Evening in the Palace of Reason

As time went on, Frederick’s curiosity ranged further and further from the cramped curriculum his father had prescribed for him. Fortunately for his education, his tutor Jacques Duhan was a wise and intrepid teacher, who followed his student’s interests and even, over time, helped him to amass a secret library, hidden in the locked closets of a house he rented near the castle. The library eventually grew to almost four thousand volumes, ranging from pre-Socratic philosophers to the writers of the early Enlightenment. When his father ended Frederick’s formal education at the age of fifteen and pensioned off the tutor, Frederick wrote Duhan: “I promise that when I have my own money I will give you 2400 crown a year and I will always love you, even a little more than now if that is possible.”

FREDERICK WILLIAM’S PROGRAM for his son was subtly but relentlessly subverted by Frederick’s mother. For much of his childhood he lived at her palace, called Monbijou, with his sister Wilhelmina, his elder by three years. Queen Sophia Dorothea was a Hanover, the daughter of England’s King George I and sister of George II. (She was also the first cousin of her hus-band, whose mother was a Hanover.) In a replay of his par-ents’ relationship, Frederick William loved his wife (he called her his Fiechen, a diminutive of Sophia), and Sophia Dorothea felt greatly diminished by her marriage. She painted Potsdam as rough and provincial in comparison to Hanover, and she let her children know of her distaste for her egregiously fat husband, who dressed every day in his faded military uniform, got drunk every night with his silly smoking party, and was forever talking about ein Plus machen. She was more than free with her opinions with her children: She consciously deployed them as part of a strategy to win them over to her vision of a real court (Hanover), the majesty of a real royal life (certainly not this one), the beauty of elaborate balls at which the latest in courtly music was played by the finest musicians. In this way and more direct ones, she made it clear to the children that they had a choice to make between her and their father. At one point, Wilhelmina wrote, her mother fiercely upbraided her for going to her father about some minor matter. She “reminded me that she had ordered me to attach myself to her exclusively; and that if I ever applied to the King again, she would be fiercely angry …”

Their father placed no less claim on their affection, of course, so Frederick and Wilhelmina, caught between antagonistic parents and their separate, dueling courts, found shelter in each other. They giggled conspiratorially at both parents’ dinner tables, made faces at each other when forced by their father to listen to his pastor’s sermons, and delighted in their common passion for music, which was perhaps the only unalloyed delight of their young lives.

Both clearly came to favor their mother. In her memoir, Wilhelmina paints a distinctly (and justly) unfavorable portrait of both parents but reserves her faintest praise for the king. “His table was served with frugality,” she wrote. “It never exceeded necessities. His principal occupation was to drill a regiment.” As for Frederick, Wilhelmina (at least as a child) had only deep affection and loyalty. “He was the most amiable prince that could be seen,” she wrote of her younger brother, “handsome, well made, of an understanding superior to his years, and possessed of every quality that forms a perfect prince.”

What the queen wanted more than anything was that her children would marry Hanovers, who were now England’s royal family. Wilhelmina was to marry the prince of Wales and Frederick his sister, Princess Amalia. Sophia Dorothea, then, would someday be mother not only to the king of Prussia but also to the queen of England, a prospect which suited her. The spies, of course, had to make sure that never happened, since it would put Prussia in England’s camp rather than the empire’s. Until the “double-marriage” plan could be completely unraveled, therefore, the spies worked “Fatty” hard, and so did the queen. Both sides used the same carrot: the aggrandizement of Prussia. The empire dangled two provinces on the Rhine, Jülich and Berg, that both the Great Elector and Frederick William’s father felt, with justice, the empire had taken from them wrongly. (The empire had no intention of actually supporting the claim, and it was characteristic of their view of Prussia that they offered as a prize something they had blatantly appropriated.) England, in its alliance with France against the empire, held out a future for Prussia as a coequal, independent, sovereign state rather than the role of imperial lackey and also support for his claim to Jülich-Berg. In trying to gain advantage for that position, the queen played a very treacherous game. Among other things, she recruited the French ambassador to Berlin, Konrad Alexander von Rothenburg, to be the conduit for secret messages to the English court, essentially plotting with them against her husband and king.

Not surprisingly, Frederick William frequently had the feeling something was going on behind his back. Who would not have been confused and suspicious, caught between the pleading of an ambitious and deceitful wife whom he loved and the advice of spies whom he considered his best advisers and closest friends?

AS HE GREW older, Frederick seemed to be less and less his father’s son and more and more his mother’s. He had never really liked hunting, and now when they went to the hunting lodge at Wusterhausen, he hid. Once when he should have been stalking game, his father found him in a clump of bushes reading. He fell off his horse. He curled his hair. He slept late. He called his uniform “the shroud.” He and his sister were ever more faithfully part of their mother’s cabal, to the point that she was able to draw Frederick into her conspiracy with the French minister, at which point her little prince began to demonstrate a distinct taste for intrigue.

His mother’s ability to bring Frederick into her perilous orbit owed a great deal to the fact that he was being physically abused and humiliated by his father. The beatings began when Frederick was twelve, and on a fixed date. Father and son were at a dinner party given by one of the spies, Field Marshal von Grumbkow. (Grumbkow was Frederick William’s war minister, of all things. The other spy was the former imperial ordnance master Count von Seckendorff.) In his cups, the king wrapped his arm around the crown prince and began loudly to give him advice, the rest of the party his audience. According to a dispatch from the Saxon minister to Dresden after the party, as he spoke the king began patting his son’s cheek for emphasis. “Fritz, listen to what I am going to say to you. Keep always a good large army [light tap], you cannot have a better friend and without this friend you will not be able to sustain yourself [harder tap]. Our neighbors desire nothing better than to make us turn a somersault. I know their intentions; you will learn [very hard tap] to know them. Believe me, do not trust in vanity—attach thyself to the real [harder]. Have a good army and money [harder]. In these consist the glory [harder] of the king [harder].” Word of the incident made its way to the capitals of all nations represented at the Prussian court.

From that point on, the beatings became increasingly frequent, humiliating, and severe. He beat Frederick for wearing gloves on a cold day at the hunt. He beat him for eating with a silver fork instead of a steel one. He beat him in front of servants, officers, and diplomats. He threw the prince to the floor and kicked him, berating him at the top of his lungs and beating him with his cane.

Frederick was not his only victim; his fury seemed omnidirectional. For a while it was thought that the king was going completely mad. So violently hostile was he even to his beloved giants that forty of them plotted to roast him alive by burning down Potsdam (a plot that gives us some sense of their collective intelligence). The penalty for desertion was to have one’s skin pinched off with red-hot tongs and then have all of one’s bones broken on the wheel, but there were hundreds of desertions anyway, and suicides at the garrison ran two a month. “The people are greatly discontented,” Rothenburg wrote to Paris. “They hope and believe that this distress cannot endure always. There are all the appearances of a revolution. Everything is preparing for it.”

AT ONE POINT, in one of his most profound depressions, the king began talking of abdication. Grumbkow and Seckendorff (and more so of course their imperial paymasters) were horrified: Should Frederick William abdicate and the crown prince succeed him now, the English alliance would be assured. So the Hapsburg emperor called upon his good friend Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, king of Poland, and grandmaster of the revels at one of the most sumptuous pleasure domes of Europe. The king of Prussia needed a rest, the emperor told Augustus, who was more than happy to oblige by sending Frederick William an invitation to Dresden.

Augustus the Strong was no doubt the most debauched ruler in Europe, which for the early eighteenth century is no small claim. His mistresses were legion, his illegitimate children numbered exactly 354, and some of his many daughters had become his mistresses as well. Obviously Frederick William disapproved such goings-on and knew what awaited. He took Frederick with him only because Wilhelmina plotted with the Saxon ambassador to pry an urgent invitation out of Augustus for the crown prince to join him. Frederick, of course, was thrilled with Dresden. He saw his first opera, he held his own in interesting conversation with smart dinner companions, he went to concerts, he even played his flute with the king’s Kapelle. In a letter to Wilhelmina describing the scene (the first letter he signed in the French manner, “Fédéric”), he wrote grandly, “I have been heard as a musician.” In that way and others Frederick greatly upstaged his father, whose most notable accomplishment in Dresden was to split his pants at a ball.

Perhaps Augustus’s greatest gift to the young crown prince came as a result of a joke played on his father. Knowing Frederick William to be something of a prude, Augustus led him to a human diorama, covered at first by a red velvet curtain. When drawn, it disclosed, surrounded by hundreds of candles, the reclining naked figure of a startlingly attractive woman. Accounts differ as to Frederick William’s reaction—he said she was beautiful and blushed, he slapped his hat over Frederick’s face and pushed him out of the room, he huffed out and said he was going back to Potsdam immediately—but we have no trouble imagining Frederick’s reaction. He had already been flirting with a certain very sexy countess who was among Augustus’s illegitimate daughters and favorite mistresses. She was cheating on Augustus with one of her half brothers, but apparently she had time for a crown prince, because Augustus caught her looking. He took Frederick aside and told him the countess was unavailable but asked if he would like to get to know the lady behind the curtain. Frederick said he would. Credible speculation has it that he eventually got to know them both.

If Frederick left Dresden with a smile on his face, it was knocked off in short order. After Dresden, father and son made immediately for the king’s hunting lodge at Wusterhausen. It was a banner hunt that year—the party brought in a grand total of 3,600 wild boar, 450 in one day—and Frederick was miserable. Apparently the king had not changed his attitude toward his son, because during their time at Wusterhausen Frederick wrote a letter to his father, who was in the next room:

For a long time I have not ventured to present myself before my dear papa, partly because I was advised not to do so, but mainly because I … was afraid to disturb my dear papa further by the favor I shall now ask. So I prefer to put it in writing.

I beg my dear papa to be kindly disposed toward me. I assure him that, after a long examination of my conscience, I find not the smallest thing with which I should reproach myself. But if, contrary to my wishes, I have disturbed my dear papa, I herewith beg him humbly for forgiveness, and I hope that my dear papa will forget the fearful hate which appears so clearly in his whole behavior and to which I find it hard to accustom myself. Until now I have always thought that I had a kind father, but I now see quite the opposite. Nevertheless, I shall take courage and hope that my dear papa will think this over and restore me once again to his favor. In the meantime, I assure him that I will never in my life willingly fail him, and in spite of his disfavor, I shall remain with most dutiful and filial respect, my dear papa’s

Most obedient and faithful servant and son,

Friedrich

His father replied:

You know very well that I cannot abide an effeminate fellow who has no manly tastes, who cannot ride or shoot (let it be said—to his shame!), is untidy in his personal habits and wears his hair curled like a fool instead of cutting it … For the rest, you are haughty, as indifferent as a country lout; you converse with no one outside of a few favorites, instead of being friendly and sociable; you grimace like a fool; you never follow my wishes out of love for me but only when you are forced to do so. You care nothing but having your own way, and you think nothing else is of any importance. That is my answer.

Friedrich Wilhelm

There was a terrible amount of animus, posturing, and truth in both letters, and the exchange had the predictable effect, which was none. Frederick did not modify his behavior, and his father kept beating and humiliating him for it. The prince seemed to have brought some illness back from Dresden, speculatively identified as venereal disease. Whatever it was, it laid him low, and was no doubt made worse by the constant battles with his father.

He had revived by the time Augustus paid a visit to Potsdam a few months later, and along with his many mistresses (including Frederick’s favorite), he brought his Kapelle, for which he had recruited the best musicians in Europe. One of them was Johann Joachim Quantz, a flautist of formidable reputation with whom Frederick had played in Dresden. On this trip he agreed to become Frederick’s teacher on the instrument, which was no small commitment, since the lessons and expenses were to be paid by the queen and kept secret from the king.

This little plot had the predictable outcome as well. The king came unexpectedly to Frederick’s apartment in the middle of one of his musical evenings, where Frederick was decked out in the red-and-gold robe he wore when he played duets with Wilhelmina. His hair was curled and puffed, and everything was just so, very French. There was a mad scramble when the lookout spotted the king coming. Frederick tore off the robe and stuffed it in a corner, the others, including Quantz, grabbed their instruments and found a firewood closet to hide in, but Frederick’s hair gave the game away. Very quickly the king sized up what was happening and began casting around the room for proof and co-conspirators. Where are they? he wanted to know. Hardened in his rebellion and protecting what was closest to him, Frederick said nothing. The king grew angrier, too angry, apparently, to think of looking in the closet. Finally he found and confiscated a few French books. Otherwise all he found was the red-and-gold robe. He stuffed it into the fire.

Sometime after that the king took Frederick with him again (for reasons unknown and unfathomable) to see King Augustus, who was holding military maneuvers in Mühlberg as the excuse for a great raucous party. On the last day, Augustus gave a dinner for all thirty thousand of his soldiers at two long—apparently very long—lines of tables, at each end of which was the head of an ox, with the skin of oxen covering the roasted quarters on the tables. Between the two lines of tables rode the kings of Poland and Prussia and their two crown princes, receiving the hosannas of the crowd. Frederick, however, could not have been regarded with unmixed awe. A day or two before he had been forced to stand at parade with his hair and clothes badly askew. For one reason or another, the king had beat him hard that day, throwing him to the ground, kicking him, and dragging him around by the hair, in full view of the crowd. When he had finished with his son, Frederick William spat at him: “Had I been so treated by my father I would have blown my brains out, but this man has no honor.”

Not long after Frederick returned to Berlin, Rothenburg informed Paris: “I have reason to believe that he is thinking of making his escape.”

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