Old Fritz Comes in from the Cold
Posted: 16th January 2012
Frederick the Great will be three hundred years old on 24 January. There are no plans to make a fuss of his birthday here in Britain although there is plenty going on in Germany, and I shall be writing about that in another place.
There was a time when we thought differently of the Prussian monarch. He was Britain’s chief continental ally in the Seven Years War. Many British people then were of the slightly misguided opinion that the enlightened, freethinking monarch was a force for Protestantism and his victories over his largely Catholic enemies were hailed with great gusto by the mob. On 18 September 1756, for example, the secretary of state, Lord Holdernesse wrote to Andrew Mitchell, the British ambassador in Prussia, to say ‘Our constant toast here now is, success to the King of Prussia: he grows vastly popular among us…’ When the news of the victory before Prague reached Britain in May 1757, Holdernesse wrote again: ‘…women and children are singing his praises; the most frantic makers of joy appear in the public streets. He is in short, become the idol of the people…’
Until the outbreak of the First World War there were a great many pubs called the ‘King of Prussia’. These were renamed with suitably patriotic, anti-German titles like the ‘Kitchener Arms’ or the ‘King George V’ in 1914. There was a Kitchener’s Arms in Trowbridge in and a King George V in Gillingham, Kent, both of which were formerly Kings of Prussia. If you click on the last link you can see how smoothly the transition took place.
Some of these pubs are red herrings: the only King of Prussia pub that figures in my own itinerary is in Kingsbridge in the South Hams, but I have been told that it commemorates a local smuggler who was nicknamed the ‘King of Prussia’. The same smuggler may well have lent his moniker to the King of Prussia in Cornish Fowey too.
Frederick’s reputation in Britain did not plummet until a century after his death. The publication of Carlyle’s life of him between 1858 and 1865 renewed enthusiasm for the king. The first volume came out at the time of the royal wedding of the Princess Victoria to the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick, an event that spawned another rash of pub signs. I gather the Princess of Prussia in Prescot Street on the eastern border of the City of London commemorates that marriage.
With German unification in 1871, attitudes to Prussia and its princes changed. Germany began to rock the imperial boat – particularly after 1889, when the last Kaiser (the product of the union between Prince Vicky and Crown Prince Frederick) decided to create his own fleet to protect Germany’s growing international trade. Then came the First World War and with the Second, Frederick the Great became a Nazi.
There were some pretty solid reasons for this, not least because Hitler himself had co-opted him into the Party. Along with Bismarck (another unlikely National Socialist) Frederick was one of the pin-ups of the new movement. Hitler genuinely held him in high regard, seeing him as a proper German prince, whereas the emperors of his native Austria had endeavoured to rule what he cast as a worthless multi-national empire peppered with Jews. In those macabre last days in the bunker in Berlin, Goebbels tried to raise the Führer’s morale by reading him ‘significant’ extracts from Carlyle. He was very keen to point out that Frederick had sacked and denigrated his brother Augustus William, as he hoped Hitler would do the same for Göring.
The Führer’s fantasies about Frederick were bound to colour post-war attitudes. Frederick was slow to recover his lost prestige. Biographers felt compelled to mention the ‘N word’ even when the imputation of Nazism to the misanthropic, French-speaking, German-language-and-culture-loathing, homosexual philosopher-king was palpably absurd. More cogent, perhaps, was the idea that Frederick was a militarist and the inventor of Blitzkrieg: the pre-emptive strike, which he used most effectively against the Saxons at the start of the Seven Years War; that he had bombarded the jewel-city of Dresden and destroyed about a fifth of it (the British and Americans completely flattened it in 1945); and that he had been party to the First Partition of Poland.
All of which is true, up to a point; even if the Saxons could hardly claim to have been innocent lambs and the Prussian ‘militarism’ he extolled can be more properly attributed to his cruel and boorish father. He did not have much time for Poles, but that had more to do with their constitution, elected monarchy and idle nobility than anything else. There were also many aspects of Frederick’s reign that were progressive and positive; indeed, it would be hard to think of a cleverer or more multi-facetted monarch in modern history.
It took a long time to clear his name, but now, when I look at the Web, for example, I find mostly positive things and I might take some small credit for having cleared the air with my biography of the king, when it was published in 1999. It has even been translated into Polish.
In Germany too, attitudes towards the king have changed mightily since the Wall fell. During the Cold War, Frederick was associated with that evil Prussian militarism that had been fiercely condemned by the Allies in the Second World War. As the year-long party planned for Berlin and Potsdam bears out, Old Fritz has come in from the cold.
Blog entries posted before 2012 can now be found in the Blog Archive.
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