Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines
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Название: Evening in the Palace of Reason
Автор: James Gaines
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007369461
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At the death of their crazy Prussian duke, the family agreed that Sigismund should take over Prussia as well, at which point a single branch of the family could lay credible claim to territories from the Rhine to the far side of the Elbe—
Just in time for the Thirty Years War. Sigismund’s son had watched over the worst of it, and he was not equal even to a lesser task. His great-great-grandson, our baby crown prince Frederick, would write many years later:
All the plagues of the world broke over this ill-fated Electorate—a prince incapable of governing, a traitor for his Minister, a war or rather a universal cataclysm, invasion by friendly and enemy troops equally thievish and barbarous … Though [the elector] cannot be held responsible for all the misfortunes which befell his territories, his … weakness only left him a choice of errors … Powerless and in continual uncertainty he always changed over to the strongest side; but he could offer too little to his allies to secure their protection against their common enemies.
LUCKY FOR THE Hohenzollerns, the heir of this ill-starred elector proved to be the savior of the dynasty. Without Frederick William I of Brandenburg, known as the Great Elector, it is entirely possible that, for all their earlier success, there would have been no Hohenzollerns ruling in Germany after the war, and no way for the Great Elector’s great-grandson to become Great himself.
Thanks to his father’s ineptitude, when the Great Elector came to power in the last decade of the war, all of his scattered lands were desolate and occupied. East of the Elbe, Prussia was overrun by Polish troops. To the west, Cleves-Mark was beset by a warring mix of Dutch, imperial, and Hessian forces. Brandenburg itself was occupied in the north by Sweden, which was everywhere else fighting imperial troops in the attempt to occupy the rest. Still not connected at any point, the Hohenzollern patchwork was difficult to defend at the best of times, and these were the worst. The electorate had lost nine hundred thousand people—two-thirds of the entire population—to war and murder. Its fields had been barren for years, and what commerce remained was undercut by plunder and counterfeit currency. The elector had lost virtually all of his power. His treasury was gone, and since most of his troops were mercenary, that meant he was all but defenseless.
Almost miraculously, through drastic military reform and the exercise of a diplomacy no less frenetic but a good deal more effective than that of his father, he managed to get his country, very much scathed but dynastically whole, through the last years of the war to an armistice that led to the Treaty of Westphalia. In the negotiations leading up to that treaty, he managed not only to hold on to all of his occupied lands but to gain some more as well. The treaty left France at war with Spain, and the standoff between Poland and Sweden would lead to the first Northern War, so the Great Elector’s diplomatic finesse and military might continued to be tested; at various times he was allied with virtually all of the combatants—Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Spain, and England, not to mention a variety of German territories. But by the time he died in 1688, the population of his territories had almost tripled, he had won Prussia’s independence from Poland, he had created an efficient civil service, and by diligent effort and imaginative reforms he had brought a measure of prosperity to his lands, which came increasingly to be called by the collective name of “Prussia.”
He had also created one of the largest, most disciplined and battle-hardened armies in Europe. In advice written to his son and heir long after the first Northern War was over, he credited not his diplomacy but his reform and expansion of the military for his success in aggrandizing his emerging nation. “Alliances, to be sure, are good,” he wrote,
but a force of one’s own on which one can rely is better. A ruler is treated with no consideration if he does not have troops and means of his own. It is these, Thank God! which have made me considerable since the time that I began to have them.
It was this advice that would, for better and worse, become his most important legacy to the Hohenzollerns, to Germany, and to the history of the Western world.
THE GREAT ELECTOR’S SON, grandfather to baby Frederick, was not Great, not even good for much, but despite a spinal deformity that kept him in bad health all of his life and despite living in the shadow of a beloved father, he seems to have been quite taken with himself, in a neurotic sort of way. Thanks to the steadily rising revenues that were his father’s gift to him, he spent wildly, multiplying by twenty the costs of his father’s household and court. Like many princes of his time, but with greater industry and commitment of resources, he loved all things French. He modeled his court on Versailles and himself on the Sun King, even to the point of taking a mistress despite the fact that he preferred his wife. The affection was not returned (which perhaps explains the mistress). His queen Sophie Charlotte, sister of England’s George I, was a knowing and educated woman who sensibly preferred the company of her court philosopher Leibniz to that of her husband. “Leibniz talked to me today about the infinitesimally small,” she cracked to a courtier one day, “as if I don’t know enough about that here.”
Where his father’s diplomacy was treacherous but artful, the son’s was simply inept. As crown prince he had secretly solicited Austria for a loan to pay for his already outrageous expenses, promising to give back one of his father’s provinces upon his accession to the throne. As soon as he was king, he repudiated the deal, saying he could not be bound by the promise of someone who could not speak for the state (meaning himself as crown prince). It hardly needs to be said that his argument got him exactly nowhere, so that among his first acts was the surrender of territory. Among his proudest accomplishments was dreaming up the Order of the Black Eagle, his country’s highest honor, for which he came up with the thrilling motto “To each his own.”
The greatest achievements of Frederick I were accidents that followed from his faults. He doubled the size of his military because loaning them out was the best way to support his extravagance. Green-eyed at the prospect of fellow electors becoming kings—his brother-in-law the Hanoverian elector was becoming king of England, the Saxon elector had already become king of Poland—he managed, for the loan of a few thousand soldiers, to get the emperor’s promise to recognize him as a king should he so proclaim himself in his eastern (nonimperial) province of Prussia. So of course he did. A procession of eighteen hundred carriages involving thirty thousand post horses (stationed at intervals to draw the carriages and carry supplies for a cast of thousands) accompanied him from Berlin during a stately progress of fourteen days to the capital of Königsberg. There, before the forcibly assembled nobility, he placed a crown on his own head and another on his wife’s. The trip and festivities cost him upward of five million thalers, his budget for several years’ expenses at home.
All that said, by the time the White Lady came to take him away, he had created for his son and heir a redoubled military and a Prussian monarchy. In deference to that fact and filial obligation, if not respect, Frederick William I threw his father the kind of funeral that Frederick I would have thrown himself. For eight days the king lay in state on a bed of diamond-dotted red velvet, a crown on his head, an ermine-and-purple mantle over his shoulders, the Order of the Black Eagle on his chest, his scepter to his left and sword to his right. Finally, draped in a gown of gold, he was carried in solemn procession to the palace chapel through a guard comprising virtually the entire Prussian army. The new king wore long mourning robes whose train was carried by his father’s grand equerry, and the entire court of Frederick I marched behind him. Frederick William I would never appear in such splendor again.
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