Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 14

  ODDLY, OR PERHAPS because he was bent on a reconciliation, Frederick William paid his first visit to the crown prince on his own birthday, August 15,1731, about ten months after Katte’s execution. He found in his son a changed man—or, what is perhaps more accurate, a changeling. Frederick utterly abased himself, washing his father’s feet with tears of remorse, pledging undying love and fealty, pleading for forgiveness. In front of a crowd, the father forgave his son and embraced him.

  The prize for Frederick was a little more freedom. The king prescribed a list of domain lands he could now visit outside of Küistrin, in each of which he was to learn economy by observation. He was to visit farms and mills and foundries, and he was to ask careful questions, see how they worked, and consider how they could be improved. Frederick did his father’s bidding and more. Soon his letters were full of practical suggestions. Some marshes around the Domain of Wollup should be drained because doing so would create a good field for wheat. The old sheepfold at Carzig was in good condition, and its fields would soon be yielding 10 percent more barley and rye. The brewery at Himmelstadt was in bad shape, but there was an old church nearby that could be restored to replace it. In Lebus, Frederick wrote, his heart leaped at the sight of a new giant for the Potsdam Grenadiers. He only wished he had more time for hunting, and he wanted nothing more than to be restored to his uniform (formerly known as the “shroud”) and his place in the army. His father began to address his replies to “My dear son.”

  How much of Frederick’s change was cynically calculating and to what extent he was seriously interested in the husbandry of flax is difficult to estimate, but it is clear that his identification with his father was neither wholeheartedly sincere nor wholly an act. He was caustic about his father in private, but he also increasingly expressed admiration for him that was not meant only for an audience. Given his more distant relations with his own feelings and sentiments, which he had reason to consider of no help to him in the past, perhaps even he was not sure of the degree of his sincerity.

  A FEW MONTHS after the reunion scene, a courier awakened Frederick at midnight with a letter from the king.

  My dear son Fritz,

  … I pardoned you with all my heart, and since that time I have thought of nothing but your welfare and to establish you well, not only in the army but with a suitable daughter-in-law.… The Princess of Bevern … has been found good and modestly reared, such as all women should be. You must tell me your sentiment immediately.…[If you agree] I will give you enough to carry on the expenses of your household and, in the month of April, I will send you to the army. The princess is not beautiful, but she is not ugly … Be obedient and faithful, then all will go well for thee in time and eternity. And the one who desires this with all his heart says: Amen. Thy faithful father unto death.

  F. W.

  Frederick wrote to his father, “Nothing is better than to be able to show my most gracious father my blind obedience, and I await in most humble submission further orders.…” On the same day he wrote Grumbkow, his new best friend: “I have always wanted to distinguish myself by the sword … Now I will have only the duty to fuck. I pity this poor person [the princess of Bevern], for she will be one more unhappy princess in the world.” In a letter to Grumbkow a week later, compassion for his intended had given way to a somewhat histrionic despair.

  I have suffered sufficiently for an exaggerated crime.… I have still resources, and a pistol-shot can deliver me from my sorrows and my life.… If there are honest people in the world, they must think how to save me from one of the most perilous passages I have ever been in. I waste myself in gloomy ideas.…

  In later correspondence, with Grumbkow and others, he would call his intended “a goose … my mute … the abominable object.… the corpus delecti,” or simply “the person.” He wrote to Wilhelmina, “She is neither pretty nor ugly; not stupid but ill-educated, timid and awkward in society; there is a true portrait of this Princess, and you can judge if I am pleased or not.” He told Grumbkow he would rather marry the most infamous whore in Berlin than she, and if forced to marry her he would abandon her to her own home and court. He promised Wilhelmina that she would be treated as his queen when he got the throne, and told her the best part about his engagement was that it “procures for me the liberty to write to you, my only consolation in your absence. You cannot imagine, my adorable sister, how often I form wishes for your happiness … Believe me, no brother ever loved so tenderly a sister as charming as mine.”

  Not long after he wrote that letter, though, he seemed to change in his attitude toward Wilhelmina. When she was married off to the Hohenzollern margrave of Bayreuth, Frederick was allowed to attend the wedding. There she saw someone she no longer recognized, literally and figuratively. He had gained a great deal of weight, and he did not smile. “I … tendered him a thousand endearments, using the most affectionate language,” she wrote, “but he remained cold as ice, and answered only by monosyllables.” He seemed contemptuous of everyone, she said, and when she reproached him later for his attitude and the apparent change in his affection for her, “he answered that he was still the same; and that he had reasons for acting as he did.”

  There were reasons, that much is true. After his engagement and his reinstatement in the army, he wrote to his old tutor Jacques Duhan, who was still in exile, “You know that my situation has greatly improved, but what you possibly don’t realize is that they have cut deeply into the marble, and that stays forever.” We know that the man of stone had not ceased to feel anything, however, because several people noted that at the ceremony of his betrothal to the princess of Bevern there were tears in his eyes.

  HIS PROMISE OF marriage had the promised effect: He was given his own household, his own regiment, and, for the most part, his freedom. He was still not free to leave the country, and some of his activities (having a company of twenty musicians, for example) required keeping his father carefully uninformed and placated by gifts of food and newly kidnapped giants, but that given, he could do as he pleased. His father pledged a large portion of Elizabeth’s dowry to a château for Frederick at Rheinsberg, which needed a lot of work, but to Frederick that was of little consequence: It had a lovely view over a broad lake, it was surrounded by woods and fields, and it was not in Potsdam or Berlin.

  In any case the more important part of his wife’s dowry to him was the composer who was to come with her from the Bevern establishment in Wolfenbüttel, Carl Heinrich Graun, who became Kapellmeister to Frederick’s growing band of musicians. Graun’s brother Johann Gottlieb would eventually be Frederick’s concert-master, and Frederick also managed to recruit the brothers Franz and Johann Benda, great virtuosi from the chamber group of Augustus the Strong in Dresden (who had conveniently died in 1733, after a drunken binge with Grumbkow from which neither of them completely recovered). Even before moving into Rheinsberg, Frederick had several instrumentalists and singers on his payroll, and he sent an emissary to look around the hospitals of Venice for a castrato. Later his old flute instructor Quantz would join him in Rheinsberg, as would a young but already formidable keyboardist, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

  Frederick lived with his regiment in Neuruppin while the Rheinsberg château was being renovated (his princess bride-tobe was put up and away in Berlin), and it was there, with his officers and soldiers in camp and a group of intellectual friends and musicians at his nascent court, that Frederick for the first time could begin to live both of his lives in one place. He reveled in his life at Neuruppin, whose only shadow was his imminent marriage. “I live here in peace with my regiment,” he wrote Wilhelmina, “and I should be perfectly happy if I could see you every day and if I never married.… The King tries to force me to love my beauty, but I fear he will not succeed. My heart cannot be dragooned. If it loves, it loves sincerely.”

  He seemed at times almost happy, occasionally even exuberant. As if to declare his own new day, he ordered a new insignia and new uniforms for his regiment, and with his m
en before a bonfire one night early in his command, he stripped to his underwear and threw the uniform of the old Goltz Regiment into the blaze: It would now be the Crown Prince Regiment. All his men of course followed their leader’s example and threw their uniforms into the fire as well. We do not know exactly how they felt about this as they made their way home in their underwear, but in coming years they performed for him remarkably in the rigorous spring reviews, exemplary in close-order drills and maneuvers even by the king’s notoriously exacting standards. Frederick, to a degree which perhaps surprised even him, proved to be a natural leader of military men.

  For the first time in his life, there are stories in Neuruppin of pranks: He was said to have mistresses in town; he was said to be “debauched”; and when a local minister made a disparaging remark about him in his Sunday sermon, he and a few of his officers bombed the pastor’s home with “missiles” (presumably nonballistic). He would from that time forward always enjoy the camaraderie that came with being among his soldiers (and there are occasional suggestions of something beyond camaraderie). The duality of his life, then and later, may have given him some comfort as well: His officers and soldiers could not participate in his intellectual and artistic interests, and his literary and musical friends knew nothing of the military.

  For the first year or two in Neuruppin, perhaps because it had only recently been restored to him (he had been drilling a regiment since the age of six, after all, and was educated by Prussian officers), the military side of his life was predominant. Having already convinced himself of the necessity of military aggression on Prussia’s behalf—for the “aggrandizement” of his country and himself—he began to elaborate his geopolitical thinking in what would become a book-length essay, Reflections on the Present State of European Politics. In at least one respect the present state of European politics was then much as it had been for a century or two, which is to say in a state of continuous readiness for war, a volatile mix of fragile alliances in a continent that seemed bent on breaking and remaking itself willy-nilly. Every monarch’s death set every other monarch thinking, and what ensued each time was like nothing so much as a geopolitical scurry of musical chairs in which the one left standing was a defeated army and a smaller nation, diminished in influence if not in territory. No nation was left standing quite so prominently and often as Prussia, and notably so during the reign of Frederick William.

  Just as Frederick was getting settled in Neuruppin, for example, his father was dealing badly with the latest pan-European tangle, the War of the Polish Succession, which had been set off by the death of Augustus the Strong. France took the occasion to bribe the Polish Diet into electing Louis’s father-in-law the king of Poland, upon which both Austria and Russia marched on Warsaw. Having pocketed the bribe, the Diet then amiably elected Augustus’s son, choice of the czar and the emperor. France, taking advantage of Austria’s distraction, then made a secret pact with Spain and invaded not only Austria’s duchy of Lorraine but also, with Spanish help, its territories in Italy. The emperor, of course, turned to his German princes for help, and while most of them dithered, Frederick William—no doubt encouraged by the spies—offered to put a forty-thousand-man army on the march immediately. Apparently the spies had done their work all too well, because the emperor was horrified: His own army was not ready yet; a large deployment of Frederick William’s welltrained forces now would reach the field of battle before his own and so would be independent of him, capable of working its own will—for example, on the provinces of Jülich and Berg, his claims to which Frederick William had been pushing the empire to support (without success) throughout his reign. The answer to Frederick William’s offer was that the emperor wanted only ten thousand men from him, and they were to wait for his order to march. Frederick William was furious at what he perceived to be a slight, yet another slight, from someone who was supposed to be his ally.

  The crown prince watched his father’s dealings with the empire now with a jaded sense of having seen it all before—how they ill-used their hapless “Fatty,” always keeping Prussia on its heels, talking friendship but giving nothing. In Frederick’s view, his father, blinded by his treacherous drinking buddies, was just being played for the fool again.

  On the other hand, Frederick’s work with his regiment and his dreams of “new worlds to conquer” had awakened in him an ambition to lead men into battle. He really had no brief against the French position, but he urged his father to let him be a part of the deployment against them so that he could learn the arts of war from the emperor’s famous general Prince Eugene.

  Thus did Frederick first lead men to war, though in truth it was not much of a war. Frederick and his father’s good friend and general, the “Old Dessauer,” were actually invited to dine in the French camp, where they enjoyed vintage wine and lively conversation. Frederick returned the favor in the large dining room in his tent, recruiting a few French officers to the Prussian army in the process. In the course of things, there were a few obligatory exchanges of fire, during which Frederick displayed courage and coolheadedness. The Austrian commanders were impressed.

  Frederick was not. He concluded that Prince Eugene alone was responsible for the awe in which the emperor’s army was held by its enemies and that the army itself was ill-trained, ill-equipped, and unprepared, and so took away from this first experience of war something a great deal more valuable than Prince Eugene’s advice on tactics and strategy: He had seen the weakness of the empire.

  A couple of years later, when another round of diplomatic and military gamesmanship among the great powers left Prussia standing alone once again and finally persuaded Frederick William that his real enemy was in Vienna and nowhere else, Frederick wrote to Grumbkow:

  Heaven appears to have destined the king to make all the preparations … we should make before beginning a war. Who knows whether providence may not be reserving me to turn these preparations to glorious account and use them for the accomplishing of those designs for which the king’s forethought intended them?

  Grumbkow replied that Frederick William’s ambiguous diplomatic position was artful rather than inept, that the king of Prussia “must be a fox rather than a lion.” Frederick’s reply was straightforward: “I am not enough of a subtle politician to be able to make threats while giving way at the same time. I am young. I would perhaps follow the impetuosity of my temperament; under no circumstances would I take only half an action.” Frederick, of course, knew exactly to whom he was speaking. After that, no one could say the empire had not been warned.

  DURING THE “WAR” with the French, the king, never healthy, was suffering acutely from all the diseases that would eventually kill him. He had had a massive apoplectic seizure, his lungs were full of fluid, his gout and dropsy flared mercilessly, and at one point he was given only two weeks to live. “Pray with me,” Frederick wrote to Wilhelmina when he heard the news, “that we shall soon be free of him.” Later, however, it dawned on him that the king’s death would mean he would gain the throne at the expense of the liberty he had been seeking for so long, and when the king recovered, Frederick was, among other things, relieved. “To recover entirely from three mortal illnesses at the same time is superhuman,” he wrote to Wilhelmina then. “One must believe that the good Lord has very good reasons to restore his life. Once again I must stand aside.”

  The king’s recovery saved two lives: his own as king and that of the crown prince in Rheinsberg, where Frederick had created for himself the life he had always dreamed of (funded by more large loans from Austria, England, and Russia—which, it must be said, he did repay as king, probably to his sponsors’ shock). He drew around him an ever larger court of musicians, wits, and intellectuals, reassembled the library that had been taken from him, and determined to give himself the education of which he had been deprived. He read the classics of France and Greece—Racine, Corneille, Plato, Aristotle, histories of Caesar and Alexander; he read poetry and history and politics; and in the evenings he
played the flute, accompanied by some of the best musicians of his time. After the concert, he read some more. Sometimes he read all night.

  His days at Rheinsberg were filled with books, conversation, and correspondence. Frederick was an almost compulsive letter writer, and never more so than now, when his time was his own. His correspondence is the greatest part of the thirty-volume edition of his complete works, titled simply Oeuvres. Published in the nineteenth century by the government of Prussia in huge red leather volumes, the edges of its cardboard-thick pages lovingly gilded, the work has a stateliness that sorts oddly with Frederick’s many outpourings of prosaic verses and verbose effusions, but it is clear from the letters of these years before his accession to the throne that he was never happier than at Rheinsberg, where, as he put it in a letter to his friend the count of Schaumburg-Lippe, “I am sequestered from the world, in a solitude where the great men of antiquity and the wisest thinkers of today keep me company.”

  Actually he had a great deal more company than that. The court at Rheinsberg was lively and in every sense gay. The record is somewhat unclear on just who was sleeping with whom, but with the exception of his first few months there, when he was notably failing to create an heir with his bride (paying his “tribute to Hymen,” as he put it), there were no women at all. Some biographers state flatly, from the circumstantial evidence, that Frederick was homosexual; others demur for lack of what in another context might be called the smoking gun. (Carlyle only says that Frederick was inclined toward “ways not pleasant to his Father and not conformable to the Laws of the Universe.”) He wrote homoerotic poetry, his letters refer often to Socratic love, and he called one of his favorites who was openly gay his “Swan of Padua.” It is of course possible that he was asexual or pseudohomosexual and misogynistic, or any number of other things, but it seems most likely on weighing all the evidence (which includes his fun at Dresden with Augustus’s daughter-mistress) that he was bisexual. At a certain point not late in his life, there ceases to be evidence of any libido at all.