Frederick the Great
If it be true that most great men are slightly “cracked” surely this fact is proved by the peculiarities of Frederick the Great. I propose to defend the memory of this most illustrious of Prussian soldiers and minor poets from the infamous slander that he died of syphilis. Frederick had the misfortune to win his glory in fighting against three women: the Empress Maria Theresa, the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, and Madame de Pompadour; and, most unwisely, he tried to fight them, not only with guns and bayonets, but with jibes and flouts and jeers. His father, as is well known, was King Frederick William Hohenzollern of Brandenburg, who was famous for his regiment of giants. These colossal creatures averaged well over six feet high, and to find them Europe, Asia, Africa and America were ransacked at vast expense. Frederick William must have been at heart a man of scientific mind, for he experimented in breeding with these human cattle; and doubtless his experience, had it beenrecorded with true Prussian accuracy, would have been the forerunner of those results of the Abbé Mendel which have laid the foundation for the science of eugenics. Unhappily his cattle were less submissive than Mendel’s peas or the Chillingham bulls, for, in spite of all the floggings and bribings to which Frederick William resorted, he was not always successful in securing his results. One day, when he was going from Potsdam to Berlin, he saw a fine strapping Saxon girl, a very giantess, whom he at once saw would be a fit wife to produce more gigantic toys if coupled with one of his guards; so he stopped her and entered into conversation with her.
“Art thou married, mädchen?” he asked her in his hearty Prussian way.
“No, kingly majesty,” she curtsied.
“Take thou then this letter to the commandant at Potsdam,” he said, “and there shall be for thee a dollar. Here it is, in thy hand, girl”; and putting a letter and a dollar in the girl’s great hand, he resumed his journey to Berlin. The blue-eyed girl knew Frederick William’s ways, and, running on toward Potsdam, met an ancient crone sitting by the wayside. To this old hag, therefore, she gave the king’s graciousletter with strict injunctions to give it to the commandant himself, and thereupon made the best of her way towards home without calling into Potsdam at all. When the commandant read the letter he found that it was an imperative order to marry the bearer to a certain private soldier, and at his peril fail not; experience had shown the commandant that his portion would be the cane or the royal boot should the king return and find Private Schmidt still unwed. The ancient crone, naturally, did not object, but Schmidt, who probably had another fräulein in his mind’s eye, sobbed and made a great moan. Still, there were His Majesty’s royal orders, and they must be obeyed, so the marriage duly took place. When the king returned to Potsdam, he found Schmidt still blubbering in a truly Prussian ecstasy, and the lady still rejoicing that at the end of a doubtless ill-spent life she had at length found a husband. As it was obvious that this experiment in Mendelism would be unlikely to be really successful, there was ultimately nothing to do but to divorce the couple, and the maiden returned home still a maid, while the soldier ceased his lamentations.
This was the kind of father that fate hadgiven to Frederick the Great; and his discipline seems, from all accounts, to have been terribly severe. At the age of about twenty his father forced him to marry a young lady, Christina-Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, apparently against his will. It is said that Frederick really wanted to marry an English girl; and, according to Lord Dover, who took his account from the Princess of Bareith, the marriage was never consummated, for, hardly had the candles been put out when an alarm of fire was raised in the castle. Frederick hastily got out of bed, rushed to the help of the fire-fighters, and never returned to his bride. The reason of this very unusual action has been the subject of endless conjecture. The princess from whose memoirs Lord Dover drew his account was quite sure of it, because the queen, her mother, told her so for a fact more than a year after Frederick had run from his bride. It is suspected that Frederick had syphilis, and that he did not wish to give it to the young lady; this, of course, is possible, though it would seem to be rather unlike the usual conduct of an eighteenth-century soldier; and again, it is said that it was really she who had syphilis, because some time later she developed a trouble in her leg and was in dangerof her life. Needless to say, that by itself would be no evidence whatever of syphilis. Another explanation of the desertion was that there may have been some physiological or anatomical trouble with the unwilling husband himself; many years afterwards, when he was lying dead at Sans Souci, the gallant fellows, whose unpleasant duty it was to wash his body, took advantage of the opportunity to examine his royal person, and issued a special announcement that His Late Majesty was as complete as any other man. But Frederick really loved his wife of an hour. He showed it by visiting her once a year on her birthday, and, such was the honour in which he held her, that he took off his boots for the occasion, and visited her in his stockings. He kept a special pair of black silk stockings just to visit his wife in, and, as he would never permit these to be held up with garters, they were always hanging down his shrunken shanks in great creases. Undoubtedly he must have loved her, and what is more important, undoubtedly she must have loved him, for he never washed himself, and yet she stood him.
The only portrait of the young lady that I have seen shows her to have been apparently a rather stupid and ordinary German girl; and itis said that she once boasted of having had a miscarriage to her husband. On the whole, perhaps a good deal of unnecessary sympathy has been poured out upon her, and doubtless that was part of the penalty that Frederick had to pay for having jibed at three women whom he had made his enemies even without the jibes. Catherine of Russia was certainly not a woman to insult; and Madame de Pompadour was quite able to take care of herself in a battle of tongues. As for poor Maria Theresa, she was probably too high and mighty, too utterly hurt at the saints for forsaking her in her hour of need, to condescend to answer Frederick in the bitter way that suited himself. But Marie Antoinette held, in common parlance, her end up. Like Maria Theresa, her mother, she was a Habsburg, and no doubt, like all the Habsburgs, despised these upstarts of Hohenzollerns. It was probably through her, or somebody equally pure-minded, that many of the stories of Frederick’s abominable and unnatural vices first arose. Well has the daughter defended her mother in the combat of slander that has signalised Frederick the Great and his Prussia.
As it is vastly important to know hisrealhabits, I draw a description of them from hislatest English biographer, Mr. Norwood Young.
“In later years Frederick gave up shaving, and merely clipped at his beard with scissors. He seldom washed any part of his person, even his hands and face. In that respect he was very different from his father,[15]who used soap and water freely, and often complained of his son’s dirtiness. One of his valets concluded from his master’s dislike of water that he must be afflicted with a kind of hydrophobia. His height has been variously stated, the extreme ranges being 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 7½ inches. He was neither thin nor fat; in his youth he was rather inclined to stoutness, but he became very thin before he died. His complexion was tanned—doubtless because it was seldom washed, like a tramp’s to-day; but unlike a tramp’s, it was touched up with red paint. His eyes were prominent and blue-grey.”
People who never wash themselves acquire a curious complexion which is distinguishable to a doctor at a glance, for it is quite different from the healthy tan of sun and air.
Hardly had he come to the throne when he attacked Maria Theresa, and marched his armyinto Silesia without warning. The iron ramrod of the Prussians proved successful, giving Frederick’s troops a far greater rapidity of fire than was possible to the wooden ramrod of the Austrians. But I am not now concerned with Frederick’s glories, and if you are interested in them you will get a far more vivid account of them from Lord Macaulay than I would care to write, even if I could; a later writer has referred scoffingly to “Macaulay’s lurid style.” All that I set out to prove was that this great man did not die of syphilis, as wicked slanders have said of him.
Maria Theresa humbled, and Prussia for the first time on the map as a war-state, Frederick returned home to a well-deserved rest, and built himself the palace of Sans Souci, where he settled down to form a great centre of literature and arts on the lines of the French Academy.
He was hardly a German in many ways; his favourite language was French, and his great ambition was to be a poet. Although he could speak three languages he could spell none; and a writer in theQuarterlyfor 1847 gives some instances of his peculiarities in that respect.
When writing a letter he used to add, in his own handwriting, some words often of bitterjibe or of sardonic humour; and these words were generally wrongly spelt. Thus, he used to spell “winter” hiverd, “actress” actrisse, “old” vieu, and “pay” peyer. That he never learned to spell “pay” properly was doubtless because he hated to think of such a thing; throughout his life, economy was his ruling passion.
To improve his spelling, grammar, and poetical construction, he invited Voltaire to stay with him at Sans Souci, and everyone knows that the two poets did not get on well together. Macaulay took the squabble too seriously, and worked himself up into a rage over it, with much about Voltaire’s “withering irony,” and other early Victorian and exaggerated phrases. It has been left for Mr. Lytton Strachey, the man who told us the truth about Queen Victoria, to tell us the truth about the famous Voltaire-Frederick squabble, and he makes it possible to compress it into a phrase. They were two poets, each trying to overreach the other. Frederick, in the eyes of the world, won, because he had the greater poet arrested, thus winning by the only way he knew—by force of arms; also he dared to call Voltaire a monkey. In our war-hospital, I remember, we had a monkey as a pet, which used to live at the top of one of the entrance gate-posts.When the descendants of Frederick the Great used to emulate him by letting loose poison gas, it was the duty of the quartermaster-serjeant to put the poor little shivering beast into a gas-helmet. At about that time Lytton Strachey’s book came out, and I sometimes read it as I looked at the monkey and heard the incessant tramp of feet that, to me, is the chief remembrance of the war, apart from the disgusting nature of the wounds and the thundering noise. And as the tramping men, marching to death in interminable thousands, looked up astonished at the monkey, I used to wonder at the effrontery of the king who would compare one of the greatest intellects that ever lived in France to that of a monkey. Voltaire got his revenge, more deadly than Marie Antoinette’s. In 1759, the most glorious year of Frederick’s life, he publishedCandide, which, though a joyful satire on Leibnitz’ philosophy that this was the best of all possible worlds, contained, if I am not much mistaken, a far more deadly description of the new style of civilised warfare introduced by the Great Frederick. Listen (I quote from Mr. Philip Littell’s translation):
“No,” said Dr. Pangloss, “Miss Cunegonde was ripped open by the Bulgarian soldiers, afterhaving been violated by many; they broke her father’s head for attempting to defend her; my lady, her mother, was cut in pieces; my poor pupil was served just the same as his sister; and, as for the castle, they have left not one stone upon another, not a barn, nor a sheep, nor a duck, nor a tree.” For “Bulgarian” read “Prussian,” and you will see the great improvements that Frederick made in war. Voltaire, like Anatole France, had an unrivalled power for saying the utmost possible in the fewest words; and yet some blockheads try to deceive themselves by saying that Anatole France is not of the school of Voltaire! I suppose they do so because they have made up their minds that Voltaire was a wicked man and an atheist, whereas Anatole France is at least now an accepted wit and therefore can say what he likes.
But two years after Voltaire died, Frederick used to pray to his God—if he had any—“Divin Voltaire, ora pro nobis!” that is to say, he acknowledged that Voltaire had triumphed. This to me seems characteristic of the man who bullied Maria Theresa.
Of course the Seven Years’ War was a very wonderful feat of endurance for the Prussian people, just as was the Great War; and in itFrederick won a reputation which was marvellous till a yet greater arose in the art of slaughter. The history of it is repulsive, in that it shows the triumph of unscrupulous burglary against people who only wanted to be left in peace. The results of our own war were better at least on paper, though fortunately it did not produce any man so great as Frederick.
But now I come to the purpose of this essay: to show the real cause of this extraordinary man’s death.
On August 4th, 1784, he attended a review in Silesia in the midst of six hours of driving rain, during the progress of which he refused to put on a coat and became drenched to the skin. Arriving home he felt ill and shivery with a constant cough. During the autumn of that year his fever left him, but was succeeded by a harsh dry cough which never left him. His strength diminished, and his legs began to swell; he had constant oppression in his chest—that is to say, his heart began to fail him—and he could not breathe if he lay in bed, but had to spend his days and nights in an arm-chair; that is to say, he probably had what we now call “cardiac asthma.”...
As the summer of 1786 gradually returned hebegan to improve, so he went from Potsdam to Sans Souci, which he never left alive. He was then under the care of the Court physicians, Selle and Cothenius, and the surgeon Frese. Unfortunately for Dr. Selle he hinted that the great man probably had dropsy, so Frederick flew into a rage, dismissed him, and wrote to Hanover, where there dwelt an eminent man of the name of Dr. Zimmermann, who arrived at Potsdam on June 26th, 1786. When Frederick saw him he asked at once, “Doctor, can you cure me?” To which Zimmermann, being evidently a courtly fellow, answered, “I can relieve you, sir.” Zimmermann, it strikes one, must have known that men like Selle and Cothenius would know enough about their patient to render it dangerous for any outsider to offer an opinion carelessly. The first thing for Zimmermann to do was evidently to try to gain his patient’s confidence, because never was there a more unruly man, especially where eating and drinking were concerned. The doctor found that Frederick would talk on literature and poetry as long as he would allow him, although it made him cough violently; and his first line of treatment was to get Frederick to promise to read throughThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Nodoubt he thought that that gigantic book would be a good way of keeping his patient quiet for a very long time. Then the conversation would shift to other sovereigns; and Zimmermann was able to give Frederick some of the truth about the health of Empress Catherine of Russia, whose surprising immorality must have been an attractive feature to a soldier. “But,” said Zimmermann, “she boasts that her health costs her only eighteenpence a year!” “Wonderful!” applauded the aged emperor, “I always said she was a woman of supreme genius.”
Then Zimmermann, seeing that Frederick was really ill, asked that he might be allowed to have a consultation with the dismissed Selle. This threw Frederick into a passion; his face flushed beneath the paint, and his eyes glowed with a deepened fury; his voice roared with anger; one fit of violent coughing after another came upon him, so that Zimmermann thought it wiser to desist, and return to his talk of scandal or literature. But he had already gained sufficient information to leave us a valuable report as to the king’s physical condition. “His legs were swollen with dropsy, which also extended up on to the skin of the abdomen, and, though he was not feverish, his pulse was hard and violent.”That is to say, he was probably suffering from a high blood-pressure with failing heart, which was causing his dropsy.
Next day Zimmermann was able cautiously to approach the question of treatment, which indeed needed much tact, for Frederick obstinately refused to try any of the doctor’s remedies, especially any suggestion that he should moderate his gigantic appetite. Zimmermann suggested taraxacum; and after a good deal of discussion the gallant soldier agreed to try it. Taraxacum, or dandelion, used sometimes to be given as a purgative that was supposed to act specially on the liver; and no doubt Zimmermann thought that if he could get the king’s bowels to act freely the dropsy might be relieved.
But next day the doctor had once again to go over the whole arguments. Of the three doses of taraxacum that he had carefully measured out with his own hands for the king, only one had been consumed; and Frederick sat looking with horror-stricken eyes upon the medicine glass as though it had been a piece of artillery.
Frederick said enthusiastically, “I assure you that though my legs are swelled I am not dropsical. The only thing that is the matter with me is that I am a little asthmatical.” Zimmermannmust have begun to suspect that to give taraxacum to his unruly patient would be very much like firing a pistol at the Rock of Gibraltar, but he persevered with a tenacity equal to Frederick’s own, and ultimately got him faithfully to promise to take his medicine. In the morning Frederick started on his medicine cautiously little by little, and by a miracle began to improve. Then nothing could be too good for the Herr Doktor with his wonderful taraxacum. It was saving the royal life. But Zimmermann added another condition. Majesty must eat less, and not so much of eel-pies. Then all the glory departed out of Zimmermann. That ignorant fellow Selle, with his balderdash about dropsy, was a better doctor after all, and Zimmermann, who really seems to have tried to act in as decent a manner as was possible towards his colleagues, allowed Selle to write and receive reports concerning the patient’s progress even though he was in disgrace. Frederick was a sworn enemy to all medicines, except a powder of his own, consisting of rhubarb and Glauber’s salts. At any moment the taraxacum might be thrown to the dogs, and the king’s own powder substituted behind the physician’s back. (Between ourselves it was not a bad powder.)“And,” groaned Zimmermann, “no idea could be formed of the excess which His Majesty allowed himself in his diet; his cooks were obliged to season his food in a manner sufficient to destroy his stomach; those dishes which were the most difficult of digestion were his favourites, especially Prussian peas, which were certainly the hardest in the world. This was the cause of all those attacks of vomiting and violent pain in the stomach which attacked him after every meal, and of the severe colic from which he suffered every week, and nobody durst remonstrate with him about it.”
Next day, when Zimmermann was sent for hastily to see the king he found him attacked with a terrible fit of coughing so violent that he spat blood. This is not uncommon in cases of very high blood-pressure, and frequently puts an unobservant physician off the scent. Still, under the purgative effect of the taraxacum, he began to get gradually better, and as he felt himself the subject of a miracle he ate more and more, until he devoured a pie of eels so hot and so highly seasoned that, to use the words of a fellow-sufferer, it seemed as if it had been baked in hell. After this he got an unusually violent attack of colic which he attributed to the taraxacum;and, to use Shakespeare’s words, “Zimmermann’s cake was dough.” Zimmermann forecasted that Frederick would soon suffer from bleeding hæmorrhoids, “And how will Your Majesty like that, please?” Majesty did not like the prospect at all, but on July 12th, when Zimmermann left, his prophecy came to pass, which was perhaps a good thing for the gluttonous patient. Then Selle tried to get rid of some of the dropsy by making incisions in his right leg; and the ancient ingrained dirt in his skin took a hand in the game; the cut suppurated and became intolerably offensive. Even Selle began to lose heart when he made a second incision and the wound became violently inflamed and erysipelatous. But Frederick never lost heart: if he found that he had a more violent indigestion than ever after his overeating, he simply took a double dose of his own powder; and on August 4th the erysipelatous inflammation spread all over the leg and on to the abdomen; blisters arose and burst, and from them leaked a quart of fluid a day, by which treatment the dropsy slowly abated, until, after a struggle worthy of his struggles in the Seven Years’ War, he gradually sank under a slowpneumonia, which is the natural end of man. But it is a cruel slander upon this mighty king to say that he died of syphilis, though occasionally syphilis is said to cause high blood-pressure. He was seventy-five years of age, and therefore there were seventy-five excellent reasons for his death. If to them you add years of gluttony and sepsis, caused by a lifetime of dirt, you get the real cause of the death of Frederick the Great. Did I not say rightly that Frederick the Great, like most other great men, was a trifle “cracked?”
The poet Campbell, in the last volume of his life of Frederick, gave a detailed account of some of the horrors of his death-bed, but, though interesting, they are too disgusting for my clean pages, and I shall not inflict them on the reader. They are chiefly concerned with the difficulty that his friends found in getting his body in a fit state of cleanliness for the grave. A lifetime of ingrained dirt! No wonder the startled washers found it necessary to get the water out of him somehow in that hot summer weather.
This is the truth that lies behind the demure paragraph of the ordinary English biographies: “Frederick died after a long illness (which hebore with exemplary fortitude), contracted, such was his sense of duty, by prolonged exposure to the rain while reviewing his troops in the province which he had rescued from the Queen of Hungary owing to his wonderful genius.”