660

Aspirations of Frederick III

[1688-97

of the Princes of the Empire at large, to see that they did not fall be hind in the general competition. The Elector of Saxony (Frederick Augustus II), as has been narrated elsewhere, was in this connexion the earliest to achieve success, and, by renouncing the Lutheran confession, with which the House of Wettin had been identified in both good and evil times, to secure the Polish throne for himself (1697), with the probability of its descent to his successors in the electorate. More fantastic schemes illustrated the spread of these aspirations. It appears that the Elector Palatine (John William of Neuburg) towards the close of the century negotiated with a view to becoming King of a Christian Armenia.

The House of Brandenburg had rather longer to wait than the Albertine branch of the House of Wettin for its elevation to royal rank: though there is evidence to show that the Great Elector himself had at one time thought of assuming the title of King of the Wends, but had abandoned the project at the time of the Peace of St Germain, when it seemed impolitic to offend Poland. The Crown which the Elector of Brandenburg ultimately secured was purchased by no such sacrifice as that by which Frederick Augustus II forfeited the last remnants of Saxony's Protestant hegemony in the Empire, and completed the transfer of that hegemony to Brandenburg. Moreover, the Prussian Crown only symbolised the tenure of a dominion which the House of Brandenburg and its subjects had secured by a consistent policy and were prepared to maintain by the force of arms. The basis of the Elector of Brandenburg's claim to rank among the Kings of Europe was, in other words, the duchy of Prussia, for which he had done homage to no man, and the army which had virtually been created by his predecessor, and which had enabled the Great Elector to assert his State as a factor in great questions of European politics. The display which Frederick III made a point of keeping up at his Court, while it may have well suited both his personality and his times, was deliberately intended to show that the means were at his disposal for maintaining the external grandeur that befits a king.

The European situation at the time of the accession of Frederick III, and the part taken by his father in urging on the great design of which the execution was imminent, were alike propitious to the aspirations of the new Elector. This would of itself suffice to explain why he steadily carried on the policy of his predecessor towards the impending English Revolution of 1688. William of Orange, it is not too much to say, was enabled to invade England by Frederick III, who, in August, 1688, in accordance with a compact concluded at Celle, sent several of his best regiments 5300 foot and 660 horse-into the United Provinces, to protect them against any French inroad. These troops were commanded by Marshal Schomberg, who, after long and distinguished service in France had, by the religious policy of Louis XIV, and by personal experiences in the same direction in Portugal, been driven into

1689-95] Brandenburg troops against France and Turks 661

the service of the Great Elector and at once appointed by him to the territorial command-in-chief. Notwithstanding the jealousy of the Brandenburg officers, Schomberg had gained the same confidence on the part of the Elector Frederick III as that which had been bestowed on him by the Great Elector. The last two years of the Marshal's career belong to English history; but he represents some of the most characteristic traditions of German military prowess, with their frequent accompaniment of an unswerving loyalty to religious con

victions.

The endeavours of the Emperor Leopold I in the War declared against France by the Empire in 1689 were actively supported by Frederick III, beyond the treaty engagements of his father. In this year 20,000 Brandenburg troops co-operated on the Rhine with Imperial forces of twice that number; and, in October, Frederick III, with the aid of Duke Charles of Lorraine (whom Brandenburg troops had assisted in the capture of Mainz), brought the arduous siege of Bonn to a successful issue. In 1690, after the defeat of Waldeck and the Dutch at Fleurus (July 1), the advent of the Brandenburgers under their Elector, and of other auxiliaries, in a measure restored the balance of forces; but it was not till 1695 that the electoral troops once more took part in an important action of the war-the recapture of Namur, which compensated William III for many failures in the Low Countries. Frederick III was at this time anxious to draw closer the bonds of alliance between himself and his kinsman by securing the hand of the widowed King for his daughter by his first wife, Louisa Dorothea Sophia. Another body of Brandenburg troops was in the same period aiding the Emperor in his perennial struggle against the Turks in Hungary.

But as yet the financial resources of Bradenburg-Prussia were so restricted that these efforts could not be made without the payment of subsidies by England and the United Provinces; and this fact to some extent explains the disappointing experiences of the Elector Frederick III at Ryswyk. Moreover, since the Emperor Leopold was entirely opposed to the conclusion of this Peace, while the paramount desire of Frederick III was to remain on the best possible terms with the Emperor, this could not fail to affect injuriously his relations with the other allied Powers. At one time he could not even obtain the subsidies promised to him, and bitterly complained of his wrongs. But, in the end, prudence gained the day, and, on September 21, his ambassador, Privy Councillor von Schmettau, notwithstanding the warlike language previously held by him, attached his name to the Treaty of Peace with France, signed at Ryswyk by the Dutch, English and Spanish plenipotentiaries. Neither the joint guarantee of the royal Crown on which the ambition of Frederick III was fixed, nor the fulfilment of William III's promise to secure to the Brandenburg dynasty the

662

The fall of Danckelmann

[1684-97 inheritance of the House of Orange, had been obtained; and for once the Hohenzollern statesmen had ploughed the sands. The failure of the electoral Government to gain any compensation for the sacrifices entailed upon it in the war seemed complete, and has been thought to have helped to bring about the fall of Danckelmann, for nine years the Elector's almost omnipotent Minister, who so late as 1695 had become President-in-chief of all the ministerial colleges or boards now to all intents and purposes dividing among them the business of the State. Ranke has, however, on the evidence chiefly of the dispatches of the active diplomatist George Stepney, whom William III had sent on a special mission to Berlin, shown that the cruel treatment meted out to Danckelmann was mainly due to the influence of the Elector's second wife, Sophia Charlotte, the daughter of the Elector Ernest Augustus of Hanover and the Electress Sophia. The influence of Sophia Charlotte upon the intellectual life of her husband's Court and people will be noticed below; her action in the matter of Danckelmann was entirely governed by her anxiety to serve the interests of her father's House. The relations between that House and her consort's were during a long series of years marked by a vigilant jealousy, to which neither the intermarriages between them, and more especially her own (1684), nor the occasional periods of political co-operation between the two future joint directors of the Corpus Evangelicorum (from 1720), were able to put an end. The House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, though until the achievement of the English succession much less powerful than the Hohenzollerns, deemed itself unquestionably their superior in descent and ancestral greatness; and the Emperor had been delighted to accept the services of the Hanoverian Elector, his son, and his brothers, against the French and against the Turks, as balancing the less cordially welcomed aid of Brandenburg. Duke Maximilian William, one of the surviving four sons of the Elector Ernest Augustus, had, after the death of his elder brother Frederick Augustus in the Turkish Wars (1691), followed his example in protesting against the principle of primogeniture which his father had proclaimed in a will confirmed by the Emperor, and, in pushing this protest had, among others, applied with success to Danckelmann. The Brandenburg-Prussian Minister had thus shown himself to be in opposition to the dynastic ambition of the House of Hanover, at the root of which lay the determination to maintain the unity of all its dominions.

It was for this reason that Queen Sophia brought about the over throw of Danckelmann (1697). His property was confiscated, and he was placed under close arrest at Peitz. The rigour of his confinement was not abated for five years; nor was it till after another five years that a partial amnesty was extended to him. He died in 1722, after receiving many signs of respect and confidence from the new King, Frederick William I. It had been largely his doing that, at the cost of many sacrifices and much disappointment, the Brandenburg-Prussian

1693-8]

Negotiations as to a royal Crown

663

Government had adhered to the House of Orange and the European alliance against France. There is no ground for the notion that, towards the close of his ministerial career, an inclination towards that Power becomes perceptible; and after his death foreign affairs were for a time at least conducted on the same lines as his own, mainly by Paul von Fuchs, one of the principal promoters of the English alliance.

Within a very few years after Danckelmann's fall, Frederick III was enabled to accomplish the object which to him was of paramount importance. The rapidity with which the transactions concerning the assumption of a royal Crown were at last brought to a successful conclusion, contrasts with their tentative and purely personal beginnings. Before 1693, when the negotiations on the subject between Frederick William and the Emperor began, there is no indication of the Elector having discussed it with his Ministers; and then the scheme found little favour with those whom he consulted - Danckelmann, Fuchs, and Privy Councillor Franz von Meinders or with the Imperial ambassador Fridag. Too much has probably been made of the characteristic excess of zeal displayed in the matter by certain papal agents. It is certain, however, that at an early date the Curia offered its assistance through the skilful Italian Jesuit and convert-maker, Father Charles Maurice Vota. He was opposed to the French interest, having given up that of the Stewarts as a lost cause, and he commended himself in more ways than one to the Electress Sophia Charlotte, who, having been brought up simultaneously in three "religions," could afford to be impartial. The earliest document in the Prussian archives concerning the quest of a royal Crown is an artistic argument by Vota on the royal dignity and the best means of reaching it to wit," reunion," not, of course, conversion. Another Jesuit, also of considerable reputation at the time, Father Wolff (Baron Friedrich von Lüdinghausen), was brought into this more or less ingenious plot; and Bishop Zaluski would have gladly been mixed up in it, with a view perhaps to anointing the King at his coronation. Father Vota afterwards opined that too many negotiators spoiled the design; as a matter of fact, Frederick was as sound a Protestant at heart as his father had been before him.

In 1694 the great project had become known at Vienna, and the Emperor Leopold's first comment upon it was a very plain-spoken non possumus. Though, as has been seen, much trouble had been taken to modify this view, a fresh estrangement between the two Courts occurred in 1697, on the occasion of the death without heirs of Duke Gustavus Adolphus of Mecklenburg-Güstrow and the disputes as to the succession. The Lower Saxon Circle, represented by Brandenburg, Sweden and Brunswick-Lüneburg, offered a determined resistance to the attempt to sequestrate the Duke's inheritance; and the Brandenburg Minister (Nicolas von Danckelmann) was recalled from Vienna. In 1698, however,

664 The Emperor yields.

The Krontractat [1698-1700

his place was filled again by Friedrich Christian von Bartholdi, a skilful diplomatist, whose excellent advice to the Elector-to assume the Crown and then negotiate with the Emperor-was, however, not followed. The feeling of the older Brandenburg statesmen was against sacrificing the advantages of a "real policy" for a mere bauble; but it may be doubted whether in this case the instincts of the Elector did not guide him aright. They were seconded by his new chief Minister, Johann Casimir Kolbe, afterwards Count von Wartenberg, an indolent but servile courtier, under whom the real conduct of business was in the capable hands of the Secretary of State, Heinrich Rüdiger von Ilgen.

Religious considerations could not in this transaction be paramount with the Emperor Leopold, although he was too much under propagandist influences not to be desirous of drawing advantage out of it for the Church of Rome. But on this head the Elector Frederick adhered to his rights and duties as a Protestant Prince; and, while he made a trivial concession as to allowing the Catholic services at the Imperial Embassy in Berlin to be continued even during the ambassador's absence, the final "Crown Treaty," as it was called, contained no reference to the religious question except an engagement on the part of the Elector not to take advantage of religious controversies in the Palatinate (where there was in these years much grievous persecution of the Calvinists under the Neuburg Elector John William) for reprisals on his own Catholic subjects.

But what finally determined the head of the Austrian Habsburgs to yield to the Elector Frederick's suit, was a motive of very direct political interest and profit. As has been shown in an earlier chapter, the Emperor Leopold I, whose assent to the secret agreement of 1668 for partitioning the Spanish monarchy had crippled the vigour of the foreign policy of Austria for a whole generation, had no share in the socalled First Partition Treaty of October, 1698. The death, in February, 1699, of the Electoral Prince Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, whose claims that Treaty had recognised, placed the Emperor in so much more favourable a position that he was unwilling to agree to the Second Partition Treaty, concluded by France, England and the United Provinces in March, 1700, although it offered much more than the First had conceded to the Austrian claims. But it was no secret to the Emperor that if he stood out for the whole of the Spanish monarchy, he would have to make good this claim by the sword.

Charles II of Spain did not die till November 1, 1700; and before his death negotiations had been carried on between the Emperor and the Elector of Brandenburg for the "Crown Treaty" (Krontractat), settling the conditions of the Imperial assent to the assumption by the Elector of the royal Crown. This compact, into which both sides had entered with a very clear idea as to the nature of the situation, was signed on November 16, before as a matter of fact the news of the death of the