1511-25] Margrave Albert invested with duchy of Prussia 635

government on the lines of an ordinary temporal principality; and on his death in 1511 Margrave Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, whose mother, the Margravine Sophia, was sister to King Sigismund I of Poland, and whose elder brother George held the principality of Jägerndorf in Silesia, was elected to the High Mastership.

Margrave Albert, through whose action the ultimate expansion of the dynastic power of the Hohenzollerns may be said to have been first rendered possible, was by his own confession inadequately trained for playing a part in times such as those in which his lot fell; 1 and towards the close of his career he showed much moral weakness. But he was

from the first animated by a determination to put an end to his relation of vassalage as High Master towards the Polish Crown. In this allimportant design he was encouraged by the Emperor Maximilian Iwhose actions, however, were not always on the level of his aspirations, and in this instance contradicted them. Albert's attempt to throw off his vassalage by his own strength, supported by such volunteer aid as he could obtain, failed; and, after making his peace with the Poles as best he could (1519), he fell back on another line of action, less heroic, but destined to prove more productive of results. This was the secularisation of the dominions over which he presided as head of the German Order. He had been more than once admonished from Rome, when the spirit of reform ruled in the person of Pope Adrian VI, to bring new life into the decayed and degenerate company of Knights; and at Nürnberg, where he had sought the countenance of the Diet, he had become subject to the influence of the rigorous Lutheran theologian Osiander, whom he afterwards designated as his "spiritual father." Thus, at a loss how to obey the papal injunction, Albert betook himself to Luther, whose advice to him and to his Order was administered in no spirit of restraint (1523). Luther opined that the High Master should cast aside the foolish rule of his Order, marry, and turn its dominions into a secular State; and this counsel was without much loss of time carried into execution by Albert.

In 1525, Albert was invested by Sigismund I of Poland with the secularised duchy of Prussia; the Black Cross vanished from his coat of arms, but the Black Eagle remained, with the suzerain's initials on his breast. In the same year Albert married Dorothea, daughter of Frederick I of Denmark. The recalcitrance shown by some of the Knights cannot occupy us here, nor the later vicissitudes of the German Order as an interesting relic of an irrecoverable past. West Prussia remained untouched by the results of Albert's action. Its feudal subjection to Poland continued, and the life of its population - the very names of its towns, Marienburg itself becoming Malborg-were

His Renaissance sympathies were shown by the setting-up of a printing-press at Königsberg in 1524.

636

Progress towards union

[1525-1618

Polonised so far as might be, and the very existence of the Order was forgotten. Danzig-perhaps alone-derived great material advantage from this close connexion with Poland, of whose trade the city enjoyed an uncontested monopoly.

Duke Albert did his best to reorganise the administration of East Prussia; but unfortunately he gave deep offence to his subjects by identifying himself with a school of Lutheran theology (Osiander and the Osiandrists) to whose teaching the bulk of them were opposed with a fury of dogmatic partisanship such as would have been hardly explicable in any particular age, and with a less stubborn race. Thus the period of his rule ended in cruel differences and bitter disappointment (1568). The question of the succession had for some time been beset with a series of intrigues and demonstrations; and when on his death his son Albert Frederick (1568-1618) was invested by Sigismund II of Poland with the duchy of Prussia, the Brandenburg Elector, Joachim II, succeeded in obtaining simultaneous investiture for himself and his son John George. The Brandenburg tradition of making prospective acquisitions was never more signally justified. The unhappy orphan boy who had succeeded to Albert's troubled inheritance, distracted by political and religious discords, and by fears not wholly illusory of attempts on his life, lapsed into melancholy and before long became insane. In the very year (1573) in which he was married to Maria Eleonora, the heiress of Duke William of Jülich, Cleves, and Berg, he had to be placed under continuous personal control, and his cousin, Margrave George Frederick of Ansbach and Jägerndorf, was appointed administrator of his duchy with the title of Duke. Though his rule failed to conciliate the goodwill of the Prussian Estates, they seem on the whole to have favoured the ultimate union with Brandenburg, partly no doubt because the event seemed still remote.

The prospect of the union advanced with George Frederick's death in 1603, when the Elector Joachim Frederick of Brandenburg with much difficulty succeeded in being named Administrator of the duchy of Prussia, neither of Albert Frederick's sons having survived beyond infancy. He could not, however, obtain his investiture as eventual successor to the duchy from King Sigismund III of Poland; and it was only with great difficulty and under hard and humiliating conditions that after his death (1608) his son and successor, John Sigismund, after obtaining from the Polish King the guardianship and administration, at last, in 1611, secured the desired investiture for himself, his three brothers, and his heirs male. His rule was accepted most reluctantly by the Prussian nobility; and his adoption of the Reformed (Calvinist) faith stank in the nostrils of the orthodox Lutheran population. With the assistance of the Polish Crown, an organised Lutheran revolt against his government and a systematic persecution of his fellow-Calvinists were set on foot. So paradoxically irreconcilable were the relations

1618-38] Brandenburg-Prussia in the Thirty Years' War 637

between ruler and ruled in Ducal Prussia, when in 1618- the year of the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War-the unhappy Albert Frederick died, and Ducal Prussia was unwillingly but, as it was to prove, inseparably united with Brandenburg.

John Sigismund, who had in circumstances so untoward united the long-coveted Prussian duchy with his electorate, and who had likewise established a hold upon the disputed duchies on the lower Rhine that was to bring first part and ultimately the whole of them into the possession of his House, died at the close of 1619, with his spirit broken. He had shown himself tolerant to Catholicism, and had taken up no decisive attitude towards the issues involved in the outbreak of the Great War, by whose course, as has been seen in a previous volume, no State was to be more continuously and more momentously affected than Brandenburg. But, as has been also shown, his son and successor George William (1619-40) was utterly incapable of making his augmented dynastic power felt in times so difficult and dangerous. As it seems necessary to repeat (for the plain fact is often lost sight of in judging the princes and magnates of this age), the failure of his career and of others such as his was due less to his inconsistencies, than to his consistencies-in other words, in his addiction to the diversions of the chase and the pleasures of the table. In justice to him, it should be remembered that his long-enduring and obstinate self-subjection to the ascendancy of his Minister Count Adam von Schwarzenberg was largely due to his own traditional regard for the Imperial House.

It is unnecessary to go back here to the difficulties in which the government of George William was involved, and the troubles brought upon his electorate, by the course of the war and the political changes consequent upon it, more especially after the landing in Pomerania of his brother-in-law, Gustavus Adolphus. The adherence of the Elector of Brandenburg to the Peace of Prague (1634) warranted the Dutch in occupying the Rhenish duchies, whence they and the Spaniards had been more or less excluded since the provisional compact of Xanten in 1614; and it had the more important consequence of a declaration of war by Brandenburg against Sweden (January, 1636). When, in the following year, the long-expected vacancy in Pomerania at last occurred by the death of Duke Bogislav XIV, the inheritor of the entire duchy, and the Estates were in favour of the union with Brandenburg, the Swedes were accordingly found in possession, and such attempts as were made to dislodge them proved futile. In 1638 George William finally abandoned any attempt to guide the fortunes of his electorate, and, abandoning the control of its affairs to Schwarzenberg, withdrew for the remainder of his days into Prussia.

Here, as fortune would have it, his rule benefited from the inevitable reaction against the uncompromising resistance offered by the nobility to his predecessor, and from the struggle of the "Protesters" (who

638 Brandenburg-Prussia towards the end of the War [1626–40

acquiesced in the concessions obtained under the ducal Government) against the pro-Polish designs of the "Querulants." Moreover, Prussian sentiment approved the line of policy ultimately taken up by him with regard to the war reopened between Sweden and Poland in 1626, which had led to the truce of 1629 and its subsequent renewal (at Stuhmsdorf, in 1635) for twenty-five years. Thus Prussia, instead of being exhausted by the visitations of the Thirty Years' War, had gained strength during its progress, and many fugitives from various parts of Europe had found a home in this peaceful corner. In reinvesting George William with the duchy of Prussia, King Wladislaw IV of Poland (who succeeded in 1632) had refrained from exacting any humiliating conditions. The proposal of a Spanish-Imperial-Polish combination, which Brandenburg was to join, for the control of the Swedish power in the Baltic, was manifestly premature, and broke down accordingly. It was primarily due to the maintenance by Sweden of the high tolls exacted by her at Pillau, Memel, and Elbing; but it also indicated the desire of Poland, which was indeed vital to her political future, to become a maritime Power, and the resumption by the Habsburg politicians of the ideas of Wallenstein as to the control of the Baltic. Under George William the policy of Brandenburg (as is shown by the Köpenick compact of August, 1638) readily accommodated itself to the designs, at this time largely concordant, of the Polish and the Imperial Government. But, partly in consequence of this tendency, the maritime trade of Ducal Prussia passed for the most part into the hands of Danzig. Thus, in this part also of his dominions George William's government had incurred much censure, when he died in 1640, after a reign of twenty-one years, full of misfortunes and of humiliations.

CHAPTER XXI

THE GREAT ELECTOR AND THE FIRST PRUSSIAN KING

FREDERICK WILLIAM, on whom his contemporaries bestowed the designation of the Great Elector, was born at Berlin on February 16, 1620-the year in which the star of the Palatine House, whose ambition it had been to stand at the head of Protestant Germany, seemed to be quenched for ever. If his father's weakness of character had been in a great measure accountable for his failure to make good the position achieved by the union of Brandenburg and Prussia in the reign of George William's predecessor, Frederick William himself rose, with a vigour and an elasticity alike rarely paralleled, above the conditions in which his own reign, in its turn, began. Even a historian so little given to dithyrambics as Ranke cannot without emotion attempt to summarise the achievements of this high-minded precursor of the Prussian Kings-who like Henry, the father of Otto the Great, toiled so incessantly and with so little thought of self, in order to lay sure the foundations on which his successor was to erect an imposing superstructure.

Fortunately for Frederick William, much of his boyhood was spent at a distance from his father's luxurious and self-indulgent Court, and out of contact with the shifts and changes of an unstable policy. At Cüstrin in the New Mark he was trained in manly habits and imbued with the deep religious convictions from which through life he never. swerved. In 1631 he moved to Wolgast in Pomerania, where his aunt Queen Maria Eleonora of Sweden resided during her consort's German campaign, and where the young Prince was regarded as the future ruler of the duchy. Gustavus Adolphus was said to have taken an interest in the boy, and to have intended to bestow on him the hand of his daughter Christina; but the project, to which the Calvinism professed by the House of Brandenburg was an obstacle in the eyes of the Lutheran Swedes, remained in abeyance, though it was not relinquished by Frederick William till some years after his accession to his electorate. He completed his education at Leyden, whence he visited the Court at Rhenen of the exiled Queen of