His personality in general:
It was entitled the Anti-Machiavel, and was an edifying homily against rapacity, perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust war—in short, against almost everything for which its author is now remembered among men.
Fritz in 1740:
His habit of canting about moderation, peace, liberty, and the happiness which a good mind derives from the happiness of others, had imposed on some who should have known better. Those who thought best of him expected a Telemachus after Fenelon's pattern. Others predicted the approach of a Medicean age— an age propitious to learning and art, and not unpropitious to pleasure. Nobody had the least suspicion that a tyrant of extraordinary military and political talents, of industry more extraordinary still, without fear, without faith, and without mercy, had ascended the throne.
Fritz in the Silesian Wars, deciding to abandon his allies now that he's got Silesia:
In the mean time, Frederick was meditating a change of policy. He had no wish to raise France to supreme power on the continent, at the expense of the house of Hapsburg. His first object was to rob the Queen of Hungary. His second was that, if possible, nobody should rob her but himself.
After the Second Silesian War:
By the public the King of Prussia was considered as a politician destitute alike of morality and decency, insatiably rapacious, and shamelessly false; nor was the public much in the wrong. He was at the same time allowed to be a man of parts—a rising general, a shrewd negotiator and administrator. Those qualities, wherein he surpassed all mankind, were as yet unknown to others or to him self ; for they were qualities which shine out only on a dark ground. His career had hitherto, with little interruption, been prosperous; and it was only in adversity, in adversity which seemed without hope or resource, in adversity that would have overwhelmed even men celebrated for strength of mind, that his real greatness could be shown.
Famous apocryphal anecdote. One blogger I found has tried and failed to trace it back further than Macaulay, who may have invented it:
He once saw a crowd staring at something on a wall. He rode up, and found that the object of curiosity was a scurrilous placard against himself. The placard had been posted up so high that it was not easy to read it. Frederick ordered his attendants to take it down and put it lower. " My people and I," he said, "have come to an agreement which satisfies us - both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please." No person would have dared to publish in London satires on George II. approaching to the atrocity of those satires on Frederick which the booksellers at Berlin sold with impunity.
One bookseller sent to the palace a copy of the most stinging lampoon that perhaps was ever written in the world, the "Memoirs of Voltaire," published by Beaumarchais, and asked for his majesty's orders. "Do not advertise it in an offensive manner," said the king; "but sell it by all means. I hope it will pay you well." Even among statesmen accustomed to the license of a free press such steadfastness of mind as this is not very common.
Macaulay's belief in religious freedom leads him to be opposed to anti-Semitism and one tiny aspect of English colonialism. One of the few works by him I have read is an essay on religious tolerance, and I remember it having some good and quotable arguments.
Religious persecution was unknown under his government—unless some foolish and unjust restrictions which lay upon the Jews may be regarded as forming an exception.
His policy with respect to the Catholics of Silesia presented an honorable contrast to the policy which, under very similar circumstances, England long followed with respect to the Catholics of Ireland.
Several pages devoted to Fritz's control issues, excerpted here:
Most of the vices of Frederick's administration resolve themselves into one vice—the spirit of meddling.
[Insert numerous examples.]
For his commercial policy, however, there is some excuse. He had on his side illustrious examples and popular prejudice. Grievously as he erred, he erred in company with his age. In other departments his meddling was altogether without apology. He interfered with the course of justice as well as with the course of trade.
It never occurred to him that a body of men whose lives were passed in adjudicating on questions of civil right, were more likely to form correct opinions on such questions than a prince whose attention was divided between a thousand objects, and who had probably never read a law-book through...
[Examples.]
He firmly believed that he was doing right and defending the cause of the poor against the wealthy. Yet this well-meant meddling probably did far more harm than all the explosions of his evil passions during the whole of his long reign. We could make shift to live under a debauchee or a tyrant, but to be ruled by a busybody is more than human nature can bear.
Fritz the terrier
Frederick, surnamed the Great, son of Frederick William, was born in January, 1712. It may safely be pronounced that he had received from nature a strong and sharp understanding, and a rare firmness of temper and intensity of will. As to the other parts of his character, it is difficult to say whether they are to be ascribed to nature or to the strange training which he underwent.
Fritz after the defeat at Kolin:
His resolution was fixed never to be taken alive, and never to make peace on condition of descending from his place among the powers of Europe. He saw nothing left for him except to die; and he deliberately chose his mode of death. He always carried about with him a sure and speedy poison in a small glass case; and to the few in whom he placed confidence he made no mystery of his resolution.
But we should very imperfectly describe the state of Frederick's mind, if we left out of view the laughable peculiarities which contrasted so singularly with the gravity, energy, and harshness of his character. It is difficult to say whether the tragic or the comic predominated in the strange scene which was then acted. In the midst of all the great king's calamities, his passion for writing indifferent poetry grew stronger and stronger. Enemies all around him, despair in his heart, pills of corrosive sublimate hidden in his clothes, he poured forth hundreds upon hundreds of lines, hateful to gods and men—the insipid dregs of "Voltaire's Hippocrene—the faint echo of the lyre of Chaulieu.
It is amusing to compare what he did during the last months of 1757 [his famous victories at Rossbach and Leuthen] with what he wrote during the same time. It may be doubted whether any equal portion of the life of Hannibal, of Caesar, or of Napoleon, will bear a comparison with that short period, the most brilliant in the history of Prussia and of Frederick. Yet at this very time the scanty leisure of the illustrious warrior was employed in producing odes and epistles, a little better than Cibber's, and a little worse than Hayley's.
We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
[Trissotin: a "scholar" and mediocre poet with lofty aspirations in a Molière play. The scare quotes are Wikipedia's, as I haven't read it.]
Mithridates: A famous Mediterranean king during Roman times associated with building up an immunity to
After his great victories:
But it was decreed that the temper of that strong mind should be tried by both extremes of fortune in rapid succession. Close upon this bright series of triumphs came a series of disasters, such as would have blighted the fame and broken the heart of almost any other commander. Yet Frederick, in the midst of his calamities, was still an object of admiration to his subjects, his allies, and his enemies. Overwhelmed by adversity, sick of life, he still maintained the contest, greater in defeat, in flight, and in what seemed hopeless ruin, than on the fields of his proudest victories.
The Seven Years' War continues, Fritz is still hanging in there:
The fifth year was now about to commence. It seemed impossible that the Prussian territories, repeatedly devastated by hundreds of thousands of invaders, could longer support the contest. But...he governed his kingdom as he would have governed a besieged town, not caring to what extent property was destroyed, or the pursuits of civil life suspended, so that he did but make head against the enemy. As long as there was a man left in Prussia, that man might carry a musket; as long as there was a horse left, that horse might draw artillery. The coin was debased, the civil functionaries were left unpaid; in some provinces civil government altogether ceased to exist. But there were still rye-bread and potatoes; there were still lead and gunpowder; and, while the means of sustaining and destroying life remained, Frederick was determined to fight it out to the very last.
The fifth year closed and still the event was in suspense. In the countries where the war had raged, the misery and exhaustion were more appalling than ever; but still there were left men and beasts, arms and. food, and still Frederick fought on. In truth he had now been baited into savageness. His heart was ulcerated with hatred. The implacable resentment with which his enemies persecuted him, though originally provoked by his own unprincipled ambition, excited in him a thirst for vengeance which he did not even attempt to conceal. "It is hard," he says in one of his let ters, "for a man to bear what I bear. I begin to feel that, as the Italians say, revenge is a pleasure for the gods. My philosophy is worn out by suffering. I am no saint, like those of whom we read in the legends; and I will own that I should die content if only I could first inflict a portion of the misery which I endure."
The war ends:
The peace of Hubertsburg put an end to the conflict which had, during seven years, devastated Germany. The king ceded nothing. The whole Continent in arms had proved unable to tear Silesia from that iron grasp.
The war was over. Frederick was safe. His glory was beyond the reach of envy. If he had not made conquests as vast as those of Alexander, of Caesar, and of Napoleon,—if he had not, on field of battle, enjoyed the constant success of Marlborough and Wellington, —he had yet given an example, unrivaled in history, of what capacity and resolution can effect against the greatest superiority of power and the utmost spite of fortune.
It's all Fritz's fault!
MT and the Pragmatic Sanction, which, remember, England supported:
No sovereign has ever taken possession of a throne by a clearer title...Even if no positive stipulations on this subject had existed, the arrangement was one which no good man would have been willing to disturb. It was a peaceable arrangement. It was an arrangement acceptable to the great population whose happiness was chiefly concerned. It was an arrangement which made no change in the distribution of power among the states of Christendom.
It seemed that justice, humanity, and the faith of treaties would have their due weight, and that the settlement so solemnly guaranteed would be quietly carried into effect. England, Russia, Poland, and Holland declared in form their intention to adhere to their engagements. The French ministers made a verbal declaration to the same effect. But from no quarter did the young Queen of Hungary receive stronger assurances of friendship and support than from the King of Prussia.
Yet the King of Prussia, the "Anti-Machiavel" had already fully determined to commit the great crime of violating his plighted faith, of robbing the ally whom he was bound to defend, and of plunging all Europe into a long, bloody, and desolating war, and all this for no end whatever except that he might extend his dominions and see his name in the gazettes.
We will not condescend to refute at length the pleas...[put forth by] Doctor Preuss.
This is where it gets really good:
Had the Silesian question been merely a question between Frederick and Maria Theresa, it would be impossible to acquit the Prussian king of gross perfidy. But when we consider the effects which his policy produced, and could not fail to produce, on the whole community of civilized nations, we are compelled to pronounce a condemnation still more severe. Till he began the war it seemed possible, even probable, that the peace of the world would be preserved.
On the head of Frederick is all the blood which was shed in a war which raged during many years and in every quarter of the globe— the blood of the column of Fontenoy, the blood of the brave mountaineers who were slaughtered at Culloden. The evils produced by this wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
Because...if two Germans fight each other that's bad, but English and French colonialism is just a natural part of the world? From the British minister in India, I suppose I expect nothing less.
But Culloden, wow, that's special. Okay, *Louis's* support for Charles had to do with wanting to divert the English from the Continent in 1745. *But*, Charles' motives had nothing to do with that, Jacobitism (like colonialism) way predated Fritz, and, most critically, actual support from Louis for the '45 was minimal. Charles raised funds mostly on his own, set out mostly on his own, arrived in Scotland, was told to go home (due to lack of French support!), announced, "I am come home," and proceeded to single-handedly drive a rebellion at the age of 24, which I've always thought had more to do with his age and his personality than French support.
It's not Fritz's fault!
Satirical verses against all the princes and ministers of Europe were ascribed to his pen...About women he was in the habit of expressing himself in a manner which it was impossible for the meekest of women to forgive; and, unfortunately for him, almost the whole continent was then governed by women who were by no means conspicuous for meekness.
Though the haughtiest of princesses, though the most austere of matrons, [MT] forgot in her thirst for revenge both the dignity of her race and the purity of her character, and condescended to flatter the low-born and low-minded concubine, who, having acquired influence by prostituting herself, retained it by prostituting others. Maria Theresa actually wrote with her own hand a note full of expressions of esteem and friendship to her dear cousin, the daughter of the butcher Poisson, the wife of the publican D'Etioles, the kidnapper of young girls for the Parc-aux-cerfs—a strange cousin for the descendant of so many Emperors of the West !
[The Parc-aux-cerfs was where Louis XV kept his mistresses. I had never heard that Pompadour had anything to do with it, so I looked it up, and a most reliable source quoted in a most reliable source, Nancy Mitford in Wikipedia, says that she did not. I mean, I'm inclined to agree, but I can't say for sure.]
Louis...had, indeed, wrongs of his own to resent. His feelings were not quick; but contempt, says the eastern proverb, pierces even through the shell of the tortoise: and neither prudence nor decorum had ever restrained Frederick from expressing his measureless contempt for the sloth, the imbecility, and the baseness of Louis.
The tastes and interests of Frederick would have led him, if he had been allowed an option, to side with the house of Bourbon. But the folly of the court of Versailles left him no choice. France became the tool of Austria, and Frederick was forced to become the ally of England
[Remember, England was at war with France during this war (and pretty much every war).]
Fritz, England's ally, totally fighting in self-defense against the Maenads during the Seven Years' war, which had nothing to do with his rape of Silesia in 1740:
The object of Frederick was to obtain possession of the Saxon State Papers; for those papers, he well knew, contained ample proofs that though apparently an aggressor, he was really acting in self-defense. The Queen of Poland, as well acquainted as Frederick with the importance of those documents, had packed them up, had concealed them in her bed-chamber, and was about to send them off to Warsaw, when a Prussian officer made his appearance. In the hope that no soldier would venture to outrage a lady, a queen, a daughter of an emperor, the mother-in-law of a dauphin, she placed herself before the trunk, and at length sat down on it. But all resistance was vain. The papers were carried to Frederick, who found in them, as he expected, abundant evidence of the designs of the coalition. The most important documents were instantly published, and the effect of the publication was great. It was clear that, of whatever sins the King of Prussia might formerly have been guilty, he was now the injured party, and had merely anticipated a blow intended to destroy him.
How convenient that Fritz is in the wrong when he fights against England, and in the right when he's allied with England!
Miscellanea
A couple quotes that didn't fit anywhere else.
Fritzmania in England after Rossbach and Leuthen:
Yet even the enthusiasm of Germany in favor of Frederick hardly equaled the enthusiasm of England. The birthday of our ally was celebrated with as much enthusiasm as that of our own sovereign, and at night the streets of London were in a blaze with illuminations. Portraits of the Hero of Rosbach, with his cocked hat and long pigtail, were in every house. An attentive observer will, at this day, find in the parlors of old-fashioned inns, and in the portfolios of printsellers, twenty portraits of Frederick for one of George II. The sign-painters were everywhere employed in touching up Admiral Vernon into the King of Prussia.
Some young English men of rank proposed to visit Germany as volunteers, for the purpose of learning the art of war under the greatest of commanders. This last proof of British attachment and admiration Frederick politely but firmly declined. His camp was no place for amateur students of military science. The Prussian discipline was rigorous even to cruelty.
Gay young Englishmen of twenty thousand a year, accustomed to liberty and to luxury, would not easily submit to these Spartan restraints. The king could not venture to keep them in order as he kept his own subjects in order. Situated as he was with respect to England, he could not well imprison or shoot refractory Howards and Cavendishes.
Dissing Boswell, sorry
selenak:The Grand Duke Peter, her nephew, who now ascended the Russian throne, was not merely free from the prejudices which his aunt had entertained against Frederick, but was a worshiper, a servile imitator, a Boswell, of the great king.