СНАР. XXIII. Erection of of Prussia. zollerns embraced Protestantism, and after having played (in the person of the Elector George William) a rather contemptible part in the Thirty Years' War, produced a really distinguished prince in Frederick the Great Elector, who reigned in the latter half of the seventeenth century. He freed East Prussia from the supremacy of Poland, consolidated his straggling dominions into a well-ordered state, and gave to his subjects, by the lustre of his military successes, a sort of incipient consciousness of national existence. d In 1700 his son Frederick, having secured or purchased the kingdom the approval of the Emperor Leopold, but not without a furious protest from Pope Clement XI, whose prophetic spirit dreaded and denounced in Hildebrandine fashion the admission of a heretic to the most sacred of secular offices, called himself king of Prussia, taking his title from the above-named Duchy of East Prussia, and crowning himself at Königsberg, its ancient capital, on January 18, 1701. This region was not a part of the Holy Empire, and its original inhabitants, the Old Prussians, were not Germans at all, but a Lithuanian people, who had remained pagans and barbarians till they were half conquered, half exterminated, by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their country Germanized by a constant immigration from the West. It is a curious freak of history, not unlike that which has extended the British name to the Teutonic and Gaelic inhabitants of the largest European island, that has transferred the name of this declining race to the greatest of modern German states. This assumption of royalty, the work of a prince who contributed nothing else to the greatness of his house, dominion till 1618; and the supremacy of Poland remained until released at the Peace of Wehlau in 1657. d So called from their dwelling next to Russia — po Russia was a matter of far greater consequence than might have CHAP. at first appeared. At that time no other member of the XXIII. Empire (except the Emperor himself, who was king of Bohemia, and the Elector of Saxony, who had in 1697 been chosen king of Poland) wore a crown, and the new dignity was soon felt to have raised its owner into a higher European position, for it made him the fellow of the sovereigns of France, England, Denmark, Sweden, and brought him into what soon became a rivalry with his titular superior the Emperor. Had Austria been wise, she would have rejected a bribe far larger than that by which her compliance was purchased, would even have dispensed with the goodwill of Brandenburg in the struggle of the Spanish. Succession, rather than have yielded to this young antagonist a moral advantage of such moment. For the time, however, little change seemed to have been made. Frederick the First was feeble and peaceful: the eccentric Frederick William I, who followed him, had a dutiful reverence for his Emperor, and prized his regiment of giants too highly to care to risk them in war. He was, moreover, thrifty to the verge of parsimony; and his energy, which was considerable, found scope for its exercise in a careful oversight of the revenue and civil service of the country which largely contributed to the successes of his son. The greatness of the Prussian monarchy begins with Frederick Frederick II, the most remarkable man who had succeeded the Great, 1740-1786. to a throne since Charles V. The military talents by which Europe knows him best, are a less worthy title to the admiration of posterity, than the ardour he shewed for good administration, for the prosperity and happiness of his people. Along with the instinctive desire of a powerful and active mind to have everything done in the best way, he had a complete superiority to prejudice and tradition, a love of justice, and a genuine sympathy, not indeed CHAP. XXIII. for political liberty, but for cultivation and enlightenment. It was at bottom this, fully as much as the glories of his campaigns, that made him, in spite of his cold heart and scornful manner, a favourite with his own people and an object of curiosity, even of pride, throughout Germany. Upon that country the moral effect of his reign was great. It stirred the national spirit to see a German prince defend his naturally weak kingdom against the allied might of Austria, France, and Russia, and come out of the terrible struggle with undaunted confidence and undiminished territories. While the other states of the Empire were languishing under an old fashioned and wasteful misgovernment, Prussia set the example of an administration which, while rigidly frugal, strove to develope the resources of the country, of a highly-disciplined army, of a codified law, of a reformed system of procedure, of a capital to which men of literary and scientific eminence were gathered from all quarters. While bigotry and feudalism reigned on the Danube, Frederick made Berlin the centre of light for North Germany; and in this way effected as much for his kingdom as he had done by the seizure of wealthy Silesia, giving it a representative position, a claim on German interest and sympathy which there had been little in its earlier history, or in that of his own house, to awaken. But in all this it would be a mistake to attribute to the great king a conception of what it became afterwards the fashion to call 'Prussia's German Mission,' the conscious foresight of a German patriot anxious to pave the way for the unity of the nation. There is little in Frederick's words or acts to shew such a feeling; what he planned and cared for was the strength and wellbeing of his own Prussian State. And when at the end of his life he took The idea was started during the Seven Years' War of uniting Germany under Prussian supremacy, deposing Francis I, and getting Frederick himself XXIII. a lead in the politics of the Empire, by forming the League CHAP. of Princes to oppose the ambitious designs of Joseph II, his purpose was simply to maintain the status quo, that status quo whose dangers were so terribly displayed by the events of the next twenty years. That League is memorable, not as being in any sense a project of reform, but as the first instance in which Prussia appears heading a party among the German States in hostility to Austria: it is the beginning of that Dualism, as the Germans call it, which at last reached a point where nothing but a life and death struggle could decide between the rival powers. wars of the What glory Prussia had gained under Frederick II she Prussian seemed determined to lose under his unworthy successor. policy of the Nothing, except indeed the behaviour of the minor German French princes, could have been weaker, meaner, less patriotic than Revolution. her conduct in the struggle with France which began in 1792.8 In 1791 she had allied herself with Austria, but their relations, as might have been expected, soon ceased to be cordial. Frederick William II began to negotiate with the French Republic, in the hope of getting something for himself out of the confusion, and in 1795 concluded with France the separate Peace of Basel, by which a line of demarcation was drawn between North and South Germany, the former being declared neutral. chosen Emperor; and his favourite minister Winterfeldt was, in 1757, sanguine enough to believe this could be effected. (See Schmidt, Preussens deutsche Politik, p. 22.) Frederick is said to have, while Crown Prince, formed the plan of marrying Maria Theresa, whose hatred he afterwards so fully earned. f See p. 405, supra. This League, which Frederick modelled to some extent upon the Smalkaldic League of the sixteenth century, answered its purpose by checking Joseph, and preventing any change in the constitution of the Empire. See upon it Ranke's Die deutschen Mächte und der Fürstenbund. See for the whole history of this period Sybel's Geschichte der Revolutionszeit. CHAP. When in 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine had been formed under Napoleon's protectorate and the Holy Empire extinguished, Prussia, which by a convention (February 15, 1806) had obtained possession of Hanover, part, it need hardly be said, of the dominions of her late ally, the English king George III, endeavoured to unite the Northern States in a league, at whose head should stand her king, with the title and prerogative of Emperor, the Direktorium being composed of himself and the rulers of Saxony and Hessen-Cassel. Talleyrand, however, found it easy to baffle this scheme, on which he had at first pretended to smile it is memorable as the first appearance of the conception of a North-German Confederation and soon afterwards the defeats of Jena and Auerstädt, followed by that of Friedland, left Prussia at Napoleon's mercy, if mercy he had any. By the Peace of Tilsit she submitted, losing her lands west of the Elbe, and in all more than half of her territories, recognizing the Confederation of the Rhine, and abandoning all claim to interfere in German politics. Meanwhile Saxony, the kingdom of Westphalia which Napoleon had just created, and the other purely German members of the old Empire, joined the Rhenish Confederation, that is to say, enrolled themselves the vassals of the Parisian crown. French domination was offensive everywhere, but nowhere so offensive as in Prussia, the feebleness of whose Court seems to have emboldened Napoleon to treat her with an insolent scorn he never thought of shewing to the more The War of tenacious, though not more patriotic, Hapsburgs. Hence, A.D. 1806. Liberation. too, when the uprising came, and the swelling wave of popular enthusiasm tossed back the French beyond the Elbe, the Weser, the Rhine itself, it was the much-suffering Prussian people that was foremost in the fight; it was northern heroes of the sword and pen, many of them not |